Jupe: Off-grid shelters that pop up anywhere on Earth

I can see these popping up all over the show at Burning Man. Maybe the guru dude just knows his audience?

Risking sounding like Mr. Wonderful: I can't tell if it's aspirational, pre-product marketing or a parody. If it wasn't a joke, then they've just reinvented the travel trailer without the convenience or the trailer. My conclusion then is that it's an elaborate trolling.

Looks like you can stay at the location where that video was filmed: Glamping at Jupe Redwoods on AirBnB: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/700752395276229298

It does feel likes this is straight out of a Silicon Valley episode.

You took the words from my mouth :) Selling tents to clueless SV customers with disposable cash, with a not-so-veiled promise they can rent them out on Airbnb.

It's the lime scooters of "housing": no permits, no safety, lawless, convenient, short-sighted.

The guru guy, and his tasteless leveraging of someone's personal tragedy to his own grift is incredibly out of touch – provided even that is not made up.

The number of times they referred to the “experience” as “crazy” or “insane”. The interviewer chucking in dundrearyisms (OK, maybe just situational code-switching) like “crib” and “right on, right on”, and “mama taught me right”.

Parody of summat, but I’m afeared of what. Something from an AI marketing department this way comes.

Is this a parody? Are people spending 25k on a tent? Holy smokes.

That's immediately what I thought. Plus, there is no absolutely no way this will withstand a 70 mph windstorm while you can fold a travel trailer down in a reasonable amount of time. It's not a secure, real, permanent shelter that conforms to building codes: it's an illusionary shortcut.

A few years ago I considered putting together an 'off grid kit' for people looking to buy themselves some time in nature to get away from the grind. I thought through heating, cooling, water, food and toilet options, as well as help locating land to set up on. I considered a range of shelters, from a rugged tent to a larger, stronger structure. I also wanted to include a 1-year subscription to an emergency satellite beacon. I actually wanted the whole setup to be able to last someone a year, or longer after re-upping basic supplies.

The plan was to make it as affordable as possible.

The conclusion I eventually came to was that to get to a remotely reasonable price point (around $10k at the time), anyone motivated enough to pursue this would probably find better solutions on the market-- like your example of a travel trailer.

Whatever these guys are doing is nowhere near that and not what the headline made me think of. It's definitely not going to help anyone who doesn't already have tons of other options.

It's amazing how many things use lighting as a selling point. It's a cool effect if you're into Burning Man inspired aesthetics... But I'd rather just have an LED lantern and a headlight

It’s clearly not for disasters. Three no provision for sanitation or cooking or anything like that.

You don't have permission to access "http://www.lowes.com/pd/Best-Barns-Virginia-16-ft-x-24-ft-Wo..." on this server.

Is that a thing? Like managed kubernetes but for burning man?

Plus $2.50 per mile for shipping.

Batteries not included at that price.

My '85 VW Westfalia poptop camper is still cheaper than that by acquisition price.

(Not so cheap after solar, remodeling, restoration, and engine swap.)

It worked for Crossfire Hurricane.

Always has been.

Evidently yes. Typically referred to as "stenography" in journalism. Rampant especially when it comes to regurgitating police reports uncritically and verbatim.

That clip is about an unrelated product called Joop. It’s also from a podcast and not his late night talk show (which is what most people are more familiar with).

Nah man they’re disrupting and decentralizing housing according to the video.

It isn’t remotely a dwelling. It doesn’t have walls. There’s no physical security.

They list that number on their website https://invest.boxabl.com/

> 170,000+ people have indicated interest by reserving a Casita on our website, representing over $10bn in potential revenue if they each purchased a Casita. Reservations do not require purchase of a Casita and there is no assurance of how many will result in actual purchases.

That’s gotta be hugely inflated. If they required any sort of down payment, then I’d believe the number is close, but this one required nothing.

https://www.boxabl.com/order/

> I think cheap, tiny dwellings are going to be a huge market. Not sure if something without a toilet qualifies, however.

Huge market for who? Airbnbs and landlords? People who actually own land and want to live in one of these?

Also French for a "skirt".

Of course a jupe table is also a round table that spins outward to expand, e.g. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ksrgRjq8ksI&t=13

“Coming soon!”

bucket + [your choice of: sawdust, leaves, dirt, sand, etc.] --> bury it every few days, or chuck it in a dumpster

Nature.

Yeah, it's just a tent. Some random widlife looking for food or simply erosion will take it out.

Not to mention: where are you going to put it? People who can't afford a house also often can't afford land, and you can't generally finance a land purchase with a mortgage, either (especially if you're dropping something like a Jupe there instead of planning to build a stick-built house).

And the 25k price is "shore power," the off grid package is another $2800!

What do you do when you are done glamping? Do they come pack it up?

This seems to be "optimized" for remote sites, where frankly you shouldn't leave anything worth $25k if you want it to be in one piece when you get back. 100% it will be occupied by animals or crackheads in a week.

Although not homeless per se, I lived in a 80's VW Westfalia along the curbs of Silicon Valley for 9 years without A/C. It had a solar panel and I didn't have to buy anything except to keep fragile West German engineering going. The problem is most Americans aren't willing or able to exchange space and comforts, voluntarily or involuntarily, for alternative approaches. Compounding this is most Americans don't have any savings at all and are living paycheck-to-paycheck. If they had funds then they would have an opportunity to use their imagination and lives differently, but too many are on the debt, expenses, and insufficient wages treadmills that may seem all but impossible to escape.

> Yowza. As a formerly homeless person, I often wonder "Who has that kind of money?"

They're called shelters, but the bottom half of the page is all pictures of people using them for camping.

Having done the off-grid thing, shelter and power are easy - sanitation and plumbing is where it all turns into an almighty pain in the ass - and having neither sanitation nor plumbing this isn’t a “complete” solution unless part of your camping plan is “having violent diarrhoea in the bushes”.

You’d actually be amazed at what you can ram into less than a cubic meter. I’m working on a horse box conversion at the moment, and am using a cisternless toilet and a detachable worm tank to have a mobile toilet - drinking water and shower/basin water is trivial with cartridge filters, a pump, and RO. Shower is outdoor, heated, rainfall. Basin is for washing dishes and food, also outdoor. Total cost under €1,000 for a full sanitary suite. Grey water just goes on the ground, or into a tub for further use if desired, black water is stored for discharge - although the volume ends up very low due to the worm tank and waste separation.

Very solvable problems that they seem to have entirely ignored.

As a currently homeless, disabled person living in a 2001 Dodge Grand Caravan, yes, I wonder who has that kind of money. And you know what else I see all over the deserts and national parks I now call home? Starlink. Everyone has StarlinK. That is expensive enough, but the rigs they sit on top of are huge and money as well.

I am all good with my situation, but I know many people who have it worse than me with not even a car to live in, so when I see opulence like this for the novelty of it I wonder where human compassion has gone.

And to make like these things are doing anything for the environment is just green washing. I have solar power that cost me $700 in total that powers everything I need. My sleeping bag is my heater and my reflective tarps are my AC. I am sure my carbon foot print in minuscule compare to anyone who could afford a Jupe.

The government has that kind of money, because they can just take yours. Also trust fund kids (and they lack the awareness of growing up reasonable that would let them figure out this is stupid, so they must be the primary market here).

This kind of thing is for rich people who want to LARP as cyberpunk homeless people for a while.

Not that I am rooting for this product, but... "For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."

A luxury Class A motor home or a nice trailer serves that market way more effectively and comfortably and those have existed for 3/4 of a century.