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Comment by 1024core | Hacker News Reader

> If you buy fresh vegetables, learn how to keep them from spoiling on you.

Here in San Francisco, we have a plethora of Farmers Markets. The thing about produce is: once harvested, the clock starts on it going bad. So the farmers have a ticking timebomb on their hands: if they can't sell the produce at the end of the day, (in most cases) it will go to waste. Some of the enterprising ones take a trip to Chinatown and offload their leftover produce for pennies.

So when I was in a situation of hardship where I was living on a few dollars per day, I would go to the farmers market near closing time, and over time developed friendships with them, so they would sell me their remaining produce for dirt cheap. I would take it home, turn some of it into stock and freeze that.

Over several months, I survived on about $100/month in groceries.

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This approach doesn't scale though. Its great that it worked for you, truly, but it unfortunately doesn't scale as a reliable way to budget for groceries

do things that don't scale

https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

That doesn't work for broad societal problems.

Paul meant his comment in the sense that that is a good way to START -- but then you have to figure out how to SCALE it.

I think what you'd find as you scaled it is that you'd turn into ConAgra.

The problem of modern society that we want one solution that scales.

What we need is 1000s of solutions that don’t.

Every case is a special case if you treat enough variables, nothing is close in high dimensional space.

If I agree with you can I still be part of modern society?

We can both be part of post modern society, the answer is not to return to the old but embrace the new possibilities.

Precisions farming and decentralised housing and transport are steps in that direction.

I don't disagree, but this isn't it.

Its too circumstantial to scale to even a dozen people in a locality. It isn't that it doesn't scale to the masses, its that it doesn't really scale at all

It can scale a bit more than one might think. For example, the Wikipedia page for Boston Haymarket even mentions that produce goes to super-cheap near weekly closing.

Still won’t scale to solve the problems at hand, even if you can find counter examples, it simply isn’t broadly applicable enough

Farmers markets are in no way cheap. I live here as well and they are luxury

Have you tried the Alemany Market? It is the best by far.

Of course, when you're trying to get by on $3/day, you can't be picky: you can't demand organic produce, for example.

They might not be affordable everywhere but they're definitely not unaffordable everywhere either.

The vendors hate that guy and won't sell off the stuff at the stalls out of general principal.

It is OK, they don't have to. It's a free market.

Of course, but the point is the idea isn't generalizable, therefor terrible advice.

Seriously? All advice is contextual.

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