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Comment by no_wizard | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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