Hackers on happiness & tiny houses, plus The Story of Stuff
faircompanies.com
faircompanies.com
The problem is that if I put all that stuff into some tiny house, I'm stuck with it pretty much forever. Nobody else who can afford that stuff wants a 65 square ft house, or at least so few that I have no hope of getting a fair market value. It seems unlikely that will change, especially since by the time you can sanely afford these things you're probably near having a family.
One extremely way in which people value homes is $/sq.ft. Compare a 65 sq ft home to a 4,000 sq ft one, both with top of the line everything, and you're probably left with a market value about equal to what your dishwasher cost.
If I buy a 4,000 sq ft home and load it up I'll be able to sell it 10 years from now. Barring the very rare bubble bursting (like we're experiencing now) I'll probably be able to sell it for more than I paid for it. If I buy a 65 sq ft home and load it up, I'll be out a bundle.
So if money is not a constraint and you just want a smaller home, I think you have to find the happy median. Get a fully loaded 1,500 sq ft house and hell, just leave half of the rooms empty. There's certainly some size below which you're hemorrhaging money on the deal, and I imagine it's at least 1,500 sq ft here in Middle America.
If you have so much money that you don't care about resale value and you do care quite a bit about the environment this is probably fine. If you want laminate counters, vinyl floors, and cheap appliances, this solution might also be fine too. But for a large segment of the market this is unfortunately financially untenable, no matter how appealing.
I'm the "programmer in Michigan" (actually Minnesota) she mentioned in the article. I live in a 3,000+ sq ft house. We moved from an 1,800 sq ft house that we only used half of, so we obviously didn't need all that space. So why is my house so frickin' large? We needed at least 10 acres of land with less than a 50-minute commute to work and wasn't 100 years old (Minnesota's climate is very harsh on houses). Every place on the market that met the basic requirements we set was close to, or more than 3,000 sq. ft. Many were much larger. Around here builders simply don't build small houses on large lots and I suspect they won't anywhere else in the US for much the same reasons you give.
Personally if I could sell my house tomorrow and buy a 1,200 sq. ft. home on 20-30 acres I'd be thrilled to death.
I think a big driver of this phenomenon is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
Sure, if you're planning on flipping the house in a few years it'll be harder to get the price you think is right, but otherwise, there's a lot to be said for looking at a house as a place to live vs. just as a financial instrument.
(Not surprisingly, people often find something to do with that space, and then they really do need the space, a sad loop.)
That's called a Lexus IS250.
Interestingly, there is a luxury version of the Civic in Canada, it's called the Acura 1.6EL. Other than the fact that it shares sheet metal with the Civic, I'm not sure why it's not sold here.
If you want a taster check out the latest series running on his blog about the history of Afghanistan:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/2009/09/kabul_city_num...
The Google Video link: http://tinyurl.com/yd5ptt6
I'm not trying to be harsh -- I'm sure the video is of high quality -- but when you say things like "In 2003, humanity’s Footprint exceeded the Earth’s biological capacity by over 25 percent" or "In the past three decades, one-third of the planet’s resources, its ‘natural wealth,’ has been consumed" there is certainly room for debate about these things.
Debate which probably doesn't belong here.
Flagged.
"Our personal consumption in the U.S. is already in overdrive. It's now equal to 70% of our GDP (about double that of China and nearly a third more than that of Canada)."
This is a nonsense claim. GDP is defined as consumption + government spending + net exports. It doesn't seem obvious that increasing the relative share of government or exports would do anything for the environment.
The URL I followed brought me to a interesting blog post with good but speculative discussion about the perspective of 'hackers' vs 'greenies' on mass consumption.
Did you really flag this link because somewhere within it there is a link to a PDF that includes unreliable sources? That's a pretty tough standard! :)
It would be great if he can confirm so.
I didn't have bandwidth for the video, so downloaded the PDF and scanned it as I had time.
If I missed the point of the article, doh! I was relying on the other comment.
The article itself is good, and you might enjoy it. I skipped the video, which is probably flawed in the ways you suggest. But maybe you could unflag the interesting link to the response in the meantime? :)
It is a very detailed look at how companies drive consumerism to keep the economy going at the expense of third world countries.
She deliberately chose to paint government as good and corporations as bad even though they are both only composed of people, who are just looking out for their self-interest, trying to get money from other people, who are also just looking out for their self interest.
It's a intellectual shortcut to paint corporations OR government as evil, and not accurate or meaningful at all.
In addition, I see no reason why painting government or corporations as evil is a bad thing because when it comes down to it, what they are doing to third world countries is evil.
We execute murderers for killing people. Yet corporations are killing people overseas by poisoning and maiming them in dangerous factories.
I see no reason why calling a corporation evil is not accurate or not meaningful.
Steinbeck portrayed the bank as a great machine in which each person working for it played a small role that they didn't necessarily like to play. Agents were forced to evict people from their land because they were not able to pay their mortgage, yet that was not something that they really wanted to do. It was something they had to do because of the corporation they were a part of.
No individual person in the corporation is evil (generally). However the corporation is bigger than each individual member.
So calling a corporation evil does not mean branding each individual person. Rather it means that you recognize that the corporation as a greater force causes evil things.
In that respect I don't see it as unrealistic to say then that the corporation can be evil.
Have not watched the video, but this is a great article. I find downsizing living to be such a relief; it's almost like having a burden lifted. One thing that drives me kinda nuts to have too much "stuff" to worry about. Quantity of possessions grows to accumulate in the space a person lives; smaller space = less room for frivolous items. Makes a lot of sense.
http://www.storyofstuff.com/pdfs/annie_leonard_footnoted_scr...
I would have preferred an HTML version because PDF is a newer, more complex, format that forces us to use newer, heavier applications to read. PDF is incompatible with old and lightweight computers so it forces us to buy powerful new computers and throw away our old ones. Given an HTML version I could have consumed even less stuff.
2. Planned obsolence: I see 40-year old cars and pickup trucks here and there. On the one hand, a lot of cars could be run longer before replacement. On the other hand, an older car is vastly less safe, without airbags or crumple zones, and the older car (ignoring manufacturing costs) pollutes more. And how many on HN work on old computers? America was settled during a period when technology rapidly advanced and obsolescence did not have to be planned.