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Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely o

by ixtli 7y ago

Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million. That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that original 0.2%. You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly. EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya; about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.

celticmusic 7y ago
What's your point? That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY? I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said. But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.
- ixtli 7y ago
  The top-most comment said > I value that choice and the freedom to change. and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices. I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    > and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." I'm just going to quote myself. _But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria_ This is like the people who argue that you shouldn't put in a solution that only makes the problem 20% better, that we should wait until it's a 100% solution. You should probably just curl up in your basement and wait to die since you apparently can't interact with everyone in the world.
    - ixtli 7y ago
      You’re doing the thing I talked about exactly! Our ability to chat with people in other parts of the world like we’re doing now is not at all what the original comment was talking about when they talked about reliance on others. Facebook and slack are not a substitute for community or family. That community needs to be strong because the fact that a small subset of all people have the ability to move to Nigeria isn’t at all evidence that we’ve got the freedom to just keep roaming about life until we find a group of people who just happen to provide everything we need. In other words the fact that you CAN deploy capital and time to go to Nigeria hardly means we live in a world where you can shift the context of your life at will. Most people don’t even have a fraction of what it would require to do this.
      - celticmusic 7y ago
        What you're trying to argue is that poor people can't move to other countries, and that's just not reality.
    - cmendel 7y ago
      That's a little bit much don't you think? Please do be kind, that is another human you are responding to.
      - celticmusic 7y ago

by ixtli 7y ago

celticmusic 7y ago

What's your point? That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY? I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said. But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.

ixtli 7y ago
The top-most comment said > I value that choice and the freedom to change. and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices. I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  > and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." I'm just going to quote myself. _But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria_ This is like the people who argue that you shouldn't put in a solution that only makes the problem 20% better, that we should wait until it's a 100% solution. You should probably just curl up in your basement and wait to die since you apparently can't interact with everyone in the world.
  - ixtli 7y ago
    You’re doing the thing I talked about exactly! Our ability to chat with people in other parts of the world like we’re doing now is not at all what the original comment was talking about when they talked about reliance on others. Facebook and slack are not a substitute for community or family. That community needs to be strong because the fact that a small subset of all people have the ability to move to Nigeria isn’t at all evidence that we’ve got the freedom to just keep roaming about life until we find a group of people who just happen to provide everything we need. In other words the fact that you CAN deploy capital and time to go to Nigeria hardly means we live in a world where you can shift the context of your life at will. Most people don’t even have a fraction of what it would require to do this.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      What you're trying to argue is that poor people can't move to other countries, and that's just not reality.
  - cmendel 7y ago
    That's a little bit much don't you think? Please do be kind, that is another human you are responding to.
    - celticmusic 7y ago