8 ms·

I'm not sure I have the faculties to address what bothers me about this comment, but there is so much tied to traditional society the comment seems to ignore.

• sausagefeet 4y ago
  > So to summarize, I think what bothers me is that the only possible way to arrive at what the parent comment suggests would be to avoid participating or contributing to any of these essential traits of civil society I don't think this take is very realistic. Most people want to live in a home with a static address. They aren't doing it because they need an address to participate in society. However, there are people who are more nomadic and the physical address requirement for some things can be a challenge.
  • JadeNB 4y ago
    > Most people want to live in a home with a static address. Statistics can address what most people do do, but how can one possibly speak to what most people want to do? (Even if one could, I can believe that people's preferences are much less absolute than they are shaped by existing affordances; maybe some people who currently want one thing would change their mind if obstacles to the alternative were removed.)
  • Someone 4y ago
    I concur that most people want to live in a home, but except for the fact that’s it’s engrained in the legal system, what do you really need a static address for nowadays? I could give suppliers lat/long coordinates of my front door or the route to my house, and my physical mailbox gets more spam than mail I really need, and the latter also could be delivered via email. A static email address is much more useful (or, actually, a static digital identity)
    • nine_k 4y ago
      How soon until we end up with government-mandated email addresses? Email is already a required field in many governmental forms in the US.
• DoreenMichele 4y ago
  There have always been travelers in the world. They have long had friction with settled peoples who feel a fixed address is essential. Even American military members have friction with the rest of America over this. It just gets mitigated by the fact that the federal government makes accommodations for them. Military members historically had trouble opening local bank accounts so there are military banks on military installations and when I was a military wife I could cash a check at the PX/BX because banks don't like cashing out of town checks. This is not just a homeless issue. This is problematic for all kinds of people with nomadic lives and this has long been true.
  • ghaff 4y ago
    Of course, it's all tied up with state government too. You need to be a resident of some state to get a driver's license. And no high tax state wants, say, Nevada to offer state residency that puts your name on an office door in exchange for an annual fee. Then there's voting/jury duty/etc.
    • DoreenMichele 4y ago
      Well heeled people already do pretty much as they please. Own a house in one state, travel as you see fit in your RV or whatever. It's only a serious hardship for poor people.
      • skybrian 4y ago
        Or alternatively, have a relative who will let you use their address? That seems a lot cheaper. A hard case is combination of not having money and not having family.
        • DoreenMichele 4y ago
          Homeless people frequently are homeless in part because they don't have any relatives they are on good terms with. Most of the world blames the homeless person and chalks it up to their presumed bad behavior but it's not unusual for them to be fleeing an abusive situation.
• yakubin 4y ago
  Regarding voting, I think people who pay taxes should only be allowed to vote based on the place they pay their taxes in. It really annoys me that because I don't have a long-term address, I need to separately register where I live at a given time to vote in local elections, to have any say in what the money I pay in taxes is spent on, while there are many people who pay their taxes in one place and vote in another, where they haven't contributed a penny. Those things should be linked.
  • dazc 4y ago
    What about people who don't pay tax because they don't earn enough. Should they be allowed to vote?
    • ElevenLathe 4y ago
      They still owe taxes, it's just that some years their obligation is $0. Edit: also there are things like fuel and sales tax that almost everyone owes, even if they don't have to pay income tax.
      • yardstick 4y ago
        I don’t think I should be eligible to vote in every city, state or country I’ve paid sales taxes in over a year.
  • vineyardmike 4y ago
    I travel a lot, I spend 50% of time at home in city A, 25% in city B and 25% in city C. Often when I travel it’s election time in some locality. Once in a while it’s an issue I have a strong opinion on, and I spent a lot of time in that city so I understand the issue. I’d love to be able to split my voting power by where I spend my time and offer 25% of a vote to city B’s impactful referendum. Instead I’m forced to pick only one city to call home even though I feel a sense of being at home in multiple places. I think voting should be about where you physically are and where you spend your time.
• hungryforcodes 4y ago
  This doesn't work at all for people who move around. I might have an assignment one year in Berlin then another for two years in Bangkok, then another three years in Singapore.
  • sfriedr 4y ago
    So how do you manage your banking and tax issues without going insane? Is your company providing you with high-quality tax advisors that help you deal with this issue?
    • ghaff 4y ago
      From my limited knowledge, companies do tend to handle the tax work for expats. In fact years ago when I was interviewing for an international position where I'd have been moving around a lot, as I recall, they told us something like they'd take some fixed percentage off our paychecks and handle the whole thing. If you're on your own, you presumably have to hire an appropriate accountant. This comes up even internally in the US if you're spending a lot of time in a number of states as a non-resident.
    • jhugo 4y ago
      It's not that complicated if you are just earning salary / self-employed income in places. GP's situation with those three countries -- given their fairly sane tax systems and streamlined reporting -- is probably about as complicated as an American's tax, especially if you have multiple states involved.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• lmc 4y ago
  I think this is a really interesting discussion. I'm a bit of a nomad myself and cautious of the things you bring up - if everyone behaved like this, there'd be no community development and things would decay. But, you already see this in more common situations, like the movement of young people to cities, e.g.: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191121-can-tiny-abandoned-towns-put-galicia-on-the-map https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191121-can-tiny-aband...
  • bfz 4y ago
    Just for some context, I was nomadic for well over a decade and consider that time an extravagant extension of youth, and a needless stunting of my growth into adulthood in absolute terms. By my late 30s I see no reason to encourage nomadism, or to celebrate or encourage others in the belief that it is a healthy way to live, it essentially amounts to the epitome of the dark side of individualism. When my children are of age, I would strongly discourage it for all the reasons in the original reply. Floaters don't grow - in the worst case they turn into "professional expats", and those (according to anecdotal experience) tend to develop into some of most fragmented and purposeless personalities on the planet by the time they reach middle age.
    • jcims 4y ago
      Holy moly just because you couldn’t figure it out doesn’t mean that nobody else can or will. I’d argue the opposite. Reducing friction with nomadism increases the likelihood of a pilgrimage and radicalization of hyper aligned internet communities into meat space.
    • lmc 4y ago
      Out of interest, where did you go, and what were your reasons for stopping? I think I can relate to a lot of what you say. I'm not saying I'm doing things the right way, but I've met people that you're describing that are basically on a very long holiday. It's a proper cliche, but travel has definitely broadened my horizons. I hope you don't discourage it too much - emphasize travelling with purpose, and when to stop.
• version_five 4y ago
  I think your concerns are valid, but I think we can come up with ways to avoid them without forcing people to declare and be bound to a specific location. Just want to add that for example in France there is a "gens du voyage" status for nomadic people that allows then to access government services without a fixed address. I don't know enough about it to say if it's successful, just saying there are options.
• reidjs 4y ago
  You are basing this on the premise only people with a fixed address can provide value to society. One of the best classical guitarists I have ever met is homeless, living on the street, but provides extreme value to everyone within earshot. Doesn’t he deserve a bank account to safely store the few dollars he makes playing Mozart, Beethoven, and other works of art on the street? Would you rather he gets mugged by some criminals and loses everything he earned that day, week, month?
• jdasdf 4y ago
  >Voting districts - obviously tied to physical land, with different styles of vote counting system per area, often according to local cultural needs. I come from a society where special voting considerations exist in order to achieve actual peace. Prior to that system being introduced, there was war. The right to vote and the manner in which the vote occurs is an essential and inalienable attribute of all democratic societies, often deeply saturated in historic customs taking centuries of diplomacy to achieve stability. People shouldn't be voting on local issues, land should. Voting on local issues should be 100% correlated with your investment in that locality.
  • ahtihn 4y ago
    So back to aristocracy?
    • jdasdf 4y ago
      No, because aristocrats could be landless.
  • dragonwriter 4y ago
    > People shouldn't be voting on local issues, land should. All issues are local on some scale.
• gorgoiler 4y ago
  I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies. The representatives might be for 24 to 34 year olds, unmarried mothers, children, prisoners, or of course the homeless. People who need more representation than they are probably getting. The more categories you fall into, the more votes you get. Maybe that’s not a bad thing when faced with the status quo of money based politics. It is a poorly thought out idea but your comment reminded me to give it some more time.
  • yencabulator 4y ago
    > I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies. The US voting system is uniquely bizarre and designed for vote manipulation by electoral district boundary fiddling. National level voting should just be by popular vote, like it is pretty much everywhere else.
• CryptoPunk 4y ago
  But why does one's address have to be fixed to provide these services / establish these qualities? Society adapted to advance the listed social causes in the historical context where having multiple or frequently changing residences was far too costly for the average person to consider. But what if modern civilization makes this mode of living attainable for the masses? * Information technology enables efficient markets for renting out housing for short durations. * Modern financial technology enables these markets to become globally accessible with minimal processing fees and delays. * Modern transportation technology enables people to travel globally very quickly and affordably. * Modern construction technology enables people to build much more housing units per capita than in the past, which makes second homes, vacation homes etc more viable. * Modern telecommunication enables people to work remotely, which makes a work life that is combined with travelling much more viable. We could very conceivably see a significant fraction and even a majority of people consider themselves world citizens, and prefer to travel non-stop, with the change brought about by the aforementioned technologies. In such a setting, society could very possibly manage physical neighborhoods differently, without tying people to a district in order to procure the necessary resources to maintain said neighborhoods. In terms of the social aspect, people may adapt by linking themselves moreso to virtual communities, in order to enable connectivity amidst physical travel and migration. Society not currently being set up to work without residents who are tied to physical neighborhoods is more likely due to the majority of people historically not being able travel non-stop than functional societies not being possible without static addresses.
  • bfz 4y ago
    I think most of this comment can be answered by highlighting the difference between supposed "Internet friends" and "real friends". Over corona there have been a wide range of studies published on the negative effects virtual communication has had on education in particular, the strength and quality of the relationships children have managed to develop, and even the severe effect it has had in some cases on development of vocal skills and the ability to read emotion. Information technology is only a tool, it is not, never has been and never will be a replacement for the real thing. A child cannot develop motor skills by climbing a virtual tree, a toddler cannot take shelter from a storm by dwelling in a virtual home. You cannot raise a child on an aeroplane without substantially reducing its quality of life and damaging its early growth. Thus continuance of the society that produced us and all the freedoms and privileges we enjoy (including air travel) is largely incompatible with these new tech-centric ideals. In the normal case for that society to continue functioning, long term physical presence is required for development of its next generation, and nomadic world citizenry is largely a temporary (and abnormal) trait of those who are young, unwilling to reproduce, and primarily misallocate their capital to consumption and selfish pursuits. This trend is a significant contributor to the collapse in population growth rates across the western world and consequently directly impacts GDP, which is to say, the steady decline of our way of life. Often immigration is offered as a solution to the population growth aspect, but immigrants quickly assimilate our culture and consequently our growth rates within a single generation (predictably as a result of their new privilege), meaning the qualities our culture celebrates cannot be worked around by importing replacement people to breed on behalf of the laptop class exploiting the spread between income and the cost of a beer in some remote reach of the world. Finally there are many signs that immigration may have reached a local peak as resource access concerns are beginning to dominate global politics for the first time in half a century. For a little more context, I'm a tech native that has lived on the Internet since around 1998, this is mostly written as a rebuke of my former self, who had little idea of the practicality or implications of all the grand empty promises of technology. You cannot now and never will be able to replace a physical address with a transaction on a blockchain.