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How much land does a man need? (1886)
- 082349872349872 3y agofor the opposite extreme, we have "Diogenes Throwing Away His Cup"
- klipt 3y agoI think the Diogenes strategy requires living in a city with a warm Mediterranean climate, not a rural area in Siberia.
- 082349872349872 3y agoTrue! (however, they say the cynics in Chelyabinsk are such tough cookies, that they merely install big metal flaps over their tubs to keep the snow off: https://cdn-media.tass.ru/width/1020_b9261fa1/tass/m2/en/uploads/i/20150224/1084189.jpg https://cdn-media.tass.ru/width/1020_b9261fa1/tass/m2/en/upl... )
- HeyLaughingBoy 3y agoA lot.
- ethanbond 3y agoJust because it’s getting mentioned around here a lot lately: Tolstoy was a convert to Georgism (the philosophy backing Land Value Tax). It’s interesting to see a very specific idea suddenly win a person, and see it reflected back in their output. Interesting piece by Tolstoy’s son on how big an influence George was: https://cooperative-individualism.org/tolstoy-ilya_leo-tolstoy-and-henry-george-1928.htm https://cooperative-individualism.org/tolstoy-ilya_leo-tolst...
- to1y 3y agoI don't think that's what the short story is about.
- ethanbond 3y ago> The question of buying freehold land recurred to him again and again. > He went on in the same way for three years; renting land and sowing wheat. The seasons turned out well and the crops were good, so that he began to lay money by. He might have gone on living contentedly, but he grew tired of having to rent other people's land every year, and having to scramble for it. Wherever there was good land to be had, the peasants would rush for it and it was taken up at once, so that unless you were sharp about it you got none. It happened in the third year that he and a dealer together rented a piece of pasture land from some peasants; and they had already ploughed it up, when there was some dispute, and the peasants went to law about it, and things fell out so that the labor was all lost. "If it were my own land," thought Pahom, "I should be independent, and there would not be all this unpleasantness." Yep can't see any sort of economic ideology regarding land ownership at play here. I didn't say the story is about Georgism, I said its influence is reflected in the short story. It's "about" greed, but it's no coincidence that the greed is specifically greed for land and that it goes into such depth about specific ownership structures of land.
- beaeglebeach 3y agoI've always found it interesting HN is so focused on Georgism given it's leanings. It works out fine for hyper capitalists who eek out highly efficient use of land for stuff like a steel mill but is arguably devastating to the average joe who uses it for economically unprofitable uses like a place to let his toddler or dog play. Property tax is definitely more preferable to the prol and even programmer wage slave, who can eek out low taxes on a larger leisure plot by not improving it and won't be forced to drill for oil or something to pay the George tax like it held a higher averaged common value. In many senses property tax is progressivism while Georgism land tax is a hyper capitalist steamroller that cares not you've barely been able to improve the land with a decrepit mobile home and meanwhile taxes the baron with the gold plated loan shark palace the same.
- Frummy 3y agoInteresting. I liked the writing, I had expected a typical cliché moral lesson, when he showed self awareness and took a shortcut I didn't know what sort of ending to expect. Tension was raised and although the moral lesson was what I initially had thought it would be, I engaged with the story more seriously because it had shown some independence from the necessity to follow strictly one format only.
- Sai_ 3y agoApparently I’m a malicious attacker trying to read Tolstoy because cloudflare is blocking me from this page.
- unmole 3y agoLooks like ham-fisted geoblocking. I'm blocked from accessing it using an Indian IP but works fine with a US VPN.
- __rito__ 3y agoYeah. Facing the same.
- Sai_ 3y agoI got this message under the "why was I blocked?" which is why I didn't consider geoblocking. > This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.
- hskalin 3y agoI'm blocked too. Why would they block Indian IPs?
- soundarana 3y agoMaybe they compare the geolocation with the browser timezone.
- mometsi 3y agoHow many kb does a man need? "You have an awful lot of media, and I only want to read a single page of text content." The site admin replied, "5m." 5m? What kind of content-length is that? That's how long your access token will remain valid. You can receive as many bytes as you like, once you've completed our captcha. But you can only load visible content, and 5m is all you get. Our javascript will follow along as you scroll and load the content progressively. He solved the captcha and began scrolling. It was good content. He knew he had to reach the end, but he paused here and there to consider the implications. He even scrolled up to reread an early paragraph, thinking this passage would inspire a fine bon mot in some future conversation. At the three minute mark he started becoming nervous, observing that he was less than halfway down the page. He kept a looser focus on the text and tried to devour it as a flattened procession of scenes and story elements to be interrogated for meaning later. Four and a half minutes- he began to skim. Now it was just a string of nouns and verbs, representing hardly more to him than its underlying utf-8 byte stream. He scrolled wildly onto the half-occluded final line of text, but it was too late: the token's time to live had already fallen below the round-trip latency to the server. Or had it? There was still a request in progress, and it had already reached the server milliseconds before expiration. Status 200: the response arrived successfully! As the final line was revealed, the page footer approached the view region and triggered a final refresh. The full page of content was invalidated before his eyes reached the end of the line, and now his browser displayed only a 404 message. This final response delivered no content at all-- only a header, 651 bytes long.
- harry8 3y agoWalter Kirn & Matt Taibbi discuss it about 2 weeks back. https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZnMGYuAM4mFnkJju36Y2 https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZnMGYuAM4mFnkJju36Y2
- crtified 3y agoI struggle to separate the man from the ideals, when it comes to political and economic matters. The fact that Tolstoy was a (no disrespect meant, but I'll use the modern term: ) 'nepo baby', born and raised into nobility on his own estate with all the trappings, and then in turn begat his own large brood of noble-born nepo babies (who by-the-way were paid a special allowance by their government in order to maintain the family estate, following Leo's passing - quite the opposite of the elsewhere-mentioned Land Value Tax, then), is somehow a sad indictment of the way humanity trumpets it's hard won wisdom either during, or after, doing the opposite themselves. That said, he was also a very good writer, and an intelligent and accomplished person in many ways.
- mediumsmart 3y agoYou are not alone. A lot people struggle with this. Truth is the person is irrelevant, what matters is what they wrote or said or did. If Putin writes something intelligent and Churchill wrote something stupid that’s all you have. A stupid text and an intelligent text. No need to get excited. That way you can also endure both kinds of texts originating from a single person without being disappointed. And no worries, once you can detach the work from the creator you are qualified to judge the work. Automatically. :)
- soundarana 3y agoThey say Buddah was the son of a king.
- rkagerer 3y agoWhy was Pahon lying on top of the oven?
- TwinOaks 3y agoCheck out the footnotes after the story. Footnote #3: The brick oven in a Russian peasant's hut is usually built so as to leave a flat top, large enough to lie on, for those who want to sleep in a warm place.
- debok 3y agoThe Russian peasant built their brick ovens with a flat top large enough to lie on. This gave them a warm place to sleep or lie down. It is explained in the footnotes on the linked story.
- orthoxerox 3y agoTolstoy explaining how much land a man needs by writing a just-so story while at the same time enjoying the payments his former serfs make for sharecropping on his remaining latifundia and the ones the government processes for the lots he sold to them after giving them freedom sounds exactly like a former plantation owner explaining that the Blacks can only prosper under his wise guidance and that's why they shouldn't own land directly, but work as sharecroppers. And we all know that a man needs at least 160 acres and maybe two or three times this area if the lands are marginal. Pahom's first lot was 40 acres. His second lot was 135 acres, still smaller than he would have received in the US or Canada. His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it.
- hasoleju 3y agoThanks for putting the areas of his different possessions in perspective. My main takeaway goes in the direction of your last statement: > His final lot was going to be several tens of thousands acres, so he did go a little bit overboard with it. Balance in life might be the pathway to happiness and fullfillment. You need health, family & friends and of course some wealth. Not too small and also not to big. Balancing my efforts between these pillars is sometimes hard when the general attitude often is to maximize wealth. It comes down to me leaving early at work to spend time with my family or do sports while other colleagues stay and work longer hours. But in the long run, I feel like this is the right way for me.
- shmde 3y agoSorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access online-literature.com I now, truly will never know how much Land does a man need :(
- nicbou 3y agoThis story was used as a chapter title in Antony Beevor’s book on Stalingrad (or another one of his) and it was so fitting. Germans racing across the Soviet Union, conquering everything but exhausting their momentum and overextending their supply lines, then the last line of the story answering the chapter title. Beautiful.
- freddealmeida 3y ago10 acres.
- ksjskskskkk 3y ago[flagged]