I mean, you do realize you FIRST need to be location-agnostic to find some people, right?
Only then can your group start to develop favorite local places to hang around at.
> I bring this up because if you look at places that had lively social activities a few decades or a century ago, they were almost always a specific place.
Which is basically irrelevant, as you can come up with a similar example of pre-covid, during-covid and post-covid changes for how people hang out. People adapt pretty quickly.
> The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week.
I'm not sure these places really ever existed with such a stability as you describe outside of _really_ small towns. Like under 5000 pop towns.
Frankly, the younger I was the longer my prospective time horizon was.
E.g. in 2000 I might have cared about what's going to happen in 2100.
Now, in 2025, as I got older, my time horizon has shrunk down to maybe 10 years at most, but typically ~3 years, as my life experience has taught me that life is often unpredictable, sometimes too short, and age has that ability to temper our expectations through health issues and other things.
I also don't have the executive function anymore to think about long-term abstract things, since it is primarily occupied with my shorter-term responsibilities.
So yeah, I really don't give a shit what 2125 will look like. I don't have the arrogance in me to even make an educated guess, because 99.9% chance it will look different than what I imagine.
Are you asking about diets? During most of the Cold War period, average people in Yugoslavia generally had more and better food than the USSR or China but less than the USA. They ate a lot of bread and potatoes. You probably won't find detailed records with percentages.
Let's say you live to 80, half your life is 40 years. You only start working a decent job around ~22 years (4 year college degree).
22+40 = 62, pretty close to 70 already. Assuming some people die early, so others have to pick up the slack, some people work part time, etc. and you end up pretty damn close to 70.
> you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all the people working hard in the rat race.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way is that you're living off of the economic surplus you were producing while working a highly paid 9-5 job that paid a shitload of taxes. Now it's your time to live off the surplus you produced and take it easier.
> I am sure it works on some level but it doesn’t seem to me to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
It's not a very positive lifestyle from the standpoint of increasing the GDP to some maximum amount, yeah.
> You seem to think that two companies selling product A will rather sell 50 for $10 per unit profit than 100 for $9 per unit profit because it's easier.
If the numbers are closer, then that's exactly what happens.
Would you rather sell 50 units for $19 per unit or 100 for $10 per unit? Option 1 gives you way less overhead and headache with cheap-o customers.
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.
When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles.
It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.
Only then can your group start to develop favorite local places to hang around at.
> I bring this up because if you look at places that had lively social activities a few decades or a century ago, they were almost always a specific place.
Which is basically irrelevant, as you can come up with a similar example of pre-covid, during-covid and post-covid changes for how people hang out. People adapt pretty quickly.
> The neighborhood cafe where locals can stop by at any time and see other locals. The bar that everyone stops by after work twice a week.
I'm not sure these places really ever existed with such a stability as you describe outside of _really_ small towns. Like under 5000 pop towns.
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