Lina Joana

paul wheaton wrote:

I am then asked about health care in the bootcamp.  

For whatever college the woman was headed to, what is the health care there?  What is the cost of the college, the cost of the housing and the cost of food?

Yep. If she does not have family support, she has maybe 3 options: 1) use loans to pay for insurance and other living expenses, 2) go to school part time, and pay for living expenses from current salary, or 3) maybe save enough to pay for the costs - depending how much they are.
3 is the only option for bootcamp. If you are going to have fun and learn some stuff for a summer, having enough saved isn’t a big deal. If you end up staying for years or decades - yeah, it’s a big deal.

paul wheaton wrote:

And there was mention of people with a lot of stuff that might need to be stored for the bootcamp.   Would it need to be stored for college?.

A woman returning to college will probably keep on in whatever home she has, and keep using her stuff.
I did not mean to suggest that college does not also require resources. Maybe my point was too obvious - totally broke people are not coming to bootcamp for the room and board. The people you are looking for have a certain level of affluence, and hence have options - college, trade school, a job, woofing, backpacking through Switzerland, etc.

paul wheaton wrote:

When a person has baseboard heaters, or natural gas heat and pay $3000 per winter, do they call that "work"?

Yes, of course! The goal of a job is that after a year of work, you have paid for room, board, bills, and fun, and still come out ahead financially. The goal of of collegp is to work (yes, work) to gain the skills you need to get a job that lets you come out ahead.

I gotta allow the people that just wanna be here for a few months if I am eventually gonna find the people that will be here for ten years or more.

What resources does your ideal 10 year person come in with? I listed the expenses I could imagine - health care, visits to family, technology, purchases for the homestead, an exit strategy. Do you disagree with that list? Do you believe (or have you seen) people stay for years without savings?

paul wheaton wrote:
Work?  I hope that nobody sees it as work.  It is a chance to grow your own food and build your own shelter.  At a pretty easy pace.  

Might have to agree to disagree there. Splitting wood and peeling logs is the kind of thing I love to do, but it is still work. Especially if you have to do it to stay warm, and can’t wander off after an hour.

paul wheaton wrote:

I think the bootcamp is amazing for existing gardeners, natural builders and homesteaders that love to create.  Now there are people that do it with you, five days a week.

I think the bootcamp is the foundation for retiring to a gert package.  

Your words seem to be about getting a person into the workforce.  I think the bootcamp is about getting people out of the workforce and into retirement.

But how many young adults dream of retiring to that humble a home before they’ve done much else? Or, going back to the root of this thread - how many believe that the world is about to implode so that this is their best option? My thesis is that most folks in their early 20’s are likely to want a life that requires some money. So, they are thinking in terms of career, or at least marketable skills. Convincing them that going to rural Montana to grow their own food is a good way to start their adult life is gonna be an uphill battle.

paul wheaton wrote:

Another angle:  A lot of people want to get into homesteading.  They buy land, put years in, and burn out.  They then sell everything for less than they paid.  The bootcamp is a far better path:  cheaper to get into and there is no loss.  Building a style of community at a pace that dodges the burnout issues.

I guess I am not sure what you are advocating - do you want to see most boots come and stay forever? Or do they come and hang out, build skills and then move on?
If the latter, you haven’t quite solved the problem. If the former - yikes. I would not do that, or suggest anyone else do so, without a significant nest egg - enough to cover any health or other emergencies, and all the other expenses that come up, as well as enough to start over if at some point they feel like they want a different life in a different place. Oh, and enough for flights to family, unless you are local to the Missoula area. I bought a sepper package when they first came out, and the looked at flights to Missoula. Whew!!! They were pricey. Doubt I will ever redeem it.
Problem is, by the time you have that much money, you probably have other ties, like a partner and kids, which make something like bootcamp hard. Or maybe you are just set in your ways and would find the rules of the lab confining.
I guess my feeling is that gardening gardeners programs, like self sufficient lifestyles in general, will remain very much a niche thing up until the shit actually hits the fan (the world would be a better place if this weren’t true, but there it is). At that point - assuming people can still travel, it will probably become very popular for the reasons you listed, such as the structure and community and free food.

Another question- say you stay a boot long enough to get an acre of land. Will you still have access to the boot workforce? That is, will bootcamp help you build and maintain your house, install the gardens, and lighten the load of getting the homestead off the ground? Sorry if I missed how this is handled, but I assume that if it fills up, not every boot who stays can get an allerton abby.

Tereza Okava wrote:

Maybe that opens up more possibilities for gardener type situations. As it is, I can't believe people aren't beating a path to Wheaton Labs for the chance to have a place to live AND learn stuff.

Really? I can, and I say that as a long time listener of the podcast and participant/supporter of permies, who thinks the bootcamp sounds fun and useful.

Think about the prerequisites. You need to be healthy, unattached (no family of pet commitments), and have enough resources to store any stuff you have and pay for transport and expenses while you are there. I’d guess mostly 20-somethings from at least somewhat affluent backgrounds.
  What is that demographic looking for? To sleep in a bunkhouse and get food in exchange for 40 hrs of work per week? Without pot or alcohol? (sorry, don’t mean to imply that kids just want to party) Now of course you are learning things. Are those marketable skills? Is anyone going to pay you a living wage to split wood by hand, build junk pole fences, harvest rhubarb in a homestead setting? Bootcamp doesn’t set you up for a career in our current society, and doesn’t pretend to. From my understanding of the the program, it teaches you to run a small homestead mostly by hand, with occasional use of the excavator and tractor. In order for this to seem like the best career option, you have to have a prepper mindset (assume societal collapse in the next few years) and assume that whatever comes after the collapse wil make homesteading a better option than 20 years of food and ammo in a nuclear proof underground bunker.

Or you just think that is fun, or you are called to the lifestyle. The fact that bootcamp is not empty obviously means a certain number of folks find it worth the trip. And I am glad they do - I think it is a worthy endeavor! But I don’t expect huge numbers of people to flock there, when I consider the current situation .

I guess the ultimate question is this: are we at a point where the kind of life most people want will soon be out of reach?
Lets face it: the gert life, even the life of a skipper who gets ahold of larger property for farming, will sound great to people on this site. It will not sound great to the majority of Americans, many of whom are freaked out by the idea that their carrots ever touched dirt.
At the risk of over generalizing, I think that the majority of Americans consider a nice house with flush toilets, automatic thermostats, purchased food, and a Netflix subscription to be prerequisites for a comfortable life. To maintain these things and cover other expenses throughout life, you need a stable job with a decent income. Historically and even today, people with those jobs are far more likely to have a university degree. Is that about to flip? Are the white collar jobs about to become so rare, and standard of living so low, that growing your own food on a few acres with an RMH and willow feeder and an income way below the poverty line is actually your best option even if you don’t like gardening, despise building fires, and gag at the thought of a bucket of aged poop?
I honestly don’t know. It is hard to imagine. To me, it seems more likely that we will see an extension of the computer era: computers automated a lot of jobs (human computers, hand accounting, research aides) but created so many more by expanding what was possible. Maybe AI will do the same. Or maybe it will collapse under its own energy needs. Or maybe we really will see massive unemployment of college degree holders, beyond anything that went before. Wish I had a crystal ball.

Alexandra Malecki wrote:I did the university path. I graduated in 3 years and had 2 full academic scholarships. I also had internships at an Engineering company every summer (2 out of 3 summers I also had a food service job after leaving my internship). I graduated with <$7000 of debt that I was able to pay off within 4 months (meaning I didn't pay interest) after graduating. A college degree in Mech Eng really paid off for me. I was able to save for a down payment and afford my first house plus rental (I purchased a duplex but I don't advise getting an FHA loan because fighting to refinance to a conventional loan was nearly impossible -- though I was successful) when I was 22 which was really helpful for building equity in the real estate world before prices for an entry-level home became out of reach for my peers. Honestly, I look around at my peers and don't know how they're supposed to make it, forget about the future of young 20s right now. A lot of my peers travel with their disposable income instead of saving it because their forward outlook is so dismal. Most people I have these kind of conversations with have accepted that they will continue to work until the day they die. This is the new norm.

If someone were to have told me that SKIP was an alternative to college back when I was 18, I would NOT have considered it. I needed financial stability and independence to improve my circumstances. Plus I knew nothing about permaculture or gardening or the presence of toxic gick everywhere, etc. Also, there's no guarantee that someone will just fork over everything to someone they've never met - that wouldn't haven't worked for 18-year old me.

Sounds like you did a variation of ERE - earn a professional salary for awhile, invest wisely, get land, and set up a frugal lifestyle so that the income from non-homestead sources covers your expenses. That is pretty similar to me.
What I still have not seen, is someone living on a few thousand a year because all their food comes from the land and they sell the surplus and maybe consult once a year, so that the only assets they need are the house and land, and they only need to work the homestead half time most of the year. Wish I had seen it.
It seems like in order to make that lifestyle work, the examples I have seen need some sort of external income, for security and the unexpected and expected costs that always come up.
That is why I hesitate to make a blanket statement of “don’t go to college”. Think carefully about what you are good at, and don’t go into major debt for it, sure. But the fact is, while college is not a guaranteed higher income, it is a prerequisite. If you want to earn enough to buy land then an accountant, lawyer, or engineer is going to earn it faster than a welder - assuming they are good, and can find a job. SKIP? Maybe. But that is really new, and we don’t know how many Otises will cave to family pressures, or need to sell to pay for end of life care, or decide the skipper isn’t worthy after all… and I suspect the number of otises is small compared to the number of people in the USA considering college. Plus, completing the farming portion of SKIP requires access to land and and excavator, which you might not have as a high school graduate. So that is problematic as well.
There are, of course, other ways to do it, especially if you are young, strong, and unattached. “Walden on wheels” had some great examples- the guy went 100k into debt on a useless degree, then payed it back by working on logging crews, Alaskan camps- jobs that paid ok and, crucially, included room and board in locations without opportunities to spend money. If he had done that without the college debt, he could have been well set up, if land was his dream.
It is a scary time right now. No one is sure how things will shake out with AI and the economy overall. Sadly, a lot of passive income ideas, like writing a book, making digital art, or stock photography are likely to be the first to disappear as AI products flood the market. More complex jobs that require human interaction will be later, and -I expect - skilled physical jobs will be last. But the timeline for all that? No idea.

Susan Mené wrote:
    I am living kind of like Gert; Gert in densely populated suburbia.  I aspire to be full Gert. Can I grow all my own food? Nope, not yet, working on it on my shy acre. I forage, I pressure can/water bath can, I make my own bread when I want it, make "yarn" from old clothing and crochet into mediocre rugs and blankets among other skills that seem useless to the outside world. Leaning into, immersing myself, living permaculture and homesteading in place is my new career.  I know where my money is if I need it.
     
   

I am curious how you achieve this? As I said, I haven’t seen any real life examples of gert.
My understanding of the gert story is that she doesn’t need a paycheck, doesn’t need to work hard most of the year, because she just doesn’t have big expenses and can save money from selling a bit of her easily grown food.  How does it work in suburbia? You mentioned growing and foraging and making rugs - how about water, power, garbage bills? Repairs to the (presumably mortgage free) house? Internet/phone bills? Transportation costs?
I am really curious: my family recently went down to one income, with a toddler I stay home with. I garden, can, cook, haul ass to use wood heat, and do various fiber arts. Seems like we are getting ahead, and then the pressure tank breaks, the wood stove’s baffle is broken, the solar panels don’t cover our electricity usage, the baby needs a hospital visit that reinforces the need for health insurance, and a dozen other little things come up.
I don’t want to suggest we are struggling - one income is enough for our current lifestyle. But gert, we aren’t even close. Either in finances or in the time we spend putting up our own food and all the rest of it. Heck, I can’t even keep the dishes done after all the cooking.
I would love to here how others manage!

paul wheaton wrote:

One question might be: How does one obtain a "humble home" with which to grow "huge gardens" without appropriate financial resources?

SKIP:  get 200 acres, 2 homes, rigs, coin, etc. for zero money.

Join the bootcamp.  If a person spends 4 years in a leadership role here I will give you an acre with a humble home and a huge garden.  Like allerton abbey

I can’t see this, or anything, preparing someone for 70% unemployment. For context, the height of the Great Depression saw 25% unemployment.
If it comes to that, there will either be a complete and utter collapse of society which will include the big businesses and AI (nobody to buy their products) or there will be a new economic model.

In the first scenario: How will the farmer who supposed to will his land to the skipper hang on to his land long enough to do so? How will he pay taxes when his bank crashes, taking his savings? How will he finish out farming when there is nobody who can afford to buy the crops he sells? Same questions apply even if you own land- how will you pay for electricity to run your well? How will you replace those 20-year lifespan solar panels? Or the well pump, or the excavator parts, or or or…
Upshot - lets hope this doesn’t happen. It is never a bad idea to own land, learn skills, and do a bit of “prepping”. But I personally don’t think that this will save you if we are talking full societal disintegration. Then again, I have never met a gert - only farmers trying hard to live by those principles, and finding it tremendously difficult. So maybe my perspective is incomplete.

Tristan Vitali wrote:
I needed to scrape some 10,000 official product images that I could "more easily" load into a client's square inventory. The AI told me it could do this with a spreadsheet of product names plus SKU and GTIN numbers. Then it said it couldn't. After several iterations of this kind of nonsense, I had it develop a perl script that would presumably do the task, scraping the images and renaming them according to specs for "easy" manual importing on my end. The script was a total failure over and over, failing to run, then failing to save the images, then failing to rename them, then failing to run again.

Yes! To be fair, when I was trying to do more complex image processing/statistical analysis in R, AI did save me time. But it never once gave me a working script - I always had to debug to take it the rest of the way.

I recently read something along the lines of “it seems like AI is thinking, but it’s not. It is predicting, based on the data it’s been trained on, what the next word is likely to be”. That is why it sometimes produces fictional references.

What I have found in practice is that it is good at things like, say, writing a form letter. It is also good at producing specialized content that seem correct on the surface, but is subtly wrong.

Example: until recently, I worked as a researcher in biology. I was working on a paper with a colleague who is fascinated by AI. He was playing with it by feeding the method and results section of our draft into AI and asking it to write the discussion. Then he mistakenly mixed up the drafts, so that, after some months of not looking at it, I ended up  with the AI augmented draft.
It was an interesting experience. I was reading through it, thinking “this doesn’t feel right - was it put in by one of the chemists, who doesn’t quite understand the subtleties of the biological side?” and “wait, did I write that? What was I actually trying to say?” It wasn’t until a suggestion for future experiments included one that was physically impossible given the technique we were using that I realized what had happened. Once I did, I decided that it was working on the level of a college student trying to cram an essay by speed reading a lot of sources, then bsing the essay during an all nighter.

So my take - ai can replace a lot of “grunt” white collar jobs, like filling out forms, writing generic letters, etc. But even though it has read every paper in my field, it cannot synthesize that information correctly. It can spit something out that sounds right to a non expert, but isn’t actually correct.

Obviously, this might change. But for now, I think real, deep expertise in a valuable field is still needed. Frankly, I am more worried about how to educate myself in areas I don’t know well. With so much AI content going up online, I am afraid of using an AI source that sounds like it was written by an expert, but is actually wrong.

I am curious - in several places, I have seen the claim that this system is “more likely to get approved” in areas where outhouses are illegal. Wondering if there is anything to actually support this? It seems to me that sheds housing barrels of poop in the back yard is not the sort of thing that suburban departments of making you sad would want to see… had anyone talked to city/county officials in any location about this? Is there an example of approval? Would the calculus change in areas prone to, for example, tornados and hurricanes?

Tammy Mayer wrote:

Reading this whole thread, and these specific ideas about earthworm systems makes me want to learn more about the earthworm system. I'm still a novice with all this. I have used a composting toilet before, but never owned or managed one...

Paul, how does the earthworm system compare to the willow system? Also, isn't there a benefit to putting the poop in the garden, which is lost if we feed the poop to a willow tree? Isn't it better to use that humanure rather than 'waste' it feeding a willow tree?

(Also we don't have space for a willow tree in our yard, as we're trying to turn the whole property into a Food Forest, and we already have too many non-food trees: ginkgo, red beech, massive pine and some yews.)

Here is a summary of the earthworm system:
https://www.earthwormsoc.org.uk/VermicompostingToilets

It is very different, and has some definite limitations of configuration (for example, your toilet has to be above ground level). Its advantages over the willow feeder and traditional composting toilet are - no carrying buckets/trash cans of poop! This is the part most people balk at, I think. Since it is a living system, it will still need some care- but since the tank is outside, I can envision outsourcing that, the way we do septic tank pumping. It uses a regular flush toilet - that means water usage, which is a disadvantage, but potentially can be mitigated through grey water reuse. If you actually don’t mind carrying the contents of a composting toilet, I think an earthworm system is a good humanure option, that would mitigate concerns over open piles. The advantage over the willow feeder would be not having to store waste for two years - worms work fast. The disadvantage would be needing to regulate the temp of the system.
  As far as using humanure/aged poop from the willow feeder on veggies - i think a lot of that is individual. If done correctly, either system should get rid of pathogens. But is someone in the house on meds, or detoxing from lead exposure, or whatnot? Maybe that isn’t actually a problem, but it worries some folks.