[rogerhb]

Being able to stand, sit and spend a long time indoors during inclement weather is a must.

Cultural issues of "personal space" need to be addressed.

Ever been on a caravan holiday in poor weather?

[PenultimateManStanding]

Does JD post anywhere here anymore? Seems like since he put up his peakoildebunked blog he doesn't feel a need to come around here anymore. Do you still deign to read the posts here JD?

[johnmarkos]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('rogerhb', 'B')eing able to stand, sit and spend a long time indoors during inclement weather is a must.

Cultural issues of "personal space" need to be addressed.

[SurvivalAcres]

Isn't the problem with food, really an issue of production / transportation / storage?

Modern living met all of these requirements (because of importations) all because of cheap energy (also imported).

And isn't (modern) housing facing the same issues? Production & transportation and importation?

I'd think that non-sustainable towns and cities will have to stabilize on the availibility of local resources - very much like it was done for thousands of years. Population reduction based upon local agriculture, renewed methods of natural home construction, etc.

[PrairieMule]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('JohnDenver', 'A') thought experiment: if we really applied ourselves, how cheap could we make food and shelter?

I mean "food and shelter" in the most minimal sense. By food, I mean an adequate diet of bread, rice, corn or potatoes, with beans, occasional meat and fresh vegetables. By shelter, I mean a place to seek refuge from the elements where you can cook and sleep comfortably (with heat, blankets etc.)

Now, all we really need as human beings is food and shelter. We clearly have plenty of food and shelter in the U.S. We actually produce way more food and shelter than is necessary to serve the basic purpose, and on top of that, we produce a mountain of other crap which isn't really necessary.

The question is: how cheap could we make food and shelter if we focused our effort on them? Let's focus on food. Clearly we can drop the price by encouraging overproduction. We could easily do that by eliminating agricultural subsidies and tariffs on imports from poor nations.

But that's where we hit the barrier. We can't make food too cheap, because it will pinch the producers and they will stop producing. This is where capitalism fails; it actually inhibits production growth beyond a certain point. The capitalists who are producing food want it to be expensive, so they use all kinds of dirty tactics to limit production. They actually arrange with the government to pay people not to produce!

To make food cheap, we have to outwit the capitalists, so let's try this idea: non-profit agriculture. We start up agricultural concerns which are organized as ordinary non-profit organizations, rather than as corporations. Land for these non-profits will be purchased with the subsidy money which was previously paid to farmers for not working. In fact, since the elimination of subsidies will put a lot of farmers out of business, farms should be available at very low prices. So, the government gives the subsidies (which it previously paid to non-working farmers) to the non-profit farms who will now farm the land. The non-profits can keep functioning below the price corporations can because they don't need to charge for profit.

These measures should make food (as defined above) cheaper. This will drive the CPI down, and the government can accordingly reduce payouts for social security and food stamps etc. This reduces government expenditures, so the government is now free to reduce taxes on the non-profit farms, and encourage further overproduction and reduction in the food price.

Now, clearly we will hit a limit here, because the employees of non-profit farms are still being paid a living wage, just like the employees of any other non-profit. To make food even cheaper, we must reduce the labor costs of the non-profit farms. But this shouldn't be a problem because food prices are dropping. Employee wages can be reduced to reflect that.

We should be able to get food and shelter prices quite low using this approach -- so low, in fact, that people who are satisfied with food and shelter need to do very little work to "make a living". This would, in turn, have beneficial effects on energy prices (and the CPI), because it would eliminate a lot of the scurrying work people do to make a living. Slacking and loafing would be encouraged by public service announcements on TV.

The people on the farms, on the other hand, would be fairly busy, so it might make sense to call for volunteers, or draft young people for a year or two of compulsory public service. The remaining question is this: How hard would we have to work (relative to how hard we are working now) if all we did was produce food and shelter, nothing else? I'd imagine (like M. King Hubbert) that we would have to each work about 10 hours a week.

Note: This plan takes a totally laissez-faire approach to non-food/non-shelter part of the economy.

[Schneider]

I am all for tiny houses,they are cheap,affordable (a great things for my generation,i'm 25 and like most of my kind,i have students depts to the eyeballs and praticaly denied access to jobs with good salaries ) !

They don't need a lot of ressources to maintain and use(materials,electricity,heating) and take a far smaller part of the land ,witch is great when you want to maximise for food production (you just have to see a picture of theses huges McMansions with barelly enough place for people to go behind without having to pass by the house to understand what i mean)..

Hell, my original dream house was a underground house a la Mike Oehler of only 400 square feets for pete sake !

But there is a little problem in a lot of towns like the one where my mother is constructing his house : they regulate the minimum square feets that you can actually build (in her case,it was 720 square feets) !

Because of this,i did have to modify my original plan..now,i plan to build a round shaped earth sheltered house of two stages with a footprint of less than 500 square feets at ground level..In this more acceptable design,smaller than that would be not only unpraticable,but also marginal in therm of savings costs ..

Schneider
French-Canadian