You don’t need passive income to be able to do what you want. Mostly you just need to get past the barrier of housing cost.

Where I am, I could pay down a mortgage on a good house in 4-5 years of working fulltime. With another two similarly-committed comrades to share the house with, we could easily pull it off in 2 years. After that, baseline cost of living would be 6000 a year for 3 people.

After working fulltime for 2 years I quit my job and the 18 months since I’ve averaged less than 10 hours a week of zero-hour type gigs or odd jobs. I’ve been on like 12 overnight-away-from-home trips in that time, totaling over 3 months. I could probably retire on 300k, including the cost of a house. I’m going to have to start working again soon but I’ve been in total vacation mode for a year and a half.

This is a very tenuous alliance.

At the capitalist bug farm, mice were always getting into our waxworms, because they buildings were poorly built, they used poorly-sealed kitty litter boxes to grow the waxworms in, and the racks easily allowed the mice to climb up (partly because of escaped-worm cocoons on them).

We’d see them running across the main floor all the time. It was very common to open up a box after 6 weeks and see a litter of baby mice inside, and barely any waxworms. Maybe one out of every 50 was like that.

little pressure and POP out comes a little beetle of ear wax.

All the commercial ear drops are based on either vinegar, alcohol, or hydrogen peroxide. And a list of antibiotics that steadily gets longer as resistance disseminates.

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/24654-ear-drops

I went by the farmers’ market the other day and a stall had duck eggs for $8-10 a dozen. Buying 36-packs from Walmart is maybe about $1 a dozen. I don’t see it going much lower than that, or higher than $20, though.

For a while now I’ve been fairly convinced that everyday expenditures scale logarithmically with income. The increase is pretty smooth, and tapers off pretty smoothly too.

Back in the day, before we invented hollow walls, you could do a whole bunch of effective home DIY with just a shovel, a hatchet, and a bucket or two. Forget commodities, retvrn to straw that you cut yourself.

A hot mess. I expect people to still be holding on to coastal real estate that floods regularly but they still do financial black magic with it. Already tens of millions of climate refugees, most western economies in a persistent state of managed collapse, lots of countries have a federal government that only exists on paper, social ties and norms have eroded on a scale we can’t comprehend due to capitalism and AI. The world order has already ended and capitalism is in the process of degenerating into techno-feudalism, yet most people are in denial about it.

Still, many constellations of safe havens exist. At least two of which I have built, mostly with my own labor and that of my accomplices. The bug farm stands as one of the enterprises that supports a commune, another is fermented foods, another is either plastic or textile reprocessing. I live in a mud hut, it’s warm as hell, we’ve got rocket stoves and like fifty blankets.

The maple trees where I live are all dead or moribund. But I do have a microclimate on one side of a hill where a yaupon holly I planted is growing.

What I probably regret is trusting people too much, letting them make rash anti-social choices rather than being assertive and proverbially kicking their asses into cooperating with each other.

Buddy, do I have just the financial instrument for you!

Physically quite dirty but ethically clean.

antialiassing

if you have chickens I will send you worms very close to at-cost

Did someone say the magic word?

Busco compradores para mis gusanos

trying not to get bugs in my rug as i count them to track the survivability of my starter mealworm population

Couldn’t be me, I would have sent you the ants in cardboard boxes.

I spend all day in a conference room with Satan, telling him what good ideas he has and how epic his memes are.

So you know how insects have no lungs, just a series of tubes throughout their body that let oxygen in as they enlarge their body cavity?

It’s a similar thing in the taint, the piss just diffuses through.

Piss is smart, it knows where to go.

Almost done building a rack to keep da bugz in, this will allow me to keep up to 400,000 mealworms at once (about 50x what I have right now), in half the floor space.

I had been hoping to have this done 6 months ago but a bunch of surprisingly cool events got in the way. And also procrastination. But it feels like I have the upper hand on procrastination.

Liberalism is a sandwich.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

Termites know something we don’t.

It’s a slug, it’s a snake, it’s…

SUPERWORMS!