I've decided to take down the thread where AlchemistGeorge made this comment, but I think his words are worth saving. The original thread was a bit derisive. But here are the words worth saving: "Nothing like some easy questions! I don't want to imply that there aren't lazy sloppy people living in buildings made of tar paper stretched between old car bodies, but here is a different story that might apply to one or two ICs you've seen or heard of. And I'm exaggerating, just a little bit, hope it makes you laugh! Many IC were started on a shoe-string budgets - the land was hundreds of thousands of dollars which nobody had, but somehow they scraped it together so there was no money left for anything else - things like building materials were scrounged (or 'borrowed') rather than bought, contractors were unaffordable, and people did the best they could with what they had. Sleeping in the back of a van gets old, even when you are 22. And, look, we are in a forest, who needs asphalt shingles or siding - we can cut up these dead trees and make beams and planks and make cedar or redwood shingles - I saw some guy at Museum do that, people did it for hundreds of years, let's go to the library (or research it on the internet at Starbucks.) Its easy. Right! Shingle are easy if you have the right kind of clear grain wood that is seasoned and you have a froe and know how to use it, and a sharp chainsaw - you get really good at 'riving' after 40 or 50 hours of practice - and then you have to figure out how not to split the shingles when you nail them on, and the result is that your first building looks like the squirrels had a fight and left behind a big pile of huge wood chips. Even though you've mostly figured it out, and only lost the tip of one finger, you Never Want To Do That again, so when you build the next building its 'no more post and beam' so let's try 'cob' - and you go through the learning curve from the beginning again, and the next building looks like two eight year olds found a huge mud puddle. And so on. And since each building is 'brittle' and 'fragile' no one will touch them until they have to - 'the roof wasn't leaking until you started to fix it!' So nothing gets fixed or repaired until "we have the money to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch" - which means "never." So the reason we all moved here together is so that we don't have to wear heels or neckties to work and be in a cubicle or stand behind a counter, but, hey, we have to pay real estate taxes and pay for health care and car insurance (hopefully no mortgage!) - we bought land in the middle of nowhere - beautiful, unspoiled, sort-of affordable but no local economy as well - but so 'for the good of all', some of them commute long distances to dead end McJobs they hate and when they get home they are too exhausted to do anything or fix anything. But that is just 'temporary'. Don't worry, Our commune is going to have a business, right? Organic farming? If you didn't grow up on a farm or in a garden, you probably have no idea how much hard work it is - there are dozens of reasons why all those people left rural America and ran to those factories and cities! But, hey, its quiet and pretty, and then when you take your 30 pounds of beautiful organic radishes to the roadside stand to sell them for 39 cents a pound you will earn enough to buy one bundle of shingles. Yes, you could grow organic arugula under contract for the gourmet restaurant at the tourist destination 147 miles away - if you know how to do that level of farming (greenhouses, cold frames, etc to extend the season, pick everything very young and cosmetically perfect) and you know how to create and negotiate those deals. And then you have to be ready for the potato bugs or the big drought or the attack of the were-rabbits. You can have a restaurant - health codes and sanitary inspections and grease traps and commercial ranges and customers and yelp reviews .... any idea what the failure rate is for new restaurants? Or you can make something, manufacture something unique and in demand and that isn't already being "hand made" in China or Vietnam or Indonesia and imported. But if you make $1 per beeswax candle before taxes, and the mortgage is $1,000 per month and gasoline is $3.65 per gallon .... how many candles would a wood chuck chuck at you before going to work at McDonalds for $8.95 per hour? Unless you've started and run a small business, its just ... hard. And running a small business is hard anyway. And the economy has been tough. So, yes, lots of communities are broke. And sometimes it seems like it is easier to get donations (charity) than to earn money. And if you read carefully the history of many of the old, established, famous communes, you'll see in the fine print that there came a day of reckoning in the late 70s or mid 80s when they all sat looking at the bank balance (zero) and the bills, and finally someone said "OK, I know how we used to do it, but if we want to survive, we have to do it differently. If you don't work, you don't eat, let's work out a system of job assignments and time cards and ...." Yeah, sometimes, its like that. And if you look at the data, what you'll see is that something like 90% of all ICs fail, most with the first two to three years, and its the rare one that lasts 10 years."
