HN Gopher Feed (2017-10-28) - page 1 of 10 ___________________________________________________________________
Delaware's Odd, Beautiful, Contentious, Private Utopia
78 points by jamesbowman
http://reason.com/archives/2017/10/14/delawares-odd-beautiful-co...___________________________________________________________________
LVTfan - 1 hours ago
As a part time resident, and a passionate Georgist, I love the
Ardens. The three villages function separately for governance, but
socially they're one, and there is a lot going on. The history is
fascinating. (If you have access to newspapers.com, read it
chronologically. I'm still working through it.) If you're in the
area in early September, don't miss the Arden Fair.
mlinksva - 1 hours ago
Did you move for your passion, or did you learn your passion from
living there?If you have the inclination, please add references
to the relevant Wikipedia articles as you read old news! Thank
you. :)
LVTfan - 59 minutes ago
I moved there because it was lovely, and was consistent with
something I have long felt strongly about. My late
grandparents were lifelong Georgists, and never mentioned the
Ardens to me. (I'm a late-bloomer -- I shared their perception
of the problems, but kept thinking there had to be another way
to solve them; when I failed to find it, I looked more closely
at what Henry George had to say, and found it very persuasive.)
For a recent article, look at Michael Kinsley's, in the
September Vanity Fair. But people from across many spectra
embrace George's analysis and George's remedy; it is a third
way, coming out of the traditions of classical economics, not
the neo-classical economics that is widely taught
today.George's most famous book was entitled "Progress and
Poverty" ... it was dedicated, "to those who, seeing the vice
and misery that spring from the unequal distribution of wealth
and privilege, feel the possibility of a higher social state
and would strive for its attainment." Its subtitle is a
mouthful:"an inquiry into the cause of industrial depressions
and of increase of want with increase of wealth ... The
Remedy."The book is quite analytical, a logical analysis. If
you want to see where it is going, jump to the final "book"
before you read the rest.Or you might start with a collection
of essays entitled "Social Problems." They still read well
today, and, among other things, show why a Constitution written
in the 18th century simply can't be frozen in time, and needs
to be reconsidered in light of 21st century realities. Some
of my favorite quotes are from "Social Problems."Both books are
online and at Amazon or schalkenbach.org; there is also a fine
modern abridgment of P&P, and audio is available at
hgchicago.org.
mlinksva - 29 minutes ago
I've read Progress and Poverty and much more by still living
Georgists (eg Polly Cleveland and Mason Gaffney). I'm pro-
LVT.Your response however typifies one reason I'd never call
myself a Georgist -- people who call themselves such come off
as believing they've discovered the single truth that obtains
social salvation, ie religious nuts -- who need to dump that
single truth on people they encounter at the first
opportunity. Seriously, if you want to be effective, and I
want you to be, please tone it down.Thank you very much for
sharing your experience in the fist 3 sentences of your
comment. That's what I was hoping to learn!
jawbone3 - 2 hours ago
> "The idea that children could be out without a parent hovering
was just completely unknown to them," Macklem recalls. "And the
fact that the kids talked to someone who they obviously knew but
who was not a parent."I didn?t know the situation in the US was
quite so dystopical that kids on their own was any surprise...
tehabe - 1 hours ago
Somewhere was a piece by an American mother, who moved to Berlin
and was surprised that free range parenting wasn't a movement
there but the norm.A couple of years ago, I was extremely
surprised about a 16 year old who said they wouldn't go an event
w/o their parents. At 16 I wouldn't have gone to an event with a
parent.
ghaff - 51 minutes ago
While there has been somewhat of a shift over time, it's also
worth observing that the reason there can be a number of links to
news stories in this thread is that they're often "man bites
dog." Outside of maybe some trend stories, CNN doesn't generally
do stories on routine everyday occurrences.
crooked-v - 2 hours ago
http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/20/living/feat-md-free-range-
pare...http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/31/living/florida-mom-arrested-
so...http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/07/mom-arrested-for-
letting-k...
qznc - 31 minutes ago
Wow. This is not a single police weirdo. This is three
different states. Ok, it is not normal otherwise it would not
be in the news. Still, moving to the US became scarier to me
(and Silicon Valley is tempting).For a contrast, I'm in
Germany. My oldest son will go to school next year. It is
considered normal to train him now to go to and from
kindergarten alone. The biggest perceived danger is crossing
roads.The kid of an acquaintance uses the tram for a few stops
on the way to school. The first week in first grade the mother
escorted her. Then she was on her own. Not alone though. The
tram is packed with kids and they look out for each other (more
or less, they are still kids).Still, we also see that
congestion at schools is increasingly a problem. More and more
parents seem to drop of their kids at school.
maxxxxx - 2 hours ago
Where I live you almost never see kids alone. They get dropped
off by car at school, when they take the school bus the parents
wait in the car until the bus has left.
cydonian_monk - 2 hours ago
Kids being unsupervised is a good way to get arrested for
endangerment in many parts of this country, or at least result in
an investigation by authorities such as child protective
services. This [0] is the most widely cited recent example, but
this idea is widespread and by no means limited to Maryland.Even
when I was growing up 30 years ago in a not-quite-as-urban part
of the country, me being alone would occasionally result in a
call.0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/maryland-
coup...
dsfyu404ed - 24 minutes ago
This.The wide authority given to CPS doesn't help either. If
you come to their attention the CPS will be a terrible
nuisance, waste your time in court and maybe take your kid. A
lot of parents probably would give their kids more freedom if
they weren't one busybody with a cell phone away from being on
CPS bad list.It's one of the many issues that comes back to
people trying to exert unnecessary control over others, "you
shouldn't be raising your kid that way" and so on.
[deleted]
[deleted]
sutble - 2 hours ago
>After the prisoners' sentences were completed, the town celebrated
with a circus. The performance included an arrest of its own: A
clown dressed as a cop entered the audience, grabbed a surprised
Sinclair, and marched him away from the show.Surely the author
meant to write a cop dressed as a clown?
ISKthrow - 1 hours ago
Wat? No, a cown dressed like a cop. Pretty explicit. A cop
dressed as a clown would not be recognized for anything else than
a clown. A clown dressed as a cop will be seen as a clown dressed
as a cop. Or maybe I'm crazy...
bmelton - 1 hours ago
The previous paragraphs insist that they had no police
department, so unless they skipped or abridged the timetable, it
seems most likely that it was a clown dressed as a cop.
neogodless - 2 hours ago
Well that was odd. Tried to read page two on my Android Oreo
device, had "virus" like alerts springing up. Sorry, this is off
topic, but I think there's reason to suspect that web page.
trav4225 - 2 hours ago
Lots of reasonably decent sites seem to participate in ad
networks that apparently allow malicious ads that hijack
browsers... It's not clear to me why this is still an unsolved
problem after so many years... :-/
SomeStupidPoint - 1 hours ago
Because the profits from serving the malware are concentrated
while the harm is diffuse.
Animats - 2 hours ago
I knew about Freehope, which is another single-tax community. But
not this one.
wonder_er - 3 hours ago
While I might not want to live in Arden, I love the experimental
approach to self-organization.I feel like a dozen of similar
experimental communities allowed to succeed or fail, and they might
bubble up some useful heuristics for how cities/towns organize
themselves.I feel like the dominant model of town organization in
the USA leaves much to be desired.
mlinksva - 2 hours ago
There are many. Success among them seems to mean longevity, not
scale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Intentional_communiti...
(on English Wikipedia, the article about Arden is in a sub-sub-
category of this one).Reading the Strong Towns site for awhile
about the "traditional development pattern"
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/?tag=traditional+develop...
ie cities and towns wordwide pre-car makes me think that whatever
idiosyncratic motivations for various intentional communities, in
form they're just following the traditional development
pattern.There's no need for idiosyncratic experimentation to take
and apply everywhere lessons from millennia of human settlements
that we've strayed from in the car era.I'm a fan of idiosyncratic
experimentation but see zero evidence of potential (because of
tiny scale) or need (above) for bubbling up of heuristics from
them.
gumby - 2 hours ago
> I feel like the dominant model of town organization in the USA
leaves much to be desired.What is that dominant model?I've lived
in Massachusetts and California. In both states what's common is
that the town decides (pretty much "has decided" at this point,
esp in Mass) to organize itself, writes a local charter, and has
local folks run a council. Town hall meetings are open to
everyone. The council members are amateurs. School districts
and utility self govern and are rarely completely coextensional
with towns.This can go wrong, of course, for example in Palo Alto
the city managers weren't given enough oversight and overstaffed
with middle managers; also real estate interests can take over
the council for a while. But by an large it's not that different
in principle.In California, in fact, most of the state isn't part
of organized towns; most "towns" are just vaguely defined areas
under the county rules; various groups do things like run a water
utility, manage the local park, etc. In fact barely a quarter of
the counties have charters; most themselves run under default
state rules. So that's much closer to the Arden idea.
mlinksva - 2 hours ago
I'm with you right up to the last sentence. Isn't minimizing
private rents from land ownership central to the "Arden idea"?
I don't see that anywhere in the organization of California
jurisdictions.
KGIII - 2 hours ago
Indeed, it's quite a rarity to find an unincorporated township
in New England. Mine is just a letter. The rules are pretty
minimal, the municipal services do not exist, and the large
animals vastly outnumber the people.I read this article and was
fascinated. I will visit there in my next expression of
wanderlust. What a curious place.
52-6F-62 - 2 hours ago
I imagine its population-dependent to some extent. I had never
heard of Arden before this post and by god it looks beautiful.It
seems important to note that it's population is ~439-450 people.
I'm not in disagreement, though. I grew up in a small town
(~4500-6000 people throughout my life there) and it had a mixed
population between hardline skilled and unskilled labour in the
steel and fishing industries, bikers, and aging hippies - as well
as a small subsection of Government of Canada and University of
Guelph environmental scientists. There was a notable difference
in opinions for that reason.I imagine its simpler at this point
in time to run a village society in that way with a group of
like-minded, read people. Other kinds of lives lived by people
tend to inform other kinds of opinions: I work hard all day, I
don't want to think about that kind of thing, I understand a
hierarchy with firm structure, I like to know who the boss is,
etc.I'm oversimplifying it for the sake of being concise, and I
hope my point is coming across. Hopefully when the political
temper settles a little, those kinds of conversations about how
life can be better can resume.