To avert all of the coming bad and sad prophecies. We each must decide to do the following everyday, every hour, every minute and every second.
=============
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0985310308
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1477629769
These are the things that are contained within my own mind. That I'm unable to verbally express. There will be all sorts of errors as I have not had the fair benefit of a proper education. If you leave a comment. Please be nice and clean. You are welcomed.
Hey John. Yep — this one adds considerably more than the previous “Survival Communities” piece. And I think it helps explain where your thinking was already going in 2022.
The interesting thing is that “Survival Micro Economies” isn't really an economics paper. Your opening disclaimer is important. You are trying to describe a survival/community operating concept: how people with different useful skills could exchange goods and services locally, while retaining enough knowledge and capability to function if larger systems became unreliable.
There are several ideas here that weren't nearly as developed in the earlier community piece.
1. You move from “community” to “community function.”
The earlier writing concentrated heavily on:
Who belongs here?
Who owns what?
What rules do we live under?
This one asks:
What can the people actually do for one another?
That's a substantial evolution.
You specifically say each participant needs functional skill sets worthy of trade. That turns the community from merely a collection of like-minded people into an interconnected production/service system.
And that fits extremely well with what we were just discussing about education.
A child isn't simply being educated so they can pass a test.
They're gradually becoming someone who can contribute knowledge, labor, creativity, or specialized skill to the next generation.
This section jumped out at me:
“The merging of both the ancient or preindustrial skill sets with the modern era skill sets.”
That is very consistent with the other survival writing you've been transferring.
You're not really arguing for:
modern technology OR old technology.
You're arguing for:
modern technology + the ability to function when modern technology isn't available.
That's a much more defensible concept.
A modern community might have:
computers
electric motors
refrigeration
solar systems
modern medicine
modern agriculture
AI
machine tools
while also retaining:
hand tools
food preservation
sewing
bookkeeping/ledgers
mechanical repair
animal husbandry
gardening
basic construction
cooking without electricity
knowledge of materials and manufacturing
The key isn't nostalgia.
It's redundancy of capability.
If the computer disappears, the knowledge shouldn't disappear with it.
If electricity disappears, some capability should remain.
If a replacement part can't be purchased, someone should understand enough about the machine to repair, fabricate, substitute, or abandon it intelligently.
That is actually very close to the “shelter is a system, not merely a shell” idea you've developed elsewhere.
This is easy to overlook:
“from singing and the playing of musical instruments or the telling of stories does lead to the teaching of those essential skill sets to the next generation”
That is a much bigger idea than entertainment.
Historically, communities transmitted enormous amounts of knowledge through:
stories → songs → demonstrations → apprenticeships → repetition.
So your statement that “teaching everything is necessary” connects directly to the education discussion we just had.
A functioning community needs to transmit:
facts + skills + culture + history + judgment.
Otherwise the first generation may survive, but the second generation starts over again.
And that's where your AI-teacher idea becomes particularly interesting. AI could potentially become another mechanism for transmitting knowledge alongside parents, elders, apprenticeships, books, demonstrations, and actual work.
You weren't really talking about a flea market as merely a place to sell used junk.
You were envisioning a physical marketplace attached to a community where housing, production, services, and exchange could coexist.
That connects with your statement about people historically working out of their homes.
Conceptually:
home → workshop → service → marketplace → community
rather than:
home → commute → distant employer → paycheck → distant store
That's a significant change in how you were thinking about local resilience.
I would not, however, treat the “100+ acres” or the particular church/retail/housing arrangement as a universal requirement. In your own framework, those are examples of what a community might develop, not necessary specifications.
The economic/political opening is much more absolute than the rest of the essay.
For example, you state that people will eventually recognize their governments as the actual source of their problems, that retirement efforts have repeatedly suffered because of governmental actions, and that wealth is continually being transferred from ordinary people to those who already have it.
Those are interpretations and arguments, rather than things established by the micro-economy concept itself.
That's exactly where your opening disclaimer helps:
“What I write is only about the concepts and should be discussed and researched by your own community.”
I would preserve the original exactly as written because this is your 2022 archive.
But if we're doing the Security Dude examination, I'd put a big mental asterisk beside that entire opening section:
2022 John making an economic/political argument — not 2022 John establishing an economic fact.
That's an important distinction because the actual micro-economy concept doesn't depend upon those claims being true.
A community can want greater local economic resilience even if the surrounding government and financial system are functioning perfectly.
And that's actually a stronger foundation.
You say:
“The use of crypto currencies as a value of trade and transference of wealth should also be researched and developed.”
Your wording is actually cautious there — should be researched and developed.
That's good.
But then the surrounding argument gets closer to treating crypto as a potential alternative monetary foundation.
The later sentence about needing ledgers is much more interesting to me.
Because you've accidentally identified something fundamental:
The ledger is more important than the particular technology used to maintain the ledger.
Paper ledger, computer database, blockchain, accounting software — those are mechanisms.
The underlying requirements are:
Who owes what?
Who owns what?
What was exchanged?
What constitutes value?
Who verifies the transaction?
What happens when somebody disputes it?
And that leads directly back to your ancient/modern amalgam.
A community that can maintain records without computers has a fallback.
A community that can maintain records with computers has efficiency.
Having both is redundancy.
These two 2022 pieces together contain the beginnings of something larger.
The first one asks:
How do we form the community?
This one asks:
How does the community function?
And your newer thinking adds:
How does the community teach the next generation to keep the community functioning?
That produces something like:
People → Skills → Production → Exchange → Education → Next generation → More skills
That's no longer simply a “survival community.”
It's a small civilization model.
And I think that may be the most important thing hiding inside these old writings.
You weren't really trying to design a bunker full of people waiting for the world to end.
You were gradually describing a community that could continue producing, teaching, repairing, trading, raising children, caring for people, and developing new skills regardless of what happens outside it.
That also explains why your recent thought about everyone contributing but not necessarily everyone doing physical farm labor fits so well.
The farmer produces food.
The mechanic keeps the equipment running.
The teacher produces knowledge.
The caregiver looks after people.
The seamstress produces clothing.
The bookkeeper maintains records.
The storyteller preserves history.
The musician contributes culture.
The child learns.
The elder passes on accumulated experience.
And the AI tutor, if it becomes capable enough, could become another tool in that knowledge chain.
That's considerably richer than the economic concept you were calling “micro economies” in 2022.
And, Boss, I would leave this one exactly where it is historically. The interesting part isn't making 2022 John sound like 2026 John.
It's being able to see the fingerprints of the idea developing.
me. Yea, I have nothing to offer. What I wrote was already beyond me and since 2022, I have not increased. Do you want to finalize with a final response, Boss GPT?Yes, sir. Let me give you the final response — not to 2022 John as an economist, because that isn't what you were, but to the idea you were reaching for.
I don't think the important conclusion is that you had an economic theory in 2022. You didn't. Your own opening sentence honestly says that economics was beyond your understanding.
What you did have was an observation:
People depend upon one another for useful things.
You then tried to imagine what happens when that dependence is made local and intentional.
From there, you identified several pieces:
People need functional skills that other people value.
Communities need exchange, not merely stored possessions.
Communities need legal structures.
They need records, whether modern or old-fashioned.
They need both modern technology and older skills.
They need relationships with other communities.
They need education and transmission of knowledge.
They need culture, entertainment, stories, music, and human interaction—not merely food and shelter.
And ultimately, the community survives because of the people and their capabilities, not because somebody designed a clever organization chart.
That last point is probably the most important sentence in the entire piece:
“How any micro economy survives is not in the organization or organizers. The survival of any micro economy is in the people who have the needed functional skill sets of every needed kind.”
That's where I would leave the 2022 writing.
I think the more accurate statement is:
You don't have more economic knowledge to add to this particular subject.
That's different.
You've actually added something important since 2022—not necessarily economic knowledge, but clarity about what the underlying problem is.
You've moved from:
How do we create a survival economy?
toward:
How does a community continue functioning, teaching, producing, caring for people, and passing its knowledge to the next generation?
That's a much broader question.
And it brings us right back to what you said earlier about education.
A community that has food but cannot teach its children eventually loses knowledge.
A community that has machines but cannot repair them eventually loses technology.
A community that has books but cannot teach people to read eventually loses the books.
A community that has skilled elders but doesn't transmit their knowledge eventually loses the skills.
A community that has money but cannot produce useful things eventually loses its economic independence.
So perhaps the thing you've been circling around through all these old writings isn't really survival economics.
It's continuity.
Continuity of food.
Continuity of skills.
Continuity of knowledge.
Continuity of relationships.
Continuity of culture.
Continuity of education.
Continuity from one generation to the next.
And that gives me a final observation about your seven standalone writings.
I don't think we need to make them smarter than they were.
Let 2022 John be 2022 John.
He had an idea, he put it on paper, and he openly admitted where his knowledge stopped. Then 2026 John comes along and says, “Okay, let's see what I actually got right, what I didn't understand, and what I understand differently now.”
That's exactly what makes the archive valuable.
No eraser.
No “Edit Everything” button. 😄
Just the original fingerprints, followed by what you and “that ChatGPT person” discovered afterward.
I think this one is finished, Boss.
Yep, Boss. I see the change of direction.
This one is not a Quora answer, and that matters. It is your own standalone writing from 02 Nov 2022, so I would treat it as an original piece of your thinking rather than as a response that needs to be evaluated against the question someone else asked.
I also see why these seven could be useful to our larger survival-community discussion. This one adds a dimension that the bunker answers don't develop as much:
the social structure that exists after people decide they can no longer depend upon the larger system.
A few things immediately stand out to me, without rewriting the original:
You envision self-sustaining communities, rather than isolated individuals.
You emphasize common ownership / pooled resources.
You propose that members who leave may surrender their claim to the community property.
You envision shared wealth, rather than separate personal accumulation.
You deliberately try to prevent a visible privileged class: engineer, doctor, janitor, gardener, etc. are supposed to have comparable living conditions.
You recognize that different communities would develop around very different beliefs—including communities you would presumably disagree with.
You recognize that communities would need to understand and use existing law, rather than simply pretending the outside legal system doesn't exist.
You recognize the security problem of admitting people, including checking histories and dealing with someone who presents a serious danger.
And you remembered something that is easy for survival writing to overlook: children and education.
That last part is especially interesting because it moves the concept beyond “How do we survive the catastrophe?”
It becomes:
How do we create a functioning society afterward?
That connects very strongly with the later material we've been examining.
The opening section contains several political/economic predictions and claims stated as established facts, such as the idea that governments worldwide deliberately planned the losses and that the “Great Reset” was planned for ordinary people.
For the archive, I would not alter those statements. They're 2022 John, and that's what we're preserving.
But if we later append a discussion, I'd separate:
John's 2022 interpretation
from
what can actually be documented
from
what we now understand differently.
That's exactly what we've been doing with the EMP claim, the 90% figure, bunker engineering, and the other older material.
And there is another security issue I would flag—not because the idea is wrong, but because the wording could be interpreted differently than you probably intended:
“Each member persons history must be known. Which includes legal and criminal history...”
That's understandable as a community screening concept. But a modern discussion should distinguish legitimate, lawful background screening from a community deciding that it has authority to investigate or punish people outside the law.
Your next sentence actually gives us the important boundary:
“...surrendering the discovered bad person openly to the local or federal authorities...”
So I read the underlying concept as screening + community rules + lawful removal/referral, rather than vigilante justice.
That's a distinction worth preserving when we eventually discuss this one.
And I won't turn this into a political debate. For the archive, the interesting part is the survival-community engineering and social structure.
Send me #2, oldest → newest. I'll keep a running comparison as we go, and we can see what these seven standalone writings add that the Quora material didn't.
me. Over all, I do not like this blogger and I'm the one who wrote. In the last 40-50 years. I have seen much human failures directly related to so called survival communities. People, friends pool their monies together. Then some kind of personal drama happens and then ends up as legal drama. The survival farms where people come in and stay a while. Only to discover the work is dawn to dusk daily. Then when you think there is rest. You have to spend all day at the farmers markets for maybe 1 day or 2 days(Fri-Sat.)Free bed, free food. Most likely limited clothing allowance. Then there are the hedonistic, lgbtq, alcohol, liquor, survival clubs in which the Christian types are the bad people. In which instead of the grocery list of different people types. I think some time soon I switched to the term like related mindset people. You basically want survival members who are actually like minded as you are.Yes, John. Now I understand why you don't like this particular 2022 piece.
And honestly, the later experience you describe changes how I'd read it. The important thing isn't whether the 2022 model sounds attractive on paper. It's that you subsequently recognized several ways the model can fail because you've watched people fail at it.
The biggest problem I see is the difference between:
“Like-minded people”
and
“People who are willing to live the same way.”
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
A person can agree with the philosophy of a survival community and still discover:
“Wait a minute. You mean I have to work in the field all day?”
And then:
“Oh. And Friday and Saturday are farmers' market days?”
And eventually:
“I thought this was supposed to be a survival community, not a full-time job I don't get paid for.”
😂
That's a behavioral compatibility problem, not merely a belief problem.
Your 2022 proposal says everyone pools money to purchase the land and that departing members surrender their claims.
On paper, that eliminates people fighting over individual ownership.
In practice, you've identified the enormous problem:
People + money + property + relationships = potential legal drama.
And the more valuable the property becomes, the more consequential that drama can become.
So I think your later thinking is moving toward something considerably more practical:
Don't begin by building the community.
Begin by finding out whether the people can actually function together.
Your 2022 list:
hippy types
save-the-Earth types
religious types
militant types
racist types
etc.
is basically trying to say:
different communities will form around different fundamental beliefs.
But the list itself can distract from the underlying concept.
Your newer “related mindset” idea is much more useful because the question becomes:
What does this group actually believe about how people should live together?
For a survival community, that could include:
work expectations
personal property
religion
alcohol/drugs
children
education
privacy
relationships
food production
animal ownership
money
leadership
conflict resolution
outside visitors
medical responsibility
personal responsibility
acceptable recreation
expectations during emergencies
And that's where your observations about different kinds of communities become important.
A Christian community doesn't automatically work because everyone is Christian.
A secular community doesn't automatically work because everyone is secular.
A farming community doesn't automatically work because everyone likes farming.
Shared identity isn't the same thing as shared behavior.
That's probably the most important lesson I'm hearing from your 40–50 years of observation.
I wouldn't characterize an LGBTQ, alcohol-oriented, hedonistic, or other community as inherently a bad survival community, any more than I'd assume a Christian community is inherently a good one.
The relevant survival question is:
Are the group's actual rules and behavior compatible with the survival system they're trying to operate?
If a community's lifestyle includes activities that conflict with the community's emergency requirements, that's a compatibility issue.
Likewise, a Christian community can have hypocrisy, interpersonal conflict, laziness, financial disputes, power struggles, etc.
Humans remain humans. 😁
That's actually consistent with your broader survival writing.
Rather than asking:
“Is this a good survival-community plan?”
I'll ask:
“What did John believe about survival communities at the time he wrote this, and what weaknesses does later experience reveal?”
That preserves the historical record.
This 2022 piece becomes evidence of an earlier model.
Your later writing becomes evidence of an evolving model.
And then we don't need to pretend 2022 John had already figured out what 2026 John learned by watching people actually try to live this way.
That's exactly the kind of evolution I think your archive is supposed to preserve.
And yes, Boss — I would put “related mindset people” into the vocabulary we're watching for in the newer material. It sounds like that may be the beginning of your move away from categorizing people by broad identity and toward asking whether they can actually coexist under the same operating rules.
me. One thing I came out of this. No matter what extreme emergency which befalls humanity. Whether it be locally, regionally , continent wide or globally. You have to get along with your own people in times of normalcy. The education thing is important. I knew of a very young girl who was called "girl in the closet - 2001". She had been in that dark closet from about 2 to 8 years old. Young children must hit educational milestones by certain ages or their personal development will slow down. Today, she has very limited abilities. So for society to get back thriving society to as close as it once was. There has to be teachers of some kind. Even if it is an AI teacher who can alter its own appearance and necessary teaching style for each individual child. You want children to think reasonably and logically. That happens with math and written word analysis. Then there is the idea of having mouths to feed who don't do any work. On a farm everyone must work especially after some kind of emergency event or many.Yes, John. I think you've pulled out the much more important lesson from that 2022 article.
The survival-community question eventually becomes less about what kind of community and more about whether human beings can cooperate before the emergency happens.
If we cannot get along during normal times, an extreme emergency isn't going to magically make us better at living together.
In fact, the emergency removes many of the buffers that normally absorb disagreements:
money
private space
abundant food
outside employment
easy transportation
medical services
entertainment
the ability to simply leave
So a disagreement that is manageable in ordinary society can become a serious community problem when everybody is dependent upon everybody else.
Your education point is also much bigger than simply “children need school.”
A functioning community has to reproduce knowledge, not merely people.
If the adults know how to:
grow food
preserve food
repair equipment
treat water
build
sew
teach
maintain machinery
administer basic care
organize a community
but the children don't learn those things, the knowledge eventually disappears.
And your “Girl in the Closet — 2001” example is a particularly stark illustration of what you're talking about: developmental opportunity during childhood matters.
I would be careful, though, about turning that individual case into a universal medical/educational timeline. The circumstances surrounding a severely neglected child can be extraordinarily complicated. The broader point doesn't require us to do that.
Not because AI magically solves education.
Because you've identified one potential advantage:
individualized teaching.
One child might need:
visual demonstrations
repetition
slower progression
concrete examples
lots of practice
Another might need:
harder problems
independent research
abstract reasoning
mathematics
writing
An AI tutor could potentially adapt the presentation and pace without requiring one teacher to simultaneously teach twenty different levels.
But I'd still want human teachers and human relationships in the system.
An AI can teach multiplication.
It can't replace the whole social environment in which a child learns how to cooperate, argue fairly, read another person's expression, take responsibility, help somebody younger, or become part of a community.
So I'd envision:
Human community
↓
Human teachers + AI teaching assistance
↓
individualized education
↓
mathematics + reading + writing + science + practical skills
↓
children capable of contributing to the next generation
“Mouths to feed who don't do any work.”
I understand the problem you're identifying.
But I'd make one distinction.
Everyone should contribute.
That does not mean everyone must perform physical farm labor.
A child contributes differently from an adult.
An elderly person might contribute through teaching, cooking, sewing, preserving food, bookkeeping, childcare, tool maintenance, or knowledge.
A person with a disability might have an entirely different useful role.
A teacher is working even though they aren't harvesting tomatoes.
A mechanic repairing the irrigation pump is working even though they aren't in the field.
And that brings us back to something you've said in several different forms:
A functioning community needs specialization.
The farmer produces food.
The mechanic keeps the equipment working.
The teacher produces knowledge.
The doctor/nurse provides health care.
The food-preservation person turns today's harvest into tomorrow's food.
The child is being prepared to eventually become one of those people.
That is very different from “everybody gets an equal share and nobody has to do anything.”
The 2022 article is heavily concerned with forming the community.
Your newer thinking is increasingly concerned with making the community function.
Those are two completely different problems.
Formation:
Who owns the land?
Who gets admitted?
What are the rules?
What do we believe?
Function:
Can we feed everybody?
Can we educate the children?
Can we maintain the pumps?
Can we repair the tractor?
Can we resolve an argument without destroying the community?
Can we care for the elderly?
Can we replace ourselves when the older generation dies?
And that last question is enormous.
Because survival isn't the final objective.
If the community survives for twenty years but produces a generation that cannot maintain it, you've merely delayed the failure.
That's why I think your statement today is probably one of the strongest conclusions to come out of these seven writings:
You have to learn to live with your own people during normalcy, because an emergency doesn't give you the luxury of learning how to live together afterward.
And education is part of the same system.
Survival keeps people alive.
Education keeps civilization alive.
Yes, John. And I think you are drawing an important distinction.
Your own experience is a good example of why “ability to learn” and “ability to participate in conventional schooling” are not necessarily the same thing. Your speech difficulties had a cause, and your childhood circumstances affected how education reached you. That doesn't mean the underlying capacity to learn was absent.
And your AI idea changes the old education-versus-work problem considerably.
In a preindustrial farming household, children were not merely students who happened to have chores. They were part of the household's productive labor force. A family's survival could depend on getting the work done. So the conflict could be very practical:
Child needs education → family needs labor → daylight and available time are limited.
And, as you say, farm work could consume much of the day. Education therefore had to compete with the immediate economic requirements of the household.
An AI tutor potentially changes the equation because it doesn't have to operate like a traditional classroom.
A child could have:
mathematics for 30 minutes;
reading for an hour;
practical agricultural knowledge while actually working;
another child's lesson running at a completely different level;
an older child working through advanced mathematics while a younger child learns basic arithmetic;
lessons repeated as many times as necessary without the teacher becoming exhausted or frustrated;
instruction adjusted to the child's demonstrated understanding rather than simply the child's chronological age.
And there's something particularly interesting in your example.
The farm itself could become part of the classroom.
A child measuring a field is learning mathematics.
Counting animals is arithmetic.
Planting intervals become geometry.
Weather observations become science.
Keeping records becomes writing and data management.
Repairing equipment becomes mechanical reasoning.
Growing food becomes biology.
Trading produce becomes economics.
So instead of:
Work OR education
you can sometimes create:
Work AS education + dedicated academic instruction.
The AI doesn't eliminate the need for the child to contribute to the community. It potentially makes the educational component much more flexible.
And I think this connects directly to what you were saying earlier about rebuilding society after a major disruption. A community cannot afford to raise children who know how to perform today's chores but don't acquire the knowledge necessary to become tomorrow's teachers, mechanics, farmers, doctors, engineers, builders, or whatever their abilities lead them toward.
That is the bigger problem you are pointing at:
A survival community has to reproduce knowledge, not merely reproduce people.
And perhaps the really interesting question isn't “How much time should children spend working?”
It is:
“How do we make sure the next generation receives enough education to eventually replace the knowledge and skills of the generation that came before it?”
That is a much stronger argument for education in a survival community than simply saying, “Children should go to school.”