sparr

I still need a lawyer

Today's writing exercise is to summarize my case in 500 words. Hopefully I can use this to catch the attention of an attorney willing to represent me, or at least consult on pre-trial motions and trial strategy.

On June 14 2024 I contracted to sell my home in Massachusetts to a developer for $1.6M. The property is unusual and includes a fire damaged historic manor, 19 bedrooms in intact buildings, and 18 acres of undeveloped forest. The below-market price was meant to secure a quick sale with no contingencies. Since then I have subdivided it into three parcels, with a current market value of ~$2.5M. The contract had a “time is of the essence” closing date of “on or about” August 28 2024.

On August 2, the buyer brought to my attention that some windows had been stolen from the manor building. Other items were also later stolen. I reported the thefts to the police.

On August 22, the buyer emailed with a demand to hold back from the sale price to replace the windows, which seemed reasonable, and also to lower the sale price, decrease the interest on the seller financed half of the sale price, postpone the payments on that financed half, and postpone the closing date, which did not. I did not accept these demands.

The buyer made no tender of performance, not on August 28 or any other date. They ignored all efforts to schedule a closing date, and only ever mentioned closing in the context of new terms.

From mid September to late October the buyer made further demands, including an additional $600k holdback and that I be responsible for damages caused by the tenants after closing. I responded by offering my own new terms to balance theirs, and some negotiation took place. Their court filings characterize my responses as repudiation of the contract, excusing their obligation to tender performance, including on prior dates.

As explicitly allowed by our contract, I engaged with other buyers. In November I sent to the buyer an agreement to release their deposit back to them in return for their release of the contract, which they ignored. I signed an offer for the same $1.6M from another buyer in November, to close in December.

They sued for specific performance and damages in December. They claim I failed to make reasonable efforts to evict the tenants (my efforts were reasonable, and succeeded in 2025), I failed to agree to a holdback to deal with the remaining tenants (we agreed, ahead of schedule), I failed to remove trash and debris from the property (not required by our contract), I refused to close unless my unreasonable demands were met (my only demands were in response to their new demands), I removed items from the property (almost all items were recovered, and the thief has been convicted), and I located another prospective buyer (I did). I counter-claimed for specific performance and damages. We each hold the other responsible for the extra 22 months of weather damage to the manor, which was likely salvageable in 2024, almost certainly not now.

The case is scheduled for trial on September 8, 2026 and I could really use some help.

More local monopolies deserve limits on the right to deny service

One of the rights shared by corporations and individuals is the right to choose when and with whom to enter into contracts, to whom to provide services, etc. You, an individual person, can decide not to sell me your grain or your smart phones, or not to hire out your labor to me to cut my trees or program my computers. A corporation can generally do the same, reserving the right to “fire a customer” and stop doing business with me or with you.

However, this right is not absolute. We have laws that apply to “public callings” and “public accommodations”, requiring businesses (whether run by an individual or a corporation) to provide services without discrimination. You're probably already aware that most businesses are generally not allowed to discriminate based on race or religion, or to make their facility inaccessible to wheelchairs. Some of these laws apply to all businesses, and some become more broad or strict the more necessary and monopolistic the nature of the business.

Even further than discrimination, the most critical of such callings and accommodations are restricted from denying a customer unless that customer violates specific reasonable rules that apply to all customers. This is most notably the case for public utilities; e.g. your electric company is (at least in most of the United States) forbidden from declining to provide you service just because they don't like you or don't want to or even have suffered some loss in previous dealings with you. Our society has decided that it would be bad for us all if the water company could shut off water to any vendor that refuses to sell them cheap parts or to any employee that refuses to provide cheap labor.

I believe that this restriction should apply to most local monopolies, and even more so when that monopoly has previously displaced its competitors. When there are a dozen places to buy an apple in your town, you lose little by one of them choosing not to sell you their apples, and each has little power in their ability to deny you. However, when there is only one apple store in town, they have much more power in that ability, and can pressure you much farther than if they had local competitors. We already recognize that their ability to raise prices is a monopolistic abuse that should be constrained in some ways. However, currently there are no restrictions on their ability to fire a customer.

This gap has a chilling effect on individuals seeking to enforce their rights against such a business. If you charge back a credit card purchase against Walmart, make a noise complaint against Simon Property Group (who own the most malls in America), or take your local Amazon store to small claims court, you risk losing access to the only source of many products and services in your neighborhood or city or possibly anywhere. Most people would never consider taking any such action against any of these businesses that they rely on, in any scenario less egregious than physical bodily harm.

That state of affairs is bad for our society and needs to be rectified. Those local monopolies need to have restrictions similar to a utility company, more so the more closely their monopoly approaches absolute. Factors in the closeness of that approach might include the physical, financial, and legal barriers to competition, i.e. how hard would it be for someone else to provide similar competing service? If anyone can open an apple stand in their front yard, the local apple monopoly might be quite weak. If, however, there are years of permits and approvals required, no land available on which to build, million or billion dollar investments required, etc then the restrictions should be near those applied to utilities.

This post reflects hundreds of my own experiences and thousands I have heard about. It was most immediately prompted by a friend posting something like “Uber stole some money from me but I can't demand it back or else I might lose access to the only car hire service in town since they put the taxis out of business”. Maybe I'll link back to this when I see posts like this in the future. I'm not the right person to push this cause, but perhaps I can inspire someone else. I dream of seeing some city or state give this idea the force of law in my lifetime.

The tyranny of civil court clerk delays

I'm sure that when a legislator looks at a new schedule of fees for motor vehicle violations, it seems sensible. e.g. $50 for 10mph over the limit, $100 for 20mph over, $200 for 30mph over, etc. I sometimes wonder if anyone in that decision making process worked through the math of all the other fees that get added on to every ticket, and seriously considered that they were actually saddling all three violations with $400+ tickets that are mostly indistinguishable. I open with this example because I expect most people are somewhat familiar with speeding tickets. My actual topic here is something a bit more niche but still conceptually related, procedural delays in civil court proceedings.

Massachusetts has laws establishing various timelines for parts of a civil court proceeding. Other states as well, but I'm going to focus on MA here since that's where most of my experience has been for the last few years. At some point, dozens of legislators (or their aides, at least, hopefully) looked at these laws in draft form and decided “yes, these are reasonable timelines for a person to wait between step X and step Y of the legal process”. They did this for many steps of many different processes, some very common and some very niche. However, they left some gaps, some intentionally and some unintentionally.

The next step in filling those gaps involves court rules and standing orders. The Supreme Judicial Court adopts rules that apply to each of the lower courts, e.g. the Superior Court and the Housing Court. Some of those rules are court-specific, and some apply to all of the Trial Courts. Then each individual court has its own leadership that issues standing orders. Between these various rules and orders, a lot more timelines are established, including small scale things like motion opposition deadlines and large scale things like “how long can a case take from start to finish?”.

However, there are still some gaps left after applying all of those layers of laws and rules and orders. And there is often little to no enforcement mechanism for those timelines. So we end up at the final layer of authority, the court clerk. As best I can tell, no one at a higher level intentionally allowed the clerk this much authority, it just fell into their lap through happenstance and tradition.

Here's an example: When a landlord is evicting a tenant, and every step of the decision process is complete, and the court has issued a final ruling that the tenant must leave, the tenant might still not leave. The landlord has to hire a sheriff to escort the tenant and their belongings from the property. The legislature has decided that the landlord has to wait 10 days after the court decision to get the paperwork for that next step (M.G.L. Chapter 239 Section 5 (a) “An execution upon a judgment rendered pursuant to section 3 shall not issue until the expiration of 10 days after the entry of the judgment”). I'm sure that seemed like a reasonable amount of time to the people writing and voting for that law. It matches the deadline for the tenant to file an appeal, and that makes plenty of sense. But here's the catch... there's no way to get that paperwork on day 11, or even on day 15. The court clerks have decided that the request for the paperwork can't be filed until day 11, and so it won't be considered or potentially granted for perhaps a week or a month after that.

Harkening back to the first paragraph, I don't think those legislators considered this. I'm pretty sure that they meant for landlords to wait 10 days, not 15 or 20 or 30 days. All of the laws and rules establishing timelines measured in days or weeks lose almost all meaning when the clerks deny any potential ability to pursue those ends without additional delays of weeks to months.

This is, of course, not limited to evictions or landlord/tenant law in general. I've encountered this situation in multiple courts at multiple levels on multiple types of cases. It continues to confound me that we tolerate this sort of obvious divergence from the intended effects of our laws about court processes.

PS: Maybe next time I write about clerk overreach it will be the tale of the SF Superior Court Appellate Division Clerk that refused to let me file an appeal because the court hadn't assigned a case number to my case or any other cases like mine.

You feel [verb]ed? That's also an accusation and request.

In the sentence “I feel ______“, the part of speech that fills that blank is an adjective, a word that describes a noun. I feel hot; a stove can also be described as hot. I feel sleepy; a cat can also be described as sleepy. I feel uncertain; the outcome of a coin flip can also be described as uncertain. These words are adjectives. These sentences describe my internal personal experience of my state of being. Nouns and adjectives, first person pronouns, the idea of feelings, and sentences of this form exist in most languages.

In English specifically, we also use past and present perfect tense verbs as adjectives. A painted (adjective) thing is a thing that has been painted (verb). A thing that has been improved is an improved thing. A given thing is a thing that has been given. The adjectives in these sentences describe the state of the thing. Even if the thing in question is an animal or person that has an internal experience and might have some subjective feelings, these statements don't necessarily describe that experience. These verb-based-adjective statements also describe some past or ongoing action and tell us about the state of the world. They say that painting happened, that improving happened, that giving happened.

In American English, the bare statement “I feel [verb]ed” always carries the implicit meaning of “I assert that [verb]ing happened”. You cannot say just “I feel honored” without also asserting “Someone has honored me”. Ditto re “I feel confused” and “Something confused me”, “I feel left out” and “Someone left me out”, or “I feel hurt” and “Someone or something hurt me”. The only way to make those adjective statements without the implication of the verb statement is with an explicit disclaimer and acknowledgement that your mental state does not correspond to reality. In my experience, this often sounds something like “I know this is all in my head and it's not based on anything anyone did, but I feel left out”. If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the verb meaning of your statement and to respond in that context.

For positive adjectives and verbs (e.g. honored), that's the end of the story. Ditto for neutral valence verbs; you might say “I feel observed” without necessarily conveying any additional obvious meaning or purpose beyond the feeling existing and the observing having happened. For negative verbs, there's another layer. The more negative the verb is, the stronger the implied suggestion that the person doing the verb shouldn't do it and the request that they not do it to you. You cannot say just “I feel neglected” without also conveying “The person that neglected me should not do what they did [in the context in which they did it] to me or in general”. Ditto “insulted”, “injured”, “burned”, “abandoned”, “hurt”, “upset”, etc. If you want to express your feelings of this sort without suggesting the person should not do the things in general, that requires explicit clarification. If you don't intend to ask them to not do the thing specifically to you, that requires even more clarification. Those requests are implicit unless you say otherwise. In my experience, the alternative statement from you often sounds something like “I feel hurt, and even though you did something to trigger it I know that you aren't responsible for the hurt. You should keep doing what you're doing.”. If you don't make the disclaimer, it's reasonable and appropriate for the other person to interpret the request/suggestion meaning of your statement and to respond in that context. Once you've been made aware of these implications to the things you say, to ignore them would make you responsible for the consequences of the ensuing miscommunications.

Every time I have a discussion about this topic, many people disagree about the certainty of these implications and the reasonableness of responding to them. And yet, every time I ask for counterexamples, they come up empty. So, before you make that sort of response here, please ask yourself, have you ever told someone just “I feel hurt” (re their actions) and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of “I request that you not repeat that action (in that context) toward me”? Have you ever told someone just “I feel disrespected” and not also intended or wanted or expected to convey the meaning of “You should not repeat that action (in that context), in general”? Examples of either of those sorts would go a long way to kickstarting a productive discussion on whatever disagreement we might have on the implied meanings I've described above. In the absence of such examples, or some other argument that I've failed to think of on my own, the only conclusion I can reach is that these implications are reasonable to interpret from the original statements.

On a meta level, it says something about me, personally, that I observe this pattern and make use of it in interpreting others' statements and that I think and write and attempt to educate about it. My awareness of this thing affects my conversations about feelings, often in ways that the other people involved think they would prefer to not be. In that sense, I am sorry for spreading this infohazard to you. But that doesn't outweigh the harms caused by people not recognizing this pattern and these implications, so here we are.

Setting community norms democratically within dictatorial bounds

This post is about something I've done before and plan to do again that I haven't seen discussed elsewhere. For that thing to make sense, I first want to describe some other things adjacent to it...

There are a few common modes of governance in groups of people. The most common category involves decisions being made some number of the people involved. When that number is everyone you have a democracy or consensus based or similar organization. When that number is less than most but still many people then you have a representational governance model. When that number is small you have something like a board or council. When that number is one then you might have a dictatorship or a sole elected leader. There are, of course, more complex systems involving committees, quorums, etc.

It is also relatively common to use different scales and methods of governance for different types of decisions. One or a few people might own the property and make decisions about new buildings, selling it, taxes, etc. A committee or subgroup might handle event planning, recruiting, onboarding, etc. Everyone might get a vote in meal times and quiet hours.

What I have done, and want to do again, and want to discuss here, is using those different scales and methods to make different parts of the same decision. The system I have in mind involves one or a few people setting hard boundaries for a rule or decision, and then more to all of the people involved drawing lines within those boundaries. In the examples below, I am the dictator in question, and I'm speaking from the perspective of me founding and organizing a community in which I would want to live with many other people. However, the same ideas apply if I am one of five co-buyers of a property and we are setting the boundaries that apply to decisions made by the more numerous non-owner members of our community.

The first motivation here is personal, to build an environment in which I want to live. A second motivation, similarly important, regards how decision making conflicts can affect the success or failure to get a project off the ground. A recent post on the Supernuclear blog (https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-a-community-before-it) dove into the disastrous consequences of including too many strong preferences in choosing a property, and I believe that same concept applies to all sorts of early direction-setting decisions. My favorite quote is “The community that they now love and live in only exists because they didn’t get a vote at the founding.”

So, in that context, here are some of the boundaries that I would establish around a forming community, with the expectation that many people would self select out, and some other people, including myself, would be able to reach some common agreement within:

I don't want to live in a community where certain drugs are welcome. If the people around me are doing meth or heroin, I'm going to have a bad time. At the other end of the scale, I don't want to live in a completely sober community. Even though I am a sober person, I enjoy my friends and family being able to partake reasonably in things like alcohol and marijuana. So those are the boundaries I would set in advance; anyone who wants to join the next community I organize needs to be comfortable living somewhere in that range. If you need to have meth in your house, my house isn't for you. If you need everyone around you to be sober, ditto. But everything between those limits is up for discussion and decision among all the members of the community. Maybe we decide as a group that mushrooms and acid are ok, but cocaine and ketamine are not. That's my personal preference, but it's not nearly as strong of a preference as the ones I used to set the limits.

I don't want to live in a community that is only 25-50 year old able bodied professionals. I also don't want to live in a community that focuses the majority of its resources and efforts toward supporting young, old, disabled, etc members. My ideal would be about halfway between a representative sample of the population and a house filled entirely with my demographic neighbors, but I can see a comfortable future in a wide range of environments surrounding that ideal. I would set those initial boundaries and then let the community settle organically somewhere within them.

In terms of communal groceries and dinners, I don't want a diet with no animal products. I understand at least a few of the arguments and motivations behind vegan lifestyles, but that's not the right environment for me. I also don't want a diet where animal products are the only source of protein, or a necessary part of a healthy caloric intake. That's expensive and unnecessarily exclusive and potentially boring. In between? I don't have strong feelings, and everyone involved in the community can be part of the decisions about how we plan the food we share.

I need everyone to participate in community meetings with some frequency, at least often enough to vote for leadership and hear about large scale plans and upcoming changes. That might two to four times per year. I can't keep up with a community that has mandatory meetings more than twice a week. In between? We can all figure that out together.

I could give a dozen other examples, and probably will in a post more specifically about my next project when the time comes to pull that particular trigger. For the purpose of this post, I hope I've sufficiently illustrated the concept in question. I'd love to hear feedback on this approach, suggestions for how to tweak it, concerns about failure modes, variations you've seen in practice, etc. Feel free to comment here or reach out to me privately.

My Ideal Day

The first steps to achieving a goal are to determine and say it, right? To that end, here's what I want my typical day to look like, probably 2-5 years from now. Some of this will sound entirely mundane, but much of it requires some particular types of environment and circumstances. Arranging my life to bring those about is something this exercise is meant to help with.

I wake up around 7-9AM, having gotten a full night's sleep in a quiet place. My nesting partner probably shared my bed, and maybe we get up together or a short while apart. I get dressed, brush my teeth, then wander somewhere comfortable, perhaps inside or out. I spend 10-20 minutes on my computer or phone catching up on messages and posts from friends near and far.

Next I go out to the workshop or garage or barn to take quick next steps in some ongoing project. Perhaps flipping over something to dry, moving something from an oven or kiln to a cooling rack, starting a next batch of 3d printed components, etc. Or maybe I'm doing a quick chore like letting the chickens out to pasture, rotating the compost, etc. Something easy and productive that makes sense after letting it sit overnight.

At this point I enter a more social environment, with my partner and some of our intentional community neighbors. Someone, possibly me, is preparing a simple breakfast for half a dozen people or more. It might involve grits or oatmeal, bacon and eggs, fruit, etc. Everyone in the household or community knows where and when breakfast is typically shared, so I get to see many of my closest neighbors for at least a few minutes while we eat. We chat about our plans for the day, exciting parts of the previous day, etc.

The rest of my morning and into the afternoon involves productive projects. I could be working in the wood shop, doing some home improvement, coordinating community or event logistics, or working some sort of day job. This is where I'll usually have the most alone time, although collaboration will also be common. Whatever I am doing to “earn a living” will probably happen in this window, whether that's selling furniture or teaching classes or writing software. If I have lunch, which is more likely if I'm doing more physically demanding work, then it probably happens in the middle of this.

In the early evening I might help cook or relax before eating. Most of the community members will gather for dinner, perhaps around 6PM. Once every week or two this will segue into a community meeting, but the more typical day will just be social conversation and maybe a bit of planning for tomorrow.

Along the way between my morning routine and the wind down after dinner, I expect to have done about a half hour of work toward the maintenance of the space. This includes typical chores like cleaning and lawn care, but also more bespoke tasks specific to the community environment. Some days I'll have done this alone, and some working alongside one or two other people.

After dinner I will either do recreational things alone or with a partner or friend, or I'll participate in the rotating schedule of social activities in the community. Throughout the week and month I'll have the choice to attend movie nights, music jams, lightning talks, board and video games, etc.

One or two nights a week I'll expect more of a party atmosphere, around the fire pit or in our community lounge or theater, or traveling alone or with friends somewhere in the nearby/surrounding city for an event. Most nights I'll wind down quietly with some reading, video games, writing, and/or time with my partner. Then a shower and bed.

Even including the occasional exceptions described above, I wouldn't want every day to be like this. 60-80% would probably be about right, with the other 20-40% of my days following wildly different patterns. I expect to spend at least one weekend a month and a few weeks a year hosting and participating in multi-day all-day events. There will be some local and national and international travel, and corresponding gaps of days to weeks in this schedule. I will at least occasionally go all in on a project, spending 12-16 hours a day on it for multiple days to deliver some significant milestone or accomplishment. But, at the end of any of those diversions, I would want to come back to a routine something like this.

Having written this, I am now considering updates to my dating doc and personal user manual. My life goals haven't changed much since I wrote them, but there are some details here that could be relevant and newly insightful. I guess I'll consider those updates as things I could do later this month as part of this writing challenge.

The attached image is an aspirational schedule for a 50-150 person intentional [meta]community that I intend to create, which environment would correspond pretty closely to this life that I want to live.

Hunting for improved real estate for a large intentional community

For most of the last decade, I have been interested in buying a large property with existing improvements, both residential in nature and otherwise, to establish an intentional community of perhaps 50-200 people. I actually did buy a 25-acre 42-bedroom Victorian estate to start pursuing a smaller version of this plan. For various reasons, my search continued during and still in parallel with the wind down of that project. What I'm looking for is rare, but not impossible to find, so I think it could be useful to write this all down. Perhaps this will bring some leads my way.

Why existing improvements? They are much cheaper than new construction. They are often better in many ways than current zoning and other codes will allow to be built. That includes size, construction methods and materials, combination of uses, positioning on a parcel, and many other factors. They are available now instead of years later. They won't require review or approval processes, from local government or neighbors. In some cases they have historical meaning that wouldn't exist in something new, such as the work of a particular architect or artist, or association with some notable period or event.

There are a few categories of properties that tend to have some to most to all of the features I am looking for. Most that have caught my interest have been schools, either boarding high schools or small colleges. Some have been religious institutions or medical facilities. A few have been campgrounds, retreat centers, military facilities, jails, and weirder options. It is relatively easy to search for some of those categories separately, but not all together and never also filtering for the other factors that I am looking to find or avoid. So, to that end, here are most of the important variables I am considering:

Residential amenities should be sufficient for at least 50 people, preferably many more. Dorms are cheap and often found in schools and colleges. Apartment buildings aren't out of the question, and sometimes exist at colleges and military installations. Individual houses tend to be prohibitively expensive, but buying a neighborhood or small town isn't out of the question. I want room for enough people to have a village of the sort where many needs can be met locally. Larger scale means we could have our own mechanics, teachers, electricians, etc. With room for enough families, children can have local peers, and local schooling becomes more viable.

Non-residential amenities are also important. I am looking for facilities that have classrooms, large indoor activity spaces like a gymnasium, auditoriums or a theater, fabrication shops, auto maintenance space, large scale kitchens, etc. Having access to these things will advance many components of the larger plan. Each of them can be used for people to start small businesses and earn a living. Each can facilitate educational opportunities. They will allow for various recreational and hobby activities, including hosting events. There will be significant savings meeting the needs of the community due to pooling resources to have access to these amenities.

Unimproved land, at least tens of acres, preferably hundreds. This is the criterion that shifts the most with proximity to a city; a hundred acres in Montana will cost less than one acre in Alameda County. Some of this will be used for agriculture, which might fall anywhere along the spectrum from food forest permaculture to industrial farming. Some will be used for camping, hiking, possibly swimming, and other outdoor nature activities. Some will probably eventually be used for expansion; starting with existing improvements doesn't mean we won't build more five, ten, or twenty years down the road.

As mentioned, proximity to a city is important, the bigger the better. Cities mean access to culture and opportunities that won't be found elsewhere. A city would mean a much larger pool of potential participants for classes, events, etc. I won't find the rest of this list in downtown SF or NYC, but I have found most of it at the edge of those cities' transit networks. I'm open to being 10 minutes by bike then 90 minutes by train from Grand Central Station, and I have found appealing properties at that distance. Transit from my current place to Boston costs $12 and takes about 3 hours; the price is ok but the time is too much. Other cities will do, even if they are less appealing to me personally; my recent short list includes properties close to Portland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and St Louis.

Long term sustainability is a major factor that shows up in a few different ways. A natural water supply is a major selling point. Good weather for farming (not too dry) and solar power (not too cloudy) are important. Locations away from climate change risk (rising temperatures, rising oceans) are significantly preferable. Forests are nice, but buildings in forests in wildfire territory are not. Good soil and lack of industrial pollutants are also something I'm looking for. These are all things that are of some benefit immediately, and will have huge value in more disastrous potential futures.

Much less individually important, but still important overall, is the variety of non-residential amenities. I'm looking for educational facilities like classrooms and labs and auditoriums. Recreational amenities like sports fields and theaters. Practical facilities like shops, kitchens, barns, etc. Existing agricultural space such as farm fields, orchards, and vineyards. The perfect property would have a wide variety of types and sizes of all of these categories. A property with only residential improvements, like an apartment complex, is almost entirely unappealing.

Price is, of course, a major factor. If I can do this at a large enough scale successfully, I suspect I would be able to find significant financial support for a second iteration of the project, but that doesn't help the first time at a new scale. Left to my own devices, I'm looking at places in the $1-2M price range. Hoping to find some amount of financing, I have considered properties with list prices of up to $5M. This cuts out a lot of the most exciting options, but still leaves plenty that can work.

At this point, you might think this list is impossibly specific and unrealistic. To hopefully address that expected response, I'm going to describe a few properties that I have at least been very interested in, some of which I have pursued, one of which I bought:

25 acres, 42 bedrooms (split between Victorian mansion and modern dormitory), 10k sqft of function/activity space, small garage, historic gardens. 3 hours from city center by transit or 50 minutes by car, walking distance to small town amenities. $1.4M sale price 54 acres, 150 bedrooms (mostly dorms), 200k sqft of function/activity space, orchard, vineyard, 3gal/s deeded spring water rights, waste water treatment facility, sports fields, 30 minutes from city center by car. $2M sale 123 acres, 42 one-bedroom apartments, common function and recreation spaces, spa. Forest trails, adjacent to state game land with public walking access to the Appalachian Trail. 90 minutes by car or 2 hours by transit to city centers. $3M listing price 47 acres, ~100 bedrooms (mostly dorms), classrooms, offices, commercial kitchen, dining facilities. 20 minutes by car or 60 minutes by bus to city center. $3.3M listing 155 acres, ~350 bedrooms (mostly dorms), 400k sqft function/activity space, classrooms, offices, labs, gyms, shops, farm, greenhouses, gyms, sports fields. 90 minutes from city center by car, walking distance to small town amenities. $4.5M sale 123 acres, 89 1-2 bedroom homes, a decommissioned military installation that's basically a whole town with the relevant facilities and utilities. $4.9M sale. 225 acres, ~300 bedrooms (mostly dorms), 200k sqft function/activity space across 20 buildings, no deferred maintenance, small college amenities. 3 hours from city center by car. $5M listing

If you ever come across a property that seems like it might be a fit, I'd love to hear about it. Whenever I find a new property that even moderately aligns with these goals, I post it to a channel on the CoDwell Discord (https://discord.gg/Dph5zk32Y). If you want to know more about my plans for my next project and community, there's a bit of insight into one possible version of that at http://CoDwell.org. While my funds are tied up right now, that server and site are mostly idle. However, I intend to kick things back into gear as soon as I'm ready to coordinate efforts on my next big project. Hang out there or watch here for my later posts if you want to know more.

Most people don't understand giving 100%

Have you ever worked yourself to physical exhaustion, enough so that you would fall if you tried to stand up, or drop something if you tried to lift it? Have you ever worked yourself to mental exhaustion, enough so that you can't figure out which way to turn a jar lid, can't recall your phone number, or forget to take your clothes off before getting in the shower? Many people with mental or physical disabilities can relate; these can be failure modes of their attempts at everyday tasks, let alone if they try to keep up with able bodied friends. But for those able bodied friends, this idea is entirely foreign. This post isn't about the able bodied people misunderstanding those with disabilities; that's a topic worthy of far more discussion. This post is about them misunderstanding the few able bodied people who ever push that far.

I encounter this situation with some regularity when people are telling me how I could have better handled some interpersonal interaction as part of a project or task. Maybe I was verbally short with someone. Maybe I ignored an offer of help. Maybe I took a tool away from someone to do their task myself. The admonitions I encounter later often sound like “You should have just taken a little extra time to explain it to them” or “You could have picked up some of the slack when they fell short”. It took me a long time to realize that the people saying these things are always keeping a large reserve. When they are faced with the need to give 10% more effort to avoid upsetting someone else, they do it. When they have to work 20% harder on a task to pick up someone else's slack, they do it. They see me not doing these things and perceive some unwillingness on my part at an interpersonal and social level. Sometimes they think I simply don't know how to pursue these options. They seem oblivious to the nature of my efforts such that there is no 10% or 20% more that I am able to give. I may already be on track to come within 10% of exhaustion, such that trying to give an extra 10% or more would result in the project failing. The idea of planning to work close to exhaustion, or getting there despite a plan to not, seems alien to most people. When I try to bring it up they either don't understand or don't believe me.

The same conversation tends to go somewhat better when it comes to money. When someone tells me I could have maintained social harmony by spending 20% more money (a common response in discussions about coliving), I often respond that I didn't have that much to spend. This doesn't always get through, but that failure mode is far less common than when the expenditure is physical or mental energy. I think this is due to most people being personally familiar with the idea of running out of money, or just planning to get close. The results are even better when discussing spending all of someone's available time (regardless of effort). We all have the same 24 hours in a day, so most people understand that it's not always possible to spend more time, and most people plan to spend most of their time when necessary. If you've reasonably planned in advance to spend 80-100% of your available time then that extra 10-20% might be strictly impossible, and almost everyone understands that.

In short, “We have to use this approach even if it makes Pat upset, because we will run out of time otherwise” is far better received than “because we will run out of money otherwise”, and that far better than “because Sam will reach physical exhaustion and we will lose their contributions and then fail at our goal”. This goes doubly so when the statements are made in hindsight, explaining decisions that were already made.

Is there some way I can improve those earlier discussions, about physical or mental energy, or even about money, to achieve the higher success rate found in the discussions about time? I've tried analogies and drawing parallels. I've tried waiting until both types of thing happen so I can bring them up in the same conversation. I'm not sure what other approaches could be useful here.

Why write about a pattern without actionable followup?

A recurring topic in my writing is of the form “I have noticed a pattern connecting these seemingly disconnected things”, e.g. “X Y Z things are similar in A B C ways”. That's the whole premise, just identifying and describing the pattern, without explicitly proceeding toward any specific conclusion or actionable insight. Sometimes just that step will take hundreds to thousands of words, so I will stop even if I do already have those other steps in mind. Two of the items on my potential writing challenge topic lists have this same general shape. A friend saw that and seemed confused at the point of such a thing, hence this writing.

I have a few different goals when I write about a pattern. There are a few different implicit questions and goals and imperatives silently tacked onto the end of every such writing. When I read this sort of thing, I see these implications automatically, but apparently not everyone does. When I describe a pattern...

I am looking for agreement like “Yes, I see that pattern too” from people who have already noticed the thing. I seek confirmation that the pattern exists, and of my pattern-finding abilities. I am looking to add confidence to any of the actionable steps that might come next. I am trying to build rapport with you, my fellow pattern-noticer. I am demonstrating my competence on this front.

I am looking for disagreement like “No, you've misunderstood Y+C, it doesn't actually fit the described pattern”. My intention here is to correct my own misconceptions and mistakes (or, perhaps, yours). There is value in improving my pattern-finding abilities. I want to highlight that Y and/or C are some combination of the factors you're most aware of and the factors you care the most about, or the factors I'm least aware of, to inform our further conversation. I want to avoid making decisions about X+C based on my already knowing how to handle Y+C (or vice versa) if it turns out they aren't connected in the way I thought.

I am looking to educate, which might sound like “I didn't see that pattern before, but now I do”. I want for everyone else all of the benefits described in the previous two paragraphs. I want everyone to have a better understanding of the world, and to be better at evaluating it. I hope that this allows us or you to better collaborate, in general and especially on this specific pattern.

I am suggesting that insights and experience on one of the things might be relevant to the others, due to the pattern. “If you know know the failure modes of X, you might know some of the failure modes of Z, even if you've never tried Z”. I want feedback on that relationship, so that I and others can better apply our knowledge about Z to X and Y.

I am looking for insight into which aspects of the pattern are most important, in general and to the people around me. If 90% of the conversation is about specifically X+A vs Z+A, then I'm probably going to focus less on Y, B, and C in whatever I write or say or do next, or if I do focus on those things then it will be specifically.

I am telling you that, all else being equal, if you're approaching one of the things for the first time, that you should apply your knowledge of the other thing to that experience. “If you know that D is dangerous to X and Y, you shouldn't do D to Z until you've confirmed it breaks the pattern”. “You should assume the first step of building a Y is the same as the first step of building an X until you know otherwise”, “The biggest factor in the cost of an X is B, so you should consider B when valuing a Y”, etc. This “should” is stronger than the “suggest” in the previous paragraph; once I have pointed such a pattern out to you, you bear increased responsibility if you ignore that pattern in your decision making.

I'm sure that I have missed a few things on this list. It's hard to exhaustively enumerate my motivations for doing something that I do regularly. But that doesn't mean it's not worth trying! You can look forward to future posts in this month's writing challenge with working titles of “Why do I keep trying to make big intentional community projects happen?” and “Why do I keep writing about consent? (Rewrite)”.

We need a way to ask Maybe/No questions

There is a large gap in common vernacular English around things that look like yes/no questions but where the asker already knows that one of the two answers can't be certain in the current context. We have no way to concisely communicate that this is what we're asking, and so the person being asked is usually operating under the expectation of more certain yes or no outcomes.

This is especially true of licensed professionals who take on significant responsibility and risk when they answer questions in their field. Lawyers answering legal questions, Engineers asking safety questions, Doctors answering medical questions, etc. In typical conversation, these professionals will always expect that whatever answer they give you needs to hold up to professional scrutiny from all angles. We need a concise way to effectively convey the following sentiment:

“I know that this sounds like a yes/no question, because the ultimate answer will be yes or no. However, I am not asking you to distinguish between those two answers. I am asking you to instead distinguish between the easier of the two answers and the alternative that includes both the more difficult to determine answer and all of the uncertainty or lack of specificity in between.”

By way of a generalized example, consider the question “Is this course of action safe?”. This looks like a yes or no question, and the ultimate answer is going to be yes or no, for some specific version of the course of action and definition of “safe”, both of which might require further elaboration as part of the answer. This is often a rather difficult question for which to reach a “yes, it is safe” answer. That answer might require many additional details, research, calculations, etc, and those things might not be available easily or at all in a particular context. However, it is often a very easy question for which to reach a “no, it is not safe” answer. For those questions, it could be very useful for the asker to learn the distinction between “no” and “I don't know” / “It depends” / “Maybe”. They might be able to get a dozen answers of that variety with less effort on the other person's part than a single confident “yes” answer, and that could be a useful result.

It should be quick and easy to preface a yes/no question and indicate that you're looking for the easy answer or a maybe or depends, not the easy answer or the hard answer. Of course, the person answering can always decide to answer that way, but that's not the same as the person asking making it clear that they know up front that this is the type of answer they are expecting. We need a better way to ask this category of question. How would you approach trying to make this work more smoothly?