sparr

We need to popularize “anti-” as an alternative prefix to “a-”

In vernacular English, the “a-” prefix gets used with somewhat broad and ambiguous meanings. It might indicate a neutral or indifferent position or the lack of a position or action. It might also or instead indicate an actively opposed position or action. These two meanings are easy to confuse. When a single word is used to mean both or either of them, lack of clarification can lead to significant miscommunications.

Atheist can mean that you don't hold any specific theistic/religious belief. It could also mean that you explicitly believe there is no supernatural higher power. Sometimes “agnostic” is used for the former meaning to clarify this distinction, but that usage is less widespread.

Apolitical can mean that you don't engage with the political process, or that you aren't aligned with existing political parties, or that you are actively opposed to the current (or any) political system. These all have very different implications for what actions you might support or take with regard to the political process.

Asexual can mean that you don't experience sexual desire and/or are indifferent to seeing or participating in sexual activities. It could instead mean that you are mildly to extremely unhappy with exposure to and/or participation in sexual activity. The appropriate responses from a [prospective] romantic or intimate partner to these two different meanings are wildly different.

There are also some lesser examples adjacent to this pattern, such as “anonymous” which might be an incidental or temporary or local state of affairs or an intentional choice and permanent goal. As the effect of the distinction shrinks, so does the need for clarification.

I propose here that our ability to communicate effectively about these topics would benefit from separating these meanings into “a-” for indifference and “anti-” for opposition, in precisely the same way that they are already separated for “apathy” vs “antipathy”.

Someone who explicitly disclaims the existence of god is antitheist, not just atheist.

Someone who explicitly opposes the political process is antipolitical, not just apolitical.

Someone who is unhappy when exposed to sex is antisexual, not just asexual.

This isn't a new idea. These words and meanings and usages already exist, but they are not popular. We should change that. I've made the distinction occasionally in the past, but I intend to approach this more directly. You can expect to hear “Do you mean antiwhatever, or are you really just indifferent?” from me more in the future, especially in rationalist and other communities with a focus on effective communication.

Events that I want to fit at my next place

One of my goals in establishing large intentional communities is to enable hosting events in the large common spaces of such a community. There are many types of events that I like to attend, and a smaller variety that I like to host. Most of them are somewhat to significantly constrained by the price and availability of space to host them, and that's something that can be minimized in a communally owned and managed space. This post is a description of some categories of events that I expect to be able to host, or attend while someone else hosts, at my next place. The features and needs of these events are significant priorities for me when choosing a property.

Camping festivals of 100-500 people. This might be a small regional burn (e.g. the early years of NECTR, Lakes of Fire, To The Moon), a skill share event like Wildfire, a music performance or jam, a community gathering like Vibecamp, or have any of a wide variety of other formats. The general idea is that everyone brings a tent for a [probably long] weekend, with a lot of planned and unplanned activities for people to participate in. Many of those activities would require large clear spaces, indoor and/or outdoor.

Music and stage performances. This will probably require an auditorium or theater, or at least a gymnasium with a stage, although there is also the possibility of an outdoor amphitheater as well. It will also need some sound insulation and/or isolation from neighbors, and a decent amount of power would be nice for non-acoustic musical equipment, lighting, etc. The properties I've looked at so far would support audiences of 200-1000 people for such an event.

Art parties where many participants thoroughly decorate rooms and spaces, possibly including immersive and/or interactive performance. This requires a lot of smaller spaces, perhaps bedrooms or offices or cabins. Some such events might be just one night, while others would likely be long weekends and require some sort of housing on-site. Such events that I am familiar with tend to look like camping festivals or hotel takeovers. I would want to have tens of separate spaces, and hundreds of participants.

Immersive and interactive theater and art events with a single focus. This could include traditional haunted house sorts of events, but also things like murder mysteries, escape rooms, LARPs, etc. There's no single specific necessary amenity for this, but the wider the variety of spaces available, and the more of them, the more of these sorts of things will be viable. Some of these events might have dozens of people involved for the duration, while others might have hundreds or even thousands of people experiencing it for just a short time each.

Educational events such as classes, courses, workshops, lectures, etc. This can be done in arbitrary spaces, but having dedicated spaces like classrooms or auditoriums will help. Spaces dedicated to particular crafts or sciences would enable teaching those specific things, e.g. a wood shop, chemistry lab, commercial kitchen, greenhouse, etc. These wouldn't be much larger than what I've done before, but I want more of them to happen.

Large dinner parties. This requires a large dining space, which could be permanent or temporary. It would also require a large kitchen.

Large scale physical activities, e.g. fitness or sports. The relevant amenities might include a climbing wall, a space tall enough for aerial arts, sports fields, etc. Having a variety would be amazing, but even just one or two such spaces would still be great. Having this sort of thing at home makes keeping fit much easier, as well as providing a focus for social interactions and an opportunity to teach classes or host competitions.

Water recreation, at least swimming, ideally also boating. There's a lot of hot weather festivity to be had around this sort of thing, but having private access is often difficult and/or expensive. Oceanfront property is hard to find without sea level rise concerns, and private lakes are expensive, but I've looked at a few steep ocean properties and plenty of places with frontage on a public river or lake.

There are, of course, many other types of events that I enjoy, but that don't require specific amenities. Having a dining hall with a hundred seats at 15 tables would make for an amazing board game night, but I can also host that event in a single family dining room. A theater with 400 seats will make for an amazing movie night, but so can a living room that seats five people. I'll keep doing many of those sorts of events wherever I end up, while the stuff described earlier has more exotic requirements.

Hopefully at least a few people reading this will be thinking “that sounds like a space I'd also like to host events in”. If so, get in touch, and maybe we can collaborate on whatever I'm doing next.

How I search for professional assistance

Increasingly often as the scope of my plans and projects and life increases, I need to hire professional assistance of some sort. My life is unusual in a lot of ways, involving a lot of niche situations and edge cases that vanishingly few people will ever encounter. That bleeds over into those requests for assistance, such that my requests are also niche and uncommon, or even unheard of in those professional circles. And, of course, these things are uncommon enough that the few pros that can handle the request don't advertise having such weird specialty abilities. I frequently find myself needing to talk to dozens to hundreds of people in a particular field just to find a referral to one of the few I am looking for.

A few examples might make this concept more clear. Very few mortgage lenders are willing to lend on 25 acre properties with multiple residential buildings. Very few plumbers are comfortable and qualified to work on a sewer (i.e. climbing underground through manhole covers). No shipping container transport company in New England has ever heard of, let alone has, a side loader trailer. Very few real estate attorneys in Massachusetts do any litigation, and almost none of the real estate litigators are interested in cases complex enough to involve criminal charges. Very few family law attorneys in California are willing to advise on a prenuptial agreement without revising it. Very few mental healthcare partial hospitalization programs offer supervised meal times. Almost none of the “very few” above advertise the feature in question, and so...

Over time, I have developed a workflow that helps me keep track of my efforts when I am searching for anything like that. I'm going to describe that workflow here, with two main goals. First, I want to help other people who need to do similar things, especially after a few people have asked me to shepherd their first use of my process. Second, I want suggestions for where you see gaps in this plan and how I could fill them.

I start with a new folder (usually on Google Drive, but this also works on a local filesystem or OneDrive or whatever) containing two files, a text document and a spreadsheet. The folder goes wherever other efforts on the same project go (e.g. a higher level folder for a project or purchase or case), and gets named for the effort and some part of the date depending on the scope of the effort (I don't record the day if I'll be searching all week or month, or the month if I'll be searching all year).

The spreadsheet starts with one page/sheet/tab. That sheet has the following columns: * Business or personal name I am contacting * Phone number * Email address * Website * Who referred me * Date added to the sheet / Date of first contact attempt * Project-specific columns, e.g. * quoted price * hours of operation * professional license number * distance to the site of the project * Status is broken down into many options depending on the project, but those options come in three main flavors: * Red – This row is done, don't contact them again. Could be a wrong number, an outright rejection, or a choice to avoid them. * Yellow – This row is worth contacting again. Maybe I left a voicemail, or they said they would be less busy next week. * Green – I am actively engaged with this row. I need to contact them or do something else or wait for some in-progress effort to proceed. * Notes/Misc – anything specific to this entry that doesn't fit elsewhere on the sheet. * Contact – notes of when I called or emailed, who I talked to, what I asked, what they said.

When the contact efforts or notes for a single row on the sheet become unwieldy, which can happen after a single long call with multiple people or multiple short calls, and if I think the contact is worth continuing to pursue, then they get promoted to having their own new sheet. The business details and status continue to be updated in the main sheet, but this new sheet has the following columns: * Date of contact or note * Method of contact (email, phone, etc) * Person I spoke to * Summary of the conversation

The text document is where I keep general notes about the process, links to sources of information, and a record of what steps I took to populate the spreadsheet. I record search terms or dates that I used, web directories where I found contact information, and how far I got in each of those result sets. This enables me to go back later and pick up with, e.g., page 5 of the directory if none of the leads from the first four pages panned out. I may also keep longer informational sections about the green leads in the spreadsheet, such as relevant excerpts from emails and contracts, and links to the original sources for those.

I will set aside 1-8 hours to make progress on a particular search. In that time I will go through the spreadsheet and follow up on green rows if needed, then yellow rows if it seems reasonable, then add more rows if there are further searches to be done or directories to scrape. Rinse and repeat until I find help or give up. That's really the whole process, although there are small tweaks depending on the nature of the project and professional help I'm looking to hire. Next I'll describe some of the places I see room for improvement.

My current workflow for turning a web page directory of professional contacts into a spreadsheet involves copying and pasting the website content into a text document then doing some regex search and replace to reduce it to a TSV of the relevant information, then importing that into the sheet. I've tried to use existing or vibe coded web scraping tools to speed this up, but due to the unlimited variety of web site layouts that has always taken longer for weaker results.

I have never found a good app for using my computer to initiate calls on my phone. Sometimes I'll use Google Voice from my computer, but it's usually more productive to manually type the phone number into the phone. This is an area I'd like to improve. If I could make a few clicks from the spreadsheet to have a call on my phone, that would save me about an hour per year.

I have considered moving to a more database-like platform in order to have better relationships between rows/entries and sheets/tables, but so far all of the ones I have considered would be much more work to use and/or much more proprietary and difficult to extract my data from. I'd love some suggestions on other tools or platforms I might use to arrange the information.

Cheating is breaking rules that you agreed to

I'm an avid board / card / tabletop gamer, and I also enjoy video games. I like to play a wide range of games, including strategy, deduction, dexterity, party, puzzle, adventure, etc. In some games, particularly games that have some sort of moderator (human or computer), there is little to no opportunity to play in a way that isn't consistent with the rules of the game. Even if you don't know the rules, the moderator won't let you accidentally break them, let alone intentionally. However, in the general case, taking actions that are against the letter and/or spirit of the rules is a relatively straightforward proposition. Doing it without getting caught might be a challenge, but it also might not, at least temporarily.

Sometimes, some or all of the rules of a game are written down right next to the game, so all the players can see them while playing. Casinos print some of the rules for a game right on the table where the game is played. Plenty of tabletop games include reference cards that summarize the most important rules like the order of actions in a turn or round, the valid actions to take, costs for those actions, etc. Almost all professionally published games include a rule book that describes 80-99% of the rules of the game, and hopefully at least some of the players at a given table have read the rule book for the game being played. Some games even require players to explicitly acknowledge the rule set of the game at the start.

Games also have unwritten rules. Some games only have unwritten rules, because they have never been published in any consistent fashion. Many games have rules that are passed down verbally, including ancient tabletop games, playground sports, etc. These rules tend to develop over years and decades as the game is passed from person to person through explanations. They can diverge over time and in different places, so “one game” with one name could be wildly different when played with different people.

Most games without centuries of history have edge cases that haven't been contemplated before and so no rule has even been spoken, let alone written. Players discover these edge cases while playing the game. Perhaps they engineer a totally novel scenario that the rules don't sufficiently cover. Perhaps they are planning a strategy that relies on some ambiguity in the known rules. These cases might require adjudication by an authority, a discussion among the players, and perhaps a compromise.

Most confusingly, sometimes two players will each have a reasonable expectation that they are playing a game with known rules, but the games and rules in question will be different from each other. Perhaps there are two games played with all the same pieces, like Checkers and Draughts. Perhaps there are two popular rule sets for a game, such as the different official published rules for scoring small cities in Carcassonne. Both players think the other player has agreed to play by some specific rules, but they are both wrong.

Sometimes, agreement to a rule can be implicit. If a game has just one set of officially published rules, it is usually reasonable to expect that players are implicitly agreeing to those rules if a game starts without other discussion. Sometimes the agreement is explicit, when players discuss and choose a rule set or house rules at the start of a game.

However, sometimes there is no agreement. Players might discover in the middle of a game that they have been playing by different rules. In that case, no one has done anything wrong. The players should have a discussion and decide if they want to continue playing after ironing out the misunderstanding, or if they want to stop playing.

And, of course, sometimes players intentionally violate the rules, doing things they agreed not to do, taking advantage of the other player. When this happens, the best course of action is usually not just to stop that specific game, but to not game with that person again unless something changes and there is some confidence that the rules moving forward are understood and agreed to and will be followed.

This post is about romantic and intimate relationships. Try reading it again if you didn't realize that the first time through. My goal here is to help people who have trouble with “is this cheating?” or “what should I do when I catch them cheating?” in a relationship but no problem with the same question in a board game. I want them to realize that it's the same question with the same answers in analogous scenarios.

PS: In discussing this post in advance, my favorite parallel is “Person who goes online to complain that a game has been unfulfilling and upsetting repeatedly and they don't want to play again, just to be told by many more experienced people that they [were playing with people who] had failed to read or understand or follow the rules, and that things would almost certainly go much better if they resolved that underlying issue.”

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.