Whoever disagrees with capitalism should say so aloud.

yes

There are many ways to hide in plain sight. Ideally you pick a method that does 3 things.

1. Supports your desired life style

2. Supports your future goals

3. Removes you from the parts of current society you dislike the most.

The trick to the hiding in plain site is described well in J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night

I agree.

The concept of a Gulch is a compelling one. Implementation for us will not be as clean as AS was.

In today's world, their is no real opportunity to physically hide as in AS. The hiding must then be some form of deception, which would basically being hiding in plain sight. I can't see a different way.

Mardi Gras - Best party of the year

Did you ever read about what they were going to do with Disneyworld? They intended to create a prototype "city of tomorrow" and use it to develop new things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disne...

Yes. One reason capitalism works is people can focus on producing what they're good at and trade it for things other people are good at. It will work best if we have the world of people, with their unique skills/strengths, to trade with.

For me, no more King Cakes would be a horrible loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_cake

Absolutely true.

How much isolation can there be then though?

Contrary to giving up stuff, I imagine the Gulch bringing new stuff to the world.
1. Gulch org convinces some gov't to create a "free-trade zone" or something in a remote region. Gov't says yes b/c they are not collecting any taxes there as it is, so they're not giving up anything.
2. Lower taxes and fewer gov't rules drives capital and innovative people to the Gulch. They invent stuff like nanofibers that could be used to build building miles high and strings of DNA that cause cancer cells to self-destruct.
3. Investors and Gulch residents get rich, but looters want a cut of it. It's not fair, looters say, to take the best and the brightest people and the capital investment, leaving traditional nations stuck with the social problems.
4. Gulch is in a Mexican standoff with investors and their nation states, leaving the Gulch in a position of tenuous peace and freedom.
5. Other settlements model themselves after the Gulch. Some nation states initiate some libertarian reforms for the practical reason that they work. Modeling gov't on the Gulch becomes a fact of life like the US Constitution. Not everyone does it. Most places do a watered-down version. But the world has a level of liberty that would have seemed like a dream to their great grandparents living in the 21st century.

One of the big divides over creating a Gulch is whether or not to be completely isolated from society.

The subject of this thread is really an avenue for discussion about that choice.
If you choose isolation that automatically produces limits.
If you stay within society, that also puts a different group of limits on you.

Personally I don't believe true isolation is achievable or optimal, the numbers just are not there.

We seem to mostly want to maintain something approximating our current standards of living, and that mitigates against total isolation without very large numbers.

I'm not sure I see that we would have to give up technology. There would be ways to stay connected to the rest of the world. Gulchers are some pretty intelligent and innovative people.

New Haven pizza.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Haven-s...

I can say this with certainty, as I already have already done so.

If you grew up in the area, you would know that this is no small thing.

A good point, but who says we need to really roll back at all? Depending on the size and scale of the Gulch, much of what we love can be either adapted to specifically support the Gulch or imported from the outside while it lasts. We've got enough network savy members that we could easily use some proxies to mask or scramble our origin and simply create an industry where a member of the gulch is the one to manage interface with the outside during the year by paying in their currency and receiving the deliveries for later delivery to the Gulch. There is not much that I would need to leave behind considering I can improvise systems and devices to provide everything that I would want. I having actually been talking to some likeminded friends about long-term goals where we have actually begun some planning for pooling resources and developing our own mini-Gulch to settle down. While it may seem like a far-flung ideal to many, if all of us here in the Gulch decided to mobilize our desires, we could likely develop a significant Gulch for ourselves.