[anm89]

Yeah, my running joke while living in Thailand was that it was a circular pyramid scheme, the yoga teachers are buying life coaching, the life coaches are all learning to become drop shippers, and the drop shippers are all getting training to become yoga teachers. They just buy and sell services from each other in a circle trying to grow their own thing until they give up and go home.

[jmcqk6]

I'm just a layperson, but it seems like you've described an economy.

Especially when you realize that

>buy and sell services from each other in a circle

isn't true at all.

I don't know anything dropshipping - the name certain implies something scammy, but our economy is full of things like that.

It's a weird aspect of society - which lies are we all going to agree to accept - and since each person answers those questions differently, it leads to a lot of tension.

[anm89]

I get what both of the comments are saying here, but this is really nothing like how a real economy works.

None of these people are solving any of the core needs of any of these other people (food, clothes, transportation, housing, any physical goods at all) and very little new money is entering this system at all, maybe some on the drop shipping side but that can also be a net loss in some cases. So yes this represents an economy but the denizens of that economy would be impoverished and miserable, constantly waiting for some outsider to come solve their problems. This is seen in the fact that most people do this as long as their pre existing savings can sustain it because they are doing it at a loss and then they give up when they have eaten through their existing wealth.

So yeah, i don't think it's much of a profound insight to point out the similarities to other economies just because of the existence of people engaging in trade with each other. The quality of the trade is the issue, not its existence.

[jcytong]

> this represents an economy but the denizens of that economy would be impoverished and miserable, constantly waiting for some outsider to come solve their problems

The outsider in this case is the government bailing out industries like when these digital nomads(businesses) failed, they'd go back to their parents (government). When their parents(gov) run out of money, they'd put it on the credit card (print more money by the Fed) and the cycle continues...

It's funny how this sounds exactly like how our economy works LOL

[zdbrandon]

That’s a microcosm of how a real economy works, actually.