[bfz]

I'm not sure I have the faculties to address what bothers me about this comment, but there is so much tied to traditional society the comment seems to ignore.

- Voting districts - obviously tied to physical land, with different styles of vote counting system per area, often according to local cultural needs. I come from a society where special voting considerations exist in order to achieve actual peace. Prior to that system being introduced, there was war. The right to vote and the manner in which the vote occurs is an essential and inalienable attribute of all democratic societies, often deeply saturated in historic customs taking centuries of diplomacy to achieve stability.

- Public services - voting and taxation are directly related to policy in a local area. The tax that I pay my local council is accountable almost directly to me because I can schedule an appointment with the very people whom I elect to spend my taxes as I desire. My physical address in that locale entitles me to an opinion on the use of those taxes, and a stake in ensuring awareness of local policy, and that the policy works for myself and the people around me.

- Land rights - a requirement for a physical address, or the alternative of no requirement for a physical address, (is/is not) an implicit endorsement of land ownership and encouraging long term placement of people within fixed communities. Community quality and composition varies greatly across every region of the world, and for folk spending most of their life inside cities, it is easy to forget the concept of a community exists. Establishing a physical local presence is essential for many kinds of growth, not least, starting a family and therefore the continued growth of a healthy society.

So to summarize, I think what bothers me is that the only possible way to arrive at what the parent comment suggests would be to avoid participating or contributing to any of these essential traits of civil society, which is to say it is an opinion explicitly rooted in contributing to civic decay. It's not "incredibly outdated", a physical address comes with many essential implications that ought to be encouraged.

[DoreenMichele]

There have always been travelers in the world. They have long had friction with settled peoples who feel a fixed address is essential.

Even American military members have friction with the rest of America over this. It just gets mitigated by the fact that the federal government makes accommodations for them.

Military members historically had trouble opening local bank accounts so there are military banks on military installations and when I was a military wife I could cash a check at the PX/BX because banks don't like cashing out of town checks.

This is not just a homeless issue. This is problematic for all kinds of people with nomadic lives and this has long been true.

[ghaff]

Of course, it's all tied up with state government too. You need to be a resident of some state to get a driver's license. And no high tax state wants, say, Nevada to offer state residency that puts your name on an office door in exchange for an annual fee. Then there's voting/jury duty/etc.

[DoreenMichele]

Well heeled people already do pretty much as they please. Own a house in one state, travel as you see fit in your RV or whatever.

It's only a serious hardship for poor people.

[yazaddaruvala]

Maybe it’s better to think of local government as a Proof of Stake system. Where you Stake the value of land+house as collateral (using an address) to access trust based services like voting, banking, etc. such that everyone is clear that you can pay the annual fees or penalties (if ever applicable) for that local government / bank.

Sadly that does mean poor people who can’t stake capital or spend capital on rent in an area get left out of the system.

What would a system look like that didn’t use Proof of Stake as collateral to get people access to trust based systems?

[pyuser583]

I live in a town with tons and tons of students. They live here for a few years and move on.

I’m glad they avoid voting. They’d just vote for high taxes, which they wouldn’t have to pay for very long.

The city has a good system for dealing with political activism by students: there are a ton of unpaid committees with actual power - but exercising the power requires jumping throwing hoops to make sure it’s used well.

In practice this means students can get lots of influence, if they’re willing to put in the time and effort.

That seems like a good system to me.

It also makes me very cynical about voting in general. The fact that someone is willing to wait in line for 20 minutes and check a piece of paper says little about their ideas.

Spending 20 hours a week - evening and weekends - to research and write reports shows you care.

[yazaddaruvala]

Proof of Time frankly is really just Proof of Stake with a different monetize-able asset.

Not to say the time isn’t worth it, or doesn’t need to be put in. I just don’t feel like it’s substantially different (for the purpose of this conversation) to buying a house in the area. ie. The homeless can’t spend time on committees.

[ghaff]

Even absent owning a house or otherwise having a permanent address in a given state, well heeled people probably have a stable/trusted relative or friend who can serve as a nominal permanent address and place to receive official mail. I did this for someone for a few years.

[mperham]

A PO Box costs ~$100/yr.

[leephillips]

Doesn’t work. Usually banks, for example, won’t accept a PO box as a residential address. They need to know where you actually live.

[Spooky23]

You need a physical address for many things.

[skybrian]

Or alternatively, have a relative who will let you use their address? That seems a lot cheaper.

A hard case is combination of not having money and not having family.

[DoreenMichele]

Homeless people frequently are homeless in part because they don't have any relatives they are on good terms with. Most of the world blames the homeless person and chalks it up to their presumed bad behavior but it's not unusual for them to be fleeing an abusive situation.

[skybrian]

Yes, I should have said "not having family they're on good terms with."

[madeofpalk]

This of course is a particular peculiarity with the US, having such varying state taxes.

[skissane]

It is actually very common in federal systems to have state/province-level taxation, driver's licensing, etc. I don't think the US is particularly peculiar here at all. Canadian provinces also have individual GST and income tax rates.

In some ways, I'd say Australia is actually more peculiar than the US, in that the Australian states have significantly more limited taxation powers than American states or Canadian provinces do – here, the federal government banned state income tax and state sales taxes (GST/VAT), forcing uniform national tax rates and collection for both. However, Australian states still retain the power to levy some other taxes independently, such as land taxes and payroll taxes.

[Spooky23]

There’s other weirdness too. CDLs are different between states. Oregon used to issue lots of shady licenses to undocumented and on the run type people.

[zabzonk]

Is this a USA thing? As a child of an RAF pilot who moved around a lot (here and overseas), I have never encountered this. My Dad had the same bank account all his life, at the bank in the town he was born in, in the UK, and never (as far as I know) had any problems cashing cheques etc. back when such were things.

[ISL]

Not cashing out of town checks (especially in large amounts) is definitely a thing in the US.

For larger transactions, it is also common to get a "cashier's check", drawn on the bank's own accounts to minimize the seller's counterparty risk.

The rationale for the in-town restriction is also to limit counterparty risk: if the check is from an unfamiliar bank, it is more likely to be bogus and the seller won't be able to verify the account with a quick call to a known bank nor expect to be able to address fraud within the local law-enforcement framework.

[zabzonk]

I take your word for it, but I rember getting cash on my UK credit card several times when I've worked in the US. Of course, these were for small amounts, and the credit card company were the ones finally at risk.

I have suddenly had a vision of Clint Eastwood, in High Plains Drifter mode, riding into town and attempting to cash a cheque :-)

[maccam94]

Credit/debit cards and checks are totally different systems. Cards can be checked for available funds instantly. Checks need to be cleared through the ACH system (in the US at least), which is an asynchronous process that might take more than a day to complete. If you cash a check from a different bank at your own, usually it will actually draw funds from your account and the check will be deposited after it clears.

[zabzonk]

It's been a long time since I had a cheque book, but way back then the cheque at the bank (not for electricity payments and such) trying to get money needed to be backed up with a bank's card, and the risk was on the card issuing bank.

[Spooky23]

It was. The US has/had a distributed banking system with thousands of banks. It’s archaic and stupid.

Basically, you can tell from the routing number on a check where the bank is. Back in the day, if the bank wasn’t from NYC or the same region they wouldn’t honor the check. Checks were mailed between clearing systems and would take weeks to clear. My dad maintained a bank account at the Bank of New York specifically for business travel in the 80s.

That’s mostly gone now as ACH is automated and quick.

[nine_k]

The problem is that the US is rather larger than the UK, so a distributed system was (and maybe still is) a natural fit. For the same reason, all the citizens of the US can't just come to one place and vote for a President, like ancient Athenians could.

[s0rce]

I was paid by the Canadian government through a fellowship while I attended graduate school in the USA. They paid my entire years fellowship in a single check which clearly said Government of Canada, however, the check was denominated in US dollars and drawn on a US bank, yet I still got a lot of confusion and difficult when trying to cash it and had to convince them it was, in fact, possible.

[DoreenMichele]

I'm American, so, yes, I'm describing my experience with the USA.

[Angostura]

One of the advantages of Empire :)

[pyuser583]

Yes, and “travelers” have historically had their own systems of law and governance.

The US military being an excellent example. Extraterritoriality for merchants was a big thing in the 19th century. Ecclesiastical laws was a big thing before that (not all clerics were travelers - monks needed their own legal system for the opposite reason).

But nobody said “screw physical jurisdictions” - they just created a new, non-territorial jurisdiction for a select few.

[Angostura]

Fundamentally it's an issue of how people in a settle community, with communal rules and support handle people who aren't part of that community.

[DoreenMichele]

It's frequently outright abusive of the nomadic peoples. People want soldiers to lay down their lives for national security, natural disasters, etc but then want to treat them as unwelcome outsiders, don't want to hire their spouses, will happily gouge them for rent, etc.

[passerby1]

> will happily gouge for rent

Making profit is the goal for renting out, right?

[sausagefeet]

> So to summarize, I think what bothers me is that the only possible way to arrive at what the parent comment suggests would be to avoid participating or contributing to any of these essential traits of civil society

I don't think this take is very realistic. Most people want to live in a home with a static address. They aren't doing it because they need an address to participate in society. However, there are people who are more nomadic and the physical address requirement for some things can be a challenge.

[Someone]

I concur that most people want to live in a home, but except for the fact that’s it’s engrained in the legal system, what do you really need a static address for nowadays? I could give suppliers lat/long coordinates of my front door or the route to my house, and my physical mailbox gets more spam than mail I really need, and the latter also could be delivered via email.

A static email address is much more useful (or, actually, a static digital identity)

[nine_k]

How soon until we end up with government-mandated email addresses? Email is already a required field in many governmental forms in the US.

[JadeNB]

> Most people want to live in a home with a static address.

Statistics can address what most people do do, but how can one possibly speak to what most people want to do? (Even if one could, I can believe that people's preferences are much less absolute than they are shaped by existing affordances; maybe some people who currently want one thing would change their mind if obstacles to the alternative were removed.)

[yakubin]

Regarding voting, I think people who pay taxes should only be allowed to vote based on the place they pay their taxes in. It really annoys me that because I don't have a long-term address, I need to separately register where I live at a given time to vote in local elections, to have any say in what the money I pay in taxes is spent on, while there are many people who pay their taxes in one place and vote in another, where they haven't contributed a penny. Those things should be linked.

[vineyardmike]

I travel a lot, I spend 50% of time at home in city A, 25% in city B and 25% in city C. Often when I travel it’s election time in some locality. Once in a while it’s an issue I have a strong opinion on, and I spent a lot of time in that city so I understand the issue. I’d love to be able to split my voting power by where I spend my time and offer 25% of a vote to city B’s impactful referendum. Instead I’m forced to pick only one city to call home even though I feel a sense of being at home in multiple places.

I think voting should be about where you physically are and where you spend your time.

[dazc]

What about people who don't pay tax because they don't earn enough. Should they be allowed to vote?

[ElevenLathe]

They still owe taxes, it's just that some years their obligation is $0.

Edit: also there are things like fuel and sales tax that almost everyone owes, even if they don't have to pay income tax.

[yardstick]

I don’t think I should be eligible to vote in every city, state or country I’ve paid sales taxes in over a year.

[reidjs]

You are basing this on the premise only people with a fixed address can provide value to society. One of the best classical guitarists I have ever met is homeless, living on the street, but provides extreme value to everyone within earshot. Doesn’t he deserve a bank account to safely store the few dollars he makes playing Mozart, Beethoven, and other works of art on the street? Would you rather he gets mugged by some criminals and loses everything he earned that day, week, month?

[version_five]

I think your concerns are valid, but I think we can come up with ways to avoid them without forcing people to declare and be bound to a specific location.

Just want to add that for example in France there is a "gens du voyage" status for nomadic people that allows then to access government services without a fixed address. I don't know enough about it to say if it's successful, just saying there are options.

[lmc]

I think this is a really interesting discussion. I'm a bit of a nomad myself and cautious of the things you bring up - if everyone behaved like this, there'd be no community development and things would decay. But, you already see this in more common situations, like the movement of young people to cities, e.g.:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191121-can-tiny-aband...

[bfz]

Just for some context, I was nomadic for well over a decade and consider that time an extravagant extension of youth, and a needless stunting of my growth into adulthood in absolute terms. By my late 30s I see no reason to encourage nomadism, or to celebrate or encourage others in the belief that it is a healthy way to live, it essentially amounts to the epitome of the dark side of individualism. When my children are of age, I would strongly discourage it for all the reasons in the original reply. Floaters don't grow - in the worst case they turn into "professional expats", and those (according to anecdotal experience) tend to develop into some of most fragmented and purposeless personalities on the planet by the time they reach middle age.

[jcims]

Holy moly just because you couldn’t figure it out doesn’t mean that nobody else can or will.

I’d argue the opposite. Reducing friction with nomadism increases the likelihood of a pilgrimage and radicalization of hyper aligned internet communities into meat space.

[zmgsabst]

Being nomadic post teenage years is natural among animals, particularly for males, before settling into a pack when mature.

I’d encourage you to not suppress that instinct in others just because you’re not currently in that phase of your life.

[ambrozk]

Both of you are correct.

[lmc]

Out of interest, where did you go, and what were your reasons for stopping?

I think I can relate to a lot of what you say. I'm not saying I'm doing things the right way, but I've met people that you're describing that are basically on a very long holiday.

It's a proper cliche, but travel has definitely broadened my horizons. I hope you don't discourage it too much - emphasize travelling with purpose, and when to stop.

[bfz]

Mostly Asia. I stopped for exactly the reason in the previous comment.. I realized that what initially seemed like a fun and academic idea about the people I was meeting absolutely did develop into a fundamental life choice, after the umpteenth drink shared with someone who might have initially seemed eccentric and interesting, but had very little depth and purpose almost immediately below the surface.

The choice was to either seize the endless excitement of travel permanently, and further develop my own eccentricities at extraordinary risk of accomplishing little material, or swallowing my pride and acknowledging the dream of travel may have been a substantially emptier experience than originally promised.

This is not to say I did not "develop" - I met numerous people, swap emails, send Christmas gifts, had amazing experiences, and so on, but the question is what permanence these actions and relationships have, and at what cost those experiences are gained. I still itch - regularly - to jump on a plane to a country I have never been before. It is so easy to indulge in that sense of adventure. But I notice this comes most often during times of stress, and nowadays I always weigh that adventure against the actual costs of what I am leaving behind. Due to this, adventure holds very little of the appeal it once did, and I often wonder how many of those life-loving expats I met who did not admit to running from their old lives were still on the run from something, perhaps while living with complete delusion that they were only having fun.

On the other hand I did meet people who had found a real sense of belonging and purpose in their life through the foreign communities they interacted with, but even if I were one of those, over a long time horizon, I don't imagine the outcome to be so much different on every occasion. There are only so many children to educate and schools to build before the satisfaction gives way to the wariness of ones own ephemeral relationship to their environment, the only answer to which is yet more adventure, or the cold reality of going home and discovering what was missed in the meantime.

As another reply suggested - travelling with purpose makes a lot of sense. Some of the most interesting people I met were NGO or higher education placements there temporarily to accomplish a specific task.

[lmc]

Thanks for sharing. Seriously.

[iovrthoughtthis]

you sound fun

[hungryforcodes]

Thanks for the judgement -- much appreciated!

On the other hand I was basically non nomadic until about 40 and always discontent. Then for the last few years have been working in different countries and love it. I also try and at least understand and if possible contribute to each culture I encounter in a small way. I'm not sure how that counts as fragmented and purposeless.

[pmoriarty]

"I was nomadic for well over a decade and consider that time an extravagant extension of youth, and a needless stunting of my growth into adulthood in absolute terms. By my late 30s I see no reason to encourage nomadism, or to celebrate or encourage others in the belief that it is a healthy way to live, it essentially amounts to the epitome of the dark side of individualism."

Way, way too many people never leave the area/country they were born in.

By traveling to radically different places you can learn about different people, customs, and cultures. You can see how the norms you were brought up with aren't absolute and that good and bad people exist everywhere. Travel can really open your eyes to the humanity of every person everywhere.

You can also learn what it's like to be the outsider, the one that's different, who can't speak the language and so is not treated like the first class citizen you're used to being back home, you might learn what it's like to go through the bureaucracy of a foreign land, and hopefully this will all help to to develop some empathy for people from other countries and who speak different languages when they come to yours.

You can learn to engage with, survive, and thrive among people very different from you. Learning the customs and languages of other people and places can be very useful for both you and them, as you can act as an intermediary or unofficial ambassador between your own country/culture and theirs.

That's not to mention your seeing and experiencing all sorts of wonderful things you might never have imagined were you to stay in one place all your life.

There are so many great things about travel, though life as a permanent nomad or expat is not for everyone. At the very least, though, it can really open your eyes and your mind.

[mr_toad]

> the epitome of the dark side of individualism

In short: anyone who isn’t part of the tribe is a dangerous threat.

[gorgoiler]

I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies.

The representatives might be for 24 to 34 year olds, unmarried mothers, children, prisoners, or of course the homeless. People who need more representation than they are probably getting.

The more categories you fall into, the more votes you get. Maybe that’s not a bad thing when faced with the status quo of money based politics.

It is a poorly thought out idea but your comment reminded me to give it some more time.

[yencabulator]

> I’ve always thought that voting, at the national level, might benefit from non-geographic constituencies.

The US voting system is uniquely bizarre and designed for vote manipulation by electoral district boundary fiddling. National level voting should just be by popular vote, like it is pretty much everywhere else.

[hungryforcodes]

This doesn't work at all for people who move around. I might have an assignment one year in Berlin then another for two years in Bangkok, then another three years in Singapore.

[sfriedr]

So how do you manage your banking and tax issues without going insane? Is your company providing you with high-quality tax advisors that help you deal with this issue?

[jhugo]

It's not that complicated if you are just earning salary / self-employed income in places. GP's situation with those three countries -- given their fairly sane tax systems and streamlined reporting -- is probably about as complicated as an American's tax, especially if you have multiple states involved.

[ghaff]

From my limited knowledge, companies do tend to handle the tax work for expats. In fact years ago when I was interviewing for an international position where I'd have been moving around a lot, as I recall, they told us something like they'd take some fixed percentage off our paychecks and handle the whole thing.

If you're on your own, you presumably have to hire an appropriate accountant.

This comes up even internally in the US if you're spending a lot of time in a number of states as a non-resident.

[CryptoPunk]

But why does one's address have to be fixed to provide these services / establish these qualities?

Society adapted to advance the listed social causes in the historical context where having multiple or frequently changing residences was far too costly for the average person to consider. But what if modern civilization makes this mode of living attainable for the masses?

* Information technology enables efficient markets for renting out housing for short durations.

* Modern financial technology enables these markets to become globally accessible with minimal processing fees and delays.

* Modern transportation technology enables people to travel globally very quickly and affordably.

* Modern construction technology enables people to build much more housing units per capita than in the past, which makes second homes, vacation homes etc more viable.

* Modern telecommunication enables people to work remotely, which makes a work life that is combined with travelling much more viable.

We could very conceivably see a significant fraction and even a majority of people consider themselves world citizens, and prefer to travel non-stop, with the change brought about by the aforementioned technologies. In such a setting, society could very possibly manage physical neighborhoods differently, without tying people to a district in order to procure the necessary resources to maintain said neighborhoods.

In terms of the social aspect, people may adapt by linking themselves moreso to virtual communities, in order to enable connectivity amidst physical travel and migration.

Society not currently being set up to work without residents who are tied to physical neighborhoods is more likely due to the majority of people historically not being able travel non-stop than functional societies not being possible without static addresses.

[bfz]

I think most of this comment can be answered by highlighting the difference between supposed "Internet friends" and "real friends". Over corona there have been a wide range of studies published on the negative effects virtual communication has had on education in particular, the strength and quality of the relationships children have managed to develop, and even the severe effect it has had in some cases on development of vocal skills and the ability to read emotion.

Information technology is only a tool, it is not, never has been and never will be a replacement for the real thing. A child cannot develop motor skills by climbing a virtual tree, a toddler cannot take shelter from a storm by dwelling in a virtual home. You cannot raise a child on an aeroplane without substantially reducing its quality of life and damaging its early growth. Thus continuance of the society that produced us and all the freedoms and privileges we enjoy (including air travel) is largely incompatible with these new tech-centric ideals.

In the normal case for that society to continue functioning, long term physical presence is required for development of its next generation, and nomadic world citizenry is largely a temporary (and abnormal) trait of those who are young, unwilling to reproduce, and primarily misallocate their capital to consumption and selfish pursuits. This trend is a significant contributor to the collapse in population growth rates across the western world and consequently directly impacts GDP, which is to say, the steady decline of our way of life.

Often immigration is offered as a solution to the population growth aspect, but immigrants quickly assimilate our culture and consequently our growth rates within a single generation (predictably as a result of their new privilege), meaning the qualities our culture celebrates cannot be worked around by importing replacement people to breed on behalf of the laptop class exploiting the spread between income and the cost of a beer in some remote reach of the world. Finally there are many signs that immigration may have reached a local peak as resource access concerns are beginning to dominate global politics for the first time in half a century.

For a little more context, I'm a tech native that has lived on the Internet since around 1998, this is mostly written as a rebuke of my former self, who had little idea of the practicality or implications of all the grand empty promises of technology. You cannot now and never will be able to replace a physical address with a transaction on a blockchain.

[CryptoPunk]

I entirely agree with you on the damage done by lockdown-imposed remote learning for kids. I don't believe we're at a place technologically where telecommunication can fully substitute for in-person learning. If left to our own devices, people would not have chosen to switch their children, en masse, from in-person learning to remote learning, for precisely this reason.

But as technology advances, I believe more activity will voluntarily migrate to electronically mediated, as this mode of interaction becomes more effective. This is especially the case if the law and institutions are adapted to make this mode of living more possible. People should have a choice to switch to this mode of living if they perceive it as advantageous. That is all I'm arguing for.

If my predictions of a mass-transition to an 'always traveling' mode of life don't pan out, then that means the technological evolution I predicted didn't emerge, and no one was harmed because they were able to discern that this mode of life was not advantageous, and avoid switching to it. So I don't see the harm in providing that option, just in case my predictions do pan out, and being able to switch to having a dynamic physical address turns out to be better for most people.

[jdasdf]

>Voting districts - obviously tied to physical land, with different styles of vote counting system per area, often according to local cultural needs. I come from a society where special voting considerations exist in order to achieve actual peace. Prior to that system being introduced, there was war. The right to vote and the manner in which the vote occurs is an essential and inalienable attribute of all democratic societies, often deeply saturated in historic customs taking centuries of diplomacy to achieve stability.

People shouldn't be voting on local issues, land should.

Voting on local issues should be 100% correlated with your investment in that locality.

[dragonwriter]

> People shouldn't be voting on local issues, land should.

All issues are local on some scale.

[ahtihn]

So back to aristocracy?

[jdasdf]

No, because aristocrats could be landless.