Useful Skills

This is a very practical post, so I think it is better to write it outside of shabbat.  The practical question is what skills are useful to a Mikraite community.  Skills break down into two categories: business and life.  Business skills are needed for making money.  The only business that makes sense for a remote Mikraite community is an online/internet business.  A life skill is useful if we can do something significantly better for ourselves than we can by just buying the product or service.  Based on this, here is my list:

business:
        programming
        user interface design
        marketing
life:
        farming
        cooking
        shelter

I think the business skills are obvious enough.  Of the life skills, cooking is also obvious but the other two need explanation.

Farming is only subsistance farming and isn't meant to provide all food.  It is just meant for what is easy to grow.  One obvious benefit of farming is lowering the cost of living.  But the other point is that food we grow for ourselves will be significantly better than anything we can buy because it will be fresh.  Truly fresh food is very hard to buy because the modern food distribution system adds significant time between when food is produced and when it is actually sold.

Shelter includes everything from architectural design to fixing a leaking faucet.  The need for architecture and construction is obvious because modern American houses are garbage.  But even home repair is a problem because the handyman has no real incentive to select the best quality materials and appliances when doing repairs.  And clearly someone who knows how to build a house should know to fix a faucet.

It is worth mentioning why we have two separate skills for making a program, programming and UI design, but only one skill for making a house.  This is because form and function can be effectively separated in a program with a model-view separation, but there is no sensible way to separate form and function in a house.

It would be nice if we could have all six of these skills in our group, but it isn't necessary at the beginning.  But I think each of us should have at least one of these skills.

I actually stumbled across an all-girl's high school of "Home Economics" in Taiwan that appears to be a housewife high school.  It teaches things like sewing, home crafts and presumably other ways to make money.  Kind of amazing.  Hopefully the society continues to support such things.

The way I see it then, is that there are a few things women are good at or suited to (computer programming ironically being one of them) that will not conflict with their roles as a home maker.  Men would do just about anything else.  I think it would be nice if certain consumeristic things would disappear but it's not too likely that this would happen.

It is most useful to have different members specialize in different primitive skills. If one person raised a couple of cows then when a cow is killed the non-hormone/organic meat can be spread across the community. Another person might garden. Another person could have chickens and make eggs. It would be impractical for one person to learn all skills or have every member learn the same skills but some basic ideas:

1. Self defense/combat: physical threats are a real possibility.
2. Farming/Livestock
3. Carpentry
4. Welding/Mechanic/Car Repair
5. Sewing/baking/home making (mostly for women)

Business:

1. Basic Real Estate
2. Basic Business (Business law, contract law, limiting liability, starting a small business basics etc.)
3. Basic stock/bond/commodity investing
4. Easy to start small business ideas that can be operated from home (I have many of these but generally I need partners to do them. I even have family members who have successfully made a lot of money with these).
5. Basics on buying and operating common businesses like a motel, gas station, fast food restaurant etc.
6. Career choices that offer the maximum return on effort

I think there should be a center of operations set up in a populated area (a city or town) and another rural compound set up. Members can move back and forth but some people obviously will be permanently in one spot or the other.

If you live isolated you suffer little ability to make money, not much ability to challenge yourself or be stimulated by connection to the world at large. If you live in the city you might get "burned out" from noise, pollution etc. Not be able to grow your own vegetables etc. It is best to maximize benefit by having both. As well in the event of some kind of disaster the urban members can flee to the rural compound.

I would add another skill category:

Optimal Health

Yoga
Chi Gung
Kung Fu (both self defense and spirit/body health)
Meditation
Traditional Medicine (acupuncture, healing herbs etc.)
Optimal Supplements: What herbal supplements are effective and worth taking
Sound Tones: They aid in meditation and spiritual health

The group can organize free martial arts and yoga classes and train together for example.

As well workshops that teach social skills is useful. Sales techniques, methods of persuasion, effective listening skills, basic people skills etc.

I would also organize basic recruiting/propaganda efforts. If members want help picking up women, or increasing their perceived social status or similar things it is possible to work together to do this.  

I don't even know what user interface design is, but programming is a complex and highly specialized skill. If you are a computer programmer great. But it is not something a lay person can easily pick up.

By contrast basic marketing is pretty easy to learn. There are many good books on it that are written in plain English. It would be easy to give a one or two hour workshop class on it that could teach a lot of useful concepts.

We aren't going to teach someone physics. They need to go to school for that. We need to focus on fairly simple, but useful skills.

Basic business skills really aren't that complicated and yield huge results. It is not hard to form a business or to learn basic contract law. Liability isn't a complex subject (at least the basics isn't). Stock investing isn't hard. Neither is starting a home business or buying a gas station and running it (or even hiring someone else to run it and just making a profit off of ownership). We can recommend good books on the subject and have a basic 200 or so page book that can be purchased off of amazon. We could put together a basic presentation on it that lasts about an hour or so. We can have a basic thread with questions and answers and maybe a worksheet the summarizes the physical presentation. It can be learned fairly quickly without any special kind of intelligence or any background knowledge other than a high school diploma.

I think you probably need an I.Q. above 108 though.

Programming if enough people are interested it would be worth giving a workshop on it but I'm not sure how useful that is unless you have studied it in depth for a long time.

You can do a joint venture project and purchase and maintain a rental property on your free time. It doesn't require a lot of effort or study. You just need to understand the basics. It is similar with buying a gas station or investing in stocks. You don't need any kind of special training and it is rather easy for someone who has experience doing these things to give useful tips and pointers that give you a competitive edge against others.

You can learn marketing and all that pretty easily as well. Not all people will be good at it, but you'll discover if you have a talent or not by doing it. Similar with gardening and other basic skills. I think maybe welding/car mechanic might require a vocational class. Martial arts would require a regular class schedule.

As an example. You can read all the books you want on buying a restaurant or gas station. But I have talked to people who own them. It is easy. But what the books likely won't tell you is that the biggest problem you have is that most managers will steal from you. You need to find a manager you can trust. If you can't do that, then you will probably get robbed.

Stock trading is simple. But I can tell you a lot of these discount online stock brokers will sell your stock at lower than market rates and buy at higher rates which will kill you on day trading (or regular trading). It is illegal but they do it.

It is basic pointers like that from people who have done it that are the real gems. Just avoid the basic mistakes that most people make when they don't have any experience. Just learn the basics of how to do a simple project effectively.

If you buy a rental property and someone says "I have to move in right now!" that person likely will be trouble. They probably are getting kicked out of their current place. All these little tips is what will give you the edge, along with explaining the very basics of how to do something. If you start a business you probably want to form an LLC which protects you from liability. It is all simple. But no one is going to tell you this stuff because they don't want you to know. They want to make all the money for themselves.