If we get the NW location finally unfucked, we need people, people we can trust. Even an older guy just to be an on site caretaker. It's not like you need to do any ten mile ruck marches. I provided a capable little 4X4 for patrolling the property.
Even some old guy on social security and food stamps can contribute to a retreat economy as desperate as some are. If you can do anything and are not half bedridden then it matters.
I really did not want an autonomous zone model based on this, largely due to the ethics, but here goes: It has been proven to work, but for our purposes will require 10-20 years of ongoing development to even prove viability which won't be finished in some of our lifetimes but we could get it started, and here is how it can start with half your people being retirees.
I have a feeling that half these things getting going will be like some of the leftover hippie communes in NorCal, with the younger eco-hippie families getting the cash portion of their income as caretakers for the aging aquarians anyway. I know of one that has been like that. When the "captain" finally died, the place fell apart.
The "Captain" was an interesting character. He had started out with the Air Force B36 program and ended up with on the fringes of the CIA LSD program, and when it was "officially" shut down and the substance made illegal, his people put it to market as the answer to solve the problem of world war three. The feds had no sense of humor about it, busted him enough times that his career choices got pretty limited so he did the disability thing, which went up as he aged. He would make money or inherit money, and oddly enough, long after being out of the dope trade these old hippie types would leave him stuff in their wills as "thanks for the enlightenment" type stuff. That, and the VA would pick him up for a while for another study on the long term effects of the experimental drugs he had been testing on himself since the late 1950s. You never knew if someone pulling up to the place in a newer car was a parole officer, university researcher, envoy from the Dali Lama or another self styled mad scientist type trying to come up with a new designer drug and wanting advice on some electro-chemical process. As he aged though, they sure made sure he was taken care of. Not that they would give him money or he would most likely do something stupid/crazy with it, but they made sure he had a roof over his head and caretakers got paid. They embezzled the crap out of stuff though. It was through his people that I met the chick who founded Burning Man, which I thought was kind of a dumb but functional idea.
No joke, it was me who put it into her head about the concept of the Autonomous zone since the original Burning Man festivals were dealing with parking issues and harassment in SanFrancisco. It was ME who told her to set up camp in the middle of nowhere and if it were good, people would come to it. Her original plans were to try and take over some beaches areas but they could not get around the parking and camping thing. That was always the limitation to Burning Man until they found their current location. Personally, I never got around to going to it. If they remember me, they probably only remember me as the "young gun nut ex-Marine".
So yeah, I could go into more detail, but it can work with around 1/3 of your people on retirement or permanent disability as long as they do something and bringing those retirement checks, disability money and food stamps to the table, that's something. As they age, then another person can go on the books as their caretaker. The trick is not to be hemorraging the capitol. Biggies on that are rent, interest, and taxes. Of those, if the whole commune thing is paying rent or a high mortgage, or bought some stupid stuff they are making payments on (like group credit cards), they will go broke. The taxes are easy to dodge, but you pay some, not all. You shift the secondary economy of the place to cash income sources which stay in circulation with the thing as much as possible. When it is payday for those on the retirement or disability dole somehow, then it's payday for everyone else too.
The thing is you got to have some kind of entrepreneurial stuff that is cash business, really important. That's the difference between the ones that kind of puddled along and the ones with growth, then the other really big huge issue, to put it bluntly, hot sex for young people. As soon as 20 somethings figure out it is a place where they will get laid, look the fuck out. You get the girls in on the program where they can goad and cause the young men to compete but winners do get laid, and those young men have to take their shirts off and work and sweat and show off to stack hay or build something or whatever, holy crap, you will see barns appear overnight. The next natural outgrowth of that, child care. You need to be able to facilitate the young women keeping the pregnancy even if the flaky 20 year old father who got the 15 year old runaway pregnant is nowhere to be seen by the time she comes to term, but you don't be driving her to the abortion clinic and as far as you remember, that boyfriend, you never checked his ID, and she was screwing around with other teenage boys anyway. Nobody identifies the father, she goes on welfare, and shut the fuck up about who the father is for several years, even if he is showing up for all of the holidays to see the kid. So not long into that, you need a child care facility.
I actually learned that from some casual study of the Rajneesh cult. Baghwan Rajneesh was in reality, a straight up pimp. In a complex but functional belief system he came up with something fairly simple - get people laid, and they will flock in. A bunch of dropout PHD types did the legal and religious writings. Rajneesh himself spent most of his time stoned, sleeping, or attending an orgy, which I heard he mostly spent laying on his side in a dope addled stupor just watching and giggling. It was his head of security who screwed things up by being a bit too ruthless with some local residents in an election issue. That's where I came up with the idea of the autonomous zone being a closed sort of thing, and not pushing too hard on local politics while having a good national level public relations campaign (not giving a fuck about what the locals think, just don't push them too hard).
