- 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 It's not "incredibly outdated", a physical address comes with many essential implications that ought to be encouraged.

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.

It's only a serious hardship for poor people.

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?

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.

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.

However, if a person owns multiple residences, all that proves is that you own that residence, not that you actually live there at all. At least in my jurisdiction, landlords receive and pay water bills (and the tenant has to reimburse the landlord the usage portion of the bill), so a water bill could even be from an investment property one is renting out.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Making profit is the goal for renting out, right?

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.

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

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.)

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

All issues are local on some scale.

So a digital identity system needs to be implemented. Something akin to what quite a few countries have already implemented.

I'm unsure why it would require more discussion at this point. It's not hypothetical science fiction without practical examples.

Also the “mark of the beast” crowd is real, really loud and politically powerful.

Can't that be bypassed by implementing the system but making it voluntary? That crowd is honestly quite unfathomable to me.

If it practically excludes people from transacting it kind of plays into the prophecy. That's how people go off on bank accounts and debit and credit cards as being the mark of the beast.

Or today, when companies assume that everyone has a mobile phone - if not a smartphone?

Fun fact: The US Postal Service offers this service, for free. (Though not in an ideal way; they'll just match name to ID, don't uniquely identify an individual. All that would need would be to write a drivers license or such number on the letter too, and the USPS to confirm that.)

In the US, people pitched a fit when the tax authority started requiring facial verification for sign in to access sensitive, vulnerable to fraud records, so it ain’t happening here.

The really rich people don’t really care, and nobody really cares about the really poor. Nobody cares in the least about the elderly. Everyone else has a home and has more to lose to the rampant fraud that happens when you make things like this easier.

Lots of places still require a phone number (many email services do for example).

Seem odd to design a whole new system for an edge case?

Why not?

I have mixed feelings about banks, national banks, lenders, art trading, casinos, pawn shops and such though. I'm a bit worried about tracking private individuals at that extent because of these.

If I was in the EU I would support sovereignty of the nation states,and oppose efforts to make the EU Government all powerful

the move to make governments larger and all encompassing including calls for a 1 world government, are IMO a threat to individual freedom and will not have the desired effect you seem to think

You imagine people knowing the lawmakers better. You think that the lawmakers will be more connected to the community. That they'll be more likely to protect the freedoms that they also want to enjoy. At first blush, this all seems reasonable.

However, if you look at history, the actual practice is the opposite of that. When power is mostly exercised locally (at the town level), over time, laws are passed to regulate the minutia of daily life. When shops can be open. Laws about who can work in which trade. Laws about who can use "public" infrastructure and when. Laws about what you can do with your pets. Laws down to what colors and fabrics your cloths are made of. And, of course, laws to protect their hold on power.

It turns out that people in power at local levels are nosy parkers who will try to force everyone they can to live the way they think is best. And they become generationally powerful. Sad but it's the historical reality.

Personally, my speculation is that it's because most people try to exercise all the power they're given. And since those local lawmakers don't have to think about "big" issues in a broader sense, they just make laws about "small" issues and deal with big issues only when they are pushed in front of them.

There's also the question of the size of the talent pool that you draw your leaders from.

First I stated smallest practical, and with that it would depend on the power we are talking about, so the smallest practical for national defense would be the federal government, the smallest practical for professional licensing may be state level, etc.

Also in that idea of federalism also include natural individual rights that can never be violated at any level of governance, including property rights like when you can open your shop...

And when we talk about American style federalism one must also recognize the checks and balances of power that over the last 100 years or does have been worn down but not eliminated. These checks need to be strengthen so no single arm of the government can end up tyrannical like your fear

I recognize the possibility of local tyranny, I think American federalism has checks in it for that. However even in the worst example of city tyranny that is far and way preferable to the alternative of an all powerful federal government

US states can basically just ignore or refuse to enforce the federal law with little to no consequences (immigration sanctuary states/cities, Texas no longer treating suppressors as NFA items, etc.), but EU member states can't. EU law is binding to all of them and there's no escape from it.

US states cannot just ignore federal law - unless the federal law is deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court - a federal institution.

There are effectively no limits to US federal powers - while the treaties governing the EU enshrine the principle of subsidiarity[1] - and the powers granted to the EU are specified in treaties. A topical and obvious example is that the current Roe vs. Wade controversy just couldn't happen in the EU - as it's unrelated to trade or competition, the EU has no competence in this area. Or the idea of the EU imposing a health care system like the Affordable Care Act or deciding drug laws or gun control laws is unthinkable.

An individual cannot be arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned for breaking EU law the way the feds can do in the US, regardless of state law. There are no EU prisons.

By any measure the US is far more centralized than the EU - money is power as they say and 64% of government receipts in the US are at the federal level while the EU budget represents only 2% of government spending in the block.

[1] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/factsheets/en/sheet/7/the-pri...

They have. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_(EU)_2021/555

This stupid thing almost caused Switzerland to leave the Schengen area, and it upset a lot of countries that didn’t want anything to do with it.

At least the complete ban on handguns (that the Netherlands wanted) didn’t happen.

As a firearms enthusiast in the EU, this actually upset me. Not that it affects me too much in the country where I live (I just can’t have 30rd mags, which is stupid, but it could have been a lot worse).

> There are effectively no limits to US federal powers

There is. The 10th amendment. Of course, there’s the commerce clause, that’s been abused ad infinitum.

The US Federal government has been very crafty in associating just about anything to "interstate commerce"[1] and thereby expanding its power enormously.

I'm sure the same thing could happen in the EU given some creative lawyering and a judiciary willing to swallow their arguments.

It's the appointment/election of particular judges and their willingness to craft or go along with certain arguments and interpret laws in certain ways that is really at the crux of how nations are governed.

Like the old saying goes: It's not votes that count, but those who count the votes. Likewise, it's not the laws that matter, but those who interpret the laws.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause

member state departments that are under its sole control are still funded by national budgets

the 2% is just the head of the snake

While the US federal government spends over $20 trillion a year. This isn't comparable at any level - regardless of any snake-anatomy analogy.

I'm not sure what your definition of a "member state department" is? But knowing something of the political set-up in a number of EU countries, none are under the "sole control" of the EU (commission I guess you mean?).

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/eu-budget/eu-budget-added...

whereas the EU member state equivalents that implement EU policy get attributed to national budgets

the EU doesn't fund enforcement of the GDPR, the national information commissioners do

not having to pay to implement its policies makes the EU look many, many times more efficient than it actually is

Meaning the EU will pass a law or regulation or program that the member states then have to fund with domestic taxes?

Generally speaking for the federal government, if they want to pass a program or requirement the federal government must also pay for that, for example the federal government could not require the state governments to put in bike lane on all road with out giving the states the money to do it.

That is why the Federal government is so large..

Also defense spending, We actually honor our NATO treaty by spending no less than 3% of our GDP on national defense, something the EU nations never do

They absolutely can and do. State government are under no compulsion to enforce federal law, nor do they have aid federal law enforcement. Sure the FBI can still arrest you but as a practical matter the federal government relies heavily on local law enforcement for support in their efforts and task forces.

The state governments can neuter federal enforcement by refusing to supply personnel and equipment or other support to federal law enforcement task forces and actions

Conversely the federal government also supplies (i.e bribes) local law enforcement with money, and gear to grease the wheel for that support.

The supremacy you are referring to with the Supreme court is about when Federal Law and State law conflict then Federal law would win over State Law. Personally I think this is bad but until there is a constitutional amendment to change it that is the reality. However that supremacy does not mean state law enforcement or governments must enforce federal law, only that they can not overrule/supplant a federal law with their own

>> A topical and obvious example is that the current Roe vs. Wade controversy just couldn't happen in the EU - as it's unrelated to trade or competition

Well according to the Current Draft our federal government did not have the power either. It is funny you mention trade, you do know that ACA is a trade regulation the constitutional power that allows ACA to exist is the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution, that was MASSIVELY expanded in power by the court in the abomination / disgraceful 1942 Wickard decision which effectively made every activity a commercial interstate activity that can be regulated by the federal government.

Personally if the court is in the mood for over turning precedent someone should take a case to them aimed squarely at over turning that abomination, putting the federal government back into their proper scope and place

Only in theory, in practice EU countries break EU law all the time, with minimal consequences. Some like Poland even openly, it recently said something like "we'll rather pay the fine than respect this particular EU law". EU states remain fully sovereign.

Problem solved. No need to reorganize society for the 0.001%.

I use my dad's address for my permanent residence. But since I'm not on the utility bills, it can be hard to provide true residence. In one case, I had to write up a lease agreement & buy renter's insurance to get one of my accounts unlocked. They wouldn't accept a bank statement, my driver's license, or voter registration card. It was a real pain in the ass, and resolving it took a good 2 weeks.

Lots of people's names aren't on utility bills. They may be sharing a place with others or utilities may be included in the rent.

The first step would be to avoid the requirement when in the same city, state or country. To the extent possible, if there are legal reasons, maybe those should be reviewed. There are options for sure.