This might sound insanely far to urbanites, but this is par for the course for anyone living outside of the suburbs. I grew up 2 hours outside of DC. Driving 30 minutes (which equals 30 miles) to do your shopping once a week was not uncommon.

Now, being in DC, I've had to adapt. Thirty miles is an hour, at least, probably closer to an hour and a half. It feels ludicrous. To not be able to travel wherever I want, whenever I want, in a predictable amount of time, is very disconcerting. And don't get me started on public transit. Travel is either long or short. Long is over 4 hours and involves me being a passenger and getting work done while I'm doing it. Short is anything else. Anything over half an hour for short travel is unacceptable for me. I can't make money during short travel.

I've been keeping track of--and secretly hoping my urban-born wife would volunteer for--the Global Village Construction Set project for years. It's had some progress issues, but ultimately the reasoning is sound. For the same reasons we love FOSS in the software development world, Jakubowski is pushing towards an earlier time when fixing your own truck was not outlandishly difficult.

But I do have to say this:

>> He likes things to be scheduled,” his fiancée, Catarina Mota, a forty-year-old scholar of open-source technology, says. “I’ll say, ‘I want to go buy some bread.’ He’ll say, ‘What time?’ ”

Is concerning. I've personally found that people who couldn't be flexible in one aspect of their life were unlikely to be flexible in most other aspects. In other words, the people I know who like strict schedules, or readily admit to "hating change", are the most likely to harbor rather deep-seated, irrational prejudices of some kind. And it just continues with stuff like this:

>> We foresee an equal playing field of competent, well-organized, small-scale, decentralized republics after the borders of empires dissolve.”

No, I'm sorry, that's not how civilization works. If you read between the lines of the "big government" scare mongering, that's all it's talking about--big versus little government. And the "little" that such people talk about is not one that is more just, free from corruption, it's the road back to feudalism. Large, federalist government has provided us a means towards equality and justice unlike any the world has witnessed prior. There is a reason developed countries don't expect their police to be "funded" through "voluntary donations" aka bribes.

Being able to service your own equipment is orthogonal to discarding 250 years of hard-learned facts about government.