The Last of Us

Kiroy said:

Lithose would have probably written 100 pages with sources, but communism wouldn't work in a group of 500 people. They'd quickly fall apart. I can't fully remember but a few diff times lithose sourced like 10-20 person tribes was best and there was some max number before it falls apart, like 30-50 or something.

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Probably more than that. I bet it works well enough up to Dunbar's number so 150-200 people.

Kiroy said:

Lithose would have probably written 100 pages with sources, but communism wouldn't work in a group of 500 people. They'd quickly fall apart. I can't fully remember but a few diff times lithose sourced like 10-20 person tribes was best and there was some max number before it falls apart, like 30-50 or something.

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It has a 100% chance of falling apart somewhere directly north of Dunbar's number. It usually falls apart at levels much smaller than that.

Kiroy said:

Probably holds together up to a higher number in a strictly hunter gatherer society since participants know that it's starvation or work. They still gonna be killing the lazy vs giving them welfare though, but lazy is almost always a choice.

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I don't actually know for sure, but if I had to guess, most hunter gatherer "societies" probably rarely hit triple digits. I would think larger sizes were only made possible by agriculture.

Kiroy said:

Lithose would have probably written 100 pages with sources, but communism wouldn't work in a group of 500 people. They'd quickly fall apart. I can't fully remember but a few diff times lithose sourced like 10-20 person tribes was best and there was some max number before it falls apart, like 30-50 or something.

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60-80 is the absolute upward ceiling with big brained people. After that you stop knowing who everyone is and trust breaks down, no matter how smart everyone is. You also start running into serious issues with mate selection. So yeah 30-50 is ideal and coincidentally as big as chimp tribes ever get. Our brains simply cannot process that many personal associations and the only reason 80 can work is single group maximum seems to be about 12 and number of extended groups you can have from there is around 7. Average people who are any kind of stress realistically can only handle about half that number. Once you eclipse that line you end up with Incels and lazy fucks who break the system, leading inevitably to an alpha taking over to keep order. And yeah Lithose had a lot of great source reads on the topic.

I can, having grown up in small towns in rural WI, believe 500 could work. But it would not be easy and people would have to know each other pretty well. Probably all the same faith system too (not the multidenominational crap) to make sure morality and goals align. And outsiders would not be walking the fucking streets at night unescorted.

BrutulTM said:

He's the brother of one of the leaders of the commune. Hardly a complete stranger.

With regard to the autistic analysis of whether they exceeded some magic number where you go from being a commune to some other kind of society well, this is a fictional story so you don't need to panic about whether your ideology is being slightly offended. Try just enjoying the story or if it's not enjoyable, watching something that is.

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Its not ideology. Its actual real social science. There have been studies on this shit. You just don't hear about them as much because no one likes the realization that they are not as smart as they believe themselves to be (e.g. Free Will is limited at best) and it basically invalidates wokeness from the bottom up.

Cybsled said:

Hunter gatherer also requires mobility. If animals aren’t where you are, you need to go to them.

A permanent settlement needs a constant and reliable source of food to support the population and you can only really get that with farming and domesticated animals, although you can supplement with hunting and gathering still

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In theory they can keep grazing areas or at least grazing hay outside the main walls. They only get fucked if some raider crew decides to burn it to flush them out and have to have armed guards patrolling when harvesting it for their domesticated live stock. Given the had working electricity and many refrigeration units last decades, I found that aspect pretty plausible (WWZ somewhat covered these concepts in depth). Potatoes and meat on that level are actually pretty easy to maintain, something we did with 1800s technology. And enough locals from that part of the country are going to be ranchers that you probably have the know how. The guns were all lever action and easy to maintain/reload rimfire guns too. You might have to scout for scrap every once in a while, but being at a power plant means its probably plentiful. They also obviously had abundant lumber.

Oddly, the part that made me rustled was them wasting light bulbs on Xmas trees. Like no one and nothing in that town is going to be able to replace light bulbs and after 20 years they would be pretty fucking hard to come by, especially in an isolated plains farming town. But these guys were burning them up on Xmas tries and nightlights in houses that were largely not even in use. I think it would have been smarter writing to have the Native old couple be some sort of traders or scavengers who did trades with the town to explain some of this, rather than them thinking the town was some evil place, but whatever. There are a few other resources that fell into the same category, but the use if incandescent light bulbs was the most blatant. Even the FEDRA complex and Ron Swanson's Wonderland Bear Lair used conventional oil lamps for illumination mostly.