1 Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches. I want all new things!

2 Glorified bums. Hoboism as a virtue. Dumpster-diving as an art form. I was raised by one parent who went through the horrors of WWII as a very young refugee child, and the economic aftermath of scarcity and want. My other parent was born in the waning years of the Great Depression in this country. And I lived for a time with a grandparent who lived through both World Wars in Europe and the intervening depression. All of them were affected to a degree, and I grew up through the failure of my father's gas station as the Arabs and Big Oil squeezed out the independent operator. So my ingrained instincts and inclinations are strongly tilted toward the kind of frugality, recycling and reuse that these people engage in. In some ways I applaud them, as I begin to weave together an alternative life away from the system that they deplore. However I part ways strongly with them in their utter disdain for private property and the rights of others to freely make different choices for themselves. It is not really overtly expressed in the linked page, but there is a stink of self-righteous moral superiority about these people that matches their garbage stench. I would be right behind the bulldozers cheering them on when the rightful property owners came to reclaim their "urban gardens" from the lowlife scum squatting on it, and backing the police as they dispersed their feral carcasses out of the public parks they had befouled. Buy yourself your *own* piece of property and build yourself your *own* big house with enough rooms where you and all your stinking hippy friends can live in one big happy happy commune. Oh, wait. You'd have to actually *work* to earn the right to own that property wouldn't you. Yeah, bummer, that.