The Pyramid Scheme

Here is a clip from The 300 where Xerxes comes on the scene in grand style on a pyramid shaped mobile dais for his throne. It is carried on the backs of a lot of little people who could die and be crushed if anything went wrong.

He comes down the steps and people scramble to serve as steps for the last few feet before touching ground.

Metaphorically, that's a portrait of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or Donald Trump or any greedy asshole billionaire for whom no amount of money and power is ever enough and the suffering of the people upon whose backs they stand is WHOLLY irrelevant or GLEEFULLY abused as a sadistic pleasure under the euphemism power hath its privileges.

In architecture, a pyramid is extremely stable. It's why pyramids in Egypt are some of our oldest archeological sites.

A metaphorical pyramid of people can be a solid organizational structure where you need a relatively small number of people on top to manage a large number below, but we currently do not have a stable economy in part because of the top heavy economic structures in place and in part because too many people in charge are NOT good stewards efficiently husbanding resources for all. Too many are people actively destroying value and simultaneously taking an unduly large slice of the pie for themselves.

This was supposed to be a stable social structure by providing a bunch of little pyramids of people at the bottom, the purpose of which was to make sure you had a hard worker available in every family to provide for the family by doing what society needed.

I had a lot of the same pieces of the puzzle as my parents, yet never had the extra money available to help people and also save and invest like my parents did. My father was career military and my mom was a full-time homemaker for a long time and after they were together for a while, she crabbed at him and made him open a checking account in an era where cash was king because she was tired of the stress of carrying around the equivalent of two months of his pay in her purse.

I NEVER had savings, and not merely because I married a younger man who didn't already have rank and he spent money like there was no tomorrow.

I'm not advocating we return to THAT. It's been falling apart organically for decades -- throughout my lifetime -- because it NEVER was some best solution for humanity.

It is most likely a reaction to survival situations. It was created so humanity could cope with subsistence environments. It also promotes subsistence culture.

In nature, we have two reproductive strategies:

1. Produce a LOT of young EXPECTING them to die in droves.

2. Produce few young and take excellent care of them so they have high survival rates.

Human culture that depends on most families producing eight or ten kids is the reproductive strategy of uncaring vermin, not intelligent, enlightened civilized creatures.

Those expectations surrounding how individuals and families are supposed to live shapes all of society and society makes choices that respect that intended outcome. It's a two-way street.

Large, poor families with limited material resources trend towards low education levels, overcrowding and other conditions conducive to the rapid spread of disease.

Paris is deemed to be a wonderful city because they decided to plan those conditions out in response to high rates of overcrowded tenements with significant health issues.

Project SRO provides information and ideas for creating housing alternatives conducive to allowing people to support themselves comfortably and feed themselves easily and adequately on a limited income so they don't have a gun to their head to marry young or otherwise try to force fit themselves to this heteronormative mold. 

It is designed to be an antidote to the housing crisis and the financial and systemic pressures to keep heteronormative culture alive at all costs.

It is descriptive, not prescriptive. It generally talks about problems and solutions and has a few illustrations, but it explicitly states that the goal is Passive Solar Design and that's always site specific.

Hypothetically, an architect could sell general plans with labels like "Designed for a south facing lot with westerly prevailing winds." to help jumpstart projects, but ALL Passive Solar Design buildings would require some degree of site specific tweaks even if such a resource existed.

Passive Solar Design works very different in hot, dry climates than in wet, humid climates. The Deep South has a history of unusual architectural styles like shotgun houses in poor neighborhoods and wrap around porches in more upper class neighborhoods to account for the heat, humidity and frequent rains.

This doesn't translate well to a desert climate.

The descriptions on the site concerning quick, easy access to affordable, nutritious meals is a critical part of the project, so much so the Intro page recommends you talk to potential business partners about vending machine lunches early.

This is explicitly designed to be Vernacular Cuisine that implicitly assumes these are people living without a full-time homemaker taking responsibility for adequately feeding everyone. 

It is intended to genuinely solve the widespread crisis that countless meal delivery and meal kit services are trying to solve while not really succeeding.

We ALL know that people who live alone and two career couples and single parents struggle to eat healthy, stay on budget and not have job plus meals and other survival essentials (like sleep) consume their ENTIRE life with no time leftover for HAVING a life. 

Such people aren't even "working for the weekend." They are working to subsist.

I'm not quite yet coming up with an alternative mental image to replace the pyramid concept, other than the idea of an Eiffel Tower reaching to the sky which requires extreme stability across a very broad surface so we can competently do space colonies within our solar system.