There have been many groups that form communes within a larger system. Sometimes its built around a religion (or cult), sometimes around various ideals, like artist communes. In my opinion, what makes these work is that they’re small (your reputation matters), people join it voluntarily, and people can be kicked out if they don’t uphold the ideals. So, you don’t need a state to enforce the rules aside from a mechanism to remove people who don’t participate fairly. And because they are within a larger entity, they don’t have to deal with things like national security or foreign affairs. I don’t think that model scales to a national level.

I’m the opposite, lived most of my life on the West coast and then moved to the East coast. Some time zone related things that I’ve noticed:

• I love to start work early and end work early, so there was a period of time where I could work 6am to 3pm and still be online later than many of my east coast coworkers. This schedule was ideal for me. Now I have to work until 5 or 6pm every day and I don’t like that very much.

• I could get up and trade stocks early in the morning, which is convenient for me because I don’t do a lot of stock trading and don’t need to stay on top of it throughout the day. Now I get up and think, “I need to make that transaction later today”, then 4pm rolls around and I realize I’ve forgotten to do it yet again.

• Not a time zone thing, but I’ve been to Hawaii once and would love to go back. When I was in California, it was a 5-6 hour flight, now its more like 12 hours. I’m not willing to make that trip. I do have the option to go to the Caribbean or Europe instead, which is nice though (if I ever get around to it).

• I don’t watch sports, but I always thought of the Super Bowl being an afternoon game. Then I moved East and realized people were staying up past midnight to watch the game (and party) and then trying to go to work or school Monday morning. No impact for me, but for my lifestyle, afternoon games would be preferable.

• I used to do a lot of online gaming with people from all over the US and Europe. Lots of my friends would stay up very late or even all night gaming. I could keep up with them when it meant staying up until 10-12pm (my time). Staying up until 2 or 3am would not work for me. I don’t play online games anymore, but that would be a challenge for me now.

At my old company we would ban customers that were repeatedly abusive to customer service agents. Agents had the right to hang up on customers that were being abusive and if the same customer kept getting reported, eventually they would receive a letter from the legal department telling them to stop. If it continued, they would get banned.

I remember one guy was so bad that a director got the phone system to automatically route any calls from him to his mobile line and put him in his phone book. He would very politely greet him by name as soon as he picked up the call to make it clear that he wasn’t ever going to get through to anyone else.