[HN Gopher] How to live on $432 a month in America
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How to live on $432 a month in America
Author : cactusplant7374
Score : 475 points
Date : 2025-05-23 16:40 UTC (1 days ago)
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| xeromal wrote:
| I've often felt this way about some of today's complaints. I grew
| up in area like what was mentioned in this article and I long for
| the day I can go back there. I would in a heartbeat if my partner
| shared the same mentality as me.
|
| I don't really see a point in living a big city with the remote
| job I have and that many others have if I can live in a smaller
| area that still has humans but much cheaper way of living.
| Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available
| services but I see those same people decry how much the food
| costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone
| to date. My thoughts aren't as articulate as I'd like them to be
| but I guess I'm ultimately trying to say is if I'm going to be
| miserable, why not do it on my own land for a lot cheaper.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and
| some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends
| who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture
| and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they
| mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as
| they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a
| pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available
| in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that
| too.
|
| I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse
| options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them
| ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a
| rationalization for staying where everything costs so much
| more.
| keiferski wrote:
| I agree with you for the most part, and think a lot of people
| think they need to live in NYC/LA/London/etc. because of
| unstated social pressure, not because they actually utilize
| all of the megacity's amenities.
|
| However - I do think there is a sweet spot. If you can get a
| remote job that pays decently well and doesn't require an
| excessive amount of time - and live in one of these cities -
| you can actually manage to see and do everything.
|
| For example - I lived in New York for a while doing exactly
| this. I worked remotely and so could avoid rush hours on the
| subway, at restaurants, etc. and I had enough time and pocket
| money to explore the city.
| trollbridge wrote:
| I've never really been super confident with remote jobs - a
| recession hits and you can't find another job.
| xp84 wrote:
| > remote jobs
|
| > a recession hits and you can't find another job.
|
| Suppose you avoid all remote work. You live in San
| Francisco. If a recession hits and you're laid off, now
| there are 10,000 local unemployed tech workers trying to
| get 5,000 local jobs. Similar risk of unhappiness.
|
| I don't believe that remote positions as a class are more
| likely to be eliminated than any other, so I just think
| of jobs located in "Remote" to be just like jobs in any
| other city, "Remote" just happens to have more jobs than
| any one city, and has unlimited housing for sale or rent
| at every price point.
|
| I went remote in 2018 and couldn't be happier with my
| choice. I'm on my 3rd job, although Job #2 required me to
| be onsite for about a year starting in 2019.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I recently visited New York City for the first time and
| honestly wasn't impressed. Outside of a few neat things like
| visiting the cronut place, I could do nearly everything the
| same back home.
|
| The bagel places were indeed good, but not noticeably
| different than the hipster bagel places in my city.
|
| Wood fired pizza was good at several places, but again...none
| were noticeably different than the wood fired oven fancy
| places in my small city.
|
| The game stores are much bigger in my city due to lower real
| estate prices.
|
| Times Square was the biggest disappointment. It's literally
| just standard big box store crap like GAP and M&M store and
| stuff like that. I guess that one's on me as it's a tourist
| trap.
|
| Central Park was cool, but not as good as the multiple large
| parks in easy driving distance.
|
| I could go on and on like that, but essentially I can own a
| home for a fraction of the cost to rent there. The only real
| difference is in a metropolis like NYC, you can meet up with
| people for any interest you want practically. You want to
| learn Klingon? I'm sure there's people doing that in NYC, but
| not like a city of 150,000.
|
| Edit: the tap water was superior to my towns.
| keiferski wrote:
| No one that lives in New York goes to Times Square, save
| for the subway station.
|
| The great thing about New York is the prevalence of
| basically every nationality, with its own designated
| neighborhood. Places like Flushing, Corona, Brighton Beach,
| etc. These are also the areas that inexperienced tourists
| don't visit.
|
| If you visit again, definitely try to venture out to those
| areas.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I always found it kind of fun to wander through Times
| Square in the evening, every now and again (on the order
| of once every few months).
|
| Pointing out that it's the same old big box stores
| doesn't really connect to the draw of it. Most people
| don't go to Times Square to shop, they go to _experience_
| it, and its entertaining. But it's not the place you're
| going to on a normal Saturday night with your friends.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Thanks. Yeah, if I do go back it won't be in Manhattan. I
| was alarmed by how every place was pretty much closed by
| 6-8 PM near me. Again...my medium city has plenty of cool
| stuff open much later -especially on a Friday/Saturday
| night.
| anon7000 wrote:
| Sure, medium cities that aren't shitty and still have some
| vibrancy are a solid middle ground. Bonus points for being
| somewhere close to nice natural areas or outdoor
| recreation.
|
| But I grew up in a town of less than 5k in the Midwest. The
| nearest cities and towns were all less than 50k population.
| Rent is, of course, incredibly low. There are even dozens
| of small universities in the area. The nearest city of 100k
| plus is more than an hour away.
|
| There are vanishingly few hipster spots in these places.
| You get chains, more chains, suburbs, and a couple of mom &
| pop restaurants. Some of which are decent, but most of
| which are disappointing. The variety of cuisines is
| extremely limited. To see any kind of major entertainment,
| like comedy or concerts, is a two hour drive. The major
| airports are two hours away. Your options for outdoor
| recreation and activity are extremely limited: not enough
| people for lots of recreational sports. Too much farmland
| for beautiful parks. Too flat for winter activities. Too
| few people to have a variety of cultural events or
| festivals.
|
| You can, of course, be very happy living here. But what you
| get is _extremely_ different from city life.
|
| Like you say, there are small cities that can check a lot
| of boxes. But I'd go out on a limb and say that's not
| typical for small town America, and not everyone is happy
| in suburbia either, even if they have their own cookie-
| cutter home!
| trollbridge wrote:
| When I lived in NYC, it was a given it would take at
| least an hour to get to an airport, and then I'd budget
| an extra hour for something to go wrong.
|
| Driving to smaller airports - just arrive 50 minutes
| before departure.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Yep. My airport has less than 20 gates and is a 30 minute
| drive and 10 minutes to get through security. You
| frequently have to fly through hubs though.
| onecommentman wrote:
| This is my thesis about the size of where you live. There
| are three types of people:
|
| 1. People who like the mega cities/metastacities. They
| genuinely enjoy the idea that they could never "fit into
| their head" the city in which they live. It's just too
| big. You can never possibly exhaust all the
| possibilities, much less keep up with all of the changes.
| They can be intensely loyal to their abstract city,
| abstract because they can never physically/socially
| experience the entire city, so it mostly exists only in
| their head. But the endless horizon of that abstract city
| is where they really live, and why they like it so much.
| Never boring...of course neither is a war zone.
|
| 2. Smaller right-sized cities, defined as cities/regions
| that you can just about fit into your head. Big enough
| that they are rarely boring, especially if you take
| advantage of the third dimension of time/local history.
| But small enough that you can experience the coziness and
| stability of fully living in that one space...in other
| words, a home.
|
| 3. Smaller towns of which you can exhaust the
| possibilities in just a few years. If you grok the place,
| it is supremely cozy, and you can deepen the sense of
| that by raising a family and becoming (an old phrase) a
| pillar of the community. You go deep socially instead of
| craning your neck across an endlessly broad horizon. You
| also have the third dimension of time/local history. And
| you have the additional option of defining your location
| not just as the small town, but rather a whole
| surrounding region as your actual home. For Americans
| this is easily an area of 60-100 miles/100-160 km radius,
| given our love affair with the automobile. That regional
| view then gets you into the second level of a small city,
| enough stimulation so it's rarely boring.
|
| And there's always cyberspace. The small town life isn't
| so _extremely_ different when that part that is online is
| so similar for everyone, big city or small town.
|
| For extremely different, try 19th Century Western life,
| or 20th Century non-Western life.
| chasd00 wrote:
| i did the same but had my wife as a guide, she dated a
| musician who lived there before we met and so she had been
| a lot of times. The different neighborhoods and just the
| scale of it all were pretty cool but, yeah, no desire to go
| back or live there. Is it required by law to play that
| Jay-Z/Alicia Keys "New York" song at all times everywhere
| there?
| RHSeeger wrote:
| With the caveat that I've only really visited a dozen or so
| states, and only lived in 2, my experience is pretty
| different than yours.
|
| NYC pizza (and even north of the city) is generally a step
| above most other places. You can find similar quality pizza
| most places if you look hard enough, but it's nice being
| able to stop almost anywhere in NY and get good pizza,
| better than the best you'll find without having to do real
| research in most places. The common open-front place in NY
| has great pizza. Where I am now (suburbs of another fairly
| large city), I have yet to find a good NYC-style pizza.
|
| Bagels in NY fall into a similar bucket. If you search, you
| can find good ones elsewhere, but it's downright easy to
| find good ones in NYC (though that's less true outside
| NYC/Long Island than it is for pizza).
|
| And man, the black-and-whites. To date, I've never found a
| good one outside NYC.
|
| Times Square is an experience, not a place you go to shop.
| And not a place you go to wander around on an average
| Saturday night. Yeah, it's a tourist trap, but that's the
| experience it is. It's entertaining to walk around/through;
| on a rare basis.
|
| I loved working in NYC (I lived about 90 minutes north of
| it at the time, but didn't need to go in every day, so the
| commute was less of an issue) and I very much miss living
| in NYS. Rarely, I'm there on a business trip (it's been
| years) and I plan my time out so I can have pizza for
| dinner.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| What did you find interesting about times square? I'm
| asking seriously as there isn't anything to do other than
| shop or ignore the annoying 50 people on every street
| corner asking me to get a bus tour.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| The lights in every direction, the people interacting
| with the performers and each other, the naked cowboy, the
| hustle and bustle. It's just a very unique location. It's
| like watching a human fish tank.
| tacheiordache wrote:
| Time Square is a tourist trap, an area I always avoided at
| any cost.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| NYC lives on the fumes of its former reputation. Corporate
| chains have changed the city into basically a shopping
| mall.
|
| When I was a kid I was drawn to NYC by the little hole in
| the wall restaurants, delis, coffee shops, funky stores.
| All owned and frequented by colorful local people.
| Technically these things still exist but they're mostly
| corporate chain versions of what used to be there. The
| unique experiences that the city still has to offer are too
| expensive and exclusive to be accessible.
|
| Ironically, if I want unique food or local weirdness
| nowadays, I can find more of it in my lame hometown than I
| can in most cities.
| pempem wrote:
| Name that town!! --
|
| There is a growing divide and there are many towns (and
| many parts of metropolises) where its a weird class
| inverted food desert. There are _tons_ of boutiques and
| vintage shops, and more tatoo shops than you 'd think is
| necessary. Maybe there's a upvamped "bodega" with
| fishwife tinned fish, and apples for .80 each. "Main
| street"s that seems pulled out of Disney's imagination
| and Rick Caruso's execution. Six coffee shops and a bunch
| of restaurants but _no grocery_ without driving, no
| affordable gas without driving, no public schools without
| driving etc.
| cschep wrote:
| This isn't a good take. When was the last time you lived
| in NYC? Surely maybe there were glory days at one point,
| but there used to be a LOT more crime too. NYC is still
| one of the all time great cities.
| ryoshu wrote:
| Food is next level in the NYC area compare to most other
| places. It's not just pizza, it's Ethiopian, Afghani,
| Iranian, real Chinese food (Szechuan, Hunan, etc.). The
| music scene and clubs can't be beat outside of other major
| cities, if you're into that sort of thing. The museums and
| galleries too. It all exists if you want to find it.
|
| You'll also find some of the most ambitious people in the
| world.
|
| Does the cost of rent justify it? Depends on what you are
| looking to do.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I guess my palette is just not sophisticated but I have
| eaten many times in NYC, in other big cities famous for
| food, in suburban places with one or two restaurants, and
| in rural places with only Applebee's, and I honestly
| don't see that much of a difference. To me, food is food.
| You eat it, you're not hungry anymore. The only
| difference I notice is the cost. I've had pizza in New
| York, and I've had "New York style" pizza from a no name
| pizzeria in upstate California and it tastes exactly the
| same to me.
|
| My wife, on the other hand goes bananas when we visit the
| city and just can't get enough of the food. She'll eat
| when she's not even hungry because she just wants to
| experience this or that meal. I play along because I
| think it's cute and we support each other's goofiness,
| but I legit don't get it.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You can go bar to bar to bar to bar until 4am in nyc and
| then find $2 pizza by the slice that is actual pizza and
| not 7/11 pizza. You can't really do that anywhere else what
| with how the busybodies regulate their liqour licenses and
| the lack of density justifying many 24hr food
| establishments. You can do all of this entirely on foot too
| within a few blocks. Nowhere else in the US is like that
| with such glaringly obvious economies of scale going on in
| your favor.
| nocoiner wrote:
| I feel like on the surface this may seem like kind of a
| facile comment, but this really gets at what makes NYC a
| special place. There's a whole day-to-day experience that
| may be technically replicable in other large cities in
| the course of a day, but there's like 100 things to do in
| New York every 200 feet. It's just a different
| experience.
| alexjplant wrote:
| I've had the opposite experience. Having moved from the
| boonies to a downtown in a Tier 2 US city has caused a lot of
| my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could buy a
| 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for what I
| pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that not having
| to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth the 35%
| premium in housing for me.
|
| Before I moved I owned a house and justified living where I
| did by saying stuff like
|
| > country people can make a day trip to do that too.
|
| ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to drive 90
| minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour before even
| getting in the vicinity of where you're going has a very real
| chilling effect on planning fun time. Most people just end up
| drinking Mai Tais that a bartender pours out of a plastic jug
| at a riverside dock bar instead.
|
| Different strokes for different folks, but I think everybody
| should give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.
| xp84 wrote:
| > give each paradigm a shot and decide what they like.
|
| Hard agree. I think the article is right that most people
| haven't even come close to trying the lifestyle he's
| suggesting.
| FeloniousHam wrote:
| > ...but I was lying to myself. Rounding friends up to
| drive 90 minutes then hop on light rail for a half hour
| before even getting in the vicinity of where you're going
| has a very real chilling effect on planning fun time.
|
| 1000%. I would complain about driving the 12 minutes just
| to get out of my subdivision (before moving into town).
| Just what you say, there's a "chilling effect" when
| everything you want to do is 30 mins away.
| bombcar wrote:
| A big part of it is how you want to find friends.
|
| If you have a "friend profile" and you want people to
| match it, a city is wonderful - more people, more
| matches.
|
| Thing: all friends within 5 years of my age, similar
| jobs, education, etc. Go city! Or college maybe.
|
| But if you're old country or old rural and want to be
| friends with _those around you_ a suburban or rural area
| can be fine. You end up making friends with the ten year
| old next door, and his parents, along with the retirees
| on the other side, etc.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> my old friends and neighbors to point out that I could
| buy a 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot in the country for
| what I pay in rent in the city. They fail to realize that
| not having to drive two hours each way to have fun is worth
| the 35% premium in housing for me
|
| Good point. There's no possible way to have fun in a
| 27-bedroom house on a 100 acre lot.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at
| chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in
| a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball
| game or the zoo or something that's only available in the
| city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.
|
| This hasn't been my experience at all. I live in an urban
| area and I haven't eaten at a chain restaurant outside of
| road trips in years. I only eat at chains when I'm on a road
| trip and need a bite in the middle of nowhere. Once I drop
| into where I'm staying for vacation off the road trip, I'm
| eating local restaurants or cooking for myself if I'm out in
| nature. The fantastic food scene in my area is a huge factor
| in why I live here.
|
| FWIW one can make the same comment about large US suburban
| home dwellers. Most of them just store stuff they rarely if
| ever use. Most of their less frequently used things are in
| varying states of disrepair and many of these folks would
| probably be better served by using communal amenities kept in
| good condition rather than storing sports equipment that they
| use once every 5 years in a dusty, mothball filled storage
| closet. Most folks in car-oriented US suburbs use their cars
| as mobile living rooms and do all sorts of illegal things
| (like makeup or doomscrolling their phone) in their car and
| only incidentally use them as transportation vehicles. But
| that doesn't stem the demand for folks who want to live in
| these homes.
|
| The fact is, aside from job considerations, there are people
| who choose their density based on their actual preferences.
| One set of preferences may seem silly coming from a different
| set but that doesn't make them right or wrong; it just makes
| them preferences.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I haven't eaten fast food in -- I don't know how
| long. Maybe it's an age thing? I ate at chains when I was
| younger....
|
| I grew up in Kansas City, lived 27 years in the Bay Area,
| and now back in the midwest (in Omaha).
|
| Guess what I miss most about the Bay Area? (It's not the
| traffic and it's not In & Out.) It's all the amazing Asian
| restaurants. C'mon Omaha!
|
| Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent Asian
| grocery store and figured out how to make some pretty good
| bulgogi....
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| > Having said that, the wife and I have found a decent
| Asian grocery store and figured out how to make some
| pretty good bulgogi....
|
| This is the move. My partner and I are Asian and we
| participate in Asian community things in the Bay. A lot
| of asians that came from less urban areas made their own
| food sourced from the high quality but unknown-outside-
| the-community Asian grocery store!
| bobthepanda wrote:
| there is a huge market distortion in that dense, walkable
| living is illegal to build in most of the country. i've
| seen polling that suggests walkability is in demand for
| about 40% of the population but there isn't 40% of
| available homes in such a configuration, so there are also
| a lot of people who get priced out of that and into
| suburbia.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Most of the country by land area has no zoning and people
| can build whatever they want. Despite that, where I live
| the only thing anyone does is the SFH and the occasional
| duplex.
| woodruffw wrote:
| That isn't especially surprising, given that there's no
| point in raising (or using) the capital to build urban
| infrastructure where none exists. It's a flywheel-shaped
| problem; the fact that the average American lives in a
| local optima of suburban sprawl doesn't itself indicate
| the absence of a better optima.
| ufmace wrote:
| To be fair, my impression is most people have highly
| contradictory desires along these lines.
|
| They say they want to be able to walk to places more. But
| they also want a big suburban-style house with bedrooms
| for everyone and storage and garage and lawn etc, easy
| parking for them, nice wide roads to drive everywhere on
| and tons of free parking when they get there. This makes
| it impossible for the area to be walkable unless everyone
| else lives in small apartments and there's actually only
| enough parking for just them to drive if they feel like
| it.
|
| In my opinion, it doesn't work that way. Yeah everyone
| wants to be the special 1% like that, but only actually
| 1% will be. If you really want to be walkable, you
| personally will need to live like that too.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| My understanding of the issue is that while walkable
| communities are in demand they are a minority and
| generally speaking, also a minority that is less
| politically active than single-family homeowners.
|
| Pretty much everywhere has a political majority of
| single-family homeowners, and if each locality decides on
| its own it doesn't want to have multifamily housing, then
| you wind up in a situation where almost nowhere actually
| allows it.
| mettamage wrote:
| This is so weird to read. My cultural bias is showing:
| I'm from the Netherlands. As most of you know,
| walkability is the norm here. And while the country is
| flat, so is the area described in this article.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| actually, i'm now noticing it may be cheaper for me to buy
| used skis than to rent them. buying used i can get it
| cheaper than even renting just once or twice
| datavirtue wrote:
| Cities wreck your finances and your health.
| goatlover wrote:
| People raise families and live generations in cities.
| There's plenty of rural poverty and poor health outside of
| cities.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available
| services
|
| The reality is that it's mostly about living in a city with
| available _jobs_
|
| What's the job market like near this lovely little $432 per
| month place described in the article? How am I going to pay for
| it?
| kemotep wrote:
| They suggested working part time at a gas station or
| seasonally somewhere else which is incredible.
|
| I have had to travel across the country multiple times to
| "live where the jobs are" so I find it hard to believe that
| the whole time I could have not done that and just picked
| some remote isolated corner and live like my great
| grandparents homesteading?
| DrillShopper wrote:
| The real trade off here is cheap rural land but no ability
| to ever retire.
|
| Sure, I could live in the middle of goddamn nowhere, grow
| my own food, make my own clothes, build my own house, etc,
| etc, etc, but at the end of the day it's never over. I'll
| be out in my 70s and 80s doing that until I die. Sure, that
| might be an ideal life for someone, but that someone is not
| me.
| xp84 wrote:
| What?
|
| First of all, unless you're 18 you should, if you're
| playing the game correctly, be saving for retirement
| already, right? That money, which you get to bring with
| you, will go a lot further in the country.
|
| Plus, Social Security exists, and again, that check will
| be the same amount regardless of where you live in
| retirement, so that'll go a lot further there too. The
| longer you've worked for "city money" already, the bigger
| your SS check will be.
|
| Even if you wait until you're just before retirement,
| moving out of the expensive market is one of the best
| ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of
| having to keep being economically productive till death.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > unless you're 18 you should, if you're playing the game
| correctly, be saving for retirement already, right?
|
| I think you underestimate the financial resources of
| those who most need to take a route like this. They're
| not likely to have _anything_ saved and likely have lot
| of debt, too. Which leads into...
|
| > Social Security exists, and again, that check will be
| the same amount regardless of where you live in
| retirement
|
| That is no longer a guarantee, and my retirement planning
| assumes that it will no longer exist in the near future.
| I have spent the last 25 years paying for it money I
| could have saved for retirement instead, and likely won't
| see a dime in return because the Republicans want it
| gone. We're realistically looking as a full elimination,
| means testing to receiveh benefits, massive cuts to
| benefits, or a work requirement (or some combination of
| these) all in the name of giving massive tax cuts to the
| group of people who will never have to work ever again in
| their lives, and neither will their children,
| grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
|
| > moving out of the expensive market is one of the best
| ways to ensure a retirement secure from the worry of
| having to keep being economically productive till death
|
| Let's constrain ourselves to just the location that the
| author of the original post suggested. How far away is
| the nearest hospital if I need treatment for cancer, a
| heart attack, or a stroke? What are the healthcare
| opportunities out there? Will friends and family be able
| to get out there to visit?
|
| The author is so disconnected from reality that its wild
| that none of this crossed their minds. It just seems like
| a "those damn millennial and their avocado toast and
| Macbooks" instead of actually looking into what it means
| to move out there
|
| The author also commits what to my parents, would be a
| cardinal sin - suggesting that the next generation have a
| worse quality of life than their parents, which used to
| be something that got you disqualified from running for
| dog catcher in most of this country.
| xp84 wrote:
| > suggesting that the next generation have a worse
| quality of life than their parents
|
| To me, it's advocating that "number of dollars you earn
| per year" and "number of dollars spent on luxuries" is
| not so simply correlated with "quality of life." That's
| one aspect, but "number of dollars it takes to satisfy
| each level of Maslow's pyramid in the place you live" and
| "number of hours you have to work" and "how stressful is
| your work" are _huge_ contributors to whether you can be
| happy (have a good QoL).
|
| Many people work 40-60 hours per week and hate every
| minute of it, despite earning six figures. Some of those
| people might be much happier working 5 hours a week and
| living in the country.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > Some of those people might be much happier working 5
| hours a week and living in the country.
|
| Have you ever lived out in the country, grown your own
| food, made your own clothes, and such? That's so much
| more work than five hours a week, and at peak times, much
| more than 40 hours a week for a harder life that you do
| not get to retire from when you get old.
| dmonitor wrote:
| All of these articles need to come with an "About the
| Author" section that describes how the author makes their
| living. They claim to be living the outlined lifestyle, but
| I doubt they are working part time at three gas stations.
| kemotep wrote:
| I could live in my hometown, rent a studio apartment,
| have an iPhone and a car, and work at the pizza place
| like I was 23 again.
|
| Have more amenities, not live in a shack, and sure it
| would cost 4x more per month but certainly not as
| decadent as the author claims living in "the city" (read
| city of 25,000 more than an hour away from anything
| larger) is.
| xp84 wrote:
| With a partner, like he mentioned he had, each one could
| easily be doing a part-time job + some minor side hustle
| like Etsy, YouTube, etc. The living expenses are about
| the same for 1 vs 2 other than food, and his food budget
| was for 2.
| onecommentman wrote:
| This sort of writing has been popular in the US for over
| 100 years. A historical review of the field (pun intended)
| can be found in the book _Back to the Land_ , by Dona
| Brown, University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
| codeplea wrote:
| This is addressed directly in the article:
|
| >And for those who might be quick to point out that there
| could be a dearth of jobs there, note that when people say
| "there are no jobs" in a given area, they generally mean that
| there are no jobs that could produce a normal, upper-middle-
| class lifestyle there. Which, even in Massena and Ogdensburg
| isn't entirely true. But even if it were, the Stewart's gas
| stations in both towns are actively hiring part-time cashiers
| at $17/hr. These places will let you work just one day a week
| if you like, and seem to be pretty good about flexible hours.
| In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per
| week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to
| live well at this particular house with just four days of
| work per month.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| And when those gas station jobs fill up but there's still
| empty houses around?
| xp84 wrote:
| Have you not read the article? The whole point of it is
| once you get your costs down to this manageable a number,
| you have a lot more options for "how you're going to
| support yourself." You could clear $5,000-10,000 a year,
| which I should remind you would be _tax free money_
| simply due to the standard deduction, doing any number of
| things either local or remote. Ideas I 'm just making up:
|
| 1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay 2. Do stuff on
| Fiverr 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little
| stand and sell baked goods or tamales 6. Make YouTube
| videos or shorts about (insert your nerdy interest) 7. 3D
| print something and sell it on Etsy
|
| All these things are things I'm sure I could do
| personally, but don't have time to do because I have to
| work 40 hours a week to earn enough money to pay for my
| mortgage in the expensive place I live. But all that goes
| away when the only thing you need to shoot for is to
| clear maybe $800 on a good month.
|
| And also, if you have modest savings _for a city person_
| you could do with far less earnings, as interest on
| $200,000 = $10,000.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > 3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters 5. Set up a little stand
| and sell baked goods or tamales
|
| Those might pay well in the city, but nobody making
| $17/hr is going to pay more than $10/hr for lawn mowing.
| xp84 wrote:
| That's fine, you don't need them to pay more than $10/hr.
| You only even need to earn say, $800 a month (I'm
| assuming you'd want a pickup truck to transport your
| mower and get around, so padding the $432 a bit) so if
| you worked 5 hours a week at the gas station for $340
| then you need about 11 hours of $10 work per week for
| another $440 and you're done. If you have any savings,
| the current interest on $100,000 would alternatively give
| you $416 so you could just not work at all.
| skyyler wrote:
| >1. Buy, repair, and flip MacBooks on eBay
|
| No internet at the house in this scenario, so that's a
| lot of trips to the library.
|
| >2. Do stuff on Fiverr
|
| See above.
|
| >3. Mow lawns 4. Clean gutters
|
| These are both viable in the summer, provided there is
| some "landed elite" in the area that makes more than the
| $17/hr the gas stations pay. I guess you could shovel
| snow in the winter.
|
| >5. Set up a little stand and sell baked goods or tamales
|
| Doing that legally requires licenses and registration,
| but good idea. Do the people of upstate New York enjoy
| tamales?
|
| >6. Make YouTube videos or shorts about (insert your
| nerdy interest)
|
| The first point again.
|
| >7. 3D print something and sell it on Etsy
|
| The first point again.
| xp84 wrote:
| My smartphone plan is $45 (happens to be same company as
| article suggests, US Mobile) and supports 50GB of
| tethering which is plenty. This doesn't appreciably
| change the cost of living but yes, obviously you'd have
| that as an expense. Who cares? Yes, it would enable like
| half those work ideas. You could afford it. What's the
| problem.
|
| > licenses and stuff
|
| What? No, nobody selling tamales outside in the country
| (or probably the city either) has a formal license to do
| so. Nobody cares unless they're trying to get you shut
| down because you're being a jerk (say, selling them right
| outside their restaurant). Also, what if I told you, you
| could pick _whatever_ kind of food the people in the area
| _do_ like, and teach yourself to make it?
| skyyler wrote:
| "Just break the law, it'll be fine"
|
| Great financial advice happening on the orangesite.
|
| Really good stuff.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Ironically, I think this is a "blind squirrel finds a
| nut" situation.
|
| When you're at the absolute bottom, you're not gonna make
| ends meet by playing by the rule and the enforcers
| generally leave you alone because you can't get blood
| from a stone. So for the people living on $400/mo running
| an unlicensed tamale stand or parting out cars or
| breeding pitbulls or whatever isn't as risky as it would
| be for someone making real money.
|
| But yeah, the advice here is generally out of touch.
| AngryData wrote:
| In my experience law enforcement in rural areas generally
| are squeezing stones for blood, you think the local cops
| or judge are going to be living on $20,000 a year? No.
| And where do they get the money? By extorting poor people
| that live in the area. Oh you literally can't afford
| their fines? Well then you can spend the next month or
| two in jail, now having a criminal record, likely losing
| your job, and when you are released owe the courts and
| jail a few thousand dollars on top of all that for the
| mandatory minimum court and jail fees which will cost
| just as much as the previous fine you couldn't pay and
| got sent to jail for.
|
| Sure you might get lucky if you keep your head low, but
| maybe you won't get lucky and you lose the gamble and are
| put in a WAY worse situation.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The problem with these lifestyles is that when you have
| it all finely tuned to live on $400/mo you have no
| capacity to absorb a $400 water heater expense.
| dmonitor wrote:
| I love the stupid math in this paragraph. One 10hr shift is
| ~30% of what you need. So multiply that by 3.3 and... oh
| hey you're working nearly 40hrs a week to afford your
| impoverished lifestyle in the middle of nowhere. Just like
| everyone else in this country, only now you get to own a
| shed. Also you have to take the bus, which runs from
| 5am-6pm, so you need to beg your boss to not be an opener
| or closer. Your coworkers will love you for that.
| nkurz wrote:
| > One 10hr shift is ~30% of what you need. So multiply
| that by 3.3 and... oh hey you're working nearly 40hrs a
| week to afford your impoverished lifestyle in the middle
| of nowhere.
|
| Are you possibly confusing "per week" with "per month"?
| hyperpape wrote:
| Honestly, this is the weirdest way the author could've
| written that sentence.
|
| He should've said either "one 10 hour shift per month
| will make 30% of what you need to live here" or even "one
| 10 hour shift per week will make more than what you need
| to live here."
| theendisney wrote:
| It doesn't seem to be caused by his lifestyle as the
| posters above also cant divide by $7 per hour. Its 62
| hours or 11 shifts.
|
| I think he means one should do all kinds of small
| projects.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| $17/hr is the rate
| theendisney wrote:
| That makes it even more funny. No wonder we cant find a
| cheap place to live.
|
| $17 x 26 h = EUR442
|
| One 10 h shift per week is to much apparently.
| trollbridge wrote:
| 432/17 is 25 hours, or otherwise stated one 8 hour shift
| every week or two.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Right, which is why it's extremely confusing that the
| author wrote:
|
| > In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift
| per week, and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you
| need to live well at this particular house with just four
| days of work per month.
|
| What he probably did was write that one shift is more
| than 30% of what you need, then switched gears to write
| about four days of work per month, but forgot to remove
| the 30% number.
| nocoiner wrote:
| I read that sentence three times. Pretty sure he was
| trying to hide the ball, but still not sure where he was
| hiding it or what exactly the ball was, to be honest.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| One 10 hour shift is ~30% of what you need _per month_
|
| 40 hours _per month_ is much less than 40 hours _per
| week_
| viccis wrote:
| Well yes, it's not a brilliant observation that in the US
| you are given the option to work at around $15-30k a year
| ($17/hr part time is going to wind up around there) and use
| that money to fund an impoverished lifestyle.
|
| "Why aren't more kids embracing a life of poverty? How dare
| they ask for anything better in a country that produces
| more wealth than any other?"
| xp84 wrote:
| "impoverished lifestyle"
|
| "live of poverty"
|
| You're really doing a great job exemplifying the attitude
| which guarantees misery.
|
| The whole point is that living a simple life in the
| country, with minimal amount of time spent working (thus
| maximum free time) is arguably a much richer and more
| fulfilling life than, say, a life where you and your
| spouse each earn $200,000 working 40-50 hours a week at a
| Very Important Job that you drive to in your Range Rover
| and BMW, and getting to spend 1 hour most nights with
| your family before falling exhausted into bed in a house
| that cost $2 million, just to wake up and do it again
| tomorrow.
| hyperpape wrote:
| I think you've arguably left out some interesting options
| in the middle.
| goatlover wrote:
| One wonders why anyone ever left the country to move to
| the city then. Maybe not everyone wants to live a simple
| life in the country. Maybe that's considering boring and
| socially isolating. Maybe some people want more kinds of
| experiences and even things. Maybe they want a kind of
| community that's a lot harder to find in the country, or
| is even discriminated against.
| pempem wrote:
| YES! this is the question.
|
| How are we the homes of the largest economies in the
| world, cities known not just by name but by brand, around
| the world and: - day care worker can't make enough to
| move beyond improverished and day care is expensive -
| teacher can't make enough to move beyond lower middle
| class and school (even public once you add in all the
| trips, certs, childcare for non-school days) don't make
| enough - your burger is $15! but the person making it
| apparently should live in a wifi-less shed.
|
| Not very long ago at all, this economy was about finding
| opportunity. Now it seems to be about aiming to
| reintroduce feudalism.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I think it goes beyond that. A city offers a lot more
| _possibilities_. If you like plays, museums, going to the
| movies, being able to find more than three people to play
| Dungeons and Dragons, or Settlers of Catan with (without
| driving 1.5 hours) - then being somewhere really rural is
| going to be unpleasant.
| xeromal wrote:
| I agree with the possibility but many people just end up
| staying home due to traffic, money, or being an introvert
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's true! And many don't!
| tacheiordache wrote:
| I agree. With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to
| work a lot more for lower pay, whatever is available in the
| area.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> With no jobs in the area $432 may as well require to
| work a lot more for lower pay
|
| >> the Stewart's gas stations in both towns are actively
| hiring part-time cashiers at $17/hr. These places will let
| you work just one day a week if you like, and seem to be
| pretty good about flexible hours
|
| 432 / 17 = 25.4 hours a month. A few more hours than that
| to pay social security, but no income taxes and they would
| get the Earned Income Tax Credit.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| The thing about places with more jobs is that they also tend
| to have more job-seekers. The two tend to vary proportional
| to the population. It's really the ratio of jobs to job-
| seekers that matters.
|
| Of course, it depends a lot on the job. Some jobs only exist
| in cities, while others are almost exclusively rural.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| The type of place being talked about in this article is a
| place with more houses than people. It's the sort of place
| that children move away from as they mature because there
| are few opportunities to build a life there
| xp84 wrote:
| > few opportunities to build a life
|
| for certain values of "a life" of course. The article
| alludes to our 'great-grandparents' and indeed, we
| wouldn't be here if the majority of people 100 years ago
| didn't build "a life" in rural areas without any of the
| things most of GenZ (and if i'm honest, millennials too)
| think "a life" requires.
|
| But the word "build" you used is telling. I think you
| mean "buy a life" -- that's what pursuing only the City
| Life is doing. In the country you would indeed have to
| build a life. To figure out what would make you happy and
| build it, whether that's a club of fellow board game
| enthusiasts, or a restaurant that you open, or a small
| chicken farm, etc.
|
| I don't blame the young people, they've only ever been
| shown a fashionable, extreme-consumption-based narrative
| of what "a life" should be. Expensive vacations, designer
| handbags, luxury cars, kitchens bigger than that whole
| $29,000 house (and that cost $100k for the kitchen
| alone). That's what we've been told happy people need.
|
| I'm just deeply unconvinced that any of that
| automatically brings happiness, and I am very convinced
| that the amount of work it takes to pay for all that is
| 100% bad for those of us who weren't just born into
| wealth.
| financltravsty wrote:
| Buddy, the entire world is being hollowed out by
| globalism and a financial race to the bottom vis-a-vis
| labor costs. Your entire way of life is predicated upon
| no one invading the country, global supply chains
| remaining intact and usable, and a lack of war -- as soon
| as that changes your way of life disappears.
|
| That gas station in the article? Gone once the
| corporation that owns it deems it a frivolous expense no
| longer worth the upkeep. Now what are you going to do?
| Find a job at the diner? Ok, how sustainable is that --
| the town is not growing, the economy is dying, and the
| incomes are stagnating.
|
| The author made his way by hitchhiking and vagabonding
| after leaving his folks' home. Guess what, surviving like
| that relies on civilization's infrastructure remaining
| viable and maintained -- it's leeching off others work
| and toil to selfishly sustain oneself without giving
| anything back.
|
| And what about how the author currently sustains himself?
| Is it by humbly working at the gas station? No, he
| maintains a substack and social media presence to pay all
| his bills. He's an entertainer larping as an outbacker.
| He's an older Christopher McCandless -- developmentally
| arrested and antisocial.
|
| It's not about fashion or luxury or "buying a life," it's
| about securing a means of self-sustainability, managing
| risk, and being a part of the growing world around you --
| and not recoiling from it, shutting one's eyes, and
| pretending everything will be alright (tell that to
| anyone whose nation transitioned into communism -- hah!).
| goatlover wrote:
| Young people might also recognize that there's a lot more
| going on in big cities, a whole lot more to do and
| experience. And attitudes tend to be more excepting of
| differences. They tend to be more cosmopolitan.
| abhiyerra wrote:
| I moved from SF to smaller towns around California. I so much
| more enjoy the smaller towns. When I lived in SF I ended up
| going to the same 5 restaurants or cafes and while it was fund
| in my 20s to be around a lot of people my age as I got older
| and now have a family having more space is nice. Plus, I still
| go to the same five places in the smaller town I live in and
| don't have to usually wait in lines.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Living in a city (or other high COL location) also means you
| can save more. Sure, you're spending more, but that 5-10% of
| your earnings you put into saving is a lot more when you're
| making city money vs not. And when it comes time to retire,
| having saved 5% of $50-150,000/year every year adds up to a
| much higher amount to retire on.
| nurettin wrote:
| Also small towns attract less serial killers.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Murder rates are higher in rural Canada than they are in
| urban Canada, and Massena is basically Canada.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| Don't tell people that. The common belief that small towns
| are some cross between _Deliverance_ and _Children of the
| Corn_ is one of the things that keeps small towns nice.
| titanomachy wrote:
| > Everyone claims it's about living in a city with available
| services but I see those same people decry how much the food
| costs and also that they have no friends and can't find someone
| to date.
|
| It sounds like they'd find a way to be miserable anywhere. I
| live in a medium-density neighborhood of a large US city. I
| have multiple close friends within a five-minute walk, and I'm
| constantly meeting new people who share my interests. The music
| venues, restaurants, and yoga studios are nice too, but having
| so many potential friends in close proximity is what really
| makes the city great for me.
|
| It's not necessarily easy to start making friends though, it
| definitely doesn't happen automatically. Maybe in small towns,
| people are more likely to notice you and spend time with you,
| because they also have fewer people to choose from.
|
| When I've lived in small towns I found dating almost
| impossible, though.
|
| > if I'm going to be miserable, why not do it on my own land
| for a lot cheaper
|
| Bro. Please go make some friends, or find a hobby or vocation
| you like, or get religion, or something! You don't have to be
| miserable, at least not all the time. Renouncing society will
| probably just make things worse.
| bradlys wrote:
| Small towns can be great if you fit the mold.
|
| They're terrible if you don't. There's inherently less
| diversity within a smaller population.
|
| I grew up in a small town. (4000 people, largest nearby was
| about 15 miles away and 20k. The nearest "city" was 100k and
| 80+ miles away. Maybe visited that city region once a year.
| Major city (500k) that was 180 mi away I never even saw growing
| up.) Even being a straight cismale nerd was considered the bane
| of my existence. There wasn't anyone else I met who shared my
| level of interests. I saw how people who were gay were treated
| and it was quite grim. Imagine now you're adding in multiple
| facets like race, politics, etc.
|
| These small places work well for those who fit a certain mold.
| You're not gonna have an easier time dating either if you have
| any modest requirements either like education, income, beliefs,
| etc.
|
| The main issues with cities is that they're very competitive.
| If you're not a competitive person or don't have whatever
| attributes the market rewards, it will be very challenging.
| Especially with dating as the pool to most people feels
| "unlimited" and therefore people will keep looking than settle
| for someone who is ugly or whatever issue you have.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| > _I would in a heartbeat if my partner shared the same
| mentality as me._
|
| And what are the chances you would find an acceptable partner
| for you in the small town if you didn't already have one?
| jeffbee wrote:
| It makes a certain amount of sense and I myself bought a little
| place way out in the hinterlands of Michigan for similar economic
| reasons ... but I live in Berkeley because subjecting your
| children to life without opportunities for art, culture,
| education, sports, friends, etc is cruel. So if you're white, or
| just don't care that your ethnicity is absent, and if you have no
| children, and also don't mind living in a car-dependent place
| where the public transit to the nearest major city is a minimum
| of 15 hours with 3-4 transfers, then sure Massena NY is dope.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If someone were buying a place in Michigan today (as a second
| home) what would be some towns (villages?) to consider?
| jeffbee wrote:
| No idea honestly. I had some family connections near the
| place I acquired.
| seabird wrote:
| Is there no culture, or no "culture"?
|
| When you talk to people from a major metropolitan area about
| culture outside of a major metropolitan area, they're very
| often not talking about culture. They're talking about
| entertainment, and a specific kind of it.
|
| I live in semi-rural Michigan and the idea that there's no
| culture here is just kind of absurd. The culture just doesn't
| consist of having a constant stream of touring musicians and
| restaurants for you to spend money on.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I admit the possibility that _your_ idea of culture is a
| barren plain of consumerism. If that 's the case, it's your
| problem and only you can fix it.
|
| Agglomeration effects are real and there are centers of dance
| and music around the country that exist in self-reinforcing
| cycles of training and performance. These scenes come and go
| but they don't arise by themselves in isolated dying towns.
| seabird wrote:
| Where in my comment did you get that I think culture is a
| barren plain of consumerism?
|
| _Some_ styles of dance and music, which are a _component_
| of an overall culture, are totally centered in large
| cities. Music is a bizarre thing to bring up -- bumfuck
| nowhere Midwest smalltown is the origin and inspiration for
| plenty of music that is listened to well outside of the
| geographical region it 's from. Hardcore punk has plenty of
| representation from gutted Rust Belt locales, and Midwest
| emo is straight-up named after it. They _do_ arise and
| perpetuate themselves in isolated locations, all around the
| world.
|
| Of course there are cultural aspects that large cities will
| have and more rural areas won't, as well as the other way
| around. Neither are lacking culture by virtue of lacking
| the other's culture.
| quesera wrote:
| Large cities have _vastly_ more cultural opportunities
| than rural areas.
|
| More different kinds of culture (diversity), more
| examples of each kind (quantity), and _usually_ better
| examples of any cultural component which is available in
| both (quality).
|
| Rural areas certainly have cultures of their own. It is
| not binary.
|
| But you cannot reasonably compare the cultural
| opportunities of urban vs rural and assert that rural is
| not lacking, unless you are thinking of your personal
| preferences only, and the rural area you're using for
| comparison happens to match up very well with your own
| preferences.
| occamsrazorwit wrote:
| How would you describe the local cultural opportunities in
| your area?
| seabird wrote:
| Different than what's in a city, and generally not as
| enjoyable if you're just passively consuming it. Lots of
| motorsport (auto manufacturing was huge in the area, very
| long tradition of it), fishing/hunting, local music (some
| styles represented better than others, but that goes for
| everywhere), hobbyist heavy industry. There's definitely
| plenty of other stuff going on that I just haven't heard
| about. Pretty often I run into situations where I'm talking
| to somebody about a new interest and they say "yeah,
| there's actually plenty of that going on, look into/talk to
| X, Y, or Z". Not so much culinary or visual/fine arts stuff
| happening, so if you're looking to participate/collaborate
| as far as that goes, I can tell you off the top of my head
| that the area would be a bad fit.
|
| If you're looking to be involved in culture for just a few
| hours at a time by going to a restaurant or show and not
| being involved much past that, you're going to be painfully
| bored here. I don't think doing that is a moral shortcoming
| or anything like that, but there are a lot of people that
| are doing that, don't realize it, and misinterpret the lack
| of opportunities to do so outside of a large city as that
| place just not having any culture at all.
| ydlr wrote:
| There is a little bit of a sleight of hand going on in this
| article by claiming the lifestyle of boomers is within reach, but
| then actually using boomers' parents and grand-parents as the
| standard. It would be more honest to say "Most of us can't have
| the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some
| sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand
| parents is attainable."
|
| Even that is only true in a very narrow sense. My great-grand
| parents built a 600sqft house in a small town and lived their
| most of their lives. But they built that house right next to
| their parents. They lived within 5 miles of their combined 9
| siblings. They were within half a mile of their church and half
| mile from the my great-grandfather's union hall. The town was
| small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My
| great-grandmother worked in two of them.
|
| They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few
| opportunities far away from their friends and family.
|
| What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the
| hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that
| supported our collective wealth and well-being. These struggles
| may manifest as complaints about the individual ability to afford
| housing, healthcare, education, etc. But there are not individual
| solutions to these problems. They are structural.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Starting now you can also get the diseases your great-
| grandparents enjoyed.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| The communities that they lived in were more self-sufficient
| and probably lived outside of the influence of large government
| or corporations or lobbying groups.
|
| The flourishing town probably grew that way organically, not
| because of government support or because some company opened a
| big facility there.
|
| It's true that land is more expensive now, but even if you
| could buy your own town and settle people on it, organic growth
| is basically illegal or impossible nowadays.
| ydlr wrote:
| Actually, the town basically existed because of the TVA. It
| was a major employer and profits went to fund the schools and
| library.
| nkurz wrote:
| Coincidentally, there was an interesting article about the
| relationship between Massena and their power company here a
| few months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42992032
|
| They have a publicly operated utility that seems to be
| working well for them. It's a good story! Direct link:
| https://nysfocus.com/2023/06/21/public-power-utility-
| massena...
| joaopscaa wrote:
| > What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the
| hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that
| supported our collective wealth and well-being.
|
| It's multi-dimensional, not even limited to just that. We are
| living in a world of increased scarcity. The deleterious
| effects of an increasing population are very real. From a labor
| point of view, it's not just increased labor supply resulting
| in devaluation of said labor. There are tighter margins in the
| managerial and corporate level of things as well. Modern
| societies are complex things that attempt to cover all of their
| bases by inventing whole portions of economy through
| structured, financial support from the top down. This means
| that on a fundamental level, additional capital must be
| appropriated by the organizational arms of society, including
| the cost of labor to organize and implement such a thing to
| begin with, which further reduces margins for the managerial
| class and for the labor class. On top of that, these can be
| counted on to compound the effects of increased competition at
| all levels in the relevant industry through artificial flow of
| capital sustaining said competition that otherwise wouldn't
| exist. The idea is that more people, more labor, more value,
| win/win/win. But in practice, we're already burning a mind-
| boggling amount of entropy attempting to establish some
| sensible bare-minimum degree of equity. More labor just means a
| greater degree of a fake and "manually" structured economy to
| stop whole swaths of society from collapsing in on itself. It's
| not to say these systems of equity are bad, but they prop up an
| inflated population number and THAT reduces the relative
| importance (and thus power) of everyone as a result.
|
| We also have to account for changing climates. Celestial
| systems aren't static in the slightest, and the status quo
| changes quite radically and quite frequently. We're currently
| living in an ice age. During a hot house period, the
| overwhelming majority of earth's surface ends up being about as
| habitable as mercury. Even without anthropogenic climate change
| (which probably just tipped the scales), the fact of the matter
| is that the climate changes by itself too. It wasn't that long
| ago that MENA was a lush, green paradise. Only 8000 years or so
| which is an infinitesimal drop in the bucket. At some point, we
| were going to enter another hot house period where only a
| couple coasts are habitable. Wanna guess what that's going to
| do to scarcity?
|
| Of course, to whatever degree these things exist have no
| linear, predictable relationship with some single-value macro
| (or even micro) economic KPI. The highly chaotic system of
| society is full of nth degree causal feedback loops which are
| completely beyond prediction. There are nigh infinite more
| problematic effects of growing populations as a result, I can't
| hope to be exhaustive about it, or asterisk every permutation
| of these abstract causes and effects.
|
| There's a lot of rhetoric to be found which assures and
| assuages that thermodynamics isn't real. There is no
| relationship between population and scarcity, or if it does
| exist, it's very minimal. We're not operating efficiently, and
| we need to do that before we start to examine the relationship
| between population numbers and quality of life. The convenient
| part that they leave out is what a society built around
| "efficiency" (in the sense that they mean) actually looks like.
| We already have places where humans live according to extreme
| principles of efficiency: Submarines. It really is efficient to
| live in bunk beds and eat in cafeterias. Not sure many people
| want to live like that though, so why the fuck are we trying to
| build such a world?
| sn9 wrote:
| I thought this piece was satire.
|
| Like even the framing showed how a ridiculous premise it was.
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Just make sure you don't get sick.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Do like your great grandfather did, eat some hot chicken soup
| and go to bed.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Just a couple generations back my family members were dying
| of preventable illness. Like I'm not joking, we have the
| records.
| Goronmon wrote:
| Also, you just need to continually scavenge for "free" water
| and heat.
|
| Don't forget the free fishing rod/equipment.
| jocaal wrote:
| In the article he mentions there is a well at the house. Also
| blankets and wood fires are free heat.
| jeffbee wrote:
| In what way is wood free? To heat even a tiny home purpose-
| built for high efficiency you'd need several acres of woods
| to sustainably harvest. For a falling-apart $30k hovel in
| upstate NY you'd probably need more like 15 acres, and you
| don't get a 15-acre stand of woods in the deal for that
| price.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| I heat my two-story, not-very-efficient house with wood.
| I'm not in upstate NY, but not much further south in the
| Midwest, where we get some sub-zero weather. For
| firewood, I cut dead or fallen trees that need to be
| removed on a neighboring farm, so they're "free" (not
| counting the cost of saw, chains, gas, oil...).
|
| So yeah, you do have to have some timber available. But
| if you live in the kind of place he's talking about,
| there's more than enough to go around. Most of the land
| where I live is in crops, but there are enough trees
| along the creeks and in rough areas that all the people
| burning wood don't make a dent in them.
| michpoch wrote:
| At these electricity prices bothering with wood might not
| be worth it. If you get some, that's nice, but otherwise
| just insulate the house well and you're golden.
| justinrubek wrote:
| Who said anything about sustainability?
|
| My parents would heat their home this way. Actually, I
| think they still do. They'd gather all sorts of wood from
| fallen trees on other peoples' land as a sort of
| "service" aka- they haul it away and you don't deal with
| it. Is it worth the cost savings? I highly doubt it.
| They're just not good with managing time/money.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| There's a guy around here (central Kansas) that charges
| money to clean up unwanted trees or hedge rows (tree row
| between fields). He then turns around and sells the
| firewood.
|
| From what I can tell both of his services are pretty
| popular.
| dmurray wrote:
| 15 acres? It should take far less than an acre. The house
| isn't well insulated, but it's also small. A few big
| trees, say 40-year Sitka spruce, should last the whole
| winter, and you can plant a thousand of those on an acre.
|
| Of course it depends on the land and the house. But
| here's some Reddit comments also estimating the need at <
| 1 acre
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/homestead/comments/1jnpbug/how_m
| uch...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Perhaps you will be surprised by the lack of Sitka spruce
| in St. Lawrence County, NY. I think you are significantly
| overstating the volume of timber that can be harvested
| from that kind of forest.
| AngryData wrote:
| As someone who has been burning wood for heat for 35
| years, those people are out of their damn mind if they
| think 1 acre will supply them their fire wood. 1 acre
| will absolutely not grow enough wood to heat your home
| unless you are cutting it all down and moving away in a
| few years. It takes a decade of growth just to get a tree
| to the point where it is growing at a reasonable rate, it
| needs a root system built up before it can grow
| efficiently, and that root system is destroyed when you
| cut the tree down and the next set of trees needs to
| regrow it.
|
| And even with a well managed rotating stock of trees, you
| are going to at best get just over half a cord per acre.
| And in my area which is as close to the same weather as
| Northern New York as it gets, I would expect they would
| need atleast full 3 cords of wood to make it through a
| mild winter, more if it is a colder winter or if no snow
| builds up to help insulate or if you live on an open plot
| where wind can blow over your house.
|
| I wouldn't even consider trying to survive on my own tree
| wood unless I had at least 10 acres to harvest off of,
| and it would still depend on the type of trees growing
| there and is still kind of straddling the edge of
| sustainable long term.
|
| Maybe if you went full 16th century and started coppicing
| the woods and maintaining bare minimum heating you could
| do better, but coppiced woods also takes a decade to
| initial establish and maintain and nobody has coppiced
| woods just sitting around waiting to be utilized.
| jeffbee wrote:
| There's also the small matter that the guy to whom you
| replied was suggesting that "free wood" means burning
| trees worth thousands of dollars each.
| Goronmon wrote:
| _In the article he mentions there is a well at the house._
|
| Wells are not "free water" unless you never have to worry
| about any sort of repair or maintenance.
| hollerith wrote:
| The OP says that electricity there "presently sells for just
| $0.04/kwh". If it were just me living there, I'd heat one
| room with electricity just for the sheer convenience (and
| lack of toxicity from combustion products) and keep the rest
| of the house unheated. (Yes, I'd probably have to make
| alterations to make sure the pipes don't freeze.)
|
| And I'd use a heated vest.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Just dress up well, cozily.
| exhilaration wrote:
| At that income level and in a blue state, there might actually
| be pretty good health coverage.
|
| I've got a relative who lost his job last year, his wife gave
| birth in Long Island soon after and they paid pretty close to
| nothing.
| AngryData wrote:
| "Pretty close to nothing" can still an absolutely massive
| expense when you are living on 1/4 the pay as others in more
| urban and prosperous areas though.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| > _any American could live an earlier iteration of the American
| Dream -- and could be living so cheaply, they've got their
| expatriate buddies down in Mexico beat._
|
| Their expatriate buddies down in Mexico probably aren't shivering
| through an upstate New York winter with nothing but a wood-
| burning stove for warmth, the way this guy proposes.
| Goronmon wrote:
| Yeah, leaving the "heat" part of the list just blank is pretty
| telling as far as how much thought went into this.
| ruste wrote:
| I've been following this guy for a while on X. He does live
| this way. This isn't a hypothetical. He lives on his writing
| and has plenty of free time to chop all the wood he'd ever
| need.
| Goronmon wrote:
| That's not what the article says.
|
| _Considering that the property has a well on-site, water
| is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either
| pay a little extra in electric for that -- or they could
| have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills
| to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply._
|
| Maybe "a little bit of electricity" or "very cheap scrap
| wood" appear to be the vague plans for how to handle heat.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Apparently electricity is 4c/KWh there, so it really is
| only a "little bit extra" even if you're heating with
| resistance heat (at least for a 600sf house).
| Taikonerd wrote:
| Sure, I think a certain rare type of guy can really thrive
| like this. But _most_ people don 't want to live like this,
| for understandable reasons.
| michpoch wrote:
| At 4 cents per 1kWh heating will not be an issue, even with
| regular resistive heater. It's almost free electricity.
|
| You could run a 1.5 kW heater 24/7 for roughly 40 USD a
| month. Just make sure the space is well insulated and not too
| large - but we're talking about basic living, so that should
| be easy.
| rconti wrote:
| It seems like you'd need more than 1.5kW of heat in upstate
| new york, even for a small place (which is more than half
| the size of my suburban home). Also, while I agree that $40
| is cheap to me, it's also an additional 10% on their
| budget.
| michpoch wrote:
| > Also, while I agree that $40 is cheap to me, it's also
| an additional 10% on their budget.
|
| They already have 30 USD per month for electricity in
| their budget. All year long.
|
| > which is more than half the size of my suburban home)
|
| How much space you need for a single person? 30-40 sqm
| (300-400 sqft)? That's more than you need.
|
| Sure, middle of winter night you might need a bit more
| heat, but then in June you'll be using close to none.
| rconti wrote:
| Of course it's more space than I need. My point was that
| heating 600sqft doesn't strike me as a trivial task,
| given my context of heating a house that's less than
| double the size in a temperate climate.
|
| Not to argue (?) that their house is too small (??)
|
| And their $30 electric budget explicitly excluded heat.
| ryoshu wrote:
| So > 10% of your budget goes to heat in cold months.
| michpoch wrote:
| Yes, that's seems rather low even? Plus that is basically
| almost included in their budget - 30 USD for electricity
| is already there.
| y-curious wrote:
| It's not about heating your house, it's about being able to
| leave it comfortably.
|
| Sincerely, someone who moved from Buffalo NY to Northern
| California and has never once regretted it.
| Goronmon wrote:
| I enjoy the part about "Heat? Well...I'm sure something will
| happen allowing me to have heat. No need for concrete plans
| there."
| diogocp wrote:
| You mean this part?
|
| > as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little
| extra in electric for that -- or they could have the Amish
| deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood
| stove, very cheaply.
| Goronmon wrote:
| Those are both vague and completely different ways to handle
| heating.
|
| Also, conveniently, neither appear to have an associated cost
| so we don't have to worry about whether the financial math
| works out.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| It's because when you live rural like this, wood stoves are
| common, and wood is free.
|
| I live in the northwest, so I can't speak to upstate NY,
| but downed trees on state and federal land near roads is
| free to take. Every day there's people posting rounds of
| wood for free to take.
|
| It's hard work, but it's good exercise and rewarding.
|
| There's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old
| maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a
| decade is practically speaking $0 heat.
| Goronmon wrote:
| If that's what you do in this situation, why didn't the
| author write that instead?
|
| _There 's some upfront investment: $200 chainsaw, an old
| maul, and an old pickup truck, but those amortized over a
| decade is practically speaking $0 heat._
|
| I feel like this is really stretching the definition of
| "$0".
| kemotep wrote:
| Well water being free also means amortizing the potential
| maintenance costs of the pump, filters, and testing to
| make sure you aren't drinking arsenic or lead.
| smileysteve wrote:
| And yeah, a truck costs money, whether for maintenance
| and gas, or bare bones insurance.
|
| .. a cargo bike might be a better choice
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| To add to the sibling comment, collecting this wood takes
| time. I've collected wood the forest service takes down
| for use in a stove I use but processing all that wood
| takes time. You bring it home, cut it into small bits,
| keep it in a dry area to make sure the green wood dries
| out, and then you meticulously rotate older and newer
| stock to make sure you use the driest stuff for heating.
|
| If you're living on $432 / month and working 30-40 hours
| at this cashier job then using your off days to grab and
| process wood is honestly pretty miserable. There are
| slums in developing countries with higher standards of
| living because they can heat their "house" (read: tent or
| hut) with oil.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| Well, minimum wage in NY state is $15.50/hour.
| ($432/mo)/($15.50/h) is about 28 hours per month, i.e. 7
| hours per week. https://dol.ny.gov/minimum-wage-0
|
| He also mentions other forms of employment, like raising
| rare herbs, so maybe he's got a little homegrown
| operation going that doesn't take much time.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Good catch on the hourly rates there.
|
| Other than that, again, not sure how different it is from
| living slums in underdeveloped countries. Me, I'd rather
| just save up and buy some oil.
| bigjimmyk3 wrote:
| I grew up in a 1300sf wood heated house, so I have
| relevant experience here. It does take time to buck,
| split, load, unload, and stack the wood. It goes faster
| if you have a small child (me) to help!
|
| We cut wood for our own use and also sold it, so it
| didn't require 100% of our time to keep the heat on.
| hyperpape wrote:
| The author makes a big deal out of not having a car, and
| the math gets a heck of a lot worse if you add a truck.
| AngryData wrote:
| Wood is not free, and you have to consider the time and
| gas and tools to cut it, also this guy doesn't even have
| a car not to mention a truck to haul it, and he is living
| on a lot, not a wooded acreage. 90% of wood people want
| to get rid of for free is pine or fir which takes 4 times
| as much to match hardwood heating, and takes more careful
| stone pipe maintenance to not build up creosote and get a
| chimney fire, a lot of people exclusively burn hardwood
| just because of the risks of burning softwood and causing
| a fire from buildup. Even myself being "lucky" to have
| Emerald Ash Bore which has killed 95% of ash trees and
| given me "free" dead hardwood for the last 25 years
| wouldn't consider it free.
|
| Say you do have a wooded plot, the first year or two it
| might not be so bad, lots of wood near the edges where
| you can drive up to to load and move, but what about
| after that when you have to go deeper into the woods? You
| need to get in there, it may not be accessible by truck
| or get swampy where you will get stuck, and now you are
| considering a tractor or other vehicle, a decent expense
| to obtain, in order to not have to carry all your wood an
| armload at a time through the woods longer and longer
| distances. Chains and gas and oil for cutting it aren't
| expensive but not free, nor is maintaining a gas chainsaw
| if you seriously use it for all your heating wood, doubly
| so if you aren't already mechanically inclined enough to
| repair engines. And then you still have to split it.
| There are cheap splitters, but cheap spliters will only
| split the wood that took little effort to split with an
| axe, and less than half the wood you cut is going to be
| that easy to split straight grain wood, so you are either
| going to need more for a splitter or to be physically fit
| and capable enough to split a lot of gnarly wood by hand.
| Some people enjoy it for the exercise, I do, but not
| everyone is up to it, and it is such a hard physical
| activity that you need to be in good health to maintain
| it.
|
| Also splitting mauls are a gimmick, they take far more
| effort than a long handled axe and are only a good option
| if you are otherwise incapable of using an axe. Speed
| applies more kinetic energy than mass, kinetic energy is
| half of the mass times velocity squared, so doubling the
| mass you are throwing around is far less effective at
| applying force into splitting than trying to double your
| swing speed. And that is the biggest "trick" to a good
| axe split, swing speed, which is why you want a long
| handle. Mauls are far slower than an axe, take more
| energy than an axe to lift and swing, and are far less
| capable of splitting more gnarly wood as the more
| aggressive edge angle has a much harder time splitting
| into and separating the grain as much of the energy
| merely crushes wood fibers before it bites in and starts
| wedging. If an axe can't do it, a maul won't do it even
| more, and then you are getting into a sledge hammer and
| steel wedges anyways, and a wedge and sledge are easier
| to set and more maneuverable than a maul with a big ass
| handle on it.
|
| Burning wood is a decent way to heat a house if someone
| is always at the house in regular 8 hour intervals or
| more, but it has a lot of caveats and is not what I would
| call free. More like subsidizing a portion of the cost of
| with hard physical labor.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Seems like a tongue in cheek way of implying that climate
| change will solve that eventually, no?
| keiferski wrote:
| Existing on the living standards of say, 1945, or even 1960, is
| very possible and allows you to make less money and presumably
| work on what you truly care about.
|
| But that means you don't get the latest iPhone, cook basic foods
| at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances, and so
| on. The hardest part, I think, would be dealing with the social
| expectations of society at large. 1960 living standards were
| universal in 1960, but nowadays you're fighting the entirety of
| Western marketing machine.
| NegativeK wrote:
| I think the author is very comfortable fighting the Western
| marketing machine. I also don't think they are capable of
| understanding why other people have other needs.
| kemotep wrote:
| Do you forgo modern medicine?
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| You would not be able to afford any kind of property insurance
| or medical care with this budget. You won't be able to have a
| well dug or a septic system maintained either. We're going back
| a few decades farther than 1945 to make this work I think.
| jedimastert wrote:
| > 1960 living standards were universal in 1960
|
| Universal for whom?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964
| keiferski wrote:
| I wrote that to imply that the living standards of 1960 were
| normal in 1960, but wouldn't be normal today. Don't over-
| focus on the word _universal_ and miss the point I was
| making.
| jedimastert wrote:
| And don't miss the point that I'm making, which is that the
| standards of living in 1960 for some people was built on
| the back of exploiting others.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sigh. Again, that has nothing to do with my comment. My
| point was that living standards at X point in the past
| were normal for the time but aren't normal for today.
| 1960 was a random year I picked. The point is that if one
| can manage to live "behind the times" materially, life is
| cheaper.
| dmonitor wrote:
| > that means you don't get the latest iPhone
|
| Why do people always have to call out "the latest iPhone". Most
| people can't afford the latest iPhone, nor do they try. You
| might as well say a Lamborghini. Why can't you be honest and
| just say "a smartphone".
| kemotep wrote:
| Even a brand new iPhone 16 is "only" $800. Plans for
| unlimited internet can be had for less than $40 a month.
|
| Using that phone for 5 years would only add like $60 to their
| total monthly expenses. Is that truly unattainable? Is that
| really what is keeping people from buying a house?
| smileysteve wrote:
| $60 is ~14% of the monthly budget, so yeah, I think that
| would make an impact.
| AngryData wrote:
| That is a shit ton of money for someone living in a poor
| rural area living on the bare minimum. It is only cheap if
| you are living in a city where you are earning far more
| money.
| MinimalAction wrote:
| I do believe that's a privilege to throw an extra $60 per
| month at something for five years straight. It's not truly
| stopping us from buying a house, but this mentality that
| everything could be bought on credit, this consumerism is
| where we are hurt.
| danans wrote:
| > But that means you don't get the latest iPhone, cook basic
| foods at home and rarely eat out, repair your own appliances,
| and so on.
|
| You can save quite a bit of money by living this way even in
| high CoL areas. That's how a lot of people without high incomes
| in those areas get by - by getting handy and resourceful.
| Through that, they often develop/discover talents and skills,
| and save a lot of expenses.
|
| For my part, I've done all my own landscaping,
| installed/repaired/maintained my home appliances, built my
| kitchen cabinetry and other furniture, etc. I estimate these
| efforts have saved me at least 100k over the years, probably
| much more.
|
| I don't think it's nearly enough to offset the housing,
| education and healthcare unaffordability crises, but it's a way
| in which regular workers get by.
|
| However, the call-Uber/Doordash/Handyman for everything
| lifestyle isn't something that works unless you are highly paid
| and have no kids.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The point is that you don't need many of those things to have
| good quality of life. Not having a TV or being on social media
| would help a lot with resisting the relentless consumerist
| pressure.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _they'd need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind,
| rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because
| in all truth, they're actually great._
|
| I am glad people like this exist because that means there is less
| competition for the climate zones I can live in without having to
| perpetually struggle with the urge to kill myself on a daily
| basis. I am from the Gulf Coast and the years I lived in Seattle
| were a constant fight with seasonal depression. Once I left for
| sunnier climes again all of that just _vanished_.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| That's exactly how I feel about hot climates - the idea of
| moving to Texas instantly makes me flash back to being
| constantly sweaty (alternating, of course, with freezing
| anywhere indoors as people crank the AC down to somewhere in
| the 50s), and to the dreary winters whose palette is washed out
| browns and dirty greys.
|
| Every time I visit the beach, I remember: wow, I really hate
| this!
| speuleralert wrote:
| Definitely a different strokes for different folks situation. I
| am also from the Gulf Coast and I genuinely love the cool rainy
| Seattle weather. In fact, I was just lamenting having to squint
| to see in the "hot" (65 F) sunny day this morning in Seattle.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Heating a space is easier and cheaper than cooling one. I find
| the midwest is plenty dry and plenty warm, even with multi-
| month snowy winters.
| triceratops wrote:
| > Heating a space is easier and cheaper than cooling one.
|
| Not really no. Cooling always uses heat pumps (air
| conditioning) while heating only sometimes uses heat pumps.
| And cooling usually has a smaller temperature delta than
| heating. It comes down to the relative costs of natural gas
| and electricity where you live.
| rconti wrote:
| It's not though. Even though fuel to heat is vastly cheaper
| than electricity to cool, the winter thermal difference in a
| cold climate is an order of magnitude more than the summer
| thermal difference in a hot climate.
|
| https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-does-it-take-
| more-...
| munificent wrote:
| The way Seattle affects some people isn't about temperature.
| It's the long dark.
|
| I also grew up along the Gulf Coast and live in Seattle now.
| I've had a bunch of other friends and family who have moved
| to the Pacific Northwest. Some love it and are still here and
| some lose the will to live and wilt like sunflowers in the
| dark. I don't know of any way to predict how the gloom will
| affect you. You just have to come here for a year and see how
| it goes.
| AngryData wrote:
| If you are living near New York im not sure how dry you can
| consider it. You are East of the Great Lakes which makes it
| rain. In the middle of summer it might be dry, but both the
| spring and fall i expect to be very wet and humid, and unless
| the Great Lakes freeze over in the winter, which is happening
| less and less by the year, you will have a wet slushy winter.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Living in rural areas is probably very different now with
| connectivity options like cell phones and Starlink. I went to HS
| in a small town ( pop. < 1k ), it has advantages and
| disadvantages just like going to HS in a big city. However,
| entertainment in a small town was vastly different then vs today.
| It's probably a lot easier to live out in the middle of nowhere
| now without going crazy as long as you have power and something
| like Starlink.
| joshstrange wrote:
| So many problems with this, including "Live like a boomer" ->
| "Actually, live like their parents or their grandparents" but
| this one:
|
| > Internet: Use library
|
| Ok, funny joke. As if it's actually _reasonable_ to live without
| a smartphone or the internet in 2025 (or 2015 for that matter).
| Can you do it? Sure, I guess, why would you? I'm not on
| TikTok/IG/<insert social network here other than HN>, that's not
| what I'm talking about here, but it seems almost criminal to not
| have access to the internet, it would be akin to parents refusing
| to take a kid to the doctor. Why would you proudly be ignorant
| and cut yourself from such a valuable resource?
| NegativeK wrote:
| > Yes, startling as it could be to many "Zoomers" and
| "Milennials," it just so happens that if you really want to
| become a member of the landed gentry, it's really not so far out
| of reach just the moment you decide that you like the snow, don't
| need access to the hottest clubs and the biggest cities, and can
| be more than happy with getting cozy in a smaller house.
|
| This is strawman to the point of rhetoric and reminds me of the
| "you can afford a house if you'd just stop eating avocado toast
| all the time." I'm actually not sure if the article is meant to
| be rhetoric with a pitch for small town America or if it's an
| actual argument that happens to have a lot of bad faith claims.
|
| I hope OP is enjoying where they live. I also hope they visit
| small towns where skilled tradespeople are losing their jobs and
| businesses due to shifts in America. I don't think telling them
| to work at a gas station would go over well.
| kemotep wrote:
| Trailers in trailer parks in my rural census designated
| micropolitan statistical area of Ohio go for 60k at the minimum
| so there certainly is a lot of modern amenities you would have to
| accept to live without in the house described in the article. And
| by modern amenities I mean heat and potentially running water.
|
| This reminds me of a hunting cabin in Alaska you could rent for
| 100 bucks a month. One room. Wood fire stove. Outhouse. Only an
| hour outside of Fort Wainwright. Good luck is all I have to say.
| viccis wrote:
| This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal
| style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud"
| style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown
| of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the
| author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as
| it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be
| written and submitted here)
|
| >At the end of it, most people don't want to live this way.
| That's OK -- I'm not here to judge them. But I am here to tell
| anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the
| "4HL," and sick of seeing our country's heartland regions
| continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their
| problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if
| they wished.
|
| No one is angry that they can't buy a piece of shit shack in
| middle America where they will have to walk an hour each way to
| work at their (as suggested by the author) gas station cashier
| job in the deep snow all winter.
|
| They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the
| actual "boomers" (rather than the previous generations that the
| author is disingenuously using in their place) could afford a
| home that was near jobs and community without being in the top
| 10-20 percentile of earners. They're angry that this is no longer
| the case for a number of reasons depending on whom you ask, to
| include housing as speculation, generational wealth destroyed by
| medical debt, onerous zoning and regulations preventing housing
| development, selfish older generations selling their homes (and
| therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either
| lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.
|
| Yeah you can live a 1910s rural lifestyle on the cheap, sure.
| Hell, get a tent and a backpack and you can live the hobo life in
| any of our major US cities today! But this is ignoring the
| obvious question, which is: If the productivity of our nation has
| exploded so tremendously since that time, where has all of the
| wealth gone that one would even dare suggest that we live a life
| of sufficient poverty to be suspended in that century-old way of
| life?
| xp84 wrote:
| You seem really certain that the older 'way of life' is
| categorically bad, but you seem very unhappy and angry in the
| life that you reject it in favor of.
|
| Also, you can make any number of easy tweaks to his formula to
| allow you to have conveniences that would make your life orders
| of magnitude richer than the true 1910s were. For instance, a
| $3,000 car, Internet access, etc. Also, anyone coming into this
| experiment with savings from a few years of "big city work" has
| a huge amount of capital to play with to set themselves up.
| $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest
| income to live on at current rates, for instance.
|
| The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we
| have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a
| million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes,
| and IG-worthy vacations. Some people would arguably be happier
| working little to not-at-all, or working for themselves to make
| $10k a year and devoting the rest of their time to whatever
| makes them happy. Why is that so offensive an idea?
| xwiz wrote:
| > The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY
| we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to
| afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars,
| designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations.
|
| I have never met a single person of my generation for which
| this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author
| is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a
| common one.
|
| > $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest
| income to live on at current rates, for instance.
|
| Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-
| library/rese...
| xp84 wrote:
| Okay, but we are reading this on HN. Anyone working for the
| past 10 years in tech should have that much saved up
| easily. If for the past 10 years you put just $400 a month
| into SPY and did nothing else, you'd have about $95,000.
| About 126k for QQQ. [0]
|
| And I don't think most people can't afford to save $400 a
| month. Lots of people save that much.
|
| [0]: https://dqydj.com/etf-return-calculator/
| johnny22 wrote:
| Why would you assume people are talking about themselves
| just because it's on HN? I'm reading these comments much
| more broadly.
| xp84 wrote:
| I didn't mean to assume anything about the whole world,
| but _we_ are talking about _ourselves_ here, so our
| situations matter to us. I read the article as a thought
| experiment that is available to me personally and many
| others, even if it isn 't practical for literally every
| human being.
| triceratops wrote:
| > so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home,
| two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations
|
| Only one of those we have control over. If starter homes cost
| a million what can you do?
| sgerenser wrote:
| Move to a place where starter homes are cheaper?
| walleeee wrote:
| If you're so concerned about class warfare, as I agree we ought
| to be, you need to get along with the people from middle
| America or anywhere else who consider this a perfectly
| respectable way of life. Many of them are equally fed up with
| things.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Huh? My in-laws came from industrial maintenance/construction
| companies in rural North Carolina. They vote for Trump,
| majority of them go to Southern Baptist churches. I spent two
| years living out there and working for one of their
| industrial maintenance companies.
|
| This is not what they aspire to, or what 95% percent of the
| people living there aspire to.
|
| Sure, the fishing sounds good, and the country living, but
| living without a car? No TV? Never eating out? That's weird,
| man.
|
| This guy's life is no more representative of how most people
| in red states live than any blue state office worker who idly
| talks about going to live on a commune is representative of
| how people in NYC live.
|
| Sure, lots of folks from any culture have a dream of getting
| back to the simple life. But it's an idle fantasy for almost
| everyone.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| > They're angry that ... selfish older generations selling
| their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth)
| to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments,
| etc, etc.
|
| Wait, so they're angry because people are spending their money
| on themselves for fun stuff at the end of their lives? Or maybe
| even using it for un-fun medical care? Rather than handing it
| over to their kids? I don't know what to say. Except that I'm
| glad I never had kids.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| There are a lot of specifics HN can and will nitpick in this
| piece, but the perspective is useful and not invalidated by these
| specifics. Personally I would never choose this lifestyle, but I
| like that OP highlights how clearly it can exist.
| kens wrote:
| The article mentions that the Moses-Saunders International Power
| Dam is nearby. A bit of a tangent, but this was built by Robert
| Moses, who isn't as well known as he should be. Moses built a
| huge number of projects that reshaped New York City: the state
| parkway, lots of bridges including the TriBorough and Verrazzano-
| Narrows, multiple NYC expressways, Jones Beach, Shea Stadium,
| Lincoln Center, United Nations headquarters, large public housing
| projects, and so forth.
|
| If you like very long books, you should read "The Power Broker",
| a biography of Moses that explains how he used his job as state
| park commissioner to become one of the most powerful (and
| controversial) people in New York.
| neilv wrote:
| > _Massena is one of the poorest, least-desirable places not only
| in New York State, but in the United States at large. [...] on
| the flip-side, it's within very close distance of two major
| Canadian cities, [...]_
|
| Coincidentally, recently thinking of Handmaid's Tale for some
| reason... I was clicking on towns on Google Maps, on either side
| of the NE US border with Canada, and was struck by many of the
| _featured photos_ of these places being abandoned-rural-decay.
|
| Probably because overgrown abandoned human activity is
| interesting to photographers. And maybe that constitutes the
| majority of photos from those places being shared with Google
| Maps.
|
| But I also had an idle thought of what-if there was a conscious
| effort to discourage people from going there, like a town that's
| kept off of maps. So I started looking around for hints of
| sensitive government facilities, developers buying up large
| swaths of land, etc. The first thing I found was an industrial
| marijuana-growing operation.
|
| I didn't know what to make of it, other than that land might be
| affordable, and hopefully Amazon delivers.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| You definitely have to be a certain type of person to do this.
| Not everyone is physically and mentally capable and has a
| "socially-acceptable morality" to live that kind of lifestyle.
|
| Access to healthcare is also a serious problem. Also the people
| may be hostile to anyone who is "a liberal" or "woke". I wouldn't
| recommend being openly transgender in one of these places.
| DrillShopper wrote:
| > Taxes: $41
|
| > Electric: ~$30
|
| > Water: $0
|
| > Heat: (no, it's really blank)
|
| > Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there,
| assuming you go to town 3x per week at $2/trip. Multiple options
| to take the bus to town each day from this location.
|
| > Food: ~$300/mo.
|
| > Telephone: $8/mo
|
| > Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
|
| > Internet: Use library
|
| This author cannot be coming at this from a serious point of view
| with this absolute embarrassment of a cost breakdown. There is no
| accounting here for _heat_ (which is sort of important in the
| middle of "American Siberia"), property taxes, homeowner's
| insurance, healthcare, or saving for retirement.
|
| > I've known men who grow rare Chinese medicinal herbs in
| greenhouses on a tenth of an acre to sell via the mail; or my
| uncle, who takes lumber from old barns and crafts it into shelves
| to sell online.
|
| Damn, I be that would be a lot easier with an Internet connection
| at home and a smartphone.
| qingcharles wrote:
| He overpriced the phone. Good2Go have a 1GB data plan for $5/mo
| that I use. I only need data when I'm outside the house. You
| can buy a half-decent Android phone off eBay for $30-50. But,
| you still need some sort of Internet. If you can't get wired,
| then that means having to fork out for Starlink or Hughes.
|
| I'm in literally the middle of nowhere in a one-horse town and
| it has 1Gbps wired to my house and they just put in a second
| company with 5Gbps the other day, which is wild.
| junar wrote:
| I'd expect 5G home internet to be cheaper than satellite,
| though probably still more expensive than an ultra-low-cost
| cellular plan.
| qingcharles wrote:
| True. Verizon and T-Mobile both had really awesome 5G home
| Internet plans for $25/mo. I had the T-Mobile one for a
| while in 2022 and was getting 800Mbps which was wild.
| cricketsandmops wrote:
| Perhaps the author heats with a wood stove. You have to get
| wood through your labor or buying it though, so it's not truly
| 0$. Plus the time and effort to keep it going.
| distantsounds wrote:
| this dude _literally_ wrote about a neighboring town that's dying
| and the government isn't helping them out.
| https://shagbark.substack.com/p/obituaryland
|
| Convincing people to move to a remote area while at the same time
| seeing literal ghost towns develop, is not something I would
| recommend. What happens when the public utilities fail? The roads
| need repairing? One of the _many_ blizzard-like seasons can knock
| out critical infrastructure.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| >Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live
| nearby, and we're doing exactly this -- we do not have an
| automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit
| bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite
| reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands
| of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a
| car.
|
| This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically
| don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American
| cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit.
| I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple
| states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.
| monroeclinton wrote:
| https://www.slcnypublictransit.com/transit-schedules
|
| It seems like they have a good number of routes and do route
| deviation within 3/4 of a mile of the bus stop.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Frequency is often as important as the route from
| experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from
| your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-
| frequency route means it's something you need to plan your
| entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're
| stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm
| curious how they manage...)
|
| Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day,
| once early in the morning and then once late in the
| afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the
| hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.
| bombcar wrote:
| Rural bus routes used to be very common - they commute in
| in the morning and out in the afternoon.
|
| You change your schedule to handle that, and they usually
| will drive the van (barely a bus) up to your door.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| > a low-frequency route means it's something you need to
| plan your entire day around.
|
| Okay but the dude is making $5K/y which means he
| basically has no job and he sits around in his house all
| week or goes hiking etc. His most exciting day of
| adventure will literally consist of taking the bus to the
| library to check out a book, and bringing it back home
| (while reading it on the bus, perhaps). He can totally
| afford to plan his entire day around the event.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's obviously not true, if you change what you "have" to go
| to.
|
| There are thousands of American towns that are about 10k
| population - large enough to have a Walmart and other stores,
| small enough to walk across in an hour or so.
| cozzyd wrote:
| While such towns may have walkable cores, often places like
| Walmart are a huge pain to walk to.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If you need only $400 a month, you have a _looot_ of time
| to spend walking to Walmart.
| cozzyd wrote:
| It's not the distance, but hostile roads with no safe
| crossings.
| bombcar wrote:
| My admittedly unscientific survey of small Midwestern
| towns with Walmarts (that are NOT suburbs!) is that you
| can walk to the Walmart on sidewalks. At most, you have
| half a block to the nearest sidewalk, or have to cross
| the street.
|
| Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk.
| The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the
| newest developments have them also, usually.
| cozzyd wrote:
| The two smallish towns I've spent significant time in
| (Tomah WI and Palestine TX) both have difficult to walk
| to Walmarts. But glad to hear it's not universal!
|
| I see from Google maps that here in Illinois the
| situation seems to be a bit better... (E.g. Morris,
| Rantoul and even Du Quoin). Du Quoin seems very
| inexpensive and seems like it would make a better
| argument than somewhere truly rural (it even has Amtrak
| service)
| macNchz wrote:
| The Walmart in the area from this article is separated
| from the main town by a four lane road with no sidewalks,
| across which the nearest crosswalks are more than half a
| mile away in either direction--so you're either playing
| high stakes Frogger, or, depending on your starting
| location, you might conceivably have to walk nearly two
| hours out of your way round trip along the shoulder of
| this road to use a crosswalk. They also get five feet of
| snow per year, so a good part of the year that walk is
| extra dangerous and miserable.
|
| I can't say for sure, but I think this is much more
| typical of American Walmarts than it is to be able to
| easily walk to them.
|
| Streetview of your opponent as a pedestrian trying to
| access the Massena Walmart:
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/ufTWTHxHCReFP8VA9
| lolinder wrote:
| We're talking about towns of 10k. Traffic in these towns
| is pretty sparse and easily navigable as a pedestrian.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Once it gets cold you won't be walking much anywhere. I guess
| grocery delivery from Walmart can mitigate this, but that
| fundamentally changes the situation.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Why not? You can walk plenty in the cold with the right
| equipment. I walked 2+ km a day at the south pole ...
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's really dangerous if you don't know what your doing.
| I'm about .5 km from the closest supermarket.
|
| If it's snowing or just cold out I'm still ordering food.
|
| If I'm mildly sick, ordering food.
|
| I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a
| 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most
| Americans can do that.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| One way (not the only way and I get this won't work well
| for people with medical needs or kids) to handle this is
| stock up on rice, beans, nonperishables and have a good
| first aid kit. You go out to get your "freshies" but it's
| not an issue to be stuck at home for a week except in the
| most dire circumstances.
| coolcase wrote:
| > I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that
| a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most
| Americans can do that.
|
| Shit that's horrifying.
|
| I have health issues and walking 2km a day to try to help
| fix. So I see 2km a day as basic. 6-10km run a day would
| be "fit" IMO. things as humans are designed to walk.
|
| Living in suburbia means I have to walk "for the sake of
| it" although I cam make it useful e.g. get some milk!
|
| As for cold. Anything above minus 5 should be OK just
| wear stuff like skiiers wear which can be got cheap off
| brand.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 77% percent of young Americans aren't fit for service.
|
| 2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is
| exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less.
|
| And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally
| hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to
| the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.
| bcraven wrote:
| This is just utterly astonishing to me. I've just checked
| a map and it's ~0.5 km between where I park at work and
| my office!
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Your going to have to walk both ways, in the rain/snow,
| etc ?
|
| Like a lot of comments have already mentioned these towns
| don't even have sidewalks. You'll be walking on the side
| of the street risking an accident
| oblio wrote:
| Is there a lot of traffic in places with 10k residents?
| esrauch wrote:
| Are you sure you mean .5km? That's only 0.3 miles, 1500
| feet. That is the distance if you drive to a Walmart
| supercenter and park in the center of the parking lot and
| walk to the door.
| harvey9 wrote:
| I am 50 years old and don't think I'd pass fit for
| service either, but I can still easily walk a few Kms.
| Aeolun wrote:
| 0.5km is like, 6 minutes of walking?
|
| How? It just doesn't compute to me that someone would
| ever see that as onerous.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Surely you walk that much inside any reasonably sized
| grocery store.
| npodbielski wrote:
| In IKEA you probably walk around about 1km for just one
| visit considering how they design their space.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Huh? I'm not in great shape but I get 2km of walking a
| day just with my commute. According to my watch I've
| averaged 13k steps a day this week (something like 9-10
| km a day, I think?). Ironically the days I walk the least
| are when I decide to bike to work instead of taking the
| train...
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| > I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that
| a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most
| Americans can do that.
|
| Most Americans would be able to do it if it became a
| regular occurrence for them. 2km of _walking_ is not much
| even if you sit around 24 hours a day.
| npodbielski wrote:
| I am sitting in front of PC probably around 10hours a day
| and drink and sit rest of my day (excluding sleep) and
| still it is not a big deal for me to have a 7km walk to
| the city or back is not a big deal.
|
| I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With
| your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot
| walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
| Lionga wrote:
| You need to be in good shape to fucking walk 2km? WTF is
| wrong with people in murica? Well is guess they are just
| ordering fast food all day
| npodbielski wrote:
| 500 hundred metres? This is long for you? If there is
| snow you can't walk? Why? Snow is much beteer than rain.
| And still it is just a couple of minutes. You most
| probably would not get wet with proper clothes. Are you
| from US by the chance?
| tshaddox wrote:
| 47 people died in a blizzard in Buffalo, New York in
| 2022.
| andriamanitra wrote:
| ..in what National Weather Service described as "once-in-
| a-generation storm". Walking 2 km on a normal winter day
| (or even a mild blizzard) is not dangerous.
| cozzyd wrote:
| And to be clear, driving in a blizzard is very dangerous
| too. But blizzards happen a minority of the time.
| mattnewton wrote:
| There are no sidewalks, so you are walking in a street in
| the snow asking to become a statistic.
| davidcbc wrote:
| What are you buying this equipment with in this scenario?
| cozzyd wrote:
| Right, I mean obviously the scenario in the article is
| unrealistic budget wise (and good winter equipment is
| going to be at least several hundred dollars), but I'm
| pushing back against the idea you can't walk when it's
| cold ...
| bombcar wrote:
| Let's not pretend that the cold regions of the world were
| uninhabitable before the invention of the car.
| danbolt wrote:
| They weren't, but they were zoned and organized a lot
| differently compared to our post-war world of today.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| This is true. I recently read that the real reason that
| the Vikings left North America was that the Native
| American authorities informed them that their site on
| L'Anse aux Meadows was not zoned for boat repair and
| construction.
| testing22321 wrote:
| Gimme a break. I walked and biked year round in the Yukon.
| Past -40 I had to keep moving, but it was fun
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Might be a slight of hand? Maybe he has a moped like the DUI
| people do.
| xp84 wrote:
| I agree that his deliberate deletion of a car and Internet
| access from the example budget undermines his point, but adding
| $200 to support the cost of owning a cheap car and $45 for a
| prepaid cellphone plan with ample tethering doesn't change the
| overall equation significantly.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| It's less click bait-ish. The max SSI payment is 967$.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/amount
|
| So you have a ton of people trying to make it off that.
|
| The cold weather is really the red flag for me.
|
| >Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is
| free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a
| little extra in electric for that -- or they could have the
| Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in
| a wood stove, very cheaply.
|
| He glosses over heating, but for a full house that can easily
| be 200 or 300$ dollars.
|
| Snow tends to cause problems. Now if he wrote this living in
| Florida or something it would be more practical. No risk of
| freezing. Walking or biking is possible year round.
|
| I'd actually love to see a bike first city, but outside of a
| few college towns I don't think it exists in the states
| firesteelrain wrote:
| You can bike year round in Florida and bike or walk to work
| if you are in vicinity. Even go to grocery store or in some
| cases use a golf cart. At least one car is still
| preferable.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I biked year round in the Yukon. -40 and beyond is a fun
| challenge.
| silisili wrote:
| Higher income employees would pay way more than that in taxes
| alone. This is why properties in low and no income tax states
| skyrocketed.
|
| Assuming it's not high income but a real scrounger, this is
| leaving out way too much. Out of pocket health insurance will
| easily quadruple that number. Utilities could too, depending.
| K0balt wrote:
| Out of pocket health insurance 1400 a month? Really? It that's
| true, that is criminally ridiculous. Why do people accept that,
| when even in developing nations basic health care is free, and
| there are plenty of private choices. Decent health insurance
| costs about 150-300 a month the world over, except in the USA
| where it is ten times that for no reason whatsoever besides
| greed and the fact that healthcare is a basic need that puts
| people under duress. Get your shit together , Americans, you're
| getting piped over a barrel six ways to Sunday and you just
| take it like it was mandatory. What gives?
| returningfory2 wrote:
| The main reason is that the government isn't funding it, like
| in other countries. I do agree the healthcare system in the
| US should be reformed. But the cost isn't going to go all
| away - it's just going to be shifted to higher taxes. Which
| is fine.
| K0balt wrote:
| Sure, but I'm having a hard time understanding how
| developing nations the world over can afford to do this,
| but the USA cannot lol. I've used the healthcare systems in
| many developing nations, and while it's not really fun, it
| is adequate and free for 80 percent of the issues that a
| person encounters.
|
| For the other 20 percent, it's best to go to a private
| clinic, where the care is as good if not better than many
| US clinics but at 10-20 percent of the cost.
|
| And the private clinics are not subsidized.
|
| My wife just got an MRI at a private, fully for profit
| imaging clinic. The total cost was $217 USD for a study
| with and without contrast on a 2023 Siemens scanner. Labs
| for the contrast approval were $6.
|
| What people pay in the USA is in no way justified by
| equipment or facility costs. Runaway liability and
| profiteering, perhaps. But not because of the "quality" of
| the healthcare or the equipment.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| I think there's a bunch of different things going on in
| the US healthcare system. I think for sure part of it is
| inefficiency.
|
| But I don't really buy the argument that healthcare
| quality is the same elsewhere. Like, do you really think
| you're going to get the same care for, say, long term
| multiple sclerosis in the United States versus Guatemala?
| I feel a lot of the "the care is the same" comes from
| younger people who have had relatively easy interactions
| with the healthcare system. When you're over 70 it's a
| totally different ball game.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| The actual cost of health care in the US is considerably
| higher than any other developed country.
| silisili wrote:
| I don't know what a healthy young person pays these days. 20
| years ago I paid 80/mo for basic catastrophe coverage.
|
| All I know is that it's gone up tremendously since then, and
| my family plan costs about $2100 a month.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Because fox news has convinced people they deserve it is
| about 90% of it.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Some of the claims here are pretty intense, but I do think his
| closing statement is true enough:
|
| > _there's never been a better time to try to "make it" in
| America and live the older version of the American Dream. If we
| can't see that now, it doesn't necessarily mean that things have
| gotten bad -- it might mean that our perception has become
| grossly skewed by an era of hyperabundance, marketing, reality
| TV, and social media comparison syndrome._
|
| With an extremely strong emphasis on "older version." This vision
| of life is not the life that most "black pilled" people were
| raised to expect or plan for. It is very accessible and is
| extremely discoverable thanks to the internet (with electricity
| costs like that I'm surprised crypto miners haven't moved in) -
| but it's a level of self-dependence and isolation that most
| people do not want. However it's absolutely true that it's never
| been easier to live a "frontier" lifestyle, only now with 3d
| printing and amazon and other bountiful resources to fill in
| traditional gaps.
| weard_beard wrote:
| What I don't understand is the authors antagonistic framing.
| The complaints about moving backward because of boomer greed
| aren't any less valid just because caves exist, fire remains
| "discovered", and we can clone wooly mammoths.
| serf wrote:
| the complaints aren't less valid, but having a constant axe
| to grind that you blame for all UN-success isn't a good
| strategy.
| sweeter wrote:
| I think it's absurd. I work full time in the richest country on
| Earth and I can't afford an apartment and healthcare. The
| problem is clearly not advertising.
|
| Real "billionaire goes homeless for one night to prove the
| stupid poors are lazy and stupid and need to hedge their
| expectations" type of energy
| digianarchist wrote:
| We're all being asked to sacrifice the living standards our
| parents grew up with because the utter failure of local,
| state and federal government to provide housing, public
| transit, education and healthcare, something most of the
| Western world manages to pull off without issue.
|
| We have never been more productive in this country's history
| and yet we cannot even meet a bar set in the 1950s.
|
| It's frankly ridiculous as is this piece.
| andrekandre wrote:
| > utter failure of local, state and federal government to
| provide housing, public transit, education and healthcare
|
| i guess the expectation in the (for lack of a better word)
| neoliberal era was these would be provided by the private
| sector?
| istjohn wrote:
| Median disposable household income is higher in the US than
| anywhere else in the world [0]. Real median personal income
| has increased 50% since the 1970s [1].
|
| 0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and
| _per...
|
| 1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/globalization-did-not-
| hollow-o...
| digianarchist wrote:
| What's your point? All of the things I listed have far
| outpaced income and disposable income.
| levocardia wrote:
| "disposable" income means "subtracting necessities like
| housing" so if disposable income is going up, by
| definition your claim cannot be correct
| digianarchist wrote:
| That's not correct.
|
| From the article:
|
| > Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including
| in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.
|
| So excluding housing, health insurance and student loan
| repayments etc.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Officially, disposable income means income minus taxes.
| Lots of people assume it means minus necessities like
| housing and food, but that is discretionary income.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I don't think it's similar to the billionaire thing, this guy
| is apparently living the way he describes full-time.
|
| And he does sort of have a point. You could probably afford
| an apartment _somewhere_, just not in any of the places you
| consider desirable.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the problem that most millenials have is that their
| parents _could_ afford a house, for a pittance, in those
| desireable areas.
| aeturnum wrote:
| Good news - his plan also includes not being able to afford
| healthcare and housing while working full time! Are you
| interested in doing what you do now but different? It just
| cuts corners in different places than other people do to
| achieve a result that doesn't seem that interesting to most
| people but is also bad in interesting ways.
|
| I don't think that this approach is "scalable" and I don't
| think it's a good idea for most people (perhaps not for
| anyone). I do think it usefully focuses attention on how so
| much of cost of living is not exactly one line item, but the
| massive interconnection of modern life. Living in a place
| where you can have access to the networks (literal, social,
| medical, etc) you need for the rest of your plan.
|
| I wouldn't want to live like this! But the fact that one
| could until one got sick (a common limitation on many
| creative ways of living the modern US I find) is interesting.
| I think the fact that there are similarities to traditional
| frontier living (wood stove heating included!) makes it a
| particularly interesting.
|
| Edit: Arguably, I think the problem is that the USA achieved
| the original "American Dream" and simply stopped thinking
| about how the world was changing and what a modern re-
| envisioning of that dream should be. Pointing out that you
| can be an impossibly good frontier pioneer in 2025 could be a
| way of pointing out to people that we need to move on and
| stop imagining a thing we can active as the pinnacle. We need
| to imagine living in a world where everyone who works full
| time can afford housing and healthcare, where performance is
| rewarded but isn't required to simply live and where we can
| let living in the woods safely fade into history as a thing
| we can certainly do if we prefer but should stop idealizing.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| Of course you could afford an apartment, or even a house! You
| just don't want to move there.
|
| I don't judge you - I also live in a VHCOL area and my wife
| wouldn't even want to move 30km where the housing prices are
| half of where we are now. Such is live.
|
| But saying you couldn't afford it is false - you can't afford
| it where you'd want to live, is more accurate.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| If I wanted to be a jerk I could spew the same opinions the
| author is, but I'm not, so I'm disagreeing with him.
|
| I don't buy lunch. I don't eat "nice" food. I don't drive nice
| cars. I don't eat out often and have never in my life run up a
| bar tab over $30. I have under $20/mo in streaming services, buy
| used/free furniture etc, etc. If I did to all those things the
| monthly cost would not even make up the ~1k/mo difference between
| my "got in early" mortgage and what rent on a shitty 1-2 bedroom
| costs these days. I live in a 1200sf house (in a post-industrial
| town with an industry more or less killed by globalization, so
| not like it's somewhere nice) and have the biggest house of
| anyone I know under 50. This is not a "people won't settle"
| problem.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I absolutely am "making it" in that I'm
| hitting milestones like home ownership, retirement contribution,
| etc (at the expensive of day to day material conditions, of
| course) but if everyone behaved like I do to do it the economy
| would collapse.
|
| There's a discussion to be had about laws, codes, zoning, etc.
| and how they've done the same things for housing that the same
| people's regulatory legacy has done for cars.
|
| And to address rural New York specifically, it is a goddamn dump.
| You think coal country is bad? You think a bad part of Detroit or
| St. Louis is bad? it ain't got nothing on <shuffles cards>
| Oneonta. We're talking boarded up to occupied houses ratios one
| step short of abandoned mining town. You either work on a farm or
| live off welfare up there. Oh, and the property taxes are pretty
| crushing in NY, you'll be better off in a comparably crappy town
| in just about any other state.
| energywut wrote:
| > any American could live an earlier iteration of the American
| Dream
|
| If (and only if) you aren't socially different from the
| communities you'd be moving to. Being gay or trans, for instance,
| might mark you out as a target in a lot of the places where you
| _could_ live this cheaply. Plenty of race, religions, or
| political beliefs that would make it untenable.
|
| It's hard to claim that _any_ American can achieve this.
| nkurz wrote:
| Maybe you have more direct experience with this than I do, but
| I'm not sure I agree. I don't follow the lifestyle the author
| describes, but I do live in an economically and culturally
| comparable town in Vermont that's much smaller than Massena.
| The town is full of gay and lesbian couples, and it really
| doesn't seem to be an issue. The few racial minorities seem to
| be well accepted. Religion is a surprisingly small factor.
|
| Political beliefs do divide the town, but national politics are
| actually less divisive than I've experienced in larger places.
| Trans folk do have it harder, but we seem to judge the few we
| have as individuals. I'm sure there are other towns where these
| things are much less true, but I wouldn't automatically assume
| it couldn't work in Massena for anyone with the right attitude.
| I think it would come down to the individual.
| energywut wrote:
| I think Vermont is, in my experience, perhaps more accepting
| of different identities. I've lived in small towns, and spent
| plenty of time in small towns. Some have a "don't ask/don't
| tell" or "live and let live" sense to them. As long as you
| aren't _loud_ about your identity, you 'll be left alone.
|
| But plenty of places will absolutely run you out of town for
| having the wrong religion, race, or sexual preferences.
| riffraff wrote:
| I experienced something similar and would posit that small
| communities accommodate diversity more easily, because you
| get to know the people, it's no longer "the homosexuals" or
| "the immigrants" or "the jews", it's "John who works at the
| coffee shop ".
|
| Clearly this breaks down at a certain size, and it may still
| suck for people on the minority side tho.
| cmptrnerd6 wrote:
| This is not true, in my experience, in rural Indiana. I
| hear the n word a lot for an area that I have yet to meet a
| black person. One neighbor was complaining about the
| California family that moved to town and brought all the
| drug problems with them, despite our county having been the
| meth capital of Indiana for years before they moved here.
| Somehow my first conversation with a friend's mom I met
| while visiting their rural farm involved how there were no
| black people in the area. But this is why all anecdotal
| data should be taken with a grain of salt.
| throwawaymb wrote:
| Indiana is known for this though...not every rural area
| is comparable
| shagmin wrote:
| Guess it comes down to the individual's attitude either way
| and what they're willing to tolerate but I wouldn't
| underestimate the aggressive ignorance you can find out
| there. Vermont is a short drive from the so-called lesbian
| capital of the world, one of the few parts of the country
| where democrats consistently win a majority of rural voters,
| and is in the most secular corner of the country. It's almost
| the complete opposite of the rest of rural America.
| kimfc wrote:
| Yeah as a trans woman who lived in Vermont for awhile this
| lines up with my experience. The worst bigotry I encountered
| was teenagers calling me the f-slur, which is like fine,
| whatever. I think people dont have a sense of just how
| massive America is and how different states are culturally.
|
| Honestly it still sucked to be trans in Vermont, it's
| extremely isolating especially if you dont have a car or live
| in Burlington/Brattleboro. The reason why so many queer
| people move to cities is that cities are really the only
| place queer people can have a semi-normal social life, and
| not because they're fleeing Westboro Baptist Church style
| bigotry
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It's hard to claim that any American can achieve this.
|
| Not only that, but there certainly aren't enough cheap houses
| in cheap areas like this to meaningfully make a dent in the
| large number of Americans struggling to afford housing.
| FireSquid2006 wrote:
| I would argue is that what we _need_ for healing and
| understanding is more brave trans and gay people in these
| spaces.
|
| It's a lot harder to hate a group when your kind neighbor is
| one of them. Debate and rational arguments dont actually
| convince most humans. Kindness without the expectation of
| anything in return and possibly even hate does.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > It's a lot harder to hate a group when your kind neighbor
| is one of them.
|
| "He/she is one of the good ones..." is a fairly common turn
| of phrase.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| > I would argue is that what we need for healing and
| understanding is more brave trans and gay people in these
| spaces.
|
| It is right, but - if you were one of them, would you risk
| your life to maybe bring in some change?
| kimfc wrote:
| I mean as a trans woman who lived pretty close to how the
| article author described their life (rural town, no car, shitty
| housing, very low income), it's definitely possible to live
| without too much trouble. In the northeast there is definitely
| bigotry, but it is very uncommon for anyone to say anything.
| People keep to themselves, and your biggest issue is social
| isolation. Though when I lived like that in the south I got
| called slurs and threatened physically by complete strangers
| pretty often, so your point stands. I'd imagine its pretty
| similar for most other minority groups.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| There's so many issues with this article. Ignoring the real costs
| of living in declining rural areas (poor health services,
| vanishing community), they also fail to account that you also
| cannot raise a family there properly. Schooling is often poor and
| the infrastructure poorer and you're fucking over your kids
| future so you can play pretend boomer while ignoring the biggest
| things they benefited from.
| thisisnotauser wrote:
| Could not get past the multiple paragraphs of strawman nonsense.
| Here, let me summarize:
|
| The counts of the indictment are luxury, bad manners, contempt
| for authority, disrespect to elders, and a love for chatter in
| place of exercise. ...
|
| Children began to be the tyrants, not the slaves, of their
| households. They no longer rose from their seats when an elder
| entered the room; they contradicted their parents, chattered
| before company, gobbled up the dainties at table, and committed
| various offences against Hellenic tastes, such as crossing their
| legs. They tyrannised over the paidagogoi and schoolmasters.
| aorloff wrote:
| This guy lives in Amish country, yet is not Amish, but drives a
| hard bargain.
|
| I'm nearly sold, but I haven't sat on the furniture yet to see
| if it will be hard enough.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| In many countries around the world, $432 is more than enough.
|
| BeWelcome.org is free accomodation for travellers, so if you need
| somewhere for just a couple of nights, you can stay. It's safe;
| there's an entire safety team dedicated to handling complaints.
|
| If you settle down for too long though, it is recommended to
| share in paying the rent or utilities, out of politeness.
| eugenekolo wrote:
| Confused by his portrayal of Massena, NY. I don't live there and
| have never driven through, but looking on Google Maps it doesn't
| seem that bad or depressing as the author (and I guess
| commentators) make it out to be.
|
| It has a Walmart, Home Depot, BJs (similar to Costco), a main
| street with several businesses. A walkable grid with sidewalks in
| that main town area....
|
| Feels like reaching that this place is so desolate and
| depressing.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| Also what I was thinking! I saw the Home Depot on the map, and
| an International Airport (with daily flights to Boston no
| less), and thought, "Wait a sec, is this guy pulling our
| collective legs?". https://flymassena.com/
| loeber wrote:
| Agreed! I'm randomly Google Street View-ing through town, and
| it looks... modest but actually quite nice?
|
| Check out these pleasant-looking houses in the summer:
| https://www.google.com/maps/place/Massena,+NY+13662/@44.9264...
|
| Edit: I've spent a few more minutes on Street View. This is not
| at all the podunk backwater that the author makes it out to be.
| They've got plenty of commercial streets, and big blocks of
| houses with nicely trimmed lawns.
|
| I suppose this actually makes the author's point more strongly
| -- even if you have very little money, you can live pretty
| nicely in Massena!
| firesteelrain wrote:
| It's got three elementary schools, one junior high and one high
| school. My hometown had two public elementary schools, few pre
| K options, two religious options for K-8, one middle school and
| one high school at 25k residents. And we don't have an
| international airport (we do one hour away and in the same
| county though)
|
| Massena is small but not that desolate/small
| aqrit wrote:
| Alcoa (Aluminum Smelter, *cheap electricity*) was the major
| industry in the area. Massena plant now produces 85% less
| aluminum compared to ~15 years ago (AFAICT), leading to
| something of a ghost town (and cheap housing).
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I looked through those numbers, and immediately thought to myself
| - hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or go
| to a dentist for that mater.
|
| FWIW, I grew up in rural nowhere (population 150, nearest town 45
| miles away) - and I honestly don't know how anyone can live out
| in the boonies without a car. Taking the bus that goes 3 times a
| day is one thing, needing to move stuff is another thing. I mean,
| obviously there are plenty of people that do manage - but sooner
| or later you'll become completely dependent on others for certain
| types of transportation.
|
| Also, there's clothes, house maintenance, and lots of other
| things.
| Loughla wrote:
| What small town even has a bus? The closest bus line to me is
| in the closest large town (40k) about an hour away.
|
| Are there bus lines in the middle of nowhere?
| wombat-man wrote:
| If you're around or on the way to a popular hike I've seen
| buses run out to some more remote spots. But probably really
| depends on the county.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Rural transit exists in some places but certainly is not
| common in the US like it is in e.g. eastern Europe
| II2II wrote:
| Granted, this was 20 years ago, but I remember taking the
| Greyhound and people were getting on or off the bus in the
| middle of nowhere. By nowhere, I mean the nowhere in the
| literal sense: at the intersection of two highways in the
| northern Ontario with no other development in sight. Of
| course, they also serviced the other types of nowhere: the
| lone gas station or the tiny village.
|
| The author is being somewhat misleading in the sense that
| this is not the type of bus service that one would use for
| your weekly commute to that 10 hour shift at the gas station,
| never mind the three or four times per week that you would
| need to cover the bills. It may be fine doing errands in
| town, where the arrival time and departure time don't much
| matter. It may also be fine for spending a day or two in the
| city, assuming you have the budget to stay over night.
|
| I'm not saying that the type of lifestyle alluded to is
| impossible, but it is not going to be the type of lifestyle
| accessible to young people. Then there is the question about
| whether they are equipped to live that type of lifestyle.
| xp84 wrote:
| I agree that the bus in the scenario is implausible for
| most. But in real life, most rural people would simply own
| a car. The author describes car ownership's costs
| hyperbolically, but unless you're doing long-distance
| commuting, driving a $5000 car wouldn't add more than $200
| to his monthly budget, which wouldn't change the math
| dramatically, while I'd argue it would improve quality of
| life tremendously, especially because rural America of 2025
| most definitely assumes car ownership in a way that it
| didn't 100 years ago.
| prmoustache wrote:
| What about cycling? If amishes are fine leaving there
| with horse carts as vehicles, there is no reason you
| can't manage using a bicycle.
|
| Even Ottawa is not out of reach at only 80miles.
| II2II wrote:
| That would depend upon the roads and, given that winter
| was mentioned as a feature, maintenance during the winter
| months.
|
| I've done some riding on rural roads with no shoulders,
| and it can be as scary as heck. At least on winding roads
| in wooded areas. That's from the perspective of someone
| who is fine riding on fast and busy urban roads during
| all seasons. Winter maintenance is also a huge issue if
| you are riding to work. If you're doing seasonal work,
| that's fine. You just wait until everything is plowed for
| winter forays. If you're working all seasons, you cannot
| maintain a job when you cannot reliably reach the job
| site.
| prmoustache wrote:
| My experience when I was commuting by bicycle all year in
| Switzerland, is that drivers had a more complicated time
| than I had when it was snowing and roads were icy. I had
| a dedicated bicycle for these kind of situation with
| studded tires.
|
| More often than not people are put off cycling by weather
| conditions not because it is that hard, but because they
| haven't put enough thoughts and preparation. Most people
| ride bicycle with subpar or no lightning, fenders, and
| more often than not have the wrong tires and protective
| gears for the job. This require a wee bit of investment
| but totally negligible compared to the money that is
| usually spent on a car.
| palmfacehn wrote:
| I lived like this when I was younger and single. Most
| here, even the self-identified cyclists would scoff at
| it. It isn't for everyone. There are definite advantages
| in terms of health and overall robustness. If you are
| acclimatized to pedaling around in freezing weather and
| hauling in all of your supplies, you probably won't have
| a problem with wood heating.
|
| That said, I don't think it would be fair to expect my
| wife to enjoy that lifestyle. I cannot imagine taking a
| child to a dental appointment under those circumstances.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| A $200 cost is a nearly 50% increase to the budget.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Some times, Boulder Creek is in the mountains between Santa
| Cruz and San Jose (it's more remote than it sounds I
| think)and it gets regular bus service on winding two lane
| roads and there's a stop at Big Basin State Park where
| there's no cell service in wide swaths of valleys and
| mountain sides.
| maxerickson wrote:
| A lot of smaller counties have a publicly operated demand
| response service that includes small buses, or at least some
| vehicle that is able to transport someone in a wheelchair.
|
| So not a regular service schedule, but you can call and
| schedule a ride and it won't cost a lot.
| projektfu wrote:
| St. Lawrence County does offer several shuttles that run only
| 1-4 times per day in each direction. It is probably better to
| add a bike or e-bike to the list.
|
| I think when people write these articles, they should have
| lived the life instead of just totaling a few expenses. It is
| very hard to live without at least a few unforeseen expenses
| above the base budget. The life proposed here is like a 19th
| century life, waiting for the stagecoach to take you to where
| you can pay your property taxes, and then spending the day in
| town because the next stagecoach out doesn't come for hours.
| skyyler wrote:
| The lack of a budget for heating in an article that uses the
| term "American Siberia" is so hilariously out of touch that it
| makes the rest of the article farcical.
| rconti wrote:
| Apparently it's "free Amish wood" or "a little extra in
| electricity"... which, as someone who lives in a temperate
| area, is a stunningly low price to imagine for electric heat
| in somewhere cold.
| garciasn wrote:
| It's a 600 ft home with electricity at 0.04kWh. As someone
| who owns a 400 sq ft uninsulated cabin in MN, with rates
| closer to 4x that, I can tell you it's about $100/month to
| heat it with electricity.
|
| I guess, if the math holds, you would be paying around
| $50/month to heat it in the winter months.
|
| E: changed kW/h to kWh per the nice commenter who suggested
| as much below.
| jaapz wrote:
| Fyi it's kWh not kW/h
| tomcar288 wrote:
| you could get a wood burning stove heater. as long as you
| have enough trees to be sustainable, burning firewood is a
| great way to go. and with the clean burning filters they have
| now a days, you'll much much better off than from the days
| when they used to burn fires inside a house with no
| container/stove/filters or even a chiminey at all! (just a
| hole in the roof if you were lucky.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| You can get by with a woodburner without buying wood in a
| fairly large city if you collected the odd car load during
| the year.
|
| That said, it might be a better use of time to work, then
| get the wood delivered.
| xp84 wrote:
| Literally mentioned in the article. Their electricity is
| literally less than 0.1x what I pay in California.
| coolcase wrote:
| Should be budgeted though right.
| lesuorac wrote:
| It's mentioned as the article as free from using waste
| wood.
| shlant wrote:
| so people are just delivering free wood to anyone who
| chooses to move out to the boonies? Seems like a bad
| assumption to be making
| lesuorac wrote:
| well, specific people are delivering free _waste_ wood to
| people specifically near them.
|
| Kinda like those people that got free _waste_ oil from
| restaurants to run their vans. It's not something you can
| replicate literally anywhere but it does exist.
| Industrial waste has to be disposed of somehow and often
| people are happy for you to accept it for free.
| lolinder wrote:
| Heat is mentioned in passing with literally no attempt at
| quantifying the cost:
|
| > as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little
| extra in electric for that -- or they could have the Amish
| deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a
| wood stove, very cheaply.
|
| That's it. The line in the budget for heat is there and was
| left intentionally blank:
|
| > Heat:
|
| You can't just hand-wave away the cost of electric heating
| at the temperatures they get in upstate NY, even if the
| 0.04 number is accurate year-round (which it almost
| certainly isn't), and wood-burning stoves use _way_ more
| wood than the author appears to be imagining with their
| "scrap wood" comment.
|
| [0] https://www.usclimatedata.com/climate/massena/new-
| york/unite...
| bregma wrote:
| I live just over an hour north of this place. Until recently
| I heated my log cabin exclusively with wood.
|
| It takes somewhere between 7 and 9 cubic metres of wood a
| year to heat about 800 square feet of house. It costs about
| CAD 1500 for a tandem load of sawlogs plus the cost of fuel
| and maintenance of the chainsaw and hydraulic splitter plus
| about 100 hours of labour bucking, splitting, hauling, and
| stacking. And still there are mornings when I had to break
| the ice on the dog's water bowl in the kitchen when it's been
| below -30 C for several days in a row.
|
| You're not going to survive a winter in that part of North
| America with just "a few scraps of wood" for heat. "A few
| carloads" is maybe going to take you to Christmas and they'll
| simply find your thawed corpse during a warm spell in March.
| nkurz wrote:
| Good points. I also heat with wood in a northern clime, and
| this seems accurate. I'm a little confused by the units and
| the costs, though. I cut my own, so I'm not sure how much a
| tandem truck holds, but am I right that your $1500 CDN load
| of sawlogs ($1100 USD) is enough for several years of
| heating? My quick search suggests that a tandem load might
| be around 12 full cords (44 m^3), and thus be enough for 5
| years for you. Is this about right?
| dangus wrote:
| I will say, at this income level you're on Medicaid. It would
| be more than nothing but very basic, and if you're using
| government assistance than you aren't really "escaping"
| modernity, you're actually living off of the economic surplus
| of all the people working hard in the rat race. (Don't
| misinterpret me as saying that social safety nets are bad, I am
| all for them, but I'm just saying - if the author of this
| article gets cancer I bet they'll want to visit a hospital
| where doctors are working 12 hour shifts grinding out the era
| of "overabundance.")
|
| But it is extremely important to point out that the American
| "rat race" cities subsidize areas like this. There would be no
| road in front of this house without those subsidies. These
| areas are net negative economic contributors that depend on
| federal and state funding to exist, including that bus transit
| that this person is relying on (not to mention the American
| factory workers who grind out their shifts in urban centers to
| make those buses).
|
| The author claims to be living the life of great-grandparents,
| but it's not like he's a subsistence farmer or something. As a
| metaphor it's kind of like claiming you're a wild animal living
| out in the wilderness living a simple life of virtue when in
| reality this existence is more similar to a raccoon living out
| of the dumpster of modern society's surplus.
|
| Why bother building a self-sufficient community like the Amish
| where they build their own homes and grow their own food and
| build their own buggies, clothes, furniture, and breed their
| own horses when you can survive in a cheap depreciated house
| someone else built, use the library and transportation that
| other working people pay for, and the roads that were built by
| the workers who actually work some significant hours?
|
| I am sure it works on some level but it doesn't seem to me to
| be a very positive alternative to a lot of other lifestyles.
|
| Apart from all that, there are so many flaws with this article.
|
| The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost, I guess it's
| just assuming you're paying cash? How does a person with this
| kind of lack of gainful employment come up with $29k?
|
| Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep and
| potentially replacement and re-drilling.
|
| Most rural towns in the US absolutely do not have this transit
| available. You'll need a working maintained car plus insurance
| almost everywhere that looks like this.
|
| Internet, use library - again, with what car? Aren't a lot of
| the methods available to make income dependent on internet
| access?
|
| The heat budget is just blank which makes no sense, heat in
| upstate new york is not cheap as you need a lot of it.
|
| Education for your kids? How is that going to look out there?
| Are they going to be trapped here? Will they even have the
| option to opt out of this lifestyle? How easy will it be to do
| homework at home with no internet? You'll rely on a rural bus
| schedule and use the library during open hours only?
|
| I might also point out that a lot of modern society lifestyles
| that aren't so far on this side of extreme of frugality are
| really easy and comfortable lives. Not all of them, a lot of
| people live difficult modern lives, but at the same time the
| "most people" who left the farm to get a job in the city did so
| for a reason.
|
| I guess you could say that the extremes of society can make for
| some interesting reading.
| ars wrote:
| > But it is extremely important to point out that the
| American "rat race" cities 100% subsidize areas like this.
|
| It's even more important to point out that places like this
| grow the food and do the manufacturing that those "cities"
| you like would collapse without.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Yeah, but the farmers and factory workers are working more
| than one ten-hour shift per week.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Which implies the public roads have a positive economic
| value - the earlier post did refer to the area not to the
| people like the author of the blog post
| dangus wrote:
| Don't mistake my comment as being pro-city at the expense
| of rural areas.
|
| The author isn't growing any food, they're just living
| adjacent to those people.
|
| Most manufacturing happens in close proximity to major
| cities.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| I think most of your points are fair ones. I also feel that
| it's rather cynical to drop out of the "rat race" by relying
| on the participation of lots of other people to pay for your
| Medicaid expense and so on. However, on average, there are
| just so few people doing this type of thing that I don't
| think we have to worry about free riders damaging the system.
| Most people who complain about the rat race aren't willing to
| take the extreme steps that this guy is suggesting in order
| to get out of it.
|
| > The budget didn't include mortgage/housing cost
|
| True, but I don't think you can get a mortgage for a $29K
| house. I'm guessing the guy is saving up for his house by
| sticking in the rat race until he's got his $29K saved up
| (presumably made easier with his wife?). Then, he shops
| around for a house on a bus route. I suspect it is possible,
| especially in a state like NY.
|
| > if the author of this article gets cancer I bet they'll
| want to visit a hospital where doctors are working 12 hour
| shifts grinding out the era of "overabundance."
|
| This is one point where I disagree. I'd really rather that
| doctors were working shorter hours. I don't want someone
| taking care of me if they're at the end of a 12 hour shift.
| Forget about the fact that it's so bad for her, it's also bad
| for me and the level of care that I get.
|
| > Water is $0? Even well water requires some level of upkeep
|
| Oh yeah, we just paid $800 to replace our pressure tank. His
| roof will need to be replaced one day, the gutters will leak,
| etc.
|
| I actually think I detect a bit of tongue-in-cheek in the
| article. I think this guy will do this for a while, enjoy his
| adventure, and then go do something else.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I think most of your points are fair ones. I also feel
| that it's rather cynical to drop out of the "rat race" by
| relying on the participation of lots of other people to pay
| for your Medicaid expense and so on. However, on average,
| there are just so few people doing this type of thing that
| I don't think we have to worry about free riders damaging
| the system.
|
| It's one of those cases where the "freeloading" is more
| miserable than just working, which is why abuse isn't
| rampant.
| wanderingbit wrote:
| The author mentions putting 20% down and getting a
| mortgage. Even with insurance, for a 10 year mortgage 29k
| is 430 per month. Or you live with your parents and save on
| $1500 rent for 2 years, bam you can buy it with cash.
| dangus wrote:
| Then the author proceeded to not include that cost in the
| example budget. They even had the gall to mention having
| a 700 credit score to buy such a house.
|
| Not a lot of people with this kind of low budget have a
| 700 credit score.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Slight digression but shorter clinical shifts mean more
| handovers, and those carry their own risk of error.
| iammrpayments wrote:
| I'm not sure if the "rat race" actually produces real wealth
| to subsidize this.
|
| If anything you could say we're able to subsidize this
| despite the "rat race".
| margalabargala wrote:
| The "rat race" refers to the economic engine that is
| American society.
| hasbot wrote:
| I was on Medicaid for three or four years and had much better
| healthcare than when I was on an employer plan. Employer Plan
| w/ a shoulder injury: no MRI until three months of PT
| (physical therapy without knowing what the issue is????).
| Medicaid w/ a foot injury: MRI, physical therapy, option for
| surgery.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I see a couple of specialist that explicitly state they
| aren't taking any more Medicaid patients. I'm not on
| Medicaid. But I assume if you have any type of need for
| more than just a GP, you're going to find your choices more
| limited.
| hasbot wrote:
| Oh definitely there are fewer provider options with
| Medicaid and Medicare, again, in my experience, I
| received better _healthcare_ than I did with an employer
| _insurance_ plan.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > you're actually living off of the economic surplus of all
| the people working hard in the rat race.
|
| That's one way to look at it.
|
| Another way is that you're living off of the economic surplus
| you were producing while working a highly paid 9-5 job that
| paid a shitload of taxes. Now it's your time to live off the
| surplus you produced and take it easier.
|
| > I am sure it works on some level but it doesn't seem to me
| to be a very positive alternative to a lot of other
| lifestyles.
|
| It's not a very positive lifestyle from the standpoint of
| increasing the GDP to some maximum amount, yeah.
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| > hope you don't need to see a doctor for anything serious, or
| go to a dentist for that mater.
|
| That's the first thing I thought about.
|
| His budget of $432/mo doesn't include health insurance. But
| $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's assume he's
| on Medicaid, then. In NY state, that covers quite a lot of
| dental care, if you believe this:
| https://www.health.ny.gov/health_care/medicaid/program/denta...
| Not saying it's a good option, but it's there.
|
| > Taking the bus that goes 3 times a day is one thing, needing
| to move stuff is another thing.
|
| What kind of things do you think he might be moving? He
| probably has just about no possessions with that budget (and a
| 600 sq ft house). In a pinch, perhaps he can rent a truck from
| Home Depot. Apparently, there _is_ a Home Depot in Massena, NY,
| so maybe it 's not quite so far out in the boonies as it seems.
|
| Personally, I wouldn't do it - the lack of choice would get
| very unpleasant very fast. But it could work for some.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Yep, it could work for some. And I think that's his point.
| Depending on how much meatspace socializing / culture one
| wants/needs. Library internet, meh ... but working 3 more
| hours at Stewart's would take care of that ... and access to
| a hyuge amount of entertainment, news, online spaces.
| Readers, writers, painters, DIYers. At $0.04 per kWh, keeping
| a small room warm in the winter is trivial ... could be
| worse!
| fifilura wrote:
| > but working 3 more hours at Stewart's
|
| And working 5 more hours would get him a some better garden
| tools, and 20 more he could support a family of 3 And if he
| just got a higher paying job, he could even get a car!
| fifilura wrote:
| (This was obviously a image of the slippery-slope most of
| us fall into)
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> But $5K/y probably gets him Medicaid eligibility. Let's
| assume he's on Medicaid, then.
|
| If he is on medicaid then he isn't "living" on 432/month.
| That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid is
| worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
|
| Then the kids need schooling, either in-person or remote.
| that is another 10k/year/kid. And you need some sort of local
| police/justice system to ensure nobody boots you off your
| homestead. But even once you account for all those local
| costs, there are things like national security. Living a
| peaceful life on a remote farm is only possible because the
| country is ringed by police and armed forces. Those things
| may be a thousand miles away, but someone still has to pay
| for them.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > That would be living on 432/month PLUS whatever medicaid
| is worth, likely well north of another 500/month.
|
| Well, not for long at this rate.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| That's a fun topic. The US government pays just over 19k
| per person. This means you need to make 100-150k (I came up
| with 126 with a standard deduction and normal credits) to
| "break even."
| s09dfhks wrote:
| In the comments on the article, the author says "we treat what
| we can at home, otherwise we go to Mexico and pay cash"
|
| Oy vey
| antisthenes wrote:
| That says a lot more about the dysfunctional US healthcare
| system than it does about the author.
| RajT88 wrote:
| You read articles like this every so often, sure. Maybe ~13
| years back I read about an indie game dev who lived in a carbon
| neutral home in the middle of nowhere Arizona or something.
| Beautiful house, hand built. Talked about how you really don't
| need all that much money to live - they were living on less
| than 20k a year from his game sales.
|
| Him and his wife were also in their 20's, and their kids I
| think were already a few years old when they moved to the
| boonies. All healthy.
|
| It's an extreme example, but this is a good read:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family
| gyomu wrote:
| For anyone curious, the game dev is Jason Rohrer:
|
| https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-
| rohrer/simpleLife.h...
|
| Things have changed since:
|
| "In October of 2011, we moved from Las Cruces, NM to Davis,
| CA. Along with all the good things listed below about Las
| Cruces came bad things. Vicious dogs loose on the streets
| (one bit my wife while biking) and in parks (I came close to
| getting myself shot during a confrontation with a dog owner).
| Crime (the little old lady next door got burgled twice in one
| year, once at 3 in the afternoon through her front door).
| After living in extremely cheap places for 8 years, I came to
| realize that these places are extremely cheap for a reason
| (because people don't want to live there if they can avoid
| it)."
| decimalenough wrote:
| Zillow says the average house in Davis costs $890k. Looks
| like they've pretty much given up on the "life cheaply"
| thing.
| gyomu wrote:
| The main page of his website now says New Hampshire
|
| https://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/
| ryandrake wrote:
| Reminds me of that past HN story [1] about that guy who
| moved to the least expensive rural town he could find to
| start a cheap business, and had nothing but trouble.
| Between burglary after burglary, locals that hate his guts,
| local government stopping him from doing anything, and just
| the general shittiness and malaise of living in a depressed
| town. The guy kept doubling down, too, buying property
| after property and ended up owning 75 or so properties,
| while his problems kept multiplying.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39802157
| noisy_boy wrote:
| These are "young people" things. The older you get, the more
| dependent you are on the society and it's benefits.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Not close from my parents home is a small farm collective of
| mostly ex hippies who have been living there communally for
| decades with people well into their 80s now. It was so
| successful that the city, taking that as inspiration, ran
| trials of creating more autonomous senior communities that
| are largely self supervised, including even people with
| dementia.
|
| From what I heard it works extremely well, not the least
| because it's more dignified and keeps people engaged, active,
| and self reliant. The modern notion of the drooling,
| dependent nursing home patient is a product of our
| (artificially!) atomized system.
| jader201 wrote:
| > _I honestly don 't know how anyone can live out in the
| boonies without a car._
|
| Why would you want to live out in the boonies without owning a
| car?
|
| Just get a car.
|
| They're not _that_ expensive, you can get a used beater for not
| much more than an iPhone. If you don't want a beater, you can
| probably afford to spend a little more with the money you save
| from living out in the boonies.
|
| Most people who live in the boonies owns a car.
| sandspar wrote:
| Interesting how the author says that people tend to react
| bitterly when he says stuff like this. And sure enough, the
| HackerNews comments are mostly people reacting bitterly.
| nkurz wrote:
| Even beyond the comments, this article was immediately flagged
| dead despite many upvotes. Then enough people vouched for it to
| bring it back. I don't find it controversial or inappropriate,
| but many people apparently do.
|
| If you (generic you, not parent) happen to be one of those who
| flagged it, maybe you could explain why?
| poopsmithe wrote:
| How do you find a property like that? Is there a Zillow for cheap
| rural land?
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| My cheap rural place is on Zillow, so you can probably just use
| that. Pull up a map, identify a couple of large cities (St.
| Louis and Kansas City, for instance), find a point between
| them, and zoom in. Repeat until you find a spot you like. It's
| a really, really big country and most of it isn't urban, so
| there are lots of places to choose from, with a wide variety of
| weather conditions, population densities, and other aspects.
| theendisney wrote:
| An expert told me there are places to earn and places to spend in
| the world. In the cheap places to spend you might want a fun job
| with very little pay and few hours. You for example earn 400 and
| spend 600 per month. In the places to earn you should try not to
| live at all. Ideal is to work 84 hour weeks for 15-20 bucks, rent
| a bunk bed with a shared kitchen and bathroom and eat whatever
| cheap crap you can stomach. 50 for the bed 100 for food, save
| something like 1400. Every week not living like that buys 6-7
| MONTHS in the afordable location. Two weeks is a year. Clearly
| you dont actually need to live. You do 2 to 12 weeks of pure
| work, enough to slightly burn out. This will make the 1 to 6 year
| vacation all the more enjoyable.
|
| You also have money in the bank so if you feel the need to burn a
| few thousand on something you can. It will shorten the vacation
| but who needs 6 years seriously?
| ianferrel wrote:
| I like this article. I think it's a little unrealistic in many
| ways, but it's good to consider that a life does not require
| extravagance. However:
|
| >often enough, the "boomers" are the scapegoat; the ones who
| lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go, pulled up
| the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes.
|
| >They'd merely need to content themselves with a manner of living
| that would be more in line with that of their own great-
| grandfathers
|
| The problem isn't that we can affordably live like our great-
| grandparents. It's that we _can 't_ affordably live like our
| parents and grandparents did.
| shusaku wrote:
| Hold up. You don't need a car due to a robust transportation
| system. You don't work too much because of a high minimum wage.
| Health care is free. Retirement is handled by someone else.
| Education expenses are free. Child raising expenses free! You are
| provided free entertainment, news, etc at the library. The author
| forgot about how they were going to pay for clothing, etc, but
| there's food stamps on the other side of the balance. Your taxes
| are zero, paid by richer people. The 29k payment for your house
| is taken from a homesteading fund.
|
| Somehow I think grandpa would be suspicious of this tale of
| bootstrapping just being socialism. But why not? I think people
| in the left have been insisting that if we gave people a robust
| baseline for free (by taxing the rich), we could revive this sort
| of lifestyle.
| chachacharge wrote:
| yes, Massena and Ogensburg. Plagues of flies and mosquitos.
| Frozen car batteries. Snow plows. Rust.
| eraviloi wrote:
| So many folks bashing the author. The message is clear, most
| people are not willing to alter their lives to live more
| comfortably.
|
| Whether that is giving up living in comfort or making small
| changes to their habits.
|
| I think the relevant commentary here is to look at what happiness
| looks like for you. For a lot of folks they are just going to
| mentally masturbate to alternative ways in life. For the select
| few that make those changes content like this is critical.
|
| Thanks for spreading the seeds.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| I think the author is arguing against their own point with the
| illustration they chose. The very last picture can be found in
| the Wikipedia page for the Homestead Act and, two jumps later,
| one can find themselves in the Dutch version of "Sod house" [1]
| which has this to say:
|
| > _The living conditions there were miserable. Due to the
| construction method, the room was difficult to heat, it was damp
| and teeming with vermin. (...) The Housing Act of 1901 prohibited
| living in sod huts._
|
| If the author says "you can live like your grandparents" to mean
| "in conditions that were already considered miserable for the
| standards of 1901", that's not a great selling point. And while I
| sympathize with the underlying message to a point, I would argue
| against romanticizing the past. Sure, my grandfather lived in a
| cheap house he built himself, but he also came back home every
| day with bleeding fingers that my grandmother would treat.
|
| [1] https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaggenhut
| tantalor wrote:
| The point could be taken in the other way, as in "hey at least
| you don't have to live in a house made of dirt, right?"
| Comparably you are much better off, so there is no point in
| complaining. They made it work. Sure it wasn't great, but we're
| all passed that now, standards are _much_ better.
| onecommentman wrote:
| Adobe (dried mud) homes in Santa Fe go for well north of a
| million dollars US. I'll take a couple of those myself.
| Centigonal wrote:
| adobe and sod are very different materials, and the
| climates they are built in are very different, too.
| Technically, a brick manor is made of dirt, too.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I don't know why they chose that picture, but it's also not
| really related to the argument of the essay.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| It's sure ironic that they chose those photos, to be sure, but
| I don't think it detracts from the words, which describe
| conditions much better than that.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I lived in a place purely heated by a wood stove in the Yukon.
| It was glorious, easily best heat and nicest feel ever. When it
| was past -40 I'd get up at 1am to put in more wood, otherwise
| I'd have to spend 30 minutes in the morning lighting it again.
|
| Places heated with wood stoves are NOT damp or miserable. I
| loved it. Working on doing it again.
| oneshotpez wrote:
| Wow tending a fire 24/7 so I don't die. Living the life, yo.
| testing22321 wrote:
| I Put wood in it twice a day in winter three when it was
| proper cold. Never in summer. New ones that have a
| catalytic combustor go 24 hours without touching them easy.
|
| Also you miss the point. For tending the wood stove a few
| times a day in winter I got to not go to work 30 hours a
| week.
| righthand wrote:
| My father is the son of homesteaders and while he didn't live
| in the original homesteader shack. He lived in the version
| after it. Eventually they built a nice house for themselves. He
| recalled having a weird enjoyment burning down the old crappy
| tarpaper childhood home.
| orzig wrote:
| The author mentions they're just about to have a baby, and it's
| notable that they don't talk about the quality of the schools.
| Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to have
| some friends, and they didn't talk about how that would work
| without a car. Once they get a car, they might get a little bit
| unlucky and live an hour away from their kid's closest peer. I
| hope they get along!
| fullStackOasis wrote:
| > Even if they homeschooled, I imagine they want their kids to
| have some friends, and they didn't talk about how that would
| work without a car.
|
| Why do you assume that they are no kids in the neighborhood?
|
| I suppose another option is that they don't actually care if
| their kids have friends. Perhaps parents are enough, in their
| view.
| wredcoll wrote:
| Where are they going to go if the birth is complicated? Just
| bleed out on the floor of their hut?
| tokai wrote:
| <<My wife took down and died upon the cabin floor / And I
| ain't got no home in this world anymore>>
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUgzXJACXzs
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Even more recently: https://genius.com/Phil-collins-the-
| roof-is-leaking-lyrics
|
| "My wife's expecting, but I hope she can wait. 'Cause this
| winter looks like it's gonna be another bad one"
|
| "The roof is leaking and the wind is howling, Kids are
| crying 'cause the sheets are so cold. Woke this morning,
| found my hands were frozen, I've tried to fix the fire, but
| you know, the damn thing's too old."
| zachlatta wrote:
| I checked and the quality of schools there are fine! 75% of
| students in high school at grade level in math and reading.
| Pretty normal.
| omosubi wrote:
| I think think is doable, but how would you find a partner that is
| willing to do it? how many men or women are interested in this
| that are also the kind of people that read substack regularly?
| bradlys wrote:
| Plenty of retvrn types that are terminally online. You're not
| likely finding them in person though in a major city. They're
| probably barely scrapping by in a MCOL and don't go out - thus,
| find them online.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Is this the place? https://redf.in/UXIUBi
| datavirtue wrote:
| The US is packed with vacant infrastructure over hundreds of
| dying cities where you can get a nice home that has electricity,
| water and sewer and trash removal and schools etc...for dirt
| cheap.
|
| You could make the payment trading options with an almost meager
| portfolio. Evil stock market and corporations could buy you a
| free house.
| lwansbrough wrote:
| In the 4th paragraph the author suggests that the economic
| backbone of the country - young people - simply desert economic
| centres of growth and prosperity and to instead assume a life of
| poverty in a rural teardown. A life substantially worse than
| their parents live, simply because their parents don't want more
| homes near their own home.
|
| I didn't bother to check if the article gets any more serious
| from there.
| tomcar288 wrote:
| I think a lot of people are taking it as a precise prescription.
| Rather, I think it's the main idea that counts: you can downsize
| and reduce your expenses by quite a bit. I think this will become
| ever more important going into the future as the standard of
| living continues to erode, as it has done for the last 27 years.
| jppope wrote:
| I think a lot of people are missing the larger point. Yes its
| very possible to live quite inexpensively in the American
| Siberia... thats not what the author is really getting at. The
| Author is pointing out that there is a HUGE opportunity for young
| americans to live in places that aren't a handful of large Metros
| with outrageous housing costs lots of these places are the
| heartland, where it is socially unacceptable now for costal
| middle class adults go.
|
| The authors point resinates for me, and I've seen a different but
| related model by friends - A couple (Dentist and small business
| owner) living in semi-rural Kansas (city pop ~40K). Their
| contention was that normal people in a normal week eat some food,
| go to work, do kid stuff (school, practices, etc), workout, watch
| some TV, and sleep a bunch... And theres really nothing about
| that that is needs to be in a major metro, so they moved to a
| place where college educated adults from the coasts dare not go-
| Kansas. The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the
| food, culture, etc... and what they did was take a trip one a
| month to live like kings...
|
| Can you imagine how much more fun you can have with ~400K of
| disposable income (after living expenses)? Seeing the trips
| they've taken and the adventures they were able to afford because
| their 7 bedroom 5 bath house cost ~400K (movie theater and
| all)... was mind boggling to me. It was all for the small cost of
| not being able to get access to the metros during the week. Seems
| worth it to me...
| lfowles wrote:
| > The recognize the useful stuff from the metros are the food,
| culture, etc...
|
| Probably most importantly, a thriving job market
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I sometimes wonder how much Amish have to spend a month.
| jebarker wrote:
| > At the end of it, most people don't want to live this way.
| That's OK -- I'm not here to judge them.
|
| What would you judge them for even if you were here for that?
| tinyplanets wrote:
| I think the author's main argument is interesting, and despite
| the good counter arguments already made in this thread (health
| care, car dependency, social isolation), it does make me think a
| bit about where I could possibly retire. I live in a smallish,
| highly-desirable city just north of Seattle that - while being
| pleasant to live in - is becoming extremely expensive.
|
| For me, one of the biggest issues with living out in a small
| rural town like this is the culture. From my experience, the
| majority of rural areas in the United States are now extremely
| politically conservative. Going anywhere outside of the Puget
| Sound metroplex always reminds me of this reality... lots of MAGA
| and confederate flags, billboards promoting the latest ultra
| right wing candidate, etc.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Worse than a Boomer who got his and pulled up the ladder is a
| Boomer who got his, pulled up the ladder, and lectures a
| youngster to go live in a miserable cold place in the middle of
| nowhere with no heat.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| My main takeaway from the article is that I agree it benefits the
| younger generation of Americans to consider moving abroad if they
| are comfortable with a different lifestyle where consumerism is
| secondary to adaptation. Personally I'm looking forward to
| traveling to places where being a Blues Guitarist from Texas
| might be a curiosity rather than a liability (such as in Texas).
| The biggest export, decade after decade, the US can cite is
| "culture" and "what is cool" and though other countries do have
| significantly different political / authority structures, I'm
| interested in exploring them. Nepal, Panama, Albania, and Vietnam
| are all on my list.
|
| Going into the armpit forgotten realms of the US is, however, not
| appealing in the least despite its financial practicality on
| limited means.
| fencepost wrote:
| So, it's a stationary alternative to the "van life" trend that
| floats around sometimes.
|
| Massena's about the size of the town we moved my parents from
| after my father had a stroke, though it's a lot poorer (in 2013
| nearly a third of the population was below the poverty line, and
| that's before Alcoa closed a chunk of operations there). It does
| have a hospital (25 beds, not-for-profit) and given the
| demographics I'm 100% positive that it's one of those hospitals
| that *needs* Medicaid to survive.
|
| I'm pretty sure that doing this really would feel a lot like
| going back and living like your grandparents or great-
| grandparents did - all the joys of the 1950s.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if there was data center work available
| though - with cheap power there's probably someone there doing
| cryptomining or maybe even hosting AI processing.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Yep, they already thought of the cryptoming angle:
| https://www.nccs.one/
| Jackson__ wrote:
| >Taxes: $41
|
| >Electric: ~$30
|
| >Water: $0
|
| >Transit: $53 for a 30-ride pass for each person living there
|
| >Food: ~$300/mo.
|
| >Telephone: $8/mo
|
| >Entertainment: Fishing and library, free
|
| >Internet: Use library
|
| >Medical costs in case a moose kicks you in the nuts while
| fishing: ~$500000
|
| Someone help me manage my budget, my family is dying.
| y-curious wrote:
| Also your offspring need to go to schools paid for by local
| taxes. Ruhroh.
| xp84 wrote:
| I've commented (probably too much) to argue with the harshest
| critics of this piece, but I am surprised to not have seen much
| this criticism which is my main one:
|
| Supposing I've made peace with the main gist of this: Cut living
| expenses to a point where you can work 1/4 or so of the time most
| of us spend working by living somewhere cheap and not being so
| materialistic.
|
| The missing piece here is social connections. Family and friends.
| If I could take my in-laws and my 2 best friends and their
| families with me, I'd sign up to move to a rural place like this
| tomorrow. But it's impractical for nearly everyone in the whole
| country to make such a thing happen. This limits its appeal. This
| place is 90 minutes or so from the Montreal airport, which is
| actually not bad for rural places, but flights are not cheap,
| certainly not accessible on the budget described here, so for you
| to have contact with _anyone_ outside this town, they 're likely
| going to have to drop about $500 per person, per visit, and will
| be staying at the Super 8 since you probably don't have a guest
| room). So, implied but not acknowledged in this piece is the
| assumption that you are almost definitely going to only see your
| family and friends a few more times (maybe once a year each, if
| you're super lucky) for the rest of your life.
|
| And unlike questions of money; food, entertainment, family and
| friends aren't fungible. You can start over and hope to make new
| friends out there, but you can't replace people. This is what
| would make this life untenable to me, and I'm not even all that
| extraverted.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Any discussion of staying near family and friends on a forum
| predominated by startups out of the bay area is completely
| disingenuous.
|
| But that aside, I suggest this is front page and meaningful not
| because it brings up a third option (to stay home, move to a
| city, or move to rural NY), but instead because it advocates
| accidentally for just _staying home_. Your family probably
| already lives in an area that is more affordable than SF
| /NYC/Paris, and they are there waiting. It's entertaining as an
| extreme data point but motivating for other reasons
|
| This article is most interesting to me because I tried moving
| to the big city to be a big shot techie, and have been
| substantially happier living outside a major city in Minnesota.
|
| Absolutely nobody that I knew in those cities lived near their
| family, absolutely all of them moved away to chase fortune and
| fame.
| lesuorac wrote:
| Eh, perhaps a curious administrator can share the data but I
| really suspect just through sheer numbers most people on this
| forum do not live in the bay area.
|
| The NYC metro area is 23 million [1] which is about 7% of the
| country (23/300). There's a good chance somebody who works in
| NYC grew up nearby.
|
| That said, if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and
| then retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead... Even if
| rent is twice as expensive in SF, if your salary is twice
| that then your savings are also twice as much which will go a
| longer way anywhere but SF.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_metropolitan_area
| Retric wrote:
| People aren't simply moving into the city locally the
| numbers just don't work.
|
| The demographics of NYC require and support the idea of a
| huge and constant flux of people from distant areas moving
| into and out of the city which matches people's
| observations. Even the gender divide is abnormal, the
| largest age group is 25-29 for women and 30-34 for men
| despite more men being born vs women living longer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
| barry-cotter wrote:
| The metro area, not the city. That extends into New
| Jersey and Connecticut.
| Retric wrote:
| I'm saying the "local metro area" just doesn't have the
| population to support that kind of migration pattern on
| its own.
|
| Sure plenty of locals move into the city just as with any
| city, what sets NYC apart is it draws in people from much
| longer distances before most of them leave. The elderly
| population in NYC being relatively tiny.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> if you chase fortune and fame for a decade and then
| retire to Minnesota you still come out ahead
|
| And the locals start to hate you for buying up land and
| generally raising prices enough that working folk are
| squeezed out of the market. Some areas are starting to
| enact laws to prevent productive farmland becoming condos
| and hobby farms for retiring city people.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Not in MN. Nobody is moving here to retire. And there's
| plenty of rural land to go around.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The land is part of the equation, but more so the impact
| on government services. More retirees is more burden on
| local healthcare and emergency response. They may
| contribute to the local tax base, but the turnaround
| between increased population and new hospitals/firehalls
| is often measured in decades. Have a look at how long it
| takes to get a new firetruck these days, let alone the
| people to run it.
| ryandrake wrote:
| For a while we were looking to move out to a more rural
| State and work remotely. More than one realtor let us
| know that the seller's price was ~10-20% more for us than
| the advertised list price because we are from California.
| I guess we have a reputation or something. Or it's just
| plain old price discrimination. Ok. I won't make an offer
| and buy your house that you are trying to sell, then. Is
| that what you want, smart guy?
| yodsanklai wrote:
| A lot of people in this forum don't even live in the US (if
| not most).
| tbihl wrote:
| "Disingenuous" is a bridge too far (and worth mentioning
| because it impugns intent.) It's easy to get drawn to the
| cities with friends and high pay, then feel like path
| dependency precludes one from returning to the lower COL
| hometown. You tell your story in the third and fourth
| paragraphs because you find it worthy of mention.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| You're right, bad word choice.
|
| But yeah, this lifestyle is mostly madness. I watched
| others stay at home and they have decades of memories,
| families, and paid off houses. Grass is greener.
| 0x445442 wrote:
| A real issue until recently, with remote work as an
| option, was the lack of opportunity to pursue more
| intellectual forms of work in a small rural area. I grew
| up raising cattle and a number of my extended family
| members were loggers. However, I had an aptitude for
| science and math and was bitten by the programming bug
| when I was a teenager. I didn't leave my rural community
| for fame and fortune but for work that was more
| interesting to me.
|
| That said, now that I'm near the end of my career I've
| taken full advantage of remote work by moving to a rural
| area while maintaining similar pay. Honestly I don't know
| why more people haven't taken advantage of this
| significant arbitrage opportunity. To each his own.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I was born in the suburbs, of a moderately large city
| (think low millions) and have lived here all my life. We
| often spend weekends out in the countryside in the quiet
| rural towns.
|
| These towns are somewhat popular with retirees, rural and
| quiet enough but within 2 to 3 hours of the city,
| international Airport, and so on.
|
| Getting closer to my own retirement, discussions about
| "where" have occurred.
|
| Thing is, I actively _don 't_ want to retire there.
| Frankly because there's nothing to do.
|
| As I'm slowly gaining more free time, I want to learn new
| things (music, ceramics, etc) go out more, play more golf
| etc. Small towns with their small shops are lovely to
| unwind in, but personally, not for me full-time.
|
| So yeah, to each his own. Which is great, we are all
| different, with different circumstances, different
| opportunities, different goals.
|
| And yes, high speed internet removes a huge part of "have
| to leave" (or at least adds a big part of "can come
| back") to the equation. Plus remote work can pump
| significant revenue into a small-town economy.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not everyone has a home to go to. Broken families, dead
| families, there may no longer be room at a home, etc.
| Everyone's circumstances are different.
|
| And honestly, based on some cultures, home isn't free either.
| The moment I got back home, I was given a few months to find
| work, but had to pay rent in 3 months no matter what. I was
| doing temp work for one month while interviews finished
| geodel wrote:
| Good point. IME it is quite common all over the world for
| grownups to chip in towards family expense if they are
| staying more than a few weeks back home. If not cash it
| could be some other way.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Of course you are right, not everyone has the option to
| move back in either their parents, and of course that
| option (when available) is often not rent free (nor should
| it be.)
|
| However I don't think that's what the parent poster meant.
| I think he meant "home" is the "home town" sense.
|
| There's a perception that young people (for probably 60
| years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life
| goal. Small towns find it hard to hold on to folk in their
| 20s as they head off into the world seeking the excitement
| of a bigger city, industry location, or indeed just the
| option of choosing from a list of more than 2 places to
| eat.
|
| The parent poster is suggesting that after experiencing
| that, and discovering the negatives (high housing cost
| being one), if you have a job which can be done remotely,
| then Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
|
| Of course this is a viable option for some, and likely not
| for most.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| There are many parents who allow their kids to live rent
| free. First job can then DCA the near entire salary and
| what you save early on compounds like crazy for life.
|
| Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on
| the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder
| if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like
| having a pet.
|
| I was always welcome at my mother's home and she told me
| there would always be shelter and food for me, whenever
| I'd come.
|
| The selfish people who kick their kids out of their home
| at 18 y/o are people best let out of my life.
|
| If a kid is working, I see no reason why parents
| shouldn't let them
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Parents telling kids in this world to "go work 24/7 on
| the treadmill without being able to save" should wonder
| if having kids wasn't something selfish they did like
| having a pet.
|
| Like I said, it's cultural. Some parents literally need
| extra income just to keep the roof over their heads, and
| having an adult dependent at home is still an expense. .
| Some parents simply don't want to facilitate a full on
| NEET lifestyle and want to encourage a proper work ethic.
|
| I agree that a kid won't just figure everything out the
| moment they turn 18, but I can empathize with a child
| also needed to leave their nest one day. Uniersity was
| the perfect environment for that transition, but we
| decided to cut funding for decades and move the costs to
| the 18YO's with no financial sense. A "party school" just
| doesn't make sense anymmore so if we don't treat it as a
| vocational school, you may as well have saved money and
| let them be a NEET for 4 years.
| bruce511 wrote:
| I've no objection to my kids living at home, and there'll
| always be a place for them here.
|
| I charge them rent though - 33% of their gross pay. Not
| cause I need the money but because it allows them to
| afford to move out one day. In other words their
| lifestyle has "rent" built into it.
|
| In other words I'm happy to offer a backstop. I'm less
| happy for them to simply ignore "becoming self sufficient
| adults" just because it's cheaper to live at home.
| HPsquared wrote:
| How about the "rent" going into a savings pot which they
| can use for a downpayment or otherwise reclaim (maybe
| partially) when they move out?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >There's a perception that young people (for probably 60
| years now) see "getting out of this town" as a major life
| goal.
|
| It sort of is. Opportunities in the small towns is
| limited compared to urban areas. As well as other social
| aspects like night life, entertainment, the culture of
| the residents, etc. The people argument of being
| irreplaceable works both ways; you're simply going to get
| more options when you're around more people.
|
| > if you have a job which can be done remotely, then
| Starlink allows you to do that from your home town.
|
| Perhaps. Both Starlink and jobs in general really don't
| want us to have such options, as seen in the last few
| years of layoffs and crashouts. Add in the cable
| monopolies and you see how WFH really isn't stable right
| now without a good connection.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Does anyone actually like nightlife though? Same for
| local entertainments, sure they're a nice extra sometimes
| but nothing worth sacrificing for.
|
| It's all some variation of "crowded into a dark room with
| hundreds of strangers with deafening music, can't see
| anything, can't hear anything".
| fnimick wrote:
| "nobody wants to go there anymore, it's too crowded"
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, Minnesota is awesome, particularly near the Twin
| Cities.
| kiba wrote:
| I am substantially happier that I moved into the big city
| because I built social connections and I don't want to live
| with my parents anymore. Driving down there is insane and I
| wish there was decent transportation option.
|
| I can use electric scooter to move around most days. It's a
| lot more fun than driving my car.
|
| Really, what these places really need is major policy reform
| to make them more livable. There's a reason why these places
| are where people want to live after all.
|
| To help make this happen, I donate to two non-profit that
| works to improve transportation and housing accessibility
| respectively.
| npodbielski wrote:
| Try to use scooter to drive the kids to school at freezing
| temperatures.
|
| > I donate to two non-profit that works to improve
| transportation and housing accessibility respectively.
|
| Most of those are just leeches or just straight political
| agendas or tools for foreign power disruption. You can't
| improve city civil planning outside of city system. At best
| you can beg, bribe officials.
|
| You seem young and naive.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Wow! Name-calling. Baseless accusations. Whataboutism.
| You're really going for it, huh?
| troupo wrote:
| > donate to two non-profit that works to improve
| transportation
|
| Unless those nonprofits work with local government to
| improve transportation, you're donating to scammers
| npodbielski wrote:
| Yes, if you plan to have kids having parents or other family
| near is a big help. Big cities are fine when you are 18-25
| and want to have fun. Near 30 and older you are just tired by
| the noise and other people being around ;)
| drewg123 wrote:
| The problem is that its across an international border from the
| Montreal airport. So you'd need to cross a border twice to fly
| to a domestic US destination and twice more on your return.
| Crossing a border is always an unknown in terms of delays, so I
| question the practicality. I'd personally feel like I needed to
| leave way more than 90 minutes to ge to the airport.
|
| FWIW, I've crossed the border at both Cornwall and Ogdensburg
| when driving to Ottawa, and they were quiet when I crossed.
| Going from the US side to Canada was fast and easy, but the
| reverse wasn't true, and that was several years ago when
| crossing the border was quite a bit less stressful.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Oddly enough, I always spend more time crossing into Canada
| than the US at Ogdensburg, even though I'm a Canadian citizen
| and travelling on a Canadian passport. Had my car searched
| last time. As always, your mileage may vary.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Same crossing, different experience: American citizen (with
| NY Enhanced Drivers License), Canadian First Nations (with
| Secure Certificate of Indian Status). They look at my
| native card and just wave me through.
|
| The single time I got pulled in to go pay tax on a gift for
| someone ($150 USD) they looked at my card and went "I'm not
| dealing with the tax paperwork on that (due to some native
| exemptions)" and waved me back out.
|
| As for local air travel: you'd have to go 30 minutes from
| Massena anyways for 'proper' air travel - Ogdensburg now
| has once-a-day service to DC via Breeze. Traveling to
| Shmoocon was hilarious for only $30 roundtrip.
| xp84 wrote:
| Indeed, though you could probably do pretty well by getting a
| NEXUS membership for this use case. At least for now, though
| obviously US-Canada relations are getting stupider by the
| week so who knows how many dumb roadblocks will end up being
| thrown up.
|
| I just noticed that Syracuse has an airport with passenger
| service, only 2 1/2 hours away, so that's another option, if
| the "international flight" hassle plus border crossing
| actually burns an hour.
| kotaKat wrote:
| Begrudgingly, neither the Ogdensburg nor Massena crossings
| support NEXUS. Closest ones with lanes are up in
| Plattsburgh or Alexandria Bay, and to get a NEXUS interview
| you have to travel the 2 or so hours to central NY.
|
| OGS-IAD flights are great though.
| tangjurine wrote:
| Massena, the place in the article, has an airport. An
| international airport.
|
| Just checked flights from sfo to there, 500 bucks. I don't
| get how this is different than moving to another state for
| work.
| permo-w wrote:
| also, if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing
| or drugs or whatever thing you like that tends to have an
| active and welcoming social community that you're willing
| to engage with, then the social issue can be dampened
| somewhat
| troupo wrote:
| > if you have a social "thing" like tennis or climbing
|
| Then you wouldn't be able to cut down expenses to
| "nothing"/month.
|
| Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| > Social thing assumes expenses. Hobbies assume expenses.
|
| Entertainment is a line item in the budget: Library +
| Fishing = "Free"
|
| Libraries can be amazingly social, for eggheads. Lots of
| groups and events meet there in my town. It's a full-
| fledged Third Space.
|
| [Neither the library access nor fishing gear is without
| cost, but at least they already account for taxes.]
|
| By the way, anyone who benefits from free stuff, for
| example installing ad blockers, and earns $17/hr, should
| seriously consider tithing 5-10% to tax-deductible
| donations. It's a matter of economic justice.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Fishing licenses aren't actually free but at least
| they're cheap
| troupo wrote:
| Fishing equipment isn't free, and you will have recurring
| (though small) costs in hooks and line, at least.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Libraries are highly dependent on the town you're in.
| Ours is open six (6) hours a week. The one in. The town
| we were renting in before we bought was open reasonable
| hours and the librarians were great.
| AStonesThrow wrote:
| It can be exceedingly difficult to fund and staff a
| library system, especially considering that libraries are
| no longer big rooms with moldy books on the shelves.
|
| Libraries are high-tech and high-maintenance. If the
| community prioritizes their mission and invests in them,
| it works out. Sometimes, not so good.
| pastage wrote:
| Social things are free! You just have to understand that
| being social is what you pay with.
| troupo wrote:
| Even hosting friends at your house incurs a cost, however
| small: for extra food and drinks.
|
| Literally every human activity incurs a cost. Well, you
| can become a Hikikomori, so your only expenses will be
| electircity and internet.
| pastage wrote:
| If you equate a good time with spending money it is
| always going to cost money. I do almost nothing with my
| time that cost money, I have a lot of perks paid by work
| that I do not use because I just see no use for them.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Just find npc sims friends who like to walk on sidewalks
| and turn around when they experience interactions with
| animals.
| os2warpman wrote:
| A tennis racket is $13 at Goodwill and tennis balls are
| $1.30/ea. In the case of living in Massena, NY like the
| author you can play at Alcoa Park for $0.00.
|
| As for climbing, you don't need a $200 climbing harness
| you can tie your own Swiss seat out of rope ($2/ft.) and
| buy a couple of snap links ($4-10/ea.). I would buy a
| lower-end harness for $30 though.
|
| Spread out over several seasons that is as close to
| "nothing" as you can get, and is well within reach of any
| person with a pulse.
|
| 35 years ago I played DnD with a single AD&D 2e player's
| handbook and DM's guide shared among us all, campaigns
| and items out of Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine
| hand-copied from issues at the library, and a player
| miniature made out of a film roll canister that I used
| whiteout to paint a design on. Our greatest individual
| expense was dice and I think those were less than $10 for
| a set.
|
| Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them
| to be.
| watwut wrote:
| Have you ever tried to do those sports with cheapest
| equipment? Because I did and it ended up the same as
| everyone else who tried it in a cheapest possible way -
| you stop because it is not fun nor pleasure and equipment
| limits you.
|
| That being said, for tenista you need to pay entry. For
| climbing, you will be kicked out of gym on top of it
| being uncomfortable. Climbing gym don't want you injured
| due to badly made seat - it makes other guests feeling
| bad.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Hobbies are only expensive if you let them or want them
| to be.
|
| Climbing gyms aren't cheap. Climbing rocks outdoors is
| fairly cheap.
| nativeit wrote:
| Now we're back to the point where you've saved so much
| money by not carrying health insurance.
| troupo wrote:
| Not available in winter and rain. Requires equipment
| (crash pads and shoes at least)
| watwut wrote:
| You need more equipment to make them safe. You need
| literally more then you need in climbing gym, you need to
| know what you are doing too.
|
| And you need to travel to the place where that climbing
| suitable rock is.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| wait... drugs? I don't get it. the dark net is a thing.
| or do you mean doing them with other people?
| specproc wrote:
| A very social activity if done right
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Your social "things" adapt somewhat to the environment.
| Since moving to rural Vermont, my wife and I have taken
| up hunting, and she has gotten back into fishing. There's
| a group of (mostly older) people who get together
| Wednesday mornings and shoot muzzleloaders and have
| coffee. I join them when work allows.
|
| As a happy side-effect, it let me get into muzzleloader
| season with some support from people with a lot of
| experience. In Vermont, muzzleloader season falls during
| the damnable month between Thanksgiving and New Year's
| when the days just keep getting shorter, and there isn't
| usually enough snow (where we live) for snowshoeing.
| Having a reason to get out in the woods and be really
| present and observing nature when I otherwise would have
| trouble is outstanding for my mental health during that
| month.
|
| That's not to say there aren't opportunities to climb. A
| rock gym just opened near-enoughish-by and I have friends
| who climb outside weekly at a nearby crag.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Massena's airport serves exactly one destination, Boston,
| and even that is possible only through federal subsidies.
| It's "international" because they can muster up somebody to
| stamp your passport if you fly in via general aviation.
| cjbarber wrote:
| The network effects/moats of places! There needs to be a
| Kickstarter for coordinating groups of people to move to the
| same place all at the same time.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Good luck getting people to agree not to compete for the best
| cheap houses.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| doesn't seems to be a problem currently.
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Then the value of the place would go up fast.
|
| This is one way gentrification happens.
| jefftk wrote:
| That seems to be pretty good for the group of newcomers!
| They all buy together at lowish prices, then prices go up
| enough that they ~make their money back on housing
| appreciation. And it's not bad for existing homeowners
| either, since they get the appreciation too.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Is someone Penny pinching $400/month really going to have
| the funds necessary to flip housing?
| pyuser583 wrote:
| Some penny pinching so they can flip houses would.
| kiba wrote:
| Or you could just invest the difference in your stock
| portfolio and institute a land value tax instead. Stock
| are more a lot more liquid than real estate and less
| risky as well. Whereas the value of a home is pretty much
| stuck in the property until you convert it to liquid cash
| by selling it, but then you need to move elsewhere.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Indeed you could either go through the arduous task of
| convincing your friends to move somewhere with you or
| just get enough political support for a land value tax
| instead. No brainer to go for the tax. Way easier to
| achieve.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Ah, path dependence.
| diggan wrote:
| > And it's not bad for existing homeowners either, since
| they get the appreciation too.
|
| Assuming everyone is only out after appreciating house
| prices. While the locals who lived there before you might
| like that the house gains in value, depending on how
| large the group is and what the culture is, they might
| not like it at all. There is a reason some rural people
| continue living in rural areas, and bringing parts of the
| city to them might not be ideal for those people.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Exactly what rural people want, enough city people all
| moving in at once to noticably change the local
| culture(their whole goal) and also price the locals out
| of their own city
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm sure there's a way to have more than 20 but less than
| 2000 people move to the same general area.
|
| Also if your primary goal is a cheap lifestyle, you're much
| less likely to gentrify anything.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It was pretty easy for me. We got enough friends to move to
| one neighborhood of SF. Once you get a few, the numbers start
| going up and the gravity of the network draws more.
| JCharante wrote:
| that's what pieter levels did in portugal
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| Seems like you could call it Cultstarter
| herbst wrote:
| Organized gentrification. Nice
| flicken wrote:
| The Free State Project[1] had 20k libertarians pledge to move
| to New Hampshire, talking 15 years to reach the total number.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Only to fail to address the problem of bears because it
| requires the kind of public action that libertarians
| rejects for religious reasons.
| os2warpman wrote:
| A libertarian solving a problem is like me performing
| brain surgery.
|
| They ain't got no clue, and will almost certainly make
| things worse.
| m0llusk wrote:
| This has turned out to be a really interesting failure. To
| point out just one aspect, back in the 1970s there were
| hints that New Hampshire was leaning toward legalization of
| cannabis. Libertarian party meetups often focused on
| legalization of cannabis. This trend seemed to be solid and
| strongly linked to Libertarian influence in the state.
|
| Then the Free State Project happened and the intense
| liberty seeking of the Libertarian party kept everyone
| occupied with arguments about bears and taxation. Meanwhile
| the rest of New England legalized cannabis while New
| Hampshire remained in a strange state of suspension. The
| influence of Libertarians has been so chaotic and
| unpredictable that what was considered the most likely
| result of Libertarian influence now seems completely out of
| reach.
|
| This powerfully demonstrates how seemingly minor or
| irrelevant factors like political networks, tone, and tempo
| can end up being as important as core political issues and
| their direct consequences. Metaphors like piloting the ship
| of state through stormy waters take on additional meaning
| in this context.
| amluto wrote:
| Forget cannabis. I always found it hilarious that NH is
| supposedly libertarian but bans privately run businesses
| from selling bottles of alcohol.
| hiatus wrote:
| I found it surprising that they allow at least one
| private sale license. https://web.archive.org/web/2017102
| 8042531/http://info.nhpr....
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| Rural living also looks cheaper because most people do not even
| remotely consider the costs of transportation.
|
| The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents per
| mile. If you have to drive 15 miles to the grocery store and
| back, your grocery bill goes up $18/trip. If you need to drive
| 15 miles to work and back, take $90/week out of your paycheck.
|
| Then there's the fact that whoever is The Employer in that
| region - if you lose your job there, you're fucked. So The
| Employer gets to abuse every rule in th book because who's
| going to complain and risk losing their job? If The Employer
| decideds to drop everyone's pay by 25 cents/hour, what are you
| all going to do? Answer: nothing.
|
| Meanwhile in the city you can go anywhere you want within a 500
| square mile area (or more) for well under $100/month and
| commuter rail will take you even further for not a lot more.
| And you can do other things while using said transportation. No
| "self driving car" needed.
|
| As a sidenote: the same author complains about the "loss of the
| $50 motel room" and laments they're 3x more expensive now. Days
| after complaining that housing isn't actually that expensive.
| The guy has to be a troll...
|
| Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life
| is _heavily_ subsidized, and I don 't just mean direct
| assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you
| roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the
| federal government, and most of them either don't know or will
| never admit it.
|
| For fucks sakes the government actually runs a program to
| subsidize rural Americans getting to fly around on barely-
| occupied turboprop planes. But heaven forbid a city get some
| federal funding for electric or hybrid transit busses that will
| serve several thousand people a day.
| no_wizard wrote:
| About the bit regarding funding:
|
| It's because rural voters are both active and reliable
| regardless of their party affiliation, they get out the vote.
| This in turn for the fact that many rural counties account
| for a great many house seats and can swing senate elections,
| they have more power than numbers suggest.
|
| If urban voters were as persistent and consistent as rural
| ones they could easily flip the narrative, but in my
| experience (and by looking at a lot of election statistics) a
| huge chunk of apathetic eligible to vote voters live in urban
| areas, so you don't have the same en masse consistency and
| persistence
| throw27263w wrote:
| I also noticed the author's budget did not include health
| insurance.
|
| I also wonder how close it is to the nearest hospital or
| urgent care.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Hello stranger! No need for a throwaway account for such an
| insightful comment. I thought exactly the same when I read
| the article.
|
| Yeah, it is a bullshit/clickbait article. No healthcare?
| Yeah, let's see how long his wife will put up with that.
| And, literally, there is zero cost for heat. Do you know
| how cold that place is in the winter? Here is what he
| wrote: > as far as heat goes, well, one
| could either pay a little extra in electric for that -- or
| they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from
| their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
|
| To be clear: That's not zero. Another lie.
|
| Still: This person should setup a YouTube channel to
| document their life. It would be like the boring/suffering
| version of people who sail around the world on a yacht.
| amluto wrote:
| To be fair, at $0.04/kWh, even at very low outdoor
| temperature, a heat pump at COP only a little bit above 1
| or even an electric resistance heater is not very
| expensive to operate. If you have anything resembling
| decent insulation and you heat only a small space, heat
| can be very inexpensive. Even in an old, uninsulated,
| drafty house, you can fudge it cheaply with window
| insulating film and by hanging fabric on the walls.
| (Those cheap cut-to-size cellular window shades sold at
| many home improvement stores also have excellent thermal
| performance.)
|
| It gets tricky if you want a civilized humidity level,
| though. You need to control leakage to achieve decent
| humidity and you need to control condensation to avoid
| damaging the window trim or other parts of the structure
| and to avoid growing mold.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I live in a pretty rural area. We have a hospital and
| urgent care 12 minutes away, though for anything that isn't
| immediately life threatening I'd be driving an hour for
| much better hospital care in a larger city.
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| That honestly doesn't sound very rural at all.
| _heimdall wrote:
| There are definitely more rural areas, that just depends
| on where you draw the line on what is considered "rural".
|
| This area is unincorporated and the nearest towns all
| have a few thousand people or less.
|
| When we moved here I was actually surprised that we had a
| hospital in one of those small towns. Its part of a
| larger network that and the city an hour away has a big
| training hospital and med school, I assume that's why
| there's a smaller hospital in our area.
|
| For reference, our only "grocery stores" withing 45
| minutes are Walmarts and Dollar Generals.
| stavros wrote:
| Wait wait, how much does fuel cost that a 50km trip is $18?
| Even my diesel car does that for 4 EUR.
| nimih wrote:
| The IRS is also presumably factoring in increased wear and
| tear on the vehicle and increased insurance costs.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| The last time I did the maths on that fuel was half the
| cost of running our car.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| The IRS reimbursement rate includes maintenance and
| depreciation along with fuel and insurance costs. I get
| back around $500 a month at $0.75 a mile for expensing my
| work-related mileage.
| rascul wrote:
| The IRS mile rate does not actually reflect real world
| costs. Even including maintenance, insurance, etc, it's
| quite inflated, unless you barely drive it.
| ivm wrote:
| Exactly, as someone who moved to a rural area (in Chile) a
| year ago, I can say that you basically pay a shipping tax on
| _everything_ you need, starting with construction materials
| themselves.
|
| It's basically that ancap meme of building your own
| infrastructure: water, electricity, access roads, clearing
| the vegetation that constantly tries to reclaim your
| property. I've never owned so many things in my life until I
| moved here, many of them just to be able to tend the
| wilderness around me.
|
| But shoveling and cutting things has been an eye-opening
| experience in terms of how many processes the high-energy
| urban civilization hides from us. Even with steel/power
| tools, it's brutal out there.
| xp84 wrote:
| > drive 15 miles to the grocery store and back,
|
| Okay, but you're inventing a strawman there, since there are
| millions of places to live that are far closer than 15 miles
| away from basic services. The outskirts of Massena for
| instance, are about 2 miles from Walmart.
|
| > whoever is The Employer in that region - if you lose your
| job there, you're fucked
|
| The article is specifically about how with a low cost of
| living you don't even need full time work. It's not about
| moving to a company town to work a 9-5 at a factory.
|
| > a city get some federal funding for electric or hybrid
| transit busses that will serve several thousand people a day
|
| I mean, they most definitely _do_ get that federal funding --
| this fiscal year there is $1.5 billion available. Here 's[0]
| last fiscal year's winners. But I assume the meaning of your
| comment is that it bothers you that someone somewhere
| complained about that fact? I doubt it's the rural folks
| complaining, probably car drivers in the city complaining
| that the money didn't all go to fixing the potholes, the same
| cranks who complain about bike lanes, etc.
|
| It is interesting how this proposal that people even just
| consider rural living as a thought experiment seems to have
| triggered a lot of people. If you love the city yet
| simultaneously think it's too expensive, other people opening
| their minds to living somewhere else is good for you. It
| doesn't have to be _for you_ for it to be an okay idea.
|
| [0] https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/grants/fy24-fta-bus-
| and-...
| Ray20 wrote:
| >The IRS estimates per-mile deduction at well over 60 cents
| per mile.
|
| I think you are manipulating and substituting concepts, and
| these calculations of the cost of the trip include expensive
| cars of highly paid city workers. And if you recalculate the
| cost of the trip taking into account cars that are used
| outside the city, then the amount will be several times
| lower. Probably 5 or more times lower if people are
| interested in the maximum reduction in the cost of travel.
|
| >almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized
|
| I don't know, show me the data. Maybe the city guys are just
| saying that it's all subsidized, while they themselves are
| completely stealing all the allocated funds, taking advantage
| of the lack of control. I recently watched a program about
| how government-funded projects were costing 10 or 20 times
| more. So, without credible evidence to the contrary, let's
| assume that what we see around us in rural areas has roughly
| zero subsidies, and all allocated funds have been completely
| appropriated by contractors.
|
| >But heaven forbid a city get some federal funding for
| electric or hybrid transit busses that will serve several
| thousand people a day.
|
| This is blatant hypocrisy. We have already sorted out how
| rural areas are "subsidized". And under these conditions, we
| are asking rural residents to pay for the transport of
| pompous urban asses? If this transport really moves so many
| thousands people as you said, why don't these city people pay
| for it themselves from their huge city salaries? Why do you
| want to put your fat fingers in the pockets of the rural
| guys?
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Nobody is using the public transport anymore as they've
| become moving toilets and drugs dens.
| vkou wrote:
| Whereas driving a personal vehicle on public roadways is
| a daily dance with death that snuffs out 40,000+ lives a
| year.
|
| Who in their right mind would put their lives at such
| risk?
| herbst wrote:
| I don't know about America. But for me here in Switzerland
| additional transportation cost is actually cheaper in a rural
| area than parking costs in any city. A standard parking space
| about 100$ a month (not including going anywhere and park
| there, which is also es expensive closer to the city).
|
| Every round trip ads maybe $5 right now. We don't have to
| drive to the city every second day.
| LunaSea wrote:
| > Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural
| life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct
| assistance.
|
| Couldn't you say the same for cities since they live on food
| produced outside of cities, energy from the Gulf and products
| imported from China?
| spicyusername wrote:
| It doesn't matter where the thing comes from, it matters
| who's paying for it.
| amluto wrote:
| You can drive for a lot less than $0.60c/mi. At $0.04/kWh,
| evergy to propel an EV costs 1-2 cents per mile. If you buy a
| $35k car and drive it 200k miles while spending very little
| on maintenance (tires might be the major expense), add maybe
| $0.20/mi, for a total of $0.21/mi or so. Insurance isn't all
| that expensive and doesn't vary that much with mileage. If
| you buy a BYD car (oh wait, not in the US), it's even
| cheaper.
| bitcurious wrote:
| >Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural
| life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct
| assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you
| roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the
| federal government, and most of them either don't know or
| will never admit it.
|
| This is pretty naive. Farmers aren't subsidized so that
| _farmers_ have cheap food, they are subsidized so that the
| city you're hyping doesn't riot because they run out of food.
| Farm subsidies exist for everyone who's not a farmer.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| "Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural
| life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct
| assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you
| roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the
| federal government, and most of them either don't know or
| will never admit it."
|
| Things like farming, forestry and so on aren't possible
| without basic local infrastructure. It's also reasonable that
| farmers can buy groceries, their kids can go to school, and
| they have access to healthcare services.
|
| Without farming city folks would starve to death, so I
| wouldn't complain about things being subsidized. Feds fund
| lots of less important things.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| To be fair, leaving everyone behind and not seeing them again
| was kind of what people did in the great grandfather era
| mentioned in the article. Even not that long ago. I was talking
| to someone only perhaps grandma age the other day who said
| their brother's family moved to BC and they didn't see them for
| 25 years.
|
| Your comment does focus in on the interesting point in that
| connected places have perhaps not scaled as well. Or perhaps
| there is some pareto front of locations on cost vs
| connectedness we need to imagine in our heads. Very
| interesting.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| > what people did in the great grandfather era
|
| Unfortunately the appeal to ancestry fallacy is always a
| terrible idea.
|
| You see this in the nutrition space where "influencers" go on
| and on about how our ancestors ate, forgetting that our
| ancestors died extremely early relative to modern humans.
|
| Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives in
| many ways.
|
| The reason to complain about the high cost of living is that
| the U.S. has an incredibly high GDP and yet Americans live
| highly precarious lives, not that in certain very specific
| ways our ancestors had it slightly better, which as you point
| out leads to all sorts of issues.
| Retric wrote:
| Cost of living is always a somewhat distorted metric
| because it ignores tradeoffs. If I was living on
| ~500$/month in that area I'd spend way more on technology
| and far less on food.
|
| Starlink and a local grocery store means the vast majority
| of the US is able to support a lifestyle most of humanity
| could only dream of until fairly recently without actually
| being that expensive. Year round bananas for dollars per
| pound is a fucking miracle of logistics.
|
| Not that long ago one of my coworkers was effectively
| living in minimum wage in a major US city and tossing
| everything else into savings. Excessive number of
| roommates, no car, cooking simple vegetarian meals at home
| etc. At the other end if he had a major medical condition,
| drug addiction, etc he'd have been "fucked," except for the
| fact modern medicine simply wasn't available at any price
| again until recently so should we assume it's normal.
| nazgulnarsil wrote:
| >our ancestors died extremely early
|
| No they didn't, stop using averages.
| karafso wrote:
| https://ourworldindata.org/its-not-just-about-child-
| mortalit...
|
| Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at
| this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was
| 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it. But
| yes, our ancestors really did die much, much younger than
| us.
| keybored wrote:
| > Childhood mortality is only one factor, and I think at
| this point we're all aware that the "life expectancy was
| 40 years" statistic has a huge asterisk next to it.
|
| No, people who say that they "died extremely early
| relative to modern humans" mean the bunk dying at 40 due
| to old age myth. Not dying at 65 rather than 80.
|
| Your link seems to show graphs going up but not why.[1]
| The medical breakthroughs have been, like first of
| discovering hygiene, vaccines and antibiotics. Which does
| exactly nothing to debunk what the OP[2] called "appeal
| to ancestry fallacy". That we know medicine now (like
| hygiene, antiobitics) do not discredit claims like, you
| should eat like a hunter-gatherer or something like that.
|
| [1] This seems typical of "data" outlets.
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44078093
| antonvs wrote:
| You're still focusing on averages, which is the error
| inherent in the myth.
|
| While it's true that _average_ life expectancy has
| increased, the point is that it was absolutely routine
| for people to live into their 60s, and not uncommon for
| them to live into their 70s or 80s.
|
| See e.g. https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-
| history/
| eloisant wrote:
| The average still means something. Yes a lot of people
| were living to 60s, 70s or 80s, but way more people than
| today were dying at a younger age because of a disease
| that can now be cured, hygiene not as good, etc.
| yardie wrote:
| When I look at some of my favourite writers, philosophers,
| and scientists from past eras quite a few of them died in
| their 60s and 70s. Medicine and nutrition was poorly
| understood for that time. What they had in common was
| wealth and professions that wasn't backbreaking labor.
| Child mortality was high and that is what really drags the
| average age down.
| nradov wrote:
| Our marginal increase in understanding of nutrition has
| had no detectible benefit in terms of population health
| or lifespan. People in past eras pretty much knew what to
| eat. Mostly the problem was that poor people simply
| couldn't afford enough high quality food.
| watwut wrote:
| It was not just child mortality. It was adults dying from
| diseases and infectiona we don't die of anymore too.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| And smoking. Everybody in my parents' generation smoked
| and most of them died young.
| watwut wrote:
| And drinking. And drinking while engaged in physical
| activities with potential for injury.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| > Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives
| in many ways.
|
| Our ancestors also had more children, less rates of
| depression and mental illness and the modern rates of
| socialization, marriage, etc are all in steep decline.
|
| Therefore maybe the cardboard box apartment, transient
| friends, and access to all that nightlife isn't all it's
| cracked up to be. While we're a lot richer and more well
| off it doesn't seem like people are happier.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Similarly, our grandparents lived pretty terrible lives
| in many ways.
|
| That's entirely subjective. My grandparents are no longer
| alive but I'm confident they would find many aspects of the
| average life today to be terrible.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > our ancestors died extremely early relative to modern
| humans
|
| As others pointed out these claims are often skewed by high
| childhood mortality rates.
|
| Beyond that, though, I'm curious why you consider the
| number of years lived to be a primary concern?
|
| I'd rather live 50 good years than 80 miserable ones. I'd
| also rather live to 65 than make it to 80 with the last
| 30-40 years spent increasingly propped up with medications,
| doctors appointments, and invasive treatments.
| antonvs wrote:
| > forgetting that our ancestors died extremely early
| relative to modern humans.
|
| While it's true that average life expectancy has increased,
| it's not really accurate to say that "our ancestors died
| extremely early". See "Did Ancient People Die Young?" at
| https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/ :
|
| > Mortality rates in traditional populations are high
| during infancy, before decreasing sharply to remain
| constant till about 40 years, then mortality rises to peak
| at about 70. Most individuals remain healthy and vigorous
| right through their 60s or beyond, until senescence sets
| in, which is the physical decline where if one cause fails
| to kill, another will soon strike the mortal blow.
| xp84 wrote:
| This is very true, that is definitely a sacrifice that they
| were much more willing to make than most of us today.
|
| They would move 1,000 miles or more, or even across the sea
| and then send back and forth letters every few months. "Alice
| had a baby, she named him Robert Joseph. I have secured work
| at the textile mill, and am saving to buy a plot of land. The
| weather here is cold in winter, but the summers are somewhat
| more tolerable."
|
| The interesting thing is, I feel like they moved back then
| mainly because there wasn't sufficient land or jobs where
| they came from. Today, the urban dwellers this article is
| talking about has an equal dearth of land and jobs available
| to them in the city, but they don't feel like the countryside
| has anything to offer them either.
| watwut wrote:
| Most people stayed with the family.
| starkparker wrote:
| That's the other unspoken side of the boomer-emulation
| argument, too. People's access to the world when boomers were
| buying houses and raising families was much less. Their
| families and friends were already close because few, if any, of
| them left where they were from (except to get drafted into
| wars). In some of those who left, they did so to enable the
| rest to follow.
|
| These things just don't happen anymore. To find better work
| (especially outside of tech), people move, some constantly.
| Siblings wind up across the country or further from each other
| and where they grew up. Elders are either left behind or move
| into retirement homes.
|
| There are exceptions, and those who keep some of that support
| network find the real boomer superpowers of sharing costs
| (financial, time, and labor alike) and inheriting wealth. But
| the ease with which people could leave home for good is one of
| many factors that make emulating boomers difficult, if not
| impossible: that rural cheap house isn't 10 minutes from the
| rest of your family, your childhood friends, and your co-
| workers anymore.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Their families and friends were already close because few,
| if any, of them left where they were from (except to get
| drafted into wars)
|
| Your original text, edited for sequence and clarity while
| preserving your voice:
|
| This doesn't apply to the U.S. or Canada, nor has it ever
| since their foundings, possibly excepting some natives. The
| American frontier was declared closed by 1890, long before
| the post-WW2 population surge to California. Before that, New
| Englanders left farmland to settle the Midwest. Later came
| the Great Migration of mostly Black Southerners to northern
| cities. Anglophone North America has never been a peasant
| society where families remained rooted for generations.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> peasant society where families remained rooted for
| generations.
|
| I'd hazard that a few parts of Appalachia remained relative
| stable, and poor, across more than a couple generations.
| rubitxxx15 wrote:
| As an introvert, I believe I could live in a remote location
| without problem. I often wish I could switch off my hearing to
| just enjoy silence, and dream of getting a chance to spend time
| in an isolation chamber.
|
| That said, I don't know if I'd want to live in a depressing
| small town, unless it had a good diner.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Seems like that low bar you should be able to meet somewhere?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If you get a sense of relief from silence, I recommend Peltor
| ear defenders. The more expensive/better ones.
|
| Seriously. I don't wear them a lot, but when I do the lack of
| stimulation is instantly relaxing.
|
| Only downside is you can't sleep in them.
| mettamage wrote:
| I sometimes sleep with them, especially while traveling.
| Paper thin walls? Hostels? Not a problem. It takes some
| getting used to.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| My ears get hot. Do they make cooled ones or something?
| projektfu wrote:
| Rural NY isn't just for introverts. Most people are social
| and are somewhat active. Like most areas, an outsider will
| probably feel like an outsider, but if one allows themselves
| to be curious about the things people are into doing, I think
| it would be fine for typically social people.
|
| One who sneers at rural people and habits will probably not
| get along. And if you take too much offense at rural people
| sneering about urban things, likewise.
|
| Unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in upstate NY. I do
| know rural NY black people, and they do fine, but I'm not
| sure they appreciate the way insults are thrown about
| "present company excluded". It's those attitudes that kept me
| from wanting to stay.
| fullstop wrote:
| > Unfortunately, there is a lot of racism in upstate NY. I
| do know rural NY black people, and they do fine, but I'm
| not sure they appreciate the way insults are thrown about
| "present company excluded". It's those attitudes that kept
| me from wanting to stay.
|
| This is so heartbreaking.
|
| I live in a suburban area, and have friends and neighbors
| from around the world -- Trinidad, Sri Lanka, Korea,
| Canada, and I _love_ that aspect of where I live. As I get
| older, I don't like the din of lawnmowers and leaf blowers.
| Many of my neighbors have lawn services, and the ZTRs and
| backpack leaf blowers are even louder than what your
| average joe would have to do the same job.
|
| On top of that, since there is land by me, the local
| government's zoning board has approved of more and more
| warehouses. As such, semi truck traffic has increased
| significantly, and somehow they all seem to have unmuffled
| straight pipe exhausts. I've contacted my representatives,
| but none of them seem to care. The state rep passes it off
| to the district rep, who passes it off to the township, who
| passes it back off to the state. The only winning move is
| to leave.
|
| The point of my tangent here, is that a place like rural NY
| seems idyllic to escape the noise. Anecdotes like yours,
| though, steer me away. I understand that it's a self-
| fulfilling prophecy in that regard.
| projektfu wrote:
| Yeah, it will hopefully improve with more exposure. Even
| suburban NY was highly racist in the 80s, maybe by the
| 2040s with more diversity it will be better in rural NY.
| But one thing I noticed as a young man road tripping
| through the South in the 90s was that the racism was a
| different species from Northern racism. In Birmingham,
| AL, I found people relating to each other like normal
| people. Birmingham, where they used water cannon and dogs
| against marchers and blew up a church in the 60s. In
| rural Ohio, a black friend of mine walked into a
| breakfast restaurant with me and had dozens of pairs of
| eyes staring at him like he had just announced he's
| robbing the place. It wasn't until I learned the history
| of sundown towns that I understood the racism of the
| North and its place in Segregated America.
| fullstop wrote:
| With the direction things seem to be going, I'm not as
| confident about your 2040 hopes.
|
| On a return trip from Florida we booked a room in
| Florence, SC for the night. Everybody was staring at me,
| but I was exhausted and figured that it was just in my
| head. We ate breakfast there the next morning and that's
| when I realized that we were the only white people there.
| About 50% of the population of Florence is black.
|
| It was an interesting experience, and it gave me the
| opportunity to understand a fraction of how it would feel
| if the roles were reversed. And this was with friendly
| people with no malicious intent or fear!
| gosub100 wrote:
| the winters up there would be brutal if you're not used to
| them. It's not just the cold, its the prolonged absence of
| the sun due to short days and cloud cover.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> The missing piece here is social connections. Family and
| friends
|
| Silicon Valley is not populated by people who are there for
| family and friends. Silicon Valley is populated by people who
| left their family and friends to go participate in a gold rush.
|
| Silicon Valley is populated by people from other continents who
| came to participate in the gold rush, family and friends be
| damned.
|
| I really don't understand the antipathy towards the fact that
| you can live on $432 a month in America. I just really don't.
| With some tradeoffs, you can live on $432 a month in America,
| and this fact makes some Hacker News commentators very very
| angry.
| trchek wrote:
| So I think some of us have done it out of having no other
| choice and found it lacking.
|
| From the time I had to live a year going to paycheck advance
| every month because of an unexpected auto repair bill
| (leaving that cheap typically requires a used beat up car).
|
| Or the time I woke up with an excruciating pain in my side
| and went to ER which resulted in bills that lead to years of
| payments.
|
| People do this experiment every day in the USA and the
| experience is pretty bad.
|
| EDIT I'll grant this is all a fine trade off for some people.
| But having lived it, I can definitely say no thank you.
| npodbielski wrote:
| I am not angry. I am barely cementator here even. But I find
| this article radicoulous. For example author mentioned
| raising family at the beginning. And then mentions no car.
| How are you suppose to transport kids to school/preschool?
| 'You can take the bus' - yeah, drive with the bus to one
| place (kindergarten), then the second (school), then the
| third (job). In the winter, rain, storm or heat. Yes that is
| doable but would be very annoying and time consuming. No
| mention to hearing kids complaining that they want to
| eat/drink/poop at the bus or bus stop.
|
| And if you and you spouse have jobs and kids you probably
| need two cars, and school is another cost so I would say 400$
| is pure fantasy unless you want to live insolitude, fishing
| in forest.
|
| Normal people need near school/preschool/highschool/job/store
| etc. And this is why you have cities. It is cheaper for
| society to concentrate population around those buildings.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What you described is what my parents have done with me.
| They took me to the kindergarden, on foot. But then again,
| I live in Europe and it is dense enough here, the
| kindergarden was about 3-5 km away. You can definitely take
| the bus, which many people do around here.
| oblio wrote:
| The article is about the US and in most places they can't
| do that.
| cozzyd wrote:
| Especially not in a rural area. (We are raising our
| daughter without a car but we live in the downtown of a
| big city...)
| eloisant wrote:
| People working in Silicon Valley can afford to take a plane
| to visit friends or family as often as they want.
|
| The article describe a life of low spending/low revenue, so
| suddenly buying a plane ticket becomes a huge expense.
|
| There is no antipathy against the $432 a month life, just
| comments that people have valid reasons not to choose this
| life.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Professionals move from city to city all the time due to jobs.
| In the modern world it's easier to keep in touch with family
| and friends with Internet and cheap (by historical standards)
| flights.
| a_wild_dandan wrote:
| That's using a mighty broad brush to paint folks'
| circumstantial situations.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have 3 close friends - they live about an hour away, about
| 8 hours drive away (or about an hour of flying + 1-2 hours
| driving), and one on the other side of the country.
|
| "Keeping in touch via Internet" for me is a pale imitation of
| what I want from a friendship. We text a few times a week. I
| visit each of them 1-2 times a year. I miss them a lot.
|
| This isn't to claim it's impossible to do better. But I have
| a feeling that especially those on the "urban" side of the
| friendship just have a hard time making time for say, a Zoom
| call with you on the same frequency as they may have gone out
| with you for dinner or drinks. Especially group dynamics
| don't allow this: If you were part of a group of 5 friends
| that hung out together, they'll just start hanging out
| without you, and no time will be opening up in all of their
| schedules to devote to tele-friendship. Those friendships
| will suffer.
|
| And remember, the "low cost of living, low earning" thesis
| we're discussing does mostly rule out even those "cheap"
| flights (which stop being cheap really quick once you have a
| family, so multiply all prices by 2, 3, 4...)
| estebank wrote:
| Americans have been moving less and less, and that trend
| hasn't reverted.
|
| https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/03/united-
| states...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| A small set of professionals do, yes. A lot more stay near
| family and friends instead.
| supermatt wrote:
| This is an example of a place. There are likely many such
| places all over the USA within a few hours drive of where your
| friends and family live.
| _dark_matter_ wrote:
| So now you have to have a car? So yes this post is still
| unrealistic
| shlant wrote:
| yea you either need to see people very rarely, see them
| often by spending a lot of time and money traveling, or see
| them often by spending multiple days away (which again, how
| are you paying for this? and what's the point of buying a
| house far away if you won't be there half the time?)
| _heimdall wrote:
| Having a reliable car can be cheap, it just requires
| skipping more modern convenience features and being willing
| to work on it yourself.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This!
|
| Ans it's also why there are homeless people un big cities when
| from a material point of view they could be living a half-
| decent life in a rural place instead.
|
| Humans are social animals, and most of our behavior are shaped
| by this characteristic, even if some people don't seem to
| realize that.
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is quite cheap to build a small prefab guest house. Room for
| guests is not a concern I think.
|
| Rather, the friction is making them endure the travel time is,
| I would say .
| polishdude20 wrote:
| The family and friends part is what gets me. I'd love to move
| somewhere 4 hours away in a rural town but nobody else will
| follow me there.
| throwaway31131 wrote:
| My problem is I mostly agree with the piece, it's very possible
| to live cheaply when everything goes smoothly and most things
| are routine. The problem is things very often don't go
| smoothly, especially once you have a family.
|
| For example, my daughter took a small fall on a jungle gym, so
| small that I didn't even think she really got hurt but she
| landed really unlucky and broke her arm. We went to urgent care
| but she needed surgery to put pins in. Modern medicine is
| amazing. Totally healed, not even scares from the pin, but it
| is not cheap. Expect to pay at least $17K [1] for this w/o
| insurance, our was significantly more. And with insurance,
| you're not living on $400/month anymore...
|
| Cars break down, pipes back up, etc. etc. etc.
|
| [1] https://www.talktomira.com/post/how-much-does-a-broken-
| bone-...
| sarchertech wrote:
| In New York you could make 5x the amount of money the article
| is talking about and still qualify for free healthcare.
| hnfever wrote:
| You'd qualify based on income but probably be excluded for
| having too many assets. The limit in New York is $32,396.
| sarchertech wrote:
| Looks like that goes up to $44k for a couple, a vehicle
| is exempt, and home equity is exempt up to a million and
| change.
|
| There's also ACA credits that don't have an asset test.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| MAGI based Medicare doesn't have asset limits.
| osigurdson wrote:
| The other issue with "living somewhere cheap" early in life is
| it limits your options incredibly if you ever want to go
| anywhere else. Maybe fine as a retirement move however.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Fine if defining living as being able to breathe, eat and
| have shelter and nothing more.
| eloisant wrote:
| Exactly, I've had this exact discussion with a friend who
| bought a house in a cheaper town.
|
| Fake numbers but for the sake of arguments: he bought a $100k
| house, I bought a $300k house in a more expensive city. Real
| estate did a 2x, his house is worth $200k and now he can't
| afford to move to a $600k place like mine - while I can move
| to an area with a similar cost of living as where I live now.
|
| The gap is even bigger because prices go up faster in big
| cities.
| sethammons wrote:
| We had to move back from nowhere Montana to society so our
| kids could more easily get jobs / careers. So far so good,
| oldest is killing it in IT at a bank.
| labrador wrote:
| Nobody wants a Breaking Bad ending like Walter White hiding out
| in a New Hampshire cabin or Ted Kaczynski scribbling his
| manifesto on cold winter nights.
| quesera wrote:
| ... that's not how Breaking Bad ended. :)
| labrador wrote:
| I assume that buying a machine gun to single handedly murder
| a biker gang is outside the scope of most of our experiences
| so not worth mentioning. The real end for me was him alone in
| a cabin with a barrel of cash. To me that was a more
| realistic ending.
|
| If anything, your correction proves my point. Most people
| don't want living alone in a cabin as their ending.
| quesera wrote:
| Actually, I'd forgotten about the New Hampshire hideaway
| episode. The (actual) final episode was much more
| memorable.
|
| And I'll agree that "living alone in a cabin" ... _while
| you are the object of a nationwide manhunt_ ... is not how
| people want to live!
| labrador wrote:
| It was forgettable because it was unspeakably depressing.
| My great-grandfathers had to live like that but they
| worked hard to provide their descendents with better
| opportunities. I'm retired, old, on a fixed income and
| live alone so I've made my peace with it. I wouldn't
| recommend it for people trying to have a dating life!
| dyauspitr wrote:
| >they'd need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind,
| rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because
| in all truth, they're actually great.
|
| You lost me here. Weather is probably _the_ most important thing
| to me. Cold weather gets into my bones and leaves me low and
| uncomfortable. My body physiology is such that even if I wear
| appropriate clothing, I end up sweating under them and
| paradoxically get even colder. Winters for me just mean being
| cold, wet and uncomfortable and is not worth it for me.
| 1024core wrote:
| Such cheap homes all across America: https://tinyurl.com/hnlink
| 1024core wrote:
| I don't think living in the boonies is for everyone.
|
| I was in South-Eastern California just visiting desolate areas.
| One place I stayed at had absolutely nothing: the nearest place
| to get food or gas was Bishop, CA, a 50-minute drive. Coming from
| a big city the desolation is appealing at first, but gets tiring
| pretty soon.
| geoka9 wrote:
| > They'd need to disabuse themselves of the idea that they ought
| to abscond to some kind of a tropical Shangri-La; and moreover,
| they'd need to leave behind the idea that snow, overcast, wind,
| rain, and long winters are all that bad to contend with, because
| in all truth, they're actually great.
|
| New Mexico, Arizona, even Florida if you're into tropics - have
| pretty amazing weather, no? And there must be low COL locations
| there. Now, imagine living in Canada. The warmest place in all of
| the country is south-western BC and it rains most of the time
| (the nature is amazing though).
| markvdb wrote:
| I've seen better publicity for a simpler life. Jacob Lund
| Fisker[0]'s ERE comes to mind.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Lund_Fisker
| don-code wrote:
| There were several years (late 2015 to mid 2017) where I did a
| much less extreme version of this. I stopped because, as many
| commenters have noted, I was (to quote this one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44077097) "living off the
| economic surplus of [others]", and perhaps even taking
| opportunities away from those who needed them much more than I
| did.
|
| Some anecdotes from that time:
|
| I had a $30/mo phone plan that got me 100 minutes, and 5GB of
| data at HSPA+ speeds. I basically never worked from home, even if
| that had been an option, because one too many `npm install`s or
| video conferences would've set me over the edge. I brought my
| personal laptop to the office to install OS updates, and took
| downloads back home on a flash drive. And if I had an unexpected
| call to a 1-800 support hotline - one that I knew would take an
| hour - I'd literally go find a payphone, where you could call it
| for free (although it's a much higher charge to the recipient).
|
| I developed a strong love of free-to-me media and entertainment.
| I was a voracious reader of library books, got my news off
| broadcast TV, listened to FM radio for music (to be fair, I'd
| always - and still - done that), and so on. I was attending one
| or two tech meetups a week.
|
| I didn't have a car. Being a 15-minute walk from a train station
| helped drastically, but I wasn't as close to the city as most of
| my colleagues were (maybe 20min over others' average). Visiting
| my parents took 115 minutes (30 minutes by car) and I did it
| every other week. Twice a week, I'd take a commuter rail train
| south of the city, then walk 20 minutes to get where I was going.
| Most of the time I'd bum a ride back to the station with someone
| else there. All said, it was probably two extra hours of
| commuting whenever I did this. There were even times where I'd
| carry odd things home from Home Depot on the train.
|
| And then, as we got older, many of my friends started to move far
| out of the city, to places unserved by our transit system. I was
| totally dependent on my friends still in the city to carpool,
| even though I was almost certainly making more than they were. I
| wish - truly I wish - that I could say that this was the straw
| that broke the camel's back, what made me snap out of it.
|
| Sadly, that honor went mostly to both my work changing (much more
| teleconferencing / Zoom), and my family situation changing
| (needing to commute out to the burbs regularly, sometimes with
| little notice).
|
| I still remember some of the jibes I'd get while doing this -
| "why do you make life so hard on yourself?" and "you don't know
| how to have money".
|
| I look back on that time and do think it was an interesting
| experiment, and to an extent, I'm glad I did it for the
| perspective. But really, I was naive. I wasn't doing something
| that somehow made me more independent, or less wasteful. I was
| dependent on much of other's output, and really only wasting my
| own ability to be productive.
| owenversteeg wrote:
| Like other people here, I have my quibbles with the exact math.
| But the general premise is true: yes, you can live in rural
| poverty for cheap. The problem is the vibes. A hundred years ago,
| you would have a community, a place in society, and all of your
| family and friends nearby. In 2025, the only actual local job the
| author of the piece can come up with is at a gas station.
|
| Top ten occupations, 1920: Farmers, farm laborers, clerks,
| salespeople, servants (bellboys, butlers, cooks), textile
| workers, machinists, carpenters, and teachers. All of those jobs,
| even the less respected ones, had infinitely more societal
| respect than the common jobs hiring in rural America today - such
| as stocking shelves at Walmart or working at a gas station. You
| could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids and a
| place in society. Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart
| or a gas station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the
| respect of the world around him.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Not saying I agree with the premise of the article at all but
| making life decisions based on how much others will respect it
| is a terrible way to live
| weregiraffe wrote:
| Humans are a social species. Your happiness absolutely
| depends on what other people think about you.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Good luck making everyone like you
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Yes, it seems the only thing the world around me respects is
| conspicuous consumption. It's better for your own wellbeing
| if you can avoid indulging that.
| andrewrn wrote:
| We're wired to yield to social pressures, it is what allowed
| us to create civilization. You're right, the energy spent to
| overcome it is well spent, but its not as trivial as you make
| it sound to be low-status and feel fulfilled.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Status is relative to who's doing the judging.. and
| everyone views things differently. I'd argue you don't have
| much of a choice whether you're low or high status in some
| people's eyes. Whether you feel it regularly heavily
| depends on who you surround yourself with
|
| Your career = your social status is a very American point
| of view
|
| Eat meat and vegans will look down on you
|
| Ride a bike for transport in America and you're poor, do it
| in Europe and it's normal
|
| Nomads will judge you on your experiences and travel, not
| your career. Wealthy CEO thats invested everything in their
| work but never left their home country? Low status
|
| Go out on your own and take a risk of starting a business
| in Asia and people will be confused why you'd do that vs
| the safe path
|
| Invest a tonne of energy into making money and anti-
| consumerist folk will laugh
|
| Skinny? Better bulk up lest the bodybuilders see you as low
| status.. but wait, if you bulk up people will judge you for
| being vain. Shit
|
| The status game isn't winnable. Best thing you can do is
| surround yourself with people of similar values
| ryandrake wrote:
| Letting go of social pressures, "status" and not worrying
| about what other people think of me was the single
| biggest quality-of-life improvement I ever made.
| andrewrn wrote:
| "Surround yourself with people of similar values"... so
| in other words, you mean find a group where you're of
| similar status. We're not in disagreement.
| kingstoned wrote:
| "Today, though, a young man working at a Walmart or a gas
| station will struggle to attract a stable partner or the
| respect of the world around him."
|
| True if they are not good looking. If a guy is really handsome,
| he could attract a partner easily and people will like him due
| to halo effect.
| icameron wrote:
| I think you'll meet most of the community and could gain some
| standing working at the town gas station actually, especially
| if you try to be even a little bit friendly with the locals.
| tuna74 wrote:
| "You could be a simple farm laborer and have a wife and kids
| and a place in society."
|
| You could not afford a good life as a farm laborer.
| wyclif wrote:
| I don't think the OP was suggesting it would be a good life
| if by "good" you mean a life of relative comfort. I think his
| claim was much more modest. The point is that at that time a
| farm laborer was valued by the local community.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Farm laborers were probably at the bottom of the social
| ladder for working rural people. They were usually fully
| dependent on the owner of the farm that they worked on.
| Think of the cowboys in the bunkhouse in "Yellowstone"
| except way worse.
| testing22321 wrote:
| > _a young man working at a Walmart or a gas station will
| struggle to attract a stable partner or the respect of the
| world around him._
|
| From personal experience I can tell you confidently you are
| wrong.
|
| The part you are missing is you only need to work 10-20 hours a
| week MAX. That means you have an enormous Amount of leisure
| time to do what you want with your life. Trust me when I say
| plenty of young women love the idea of not working a lot and
| instead having wilderness adventures.
|
| Want to see it for yourself? Go spend a summer in the Yukon. If
| you love it, stay the winter. It's nothing short of epic.
| dangus wrote:
| Wilderness adventures will be the only option within your
| budget.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Lest's say you are serious and it's only a lack of
| imagination [edit: or _taste_ obviously but as the article
| author points out: it 's only on you to choose what you
| like]:
|
| - learn music instruments, perhaps join a local band or
| share samples on the net with enthusiasts
|
| - draw, paint, sculpt, all of which has many options of
| techniques and cheap materials. As with music, the only
| limit is yourself and the the expense of your instrument
| but you don't need to use expensive techniques to enjoy
|
| - make a year-round vegetable garden, thats' often time
| consuming and you won't need much terrain
|
| - read tons of books, learn philosophie, math, history,
| whatever makes you find interesting. And in 2025 there's
| the option to read blogs for those that feels like it.
| watch movies, listen podcasts.
|
| - cook whatever you eat, get creative and share the food
| with your neighbor or the receipt with the internet users
|
| - do more sport. 1.5h/day practice of yoga, tai chi, swim
| or whatever will influence the rest of your day
|
| - participate in local NGO or crate the one you want to,
| from homeless shelter to business and startups free
| guidance, animals caring and astronomy enthusiasts.
|
| - to support your cheap live, learn to like the chores:
| hand wash your dishes and clothes. Sounds super boring, but
| how boring is an Amazon warehouse job ? I'd choose the
| dishwashing+podcast.
|
| - use the bus or walk or bike to the wilderness, you got
| time. You don't need to get to the super-far-and-wild spot
| to enjoy the nature anyway.
|
| - in the wilderness you can: walk, run, off-road
| exploration, climb trees (yes, that's still a hobby),
| listen and learn to recognize birds, mushrooms (beware),
| plants, insects, draw (that you can do anywhere), get
| aromates for cooking or leaves for tea, sleep in a tent,
| collect fossils and minerals. Become a local guide.
|
| - get a cheap computer and play (not that) old games. Bonus
| if you live somewhere where internet is cheap, try some
| MMORPG (ok not too long to stay sane). Here in France
| unlimited 1Gb connection is 25EUR/month.
|
| - learn to knit, wave, sew. Some people find those fun, and
| make extra money on local handmade shops.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I am sure people are managing it in New Orleans.
| alexpotato wrote:
| I remember reading about a family with 4 kids who lived in a one
| bedroom house.
|
| The kids slept in two sets of bunk beds in the bedroom. The
| parents slept on a pull out couch in the living room.
|
| I'm not saying I want to live that way. Just pointing out that
| people have lived that way before.
| yibg wrote:
| The other version of this is the whole FIRE movement. Instead of
| living cheap, which also affords the ability to not work much,
| work as normal (or more than normal) for a shorter time while
| living cheap, so eventually you can live cheaply forever without
| working.
|
| Especially tenable for the tech crowd, where salaries are high
| and potentially scales well with more effort put in, even if for
| a short duration.
| aeblyve wrote:
| The book "Hinterland" by Phil Neel comes to mind.
| shipscode wrote:
| It's actually possible to live pretty cheaply in America if you
| can save up enough to buy a house or condo in cash. This article
| harps on ultra rural America, but there are plenty of closer knit
| communities that are quite affordable as well.
|
| Lots of HOA communities exist with condos or townhouses. Example
| prices would be $175k for 3 bed, 2 bath condos. These can be
| found all over the country. Add a little more on top of it, say
| $250k-$300k and you've bumped up to a 3 bed 2 bath townhouse with
| a garage. For the price of a downpayment for a dump in a major
| metropolitan area, you can own a 20-30 year old construction
| fully paid off. And that's a mid-case scenario.
|
| In a low tax area a place that's paid off like that might cost
| you $400-500/mo between taxes, homeowners insurance, and HOA
| fees. The big "GOTCHA" everybody comes up with is health
| insurance. Well between medicaid and Obamacare you can get
| sizeable tax credits up to fairly high incomes. If you're making
| around $50k/yr in my state PA, you can get around $1500/mo in
| credits with a family of 3, and end up paying ~$1200 in premiums
| per year.
|
| There's literally nothing blackpill about this lifestyle. It's as
| walkable as any suburb, with the same CHATGPT-style standard of
| care healthcare that exists across the country, and it's actually
| more convenient to get from point A to point B in a car than in
| most major cities or in high density suburban areas. Fiber
| internet is likely more accessible and reliable too, unlike how
| it would be in decrepit city buildings.
|
| A lot of pros, and not many cons - sure it isn't $432/month, but
| you can make situations like this work for $2-3k, which opens up
| an endless number of careers, projects, and opportunities to live
| off of.
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Missing healthcare costs.
| refurb wrote:
| at that income level Medicaid is an option in many states.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Same with education and such. "How to live on $432 a month",
| "... with society subsidizing a bunch of the important
| parts."
| bmenrigh wrote:
| "Internet: Use library" says all you need to hear about this
| wonderful bargain of a location.
| hysan wrote:
| I flagged this article and later saw it dead, so I'm quite
| surprised it came back. I found the content extremely shallow and
| lacking nuance. Others have mentioned, but it leaves out huge
| caveats because it would destroy the the conclusion - the cost of
| moving to the place in the first place, social connections,
| health (even worse for those with disabilities), emergency
| services, retirement, etc etc. The list of obvious hurdles that
| immediately disqualify most people is a glaring omission and I
| really don't understand why this article garnered upvotes aside
| from affirming confirmation bias. This is the first time I've
| been greatly soured by the response from the HN community. What
| substance are people finding in this article?
| an_guy wrote:
| > the cost of moving to the place in the first place, social
| connections, health (even worse for those with disabilities),
| emergency services, retirement, etc etc
|
| Anyone moving to bay area for a higher income job would have
| most of these issues.
|
| A forum full of people willing to migrate for better income and
| lifestyle should not be criticizing "cost of moving", "social
| connections", "health disabilities" and "retirement".
| hysan wrote:
| I might be misreading your reply, but what you're keying in
| on and singling out is a tiny fraction of the audience the
| article is arguing for. My problem is with how shallow this
| article is and how it throws a wide net that doesn't cover a
| ton of situations that prevent people from doing what he
| claims is possible for just about anyone if they change their
| mindset. If the argument were just for the subset of users
| you're using as an example, then sure? But that's isn't as
| clickbaity and certainly doesn't support the claim that any
| young person can just up and do what the writer claims.
| nkurz wrote:
| Thank you for posting your reasons for flagging it! I'm on the
| exact opposite side. I thought it was a decent article, flawed
| but worthy of discussion. I was surprised to see it flagged
| dead, so I vouched for it. When this didn't bring it back
| alive, I emailed Dan to see if he could resuscitate it. He said
| that it was already alive due to enough other people having
| vouched for it.
|
| Your criticisms are all reasonable, but they are exactly the
| sort of things I'd hope to see discussed in the comments. And
| they are! I think the article is a good starting point for a
| discussion on what's possible. I'm nowhere near as extreme as
| the author of the piece, but I live a life much closer to what
| he describes than most people here.
|
| Rather than being soured by the response, I'm glad to see both
| the pros and the cons being discussed. Yes, there are lots of
| ethical issues about living the way he suggests. There are lots
| of things you'll be doing without. But there are also lots of
| upsides about living in a way that you have time to do things
| besides just work and sleep. Which parts of the response did
| you find souring?
| dbbljack wrote:
| i'd have to do a lot of research to find a cheap rural area that
| I would be able to exist in after sundown.
| rendall wrote:
| > _A long and mostly endless stream of "blackpills" about the
| cost of housing can be readily found on any social media platform
| -- and often enough, the "boomers" are the scapegoat; the ones
| who lived their American Dreams and, as the allegations go,
| pulled up the ladder behind them as they tasted their successes._
|
| I've often heard the criticism that Boomers lived unsustainably
| and then pulled the ladder up behind them, making life harder for
| future generations. But what I don't often hear is a breakdown of
| the specific policy decisions that led to this. What were they?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I've been thinking a lot about this in my personal context. I'm
| not super wealthy and thinking about the inevitable moment when I
| will work less and need to live on what I've scraped together by
| then. I currently live in Berlin in a gentrified area which is
| nice to be in but also getting more expensive rapidly. It's
| convenient for me to be here. But I wouldn't mind being in a much
| cheaper place otherwise.
|
| I see a few technical trends that would enable me to live quite
| far away from Berlin mid term that could be a lot more
| affordable.
|
| - Starlink provides good enough internet pretty much anywhere.
| Rural Germany is famous for its lack of connectivity. I could
| live anywhere in Germany and have a decent connectivity and be
| able to work remotely. Complete science fiction until recently.
| But now feasible. I expect there will be competitors in a few
| years.
|
| - Improved modes of transport to remote locations via autonomous
| driving electrical cars, mini buses, drones etc. could unlock
| rural destinations. Electrical means cost per mile/km is
| expressed in kwh. About 2-4 km/kwh. Autonomous means there is no
| driver to pay or tiring driving to do. Even at Germany's high-ish
| grid prices, a 50 km commute becomes quite affordable (a cup of
| coffee worth of energy). And you can take a nap, relax, or work
| while you move and be quite comfortable while being moved. There
| are a lot of affordable housing options starting from about 10km
| away from where I currently live. 50km, we are talking rural
| Brandenburg which has depopulated significantly since the fall of
| the wall. Ghost villages, lack of employment, etc. I know several
| people that moved to the edge of Berlin or beyond and have a
| great standard of living there.
|
| - Tiny/prefab housing means the current cost of constructing
| houses is increasingly complete bullshit. I don't need a
| artisanally crafted house at great expense. I just need a small
| amount of space that is comfortable. That shouldn't cost me north
| of half a million and put me in debt for decades. And modern
| materials means such a place could be well insulated and
| relatively cheap to heat.
|
| - Low cost, renewable energy is starting to dominate. Germany has
| really high energy prices. But it's investing to fix that. Those
| investments might pay off in a few decades and lower the cost of
| energy. That's good news if I'm heating with a heatpump, and am
| being moved around electrically.
|
| So, I need some land reasonably close to where the action is
| (Berlin in my case) but not in the middle of it. An affordable &
| comfortable way to get to Berlin when I need to. And some housing
| that won't break the bank. I think all of those are well in reach
| for well below 100K and next to nothing in monthly cost. All I
| need is some kwh of power and water. And the usual insurances,
| taxes, and what not. And food, which I might even grow some
| myself if I had enough room for a garden. And being far away from
| all the hipster areas in Berlin, probably means local shops are
| going to be relatively cheap.
|
| Of course this being Germany, the obstacle to this is going to be
| immense bureaucratic inertia. You can't just plonk down a tiny
| house anywhere you want. There are rules! Designed to frustrate
| anything entirely reasonable like that.
|
| But I imagine similar things are going to be true everywhere and
| there is going to be fierce competition between depopulated
| regions to attract people and their money. And when push comes to
| shove, I'm not German and could be persuaded to move elsewhere.
| Also, if you extrapolate to autonomous RVs, you could just live
| in those and let them drive you to some remote parking space at
| night and to charging and water points for access to the
| essentials. Be in nature when you want to be, drive up to a city
| when you need to. Move south in the winter, north in the summer,
| etc.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| Two words: "Health Insurance"
| yodsanklai wrote:
| No mention of health expenses. This is often underestimated in
| all these "Retire Early" scenarios.
| sgerenser wrote:
| At this income level health is covered 100% by Medicaid.
| Depending on where you live, that can be perfectly fine or
| pretty bad.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Jobs and crime: What value can you add, and what value can be
| taken from you?
|
| Stressed communities like Massena are defensive: outsiders
| (particularly relatively wealthy ones) are typically a target,
| and are unlikely to get a plum job that goes by word of mouth.
| That effect is amplified when people don't have the assets or
| kind of life they want to protect for themselves, so they have
| little to lose and a big chip on the shoulder.
|
| To me the sweet spot for young people would be the in-law unit in
| a great neighborhood where you could do professional work. Learn
| from the best, and deal with people more interested in a clean,
| secure transaction than extracting every advantage they need
| (e.g., buy good engineering used from someone who loved their
| car). Even wealthy people aspire to pare down to what they really
| need, because the simplicity restores irreplaceable time.
|
| If there are thousands of ways to do wrong and few to do right,
| give yourself your best opportunities. Make yourself not only
| useful but reliable and graceful. Anyone under 30 (or anyone at
| all?) should be budgeting 30% on making the future selves they
| really want to be.
| fullstackchris wrote:
| Great article, yes, its the classic "I want to not work AND keep
| my current lifestyle" I dont know if it was social media,
| bitterness at boomers, or whatever, that made most zoomers behold
| this pipe dream.
|
| Loved the Massena example, but I went to school near there
| (Clarkson) and the winters are pretty rough. Summer / fall is
| beautiful though!
| pqs wrote:
| I like this proposition, but the article didn't mention health
| services in the area. I'm European and I don't fully understand
| the US health sector but I want to know what would happen in case
| of severe illness, living this way.
| AngryData wrote:
| There are some little emergency clinics around in rural places,
| but its generally like the bare minimum where if you make it
| there they can give you a bag of blood and an oxygen tank, but
| I would expect atleast a 45 minute travel time to an actual
| hospital that can treat you for anything, and it would cost
| $2,000 for the ambulance trip alone, not to mention the actual
| hospital bills..
|
| The hospital will have to take you in if you need emergency
| treatment, provided you make it that far, however they only
| guarantee the minimum treatment to "stabilize" you, and at that
| point they are going to expect either an insurance policy be
| given to them, or your agreement to take on additional medical
| debt beyond what you already incurred to receive additional
| treatment. Like if you have a heart attack, they will take you
| in, give you some nitroglycerin, and try to get it so that they
| aren't worried about you keeling over within the next 2 hours,
| but if your heart is still in a lower level of afib and you
| can't afford treatment? They will give you the boot and tell
| you to go see a doctor but it ain't an absolute emergency any
| more.
|
| Or say you crash your car and your leg is crushed. They will
| stabilize you, but then you or someone else will have to make a
| financial decision for you or give your insurance. Will you be
| able to afford the costs of multiple surgeries to pin your
| shattered leg bones back together and all the rehabilitation?
| Sure they can do that. Can you already not afford the costs you
| incurred and certainly can't afford all the additional
| surgeries and rehabilitation later? Well they will "save" you
| from all those costs you can't afford by chopping off your leg,
| knowing that without those other surgeries they will end up
| cutting it off 6 months later anyway.
| aqrit wrote:
| > health services in the area
|
| Massena Hospital is a 25-bed hospital. Might have to go to
| Canton or Ogdensburg for a family doctor (45 minutes by car).
| Most things serious get referred to Syracuse or Burlington (3
| hours away by car).
|
| AFAIK, Cost[1] is "theoretically" nothing if annual income is
| less than the federal poverty line ($15,650 for an
| individuality). And might as well be free for an income up to
| $39,125.
|
| [1] https://info.nystateofhealth.ny.gov/EssentialPlan
| Coffeewine wrote:
| This is bizarre to me - my extended family live in the towns
| surrounding Massena, NY, and have for about four generations now.
| The area certainly has its perks, it can be very pretty and there
| is plenty of room for hunting, fishing and other such pursuits if
| one is so inclined. Houses are extremely inexpensive, as is a
| surprising amount of land if that's what you want. Though the set
| who are actually farming has declined precipitously over the
| generations.
|
| The article however rather oversells the economic opportunities
| of the area - the two best employers are a nearby Indian casino
| and the prison system, both of which have their drawbacks.
| Otherwise there is a reason why all the local farmland is slowly
| being occupied by the Amish, they're a group that doesn't care
| much about the lack of opportunity.
|
| As you can guess, this has led to a big divergence in outcomes.
| My relatives who have found remote work are living like kings,
| and the ones who haven't are really struggling.
|
| I dunno why I'm writing this. I guess it's just funny to see
| Massena written about. And Massena is the big city compared to
| the surrounding towns.
| davedx wrote:
| What happens when you get sick?
| Version467 wrote:
| This is one of those articles where the comments are really
| interesting to read through. I see a bunch of comments who don't
| agree with the exact math, which might be warranted, but it seems
| at least directionally correct to me. However there's also a
| bunch of people commenting that this lifestyle isn't viable for
| some reason or another, that mainly just boils down to a personal
| preference those commenters don't want to live without.
|
| But having read through most of the objections I still find
| myself enticed by this. If I mentally place myself in this
| position I think I could quite happily live a few decades without
| talking to anyone for weeks or even months at a time. I'd still
| have my pets to give me companionship. Load my kindle up with a
| thousand books I want to read and just work my way through it.
| Pick up writing as a hobby and spend the rest of the time working
| at a gas station and fixing up the house and/or grow some food to
| offset the reduced income.
|
| Healthcare is an issue. Doesn't seem like a viable place to grow
| old. Once you become too frail for physical work it's probably
| just time to die, which isn't great.
| discordance wrote:
| You might also like a documentary called Alone in the
| Wilderness, which tells the story of Dick Proenneke, a man who
| moved to the remote Twin Lakes region of Alaska in 1968 and
| lived alone in the wilderness for 30 years.
|
| Proenneke built his own log cabin entirely by hand, using only
| simple tools (many of which he made himself), and filmed his
| daily life, including hunting, fishing, foraging, and crafting
| everything from scratch
| MichaelRo wrote:
| Man, I don't wanna see someone going to live as a hermit in
| the woods and shit in the bushes for $400. I've got plenty of
| examples of people living in mud huts in Africa for much
| less.
|
| I wanna see how it's possible to live a decent life in
| civilized conditions (roof over your head, running water and
| sewage system, electricity, heating) on $400.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > However there's also a bunch of people commenting that this
| lifestyle isn't viable for some reason or another, that mainly
| just boils down to a personal preference those commenters don't
| want to live without.
|
| Given humans are also just animals that had lifestyles before
| money and modern society was invented, this doesn't seem like a
| useful distinction. Either you're talking about your personal
| preferences you don't want to lice without or money isn't even
| part of the picture in the first place. Where that line is
| personally drawn is just as arbitrary to this point at $1 as
| $1,000,000.
|
| Overall though I agree the article sheds light where we don't
| normally tend to think. At the same time it crosses points too
| often to make that those focus of conversation. That is to say
| it makes a good point with just a little too much PoV twist
| inserted so people who don't agree will think about that
| statement instead. E.g. don't complain about not having the
| home prospects of a boomer because you can live like your great
| grandparent - which would be something ~40 years prior to the
| boomer comparison, even for a zoomer (-> driving pushback
| against the idea owning a house at all is the same as the
| lifestyle the article laments hearing about -> driving
| conversation like the above paragraph).
| mattlondon wrote:
| I think a lot of the complaint I see is people want to have
| 100% of everything they want, within a 10 minute walk, with
| zero compromise. I.e. they have unreasonable expectations.
|
| I see people come to London from other parts of the world and
| ask where they can live that is nice and a 5-10 minute walk
| from the office and I usually laugh in their faces. If you can
| afford to live that close in central London (even before you
| think about "nice"), then you don't need to work. Even single
| car parking spaces in central London cost more than family
| houses elsewhere in the UK.
|
| When I got my first place it was on the outskirts of London,
| cost 20x the average UK salary (and for which I obviously took
| out a huge mortgage for that basically took 75-80% of my salary
| at the time to pay), and took over an hour on public transport
| (which was also not cheap - walking is free but probably about
| 4 hours each way) to get to central London. And this was just
| in the 2008-era - it's _never_ been cheap (or even reasonable)
| to own nice property in the center of a large global metropolis
| like London where you are 10 minutes walk from your office AND
| transport AND entertainment AND everything else unless you are
| ultra wealthy.
|
| People need to lower expectations about locality/proximity and
| affordability before things become viable. This isn't a new
| problem.
| api wrote:
| You can go to not quite as extreme levels. There are thousands
| of small towns all through Appalachia, the Midwest, and the
| Northeast with a bit of interesting local culture and a low
| cost of living. Not this low but they also have hospitals and
| often colleges and other things.
|
| If you are a minority concerned about the culture of red
| America, the 2016 and 2024 elections both provide excellent
| county by county color coded maps for you.
|
| Telework is what really unlocks this if you're a developer.
|
| The Midwest also has many medium sized cities. Not as cheap as
| small towns but not as expensive as the coastal real estate
| cost traps. I live in Cincinnati, which has three universities,
| four Fortune 500 companies, a small startup scene, and over a
| dozen small neighborhoods with walkable streets (overall you'd
| want a car but you could get away with not using it every day).
|
| At some point the only economically rational decision is to
| leave very high cost of living cities. I tell people for cities
| like SF that it might be good to go there to launch your career
| but look at it like a college. If by 30 you are not making --
| for SF I'd say over $300k -- then leave. You will never get
| above real estate in those places unless you are approaching
| mid six figures.
|
| It also negatively impacts what you can do. Even if you can
| earn that, it might be with golden handcuffs to a FAANG. Think
| about that. If you want to start a startup, one that is not
| lavishly funded enough to pay that, then leave. If you just
| don't want to be golden handcuffed to a monster mortgage,
| leave.
| kristianc wrote:
| > Moreover, the vision that I am going to postulate here would
| not even require very much in the way of work. I say this because
| by all I have seen, many young people today find the idea of
| indefinite wage labor to be a dismal one. They seem to prefer a
| "low-work lifestyle," but very often, the manner of living that
| such a lifestyle would require is completely foreign to them.
| Because of this, right alongside the many social media posts on
| the topic of the awful expense of buying a home -- there are just
| as many posts, it seems, complaining about "life in the 4HL," or
| pining for remote work, or (rightfully) bemoaning the scam-
| infested, difficult-to-navigate, often cynical and fake job
| market that they've encountered.
|
| It's cheeky because it frames itself as rejecting the status quo,
| when actually what it is doing is saying "accept the status quo
| wholesale and just move to somewhere the status quo hasn't
| reached yet." And of course, if enough people do that, no one
| will be around to fight against the status quo anymore. The main
| difference between this and Thoreau's cabin in the woods is that
| Thoreau could have chosen to do differently.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| It seems a fairly pragmatic solution to me. Yes, at a societal
| level things are pretty messed up for lower earners but there
| is next to nothing they can do about that. However from an
| individual perspective there are options and they aren't all as
| extreme as this.
| brokegrammer wrote:
| I think living in rural areas sucks because you'll end up feeling
| very lonely. And I'm speaking as a hardcore introvert who didn't
| feel lonely at all during the lock-down. But after extended
| periods of isolation, human connection becomes important,
| especially if you're young.
|
| I'm currently living below my means in a small village in
| Mauritius, but I'm planning on moving to a big city in a big
| country ASAP because while living like this is good for my bank
| account, my mental health is taking a heavy toll. Not to mention
| how challenging it is to find a date.
|
| As a young person, IMO the best thing to do is move to a place
| where you can make some good lifelong friends, and build a solid
| network for employment opportunities. Saving money while living
| frugally only served to dampen my social muscles.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| Yeah, it really depends on your life situation. When I was
| reaching 20's I felt like you, and moving to city was great for
| my mental health. Now I'm in my 30's, my parents and my spouses
| parents live in rural area. We have small kids, and due to that
| we have barely any time to socialize. At this life stage,
| cheaper housing, quiet and proximity to our family in the
| countryside is really becoming attractive. City life with kids
| sucks when there's no family nearby, and you can't afford a big
| enough apartment.
| ada1981 wrote:
| I sold a small import export business I stood up during Covid and
| after living in NYC for 13 years, decided to get a "fancy
| instagram bus" after a voice in my head told me to do so.
|
| The _next day_ a friend called, who I hadn't seen since we got
| shipwrecked in the gulf of Panama, and told me he had been
| building out a "fancy instagram School bus" for the last year and
| between his wife and his pot farm in CA he realized he'd have no
| time for it.
|
| "I figure you were the guy to buy it from me."
|
| I said yes and bought a 1 way ticket to Santa Cruz.
|
| I sublet my place in park slope for $3,600 a month furnished
| which was $1k more a month than the base rent.
|
| I thought I'd spend a few months driving around, go on Phish
| Tour, and flip the bus for $50k.
|
| That was about 4 years ago.
|
| The bus cost me $36k and within 10 months paid for itself.
|
| I let the place in nyc go entirely after that and for one months
| rent could drive back and forth across the US.
|
| A $89 parks pass gets me into all the national parks and I can
| stay on BLM land in the most beautiful places for free.
|
| I soon realized many people have at least 1 home and love having
| a self contained guest for a week or two. I visited friends,
| family and clients (I still maintain a high end high performance
| coaching business working with founders of companies like Asana,
| Bombas and other interesting folks).
|
| I also run a remote AI research lab for the last 4 years.
|
| I shop at farmers markets or wholefoods.
|
| I love ultimate frisbee and am pretty good, having been a former
| world games invitee, and any city usually has a game and within
| an afternoon I can make a dozen or so new friends and be invited
| to all sorts of things. (pickupultimate.com).
|
| Last year on the eclipse I met a woman in hot springs, Arkansas
| and fell in love - and she lives in Kansas City so I've spent a
| lot of time here with her the last year.
|
| The creative freedom of having a bus and living in beautiful
| spaces is unmatched. And knowing if I lose all money, I can buy a
| 50lb bag of rice and beans, fill up on water, and use my cell
| phone and solar for a month to figure out the next move, is very
| comforting.
|
| Of course there have been problems like breakdowns, a friend
| filling my diesel tank with reg gas, a break in in nyc, and
| getting hassled for parking legally by house dwellers in Santa
| Monica, but it's been a great investment.
|
| So much of "middle class lifestyle" is a trap marketed to you
| people by the upper classes to get you to opt in to being a
| modern day share cropper. Taking a couple vacations a year,
| retiring out of shape and unable to really enjoy life and nature,
| and coping with pills and drugs and tv and consumption that are
| primarily part of the problem.
|
| Ps we host an ai / philosophy / founder meetup every Wednesday,
| come as my vip! Http://earthpilot.ai/play
| smeeger wrote:
| living outside of society is not viable. but its true that the
| economic system that we all live inside of is not serving us well
| because of corruption. everything is much more expensive than it
| should be. i think the best solution is for people to make their
| own little societies, bring back towns, and instead of a walmart
| and box stores put people to work growing food and making things.
| its the only way to live affordably without moving to another
| country.
| andrewrn wrote:
| I've spent time in upstate New York, and the communities I
| visited were not welcoming to newcomers. I had a few beers in a
| bar in Tupper Lake and I may as well have been a green alien.
| Unless you're religious and can lean on a church community, this
| life seems absolutely lonely.
| dsalzman wrote:
| Surprised that there isn't a kibbutz trend in the US with this
| sentiment.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| A lot of kibbutzim are run collectively. As a joke in the TV
| show The Americans went, from an Israeli to a Soviet spy: "if
| you like socialism so much, defect to Israel, we do it better".
|
| That kind of thing isn't in the American DNA. You'd have people
| demand a lawn and a fence after a month.
| thrance wrote:
| Disregard systemic problems, place the blame entirely on younger
| generation using too much tiktok/uber/doordash/netflix/whatever.
| You should live like it's 1899 out in the fields and basically
| enjoy none of the good sides of modern life. This is part of the
| reason why "OK boomer" is so popular.
|
| (Also, living that far from urban centers when you're not a
| farmer is a burden on society. You require much more road, water
| pipes and power line maintenance than someone that lives in the
| city.)
| AngryData wrote:
| It sounds nice, atleast until non-daily tasks and costs start to
| pile up. Goods are not cheaper in a rural area, you don't get an
| Amazon or Walmart discount for living in the middle of nowhere,
| medical and dental are not cheaper, general services are far more
| expensive so I hope you can fix or install most all of your own
| appliances and plumbing systems and roof, it will cost you a lot
| more to have wood delivered than cut it yourself for heating and
| using sawmill cutoffs is not a great material for maintaining a
| fire overnight. Friends and family are farther and fewer. Law
| enforcement in these places basically only exist to extort people
| because that's how they fund themselves and real crime is so
| uncommon, but of course they still need to pay for maintenance on
| their MRAPs and Humvees and such and think they are better than
| the local "yokels". Fire service may or may not cost you money to
| pay into, or may simply not exist for anything other than making
| sure it doesn't spread after your house is gone. And of course
| you are living outside of modern society and being left behind
| technologically, which isn't a problem for a few years, but after
| 10+ years you start to become out of touch.
|
| This kind of thing might sound nice from the outside, but if poor
| rural community living was as nice and cheap as claimed, these
| kind of areas wouldn't be so cheap or abandoned. These kind of
| articles always seem like a "grass is greener" type escapist
| fantasies. Yeah sure there are a handful of unusually better
| spots, maybe this place is one of them, but 95% of poor rural
| areas are just... poor rural areas with little to offer. Hope you
| don't have kids because the schools will be garbage. Hope you
| don't like going to bars or being super social because 90% of the
| clientele are the same handful of drunks you see every time.
|
| Just because you can eek out a few cheap years in a place like
| this in your 20s or 30s doesn't mean it is a great place to
| actually live. Say you work a decent amount to "save" money for
| 10 or 15 years, what will you walk away from there financially?
| You weren't saving city wages that will afford you to move
| wherever you want, you saved poor rural wages which will afford
| you.... another slightly less poor rural area or maybe living
| like a 20 year old in a more prosperous place for a year, your
| house might be worth less later than what you paid for it, your
| job might just disappear one day without warning and no viable
| replacement except for a desperation job at just a bit above
| minimum wage.
|
| Ive lived in rural areas, mostly poorer areas, my whole life. And
| yeah sure there are some hippies around surviving, some Amish
| dudes surviving, a few people are doing a bit better with long-
| distance traveling jobs like truckers or seasonal work farther
| away. But 90% of people are just barely surviving, watching their
| health slowly fail away faster and faster because they can't
| afford the care to maintain it. Hopefully you can live until you
| are 60+ without any health problems, but that is a big gamble. If
| you get sick a single hospital visit can wipe out a decade or
| more of careful savings. Break an arm or an ankle? There is an
| entire year's savings or more. You get to watch those few still
| around you struggling day after day living in shacks or 30 year
| old decaying mobile homes. Poor rural areas are not some hidden
| grove of wonder and peace, if it was these places wouldn't have
| been abandoned to start with.
| losvedir wrote:
| > _In this case, you could work just one ten-hour shift per week,
| and in so doing, earn more than 30% of what you need to live well
| at this particular house_
|
| Am I missing something or is this implying that you need to work
| 34 hours a week at the gas station to live there. That's....
| basically a normal, full-time job, right? It's a strange way of
| putting it.
| sgerenser wrote:
| No, it's saying one 10 hour shift a week gets you 30% of what
| you need to live for a month. So doing 3 or 4 of those a
| _month_ is sufficient to live on, assuming the posted costs are
| remotely accurate and aren't missing anything important (big
| assumption).
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| The expenses are monthly so if you did that shift every week,
| you'll have an income surplus.
| 0n0n0m0uz wrote:
| Only way you could live on $500 a month is in a paid off vehicle
| on public lands in western states where you only drove to buy
| food. I know because I do it.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| What happens if you need to go to a museum or the opera?
| byronic wrote:
| An incredible strategy for getting the article to break
| containment. I won't share it unless you pay me $7100, which is
| how much it costs me to live in America with dependents
| timcobb wrote:
| > In fact, were it to be that any of those who seek a simpler,
| more straightforward, more affordable way of life matched
| themselves up with the various regions in which that kind of a
| life is on offer in spades -- it just might make our country
| better.
|
| I think this all the time too. Would be interesting to try to
| start a colony like this.
| tallanvor wrote:
| People have tried it plenty of times. There might be a few
| still sort of running, but most of them fail.
| stickfigure wrote:
| On one hand I agree with the general _premise_ of the article,
| which is that you can live a lot cheaper than you choose to.
| Homes in the passably-cute downtown of Massena are under $100k;
| you could live on $40k /yr comfortably and if you're here on HN
| you can probably earn at least than that with a remote job.
| Cutting it to $5k/yr is just trying to prove something.
|
| The missing thing is health care. If you're young and immortal
| and willing to take risks, sure. This attitude won't last into
| middle age. My wife had cancer, and without health insurance I'd
| be a single parent right now. Maybe you can lean on public
| assistance like Medicaid (if it continues to exist), but this
| isn't really a scalable solution for "we can all live cheaper".
| It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay for
| it.
|
| "Cheap" health insurance for a youngish small family is
| >$1000/mo. That really isn't optional in the US.
| MarceColl wrote:
| That's insane, my dad had cancer 3 years ago, and here in Spain
| we didn't even think about it (beyond of course the terrible
| situation). If you also want private insurance it will cost a
| youngish small family (like mine) 150EUR/month.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is America.
|
| We don't have any money to treat sick people, we need to make
| sure the networth of billionaires continues to grow.
|
| We need to fund military bases all over the world and
| conflicts in places most of us can't find on maps.
|
| You find how truly alone you are when you can't afford your
| medicine. No longer an "American" you're a freeloader, a
| parasite. Perhaps God himself hates you.
|
| And Blessed are the Billionaires for God gave them so much.
| hajile wrote:
| The problem with US healthcare is bloat.
|
| According to Google, person in Spain spends on average $4,432
| per person per year with some $3,113 of that being paid by
| the government.
|
| The US government pays out $6,000 per person per year or
| nearly TWICE as much.
|
| The problem is that $6000 is still less than half of the
| $14,570 per person per year (2023) healthcare costs in the
| US.
|
| And of course, the US government payments don't cover
| everyone equally. They only cover the elderly and some subset
| of the very poor (mostly kids).
|
| The only fix is reducing US healthcare costs to something
| more like the rest of the world, but that requires sharing
| drug R&D costs evenly with other countries (raising your
| costs), reigning in insurance companies, eliminating over-
| credentializing of doctors and other medical professionals,
| fixing school cost/debt, and reducing/eliminating the massive
| amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy/paperwork (allowing
| doctors to reduce staff and see more patients per day which
| reduces overall medical costs).
| projektfu wrote:
| If your income is $5k/yr you are on medicaid in NY.
| axiomdata316 wrote:
| Is that Massena NY or Massena Iowa?
| stickfigure wrote:
| The article focuses on Massena NY.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> It only works if enough people stay in the rat race to pay
| for it.
|
| Given the reaction to the article by the commenters here, I
| don't think we need to worry about a mass movement of people
| wanting to live like dirty hippies in the Massenas of the
| country.
|
| The article is just saying, "Here's one of the things you are
| allowed to do". There are trade-offs, the same as there are
| trade-offs for the people moving from India to Silicon Valley
| to make money, but who won't see their families more than once
| every year or two or three.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| This works if you're young and healthy. Which is possible. I
| didn't have health insurance for the first 45+ years of my life
| and saw a doctor maybe 4-5 times before my mid-50s. Must not
| have spent more than $5k total on medical in 30 years including
| dental. If you live a healthy lifestyle (much easier out there
| than in the city) and are relatively lucky genetically then
| lack of health insurance isn't the bugaboo that most Americans
| seem to make it.
| stackedinserter wrote:
| If you're ready to move to frozen salty belt to live bare
| minimum, why not move to a cheap country, work as English tutor
| for 10x quality of life?
|
| Don't live in this area, it sucks. You'll have 8 months of
| miserable, not enjoyable winter with winds and freezing rains, 2
| months if suffocating humid summer with mosquitos and ticks, and
| maybe relatively enjoyable September. Ask me how I know.
| kixiQu wrote:
| I think we should all just calibrate what kind of project we
| believe the author to be engaged in from the following quote from
| a linked post:
|
| > After all, constant sunshine is the weather of the dullard. The
| lover of hot, lazy days and breezy, cloudless skies fancies
| himself a lordling -- he insists that the earth be his womb-like
| chamber of easy, saccharine delights. He is the same man who
| enjoys sugary-sweet sodas, on-the-nose political commentary,
| prefers his novels to be cheap and gutless, and his women botoxed
| and spray-tanned.
|
| No very close reading is required, I believe.
| rayiner wrote:
| > By the standards of our great-grandfathers
|
| Not even great grandfathers. My wife's dad grew up in a 600-700
| square foot modular home with three siblings. Mom was a waitress,
| step-dad never had a W2 job (hunted, did handyman work, etc).
| Derawk wrote:
| I suspect there is also something in between the big city and
| rural Massena. Just a couple hours east of Seattle you've got a a
| full fledged city (Yakima) with lots of infrastructure and plenty
| of 3-4 bdrm houses going for ~33% the cost (~350k).
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Ok so the math is off by a factor of 2, but the basic premise
| still holds. Harder to do if you have school age kids though or
| are generally in poor health. But otherwise doable. Not for
| everyone, but for some it's a much better life, qualitatively.
|
| I wonder at what point we'll see this become a trend as young-ish
| people realize that the trade off is worth it for them. Will we
| see a reverse migration from the cities at some point? We did
| some of that during Covid but I haven't seen any numbers on much
| of it "stuck" post-COVID especially with RTO. Anyone seen any
| stats on this?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| This is why I love the idea of remote work. The wealth of these
| companies doesn't need to stay trapped in a handful of rich
| enclaves. We could have millions of Americans living in these
| sorts of places "sharing" the wealth.
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