I used to live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Sitting inside everyday is not how I want to spend my life. Now I live in a mountain town of 10,000. There is no traffic. We ride everywhere in town. I work 10-20 hours a week on writing and books, depending on the season. I snowboard 100 days a season. We took our 6 month old on a trip for a year (wife got 18 months maternity leave) she works 3 days a week.
I cut our firewood so we have no heating bill, have no phone, no tv. We really enjoy the simple life. We have plenty of time to host dinner gatherings, hang out with our daughter, hike, camp etc.
We did a 10 day wilderness canoe trip with friends this summer, it was unreal.
We realized More money will not make us happier. We don’t want more money. More time doing the things we love with family and friends will.
The choice is there.
I live in a big city and work as a software engineer.
I love the city, the friend group, being into some communities that do not exist in small towns.
If you'd put the outdoorsy small town lifestyle on me, I'd kill myself.
I'm really happy for you it worked out, but what you suggest is not an overall solution. (And just imagine how your town would look like, if we all moved out of the cities ... we'd create new cities).
The fact that cities are big is cause by people wanting to live there, not elsewhere.
A big portion of that is the greatly restricted access to healthcare. Federal law changes caused a large number of rural hospitals and other medical facilities to shut down over the last decade. This delayed access to diagnostic care, and slowed down golden hour treatment have greatly impacted average age of death for rural communities.
I mean, since 1900. If you could afford to stay rural during the Industrial Revolution*, you could expect 10 years more life expectancy. Dickensian cities were disease nightmares.
(*) but you started off as the kind of person who could afford that choice
I am also very happy your choice has worked for you and you are happy.
Obviously it’s horses for courses.
That being said, would you take an extra paid week of leave if offered? What about two or three?
Would you be happier?
What if you had 20 weeks of paid leave? Would you be happier?
I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
> I think the very vast majority of people would work less if they could.
But you also said "the choice is there". So which is it? If you think they can, and you also think they would do it if they could, then why do you think they don't?
They said "if we all moved out of the cities". Do you think the whole world could live in the countryside? Historically people moved to the cities because they weren't able to live in the countryside anymore...
What do you do for health insurance? That seems to be the big thing at least when I was not a W-2, and the state marketplaces are not cheap and way worse than insurance from any employer I've had.
I work, earn money and pay taxes. So does my wife. We have a mortgage, and pay property taxes too.
Is it a requirement of society to work maxx?
If a doctor can earn $50k a year working one day a week and a Walmart worker has to work 40 hours a week to earn $50k, does the doctor have some kind of obligation to work and earn more? What if they just want the kind of life $50k a year allows for?
Should the Walmart worker do 80 hour weeks to contribute the same taxes as an engineer working 40 hour weeks?
Surely we all get to choose how much we work.
If I want to live in a 100 year old house and ride my bike with no phone and no tv, and modest lifestyle, it’s absurd I should be forced to work “full time” when I earn as much as I want to live the life I want. That is my choice.
That was a genuine question: you say you don't have to worry about paying health insurance because you immigrated to a country where it's free, right?
My question is: if it's free, it comes from taxes. And if you earn less, you contribute less. Does it pay for your health insurance, or do you benefit from the fact that others work more and contribute more?
Not saying you should be ashamed at all. Just wondering if you would get the same level of health insurance in a world where everybody did the same as you. I guess not? Which is maybe fine, of course.
> I pay more taxes than the millions of people on minimum wage.
I assume those people couldn't survive on working 10-20 hours a week, if they are on minimum wage at 100%?
I guess what I am saying is "good for you, but it's not like everybody can do that". You are lucky that you can do that, it's not "just a choice everyone can make".
You say "the choice is there", but right after you explain that millions of people wouldn't be wealthy enough to do it...
I guess it felt to me that the OP was answering the question "why are we still working this hard" by giving an example of how we actually could work less.
Which does not seem to be the case at all. The OP seems closer to someone who would be wealthy if they worked full time (they say that by working 10-20h a week, they still make more than people on minimum wage).
They conclude with "The choice is there". Sure, "the choice is there" when you are wealthy enough.
That’s only true if you have a bad setup (has to be manually setup and torn down)
Permanently mount the panels on your roof and you’ll never spend a single second dealing with them, and you’ll be getting power every second the sun is up. Driving, camping, filling gas tank, at grocery store, waiting at border, etc etc.
A bad setup is junk. A good setup is indispensable.
I’ve bought local SIMs in three dozen countries and while it sometimes takes 30 minutes of photocopying my passport and whatever, they’ve always worked flawlessly. Around $1/GB.
Yeah, Starlink got A LOT less useful for global with the recent change.
You can re-register in the country you’re in, but there are limits to how often you can do that, so still not great for driving around a continent like South America or Africa.
The Federal Government really doesn't deal with addresses, roads, etc. That's the job of the states, counties, towns, etc. The USPS, though, needs to know all of that so mail can be delivered.
Via multiple different processes (depending on the entity in charge) the USPS and the entity (state/county/city/town/village/developer/whatever) that comes up with road names/parcels/lots determine the addresses. These addresses get sent to the USPS.
It sounds like the process depends on your specific locality and which government overlays are in charge.
Note that a plat map (the survey that slices land up into chunks) does not necessarily have to include the address.
I lived in a place that was renumbered twice while I lived there, and it wasn't at all obvious - to anyone - as to where the new addresses came from. I asked the county, city, and USPS, and none really could explain how it worked really.
In the US, your mailing address is essentially a routing label. The zip code is designed specifically to help route messages.
The "city" field in the mailing address is less city and more post office name. USPS is a lot more flexible now, but used to be, if your city didn't have its own post office, your mail would need to be addressed to the city where your post office resided; and even if your city did have a post office, it doesn't mean that's the one that services your delivery point.
Many people don't even live in an incorporated city, so at a municipal level they're just in a state and a county, but not a city. Those people still have to put something in the address field, but that leads to a lot of confusion. Unincorporated towns often have no official basis, and aren't always unique either. Of course, neither are incorporated cities in some states. :P
Changing ZIP codes to be geographical would significantly reduce the usefulness of ZIP codes for their primary use, sorting and delivering mail, so that's a non-starter. Use something else!
Well, Postal Code is a geographical region but it's not one aligned with legal boundaries.
These are all real scenarios I've lived/have family who has lived:
- Town A contains a region called "Village B" with no distinct government structure. However, Village B has its own post office, so a subsection of Town A has a separate ZIP Code and is delivered mail by this second post office.
- Town C contains two disjoint sub-regions (unincorporated villages) called "Village D" and "Village E." Both have post offices and both have their own ZIP Codes. Some addresses in Village D are delivered mail by the post office in Village E—not the one in Village D.
- Town F has its own post office, but a street in town F receives mail delivered by the post office in Town G.
The practical impact of these is twofold:
- Mail is written to addresses not matching the municipal governmental structure of your town/city.
- Mapping apps that rely on USPS data to provided addresses (which is generally good, because it means mail will go to the right place) will show the wrong legal town names for the structure.
I'm in postal ZIP code A, closer to village B, served from city A, yet my utilities all have me as being in ZIP code for village B (especially Verizon) - if I give them my city A zip code, I'm unservicable. For technical reasons, my account with them is billed to zip code A and served in zip code B despite the house not being in zip code B. Bonus points that my fire and rescue comes from zip code C...
If I'm understanding correctly, this means that Verizon is not using ZIP Code geography to determine what ZIP Code you belong to. They are mapping to a city/town and then mapping that city/town to a ZIP Code?
A zip code doesn't guarantee that you live inside city limits. I would like to think that Verizon has been around long enough that they get the boundaries directly from the city's GIS department.
The reason that's important is that various municipalities tax things like telecommunications, especially for franchise fees, 911 fees, etc. So the telcos need to know who to pay.
I have a family member whose ZIP Code and government boundary are all consistent, but Verizon serves them via a line from a bordering town so her phone number and infrastructure is all attached to that other town.
This stuff gets complicated even without ZIP Codes involved.
Historically, only larger cities had things you might recognize as a postal code. For example: Boston 8, Mass. The current abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA. And some changed - such as NB being Nebraska (and is now New Brunswick) and Nebraska is now NE.
On older letters, you'll see the red abbreviations instead of the more modern ones:
routing. how do we route a physical package to someone, what route does the mail carrier take?. is where the networking term stems from.
you don't really need to know exactly who or where the target house (or IP) is, you just sorta need to know what post office or trucks serve that area (or which networks connect to your target IP / next hop).
thats up to your local post office (or switch) -- send it to them and let them figure it out, which routes and truck to take to get there, like which routes will eventually pass through this locality?
sometimes that's simple and geographical, like a big city and the local post office serves the people around you, 10 miles in any direction, and sometimes it's because there is a mail truck that drives up and down a valley serving people on multiple sides of a state line and in multiple towns.
back in the day, before cars, those routes could be multi-day treks.
also consider that USPS is federal and plays by federal jurisdiction rules, meaning that they don't really care about neat and tidy state or municipal lines -- they're valid everywhere.
tl;dr: USPS cares about delivery routes and that's what ZIP codes help with. These happen to make up, more or less, areas. This is close enough an abstraction for many use cases (which is why they are ubiquitous), but pretty horrible once you get into the details.
Postal codes are designed to help with delivering mail so it is less linked to geographic in terms of other things we care about and mostly linked to things that are relevant to mail delivery.
Watch the Scott Manley video where he does a very deep dive on the physics of cooling a data centre in orbit. He takes into account reflected heat off the earth and a LOT more.
TLDW summary: it’s entirely doable. Anyone that says it isn't simply hasn’t looked at the physics and math.
Will it be financially beneficial is a totally different question. Of course there were endless experts saying reusable rockets and electric cars never would be.
> I've never heard someone explain what bottleneck exists on earth
1. Power.
2. Political will (current massive pushback over data centre builds).
Feasable for sure, humans can solve this. But Elon Musk doesn't seem to really throw himself on solving power.
I find that very weird.
He 'makes' (panasonic) batteries on mass and had Tesla Solar roofs. So why instead of talking about a dyson sphere or DC in space, he wouldn't just build a solar city in the dessert, put some fiber around and start putting solar panels and his batteries around? AI is not that latency dependend than a lot of other things
Against my better judgment, I let someone on the internet tell me to do my own research by watching a 30 minute Youtube video. Parts of it, at least. I regret it.
Scott Manley literally waves his hands at thermals, claiming that because there exist 28kW SpaceX satellites in space (that operate only intermittently, because they need to cool down), it is feasible to efficiently run modern datacenters that are ~three orders of magnitude more power-hungry 24/7.
He does not do any math. He acknowledges that cooling systems are heavy, take up huge amounts of space, and that small, existing satellites need to schedule downtime to cool off. I'm no physicist, but I'm pretty sure radiant cooling systems scale with surface area, which is bad news for anyone trying to scale existing cooling systems up 1000x.
To keep perspective, that is illegal in many countries. Not everyone has it so bad. You can make it better.
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