I was raised in a rural city and as a kid I thought it was OK. I studied/worked in big cities and my city felt small. Later I returned and now that I turn 50 my small city feel OK again. Tltr: small cities are nice only when you are kid or old(ish)
I wouldn’t go that far. I moved from South GA in 1996 a week after graduating college. I am now back home visiting my parents for Christmas. Everything I hated about living in rural America is even worse now, the economy is even more hallowed out after the factories left and it’s more culturally backwards as all of the people who could leave - did.
My parents retired in their 50s in the early 2000s - mom a teacher and dad a factory worker and they are doing well.
When you have children, your life is mostly about the kids. It really doesn’t matter if you live in rural America.
As empty nesters, at 51 and 50, there is nothing interesting about rural America. I’m in South GA now visiting my parents with my wife. They spend all of the their time between yard work doing things around the house and church. My cousins who still live here and their lives are just as boring - unless they go out of town.
> They spend all of the their time between yard work
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I have two female cousins who are divorced and whose children are grown or nearly so. They are both in their late 40s, early 50s. They still live in my hometown. Guess how much they hate it here (I’m home for the holidays)?
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
I... didn't really understand most of what you wrote in context of my post. Yes, if I were single I'd probably go for a city. My wife hasn't had a job since we had kids when I was 25, and I think we're in a much better financial state because it meant we had an easier time shifting our lives around the world for my job. I've never earnt big tech salary but I make more than was possible with the jobs I could access in New Zealand.
I (admitedly much younger than you) would think that assuming there's good internet and decent road connectivity, you could spend a lot of time on your interests and hobbies, no? My biggest hobbies (photography, diy audio) don't really need urban environments after the manufactured camera/woofer leaves the warehouse and ships to your home. Even easier perhaps if your interest is purely coding/laptop work (like writing a novel), I would think?
(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
The two times in my adult life that I was single (22-28 and 32-35), I would have been miserable in my hometown - as are almost everyone I talk to who is stuck here and single.
When I was single and younger, my hobbies were teaching fitness classes around the metro area and participating in group charity races with friends. We use to do one every month.
Yes. A lot of properties in a small town well outside a major city limit can feel pretty rural (and may not be super-expensive). You're probably not walking to a grocery store but you can likely drive to one in 15 minutes or so.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
I don't know exactly. Maybe $400K; haven't had appraised recently. One neighbor has a Christmas tree farm. The other has a pasture with horses. I don't personally have a huge amount of land--a bit over 4 acres. Don't do anything personally with my land.
But, basically, while Bay Area CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
Probably shaped by Bay area narratives, a lot of people assume that you're either living in the city or you're living in some remote rural location.
Why do the images look like someone took pictures of dotmatrix printer output?
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Update: for whatever it's worth, I just asked the Magic 8 Ball (Perplexity):
Low-tech Magazine uses the option to display images as dithered primarily to reduce the energy consumption and data load of their website. Dithering is an old image compression technique that reduces the number of colors in images to just a few shades of gray (black and white with four levels of gray), which dramatically decreases the file size. The black-and-white dithered images are then recolored via the browser’s CSS, which adds no extra data load.
This approach makes images roughly ten times less resource-intensive than full-color high-resolution images, which supports the magazine’s goal of having a low-energy, solar-powered website. However, some images, such as graphs or those with crucial color information, may become less clear under dithering, so the website offers the option to turn off dithering for individual images to reveal the original, heavier images. This balances energy efficiency with the need for clarity when visual information depends on color or detail.
Thus, the dithered image feature is both an energy-saving measure and a distinct stylistic choice that aligns with the philosophy of reducing the environmental impact of web usage while maintaining visual storytelling appeal.
This feels (needlessly) performative. I get the idea, but the low quality images make it harder to understand what they are showing in the photos, which makes it harder to then reproduce their work.
I suppose the vast majority of users will not need the higher resolution, so perhaps have it be a toggle to get the higher-resolution when needed.
I looked into this and the same photos could be compressed as nice color JPGs of the same size, with a lot more detail. But it would require more computing resources on the viewing end. I think this is their main target, hardware required to decode.
Not sure, JPEGs were fine in Netscape on my 60 MIPS 5x86-133 29 years ago. Mortification of the flesh to do penance for the sin of humanity tasting the forbidden fruit of knowledge may be their main target.
"EVs convert over 77% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 12%–30% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels."
Things look even more dire for gas when you consider the entire supply chain. Remember that you burn gas as terrible efficiency to transport it to gas station.
it is even more dire - transport of gas - imagine hurricane, tornado damages, pipelines, electric supply for gas pump pumps... good luck with pumping gas without electricity, or i remember 8 hour queue before hurricane in front of gas station for some reason...
with PV on roof you do not need to transport anything from anywhere, charge and be functional. not even talking about house comfort while literally everyone around you is panicking, because of lack of electricity. ( you can connect 200watt inverter to your outlet to help "pace" ongrid inverter to work in offrgid situation, so yes all PV can do offgrid for 30 bucks on top)
yes generators are a thing until russia knocks on US sovereignty and US does nothing about it - Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack ...
Did you really think 10-20% loss would erase 50-60% more efficiency when you asked that question? Did you also ask the same question about gasoline energy efficiency and whether it included the significantly higher amount of energy required to move that oil/gasoline all over, multiple times, before it ends up in a tank?
You’re missing a state of change.
California uses coal, natural gas, and nuclear primarily.
Nuclear efficiency is low at 33%.
Best case you‘re charging your car from a new natural gas plant that is a combined cycle design which can potentially have up to 60% efficacy.
So 60% efficiency, minus 9.2% transmission loss, Minus charging losses and then electric motor efficiency loses… verses directly consuming fuel and putting the power to the wheels.
Electric cars are much less efficient if you consider the entire stream. If you want to use the argument that the gasoline needs to be refined and transported. Well so does natural gas. Or coal, or nuclear fuel rods, or bio mass, etc etc.
I’m not saying electric cars aren’t good. But we should really force people to charge them with solar if we want peak efficiency to save the planet.
I’m not missing anything. You’re being extremely selective in your argument by excluding all of the processes that extracted, transported, and converted, transported again, and again, and then again before ending up in a tank, and ignoring all those same processes required and used recursively for each of those processes, including the coal, natural gas, etc burned to power all those processes, etc etc to the same level of insane detail that you want to pick electric apart.
But then, starting from the position that 10% loss on a 60% directly efficient ‘fuel’ is worse than a minimum 83% loss of efficiency on another fuel isn’t much of a genuine position in the first place.
you forgot to calculate how much of cost of nuclear energy(sic) is going towards removing all CO2, NOx it is generating....
so if you are calculating efficiency of one power plant calculate this into price of another power plant too.
we can build utility PV + 12 hour battery with LCOE lower than nuclear... PV + battery price is for already deployed system. nuclear price is prediction of price of new plant...
Nuclear is dead in the water. And it is not pacific ocean water.
Draw salary as long as you can, save as much as possible and buy land outright somewhere cheap. No mortgage. I saw where it was all headed back in the early 2000s. I was in my mid 30s and feeling the grind back then.
Rent? Fuck that. Your life is on the line and this is for all the marbles. You find a way to go rent free. Maybe do like the bums are doing all over the place, live in a van, etc. Nobody seems to care. Save that money and then get out.
I did this, ending my career in IT back in 2006. Best move ever. When they fired everyone on the last contract I was on, I can't tell how good it felt.
By the way, the house I lived in at the end... Remember the house in Fight Club? That would have been an improvement.
That's what I am thinking of doing if things go for worse. I am planning to do in 4-5 years time. I already have enough to buy a small house in the country side back in my home country. I could be building my own projects for fun.
I think you nailed it. My current fear arises from the fact, I am at one of the highest HCOL cities in the world in comparison to wages. This makes the fear more imminent, as I basically would have to move if my salary goes significantly lower.
That wouldn't be the case where I am originally from, in Scandinavia.
