You're not very serious if you don't realize that this is an extraordinarily privileged position based on your position in the socioeconomic ladder.
> I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper,
It's cheaper FOR YOU based on your job that you can do remotely, and comparing to the lifestyle you maintained in San Francisco.
Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]
> San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.
You're so close
> taxes are cheaper
But so far.
The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco. Which, like Seattle, Vancouver, and LA tend to concentrate human misery in North American not because they attract misery but because they're the only places on the continent where these human beings can SURVIVE. Homeless people struggle to not die in the winter in most of the East. The Deep south has no social programs or jobs. Once you get to the SouthWest, the local policies is just to put homeless people on the bus to California.
Which is where everyone - from homeless to billionaire - has the best outcomes for health and life expectancy.
Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.
But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)
> The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco.
Ah, so social programs attract and cause drug, mental health and poverty issues? Well, I guess it is lucky for them providing for the general welfare is literally in the US Constitution twice, in the Preamble and also in the Taxing and Spending Clause. But I guess that is what is wrong with this country, the Constitution and the government should be disbanded, so you don't have to look down on all those less fortunate than you, right? The Framers were supremely foolish not to realize that welfare causes poverty and drug and mental health issues. You should really tell someone so we can fix this problem.
> The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco.
It’s a well known fact that ceteris paribus the more you spend on something the more you get of it. I honestly can’t understand why people in those cities want more open air drug markets, feces, and crime, among other things, but there’s no arguing with revealed preference. They observably want those things and vote to get more of them.
From my point of view it’s simple enabling behavior, like with an alcoholic. It’s not like these problems are ordained by nature. People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.
> People in cities are the ones enabling human misery.
And people in locales that solve these problems by kicking out their problem citizens are the ones creating this human misery, but we never seem to be able to hold them to account for it, or to demand that they pull their own weight.
That’s really interesting. Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?” That was the plot of Rambo and that was a great movie, but I’ve never heard of such a thing in this century. I welcome being educated so please do tell if you can point to some examples that aren’t old enough to legally drink.
> Can you document a single locale that is “kicking out their problem citizens?”
Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?
There's fewer than 500 sheltered/unsheltered homeless people in those three cities, compared to ~11,000 in the rest of King county - yet they make up ~1/6th of the county's population.
Or, on a smaller scale, nice parts of town calling the cops to sweep the homeless into less nice parts of town? For some reason, I can't say I've seen a lot of tent cities in Magnolia...
> Would Bellevue, Kirkland, and Redmond dumping their homeless people into Seattle, as they NIMBY shelter/housing satisfy you?
That doesn’t sound like kicking out. That sounds like Seattle for reasons that I don’t understand inviting vagabonds from elsewhere in King County.
More to the point, I wasn’t referring to your local county politics, I was asking for specific evidence of rural communities shipping vagrants to far away cities as the person I was replying to implied is happening.
You don't understand that people need a few basic needs to live, and the suburbs aren't pulling their weight in providing them?
You don't understand that the suburbs keep harassing and arresting people for being homeless, and taking their things, until they fuck off to the city?
If we did that to you, until you left whichever town you live in, would you consider yourself getting kicked out of it?
You don't understand that if Seattle did the same thing, all of those suburbs would suddenly discover that they had to pull their own weight, and not just sweep their problem to the other side of lake Washington?
You're splitting hairs over semantics of what 'kicking out' means. The bottom line is that rural America gives it's problem people a choice between jail, harassment, death, or taking themselves and all their problems to urban America.
It then complains about how urban America is a cesspit that 'invites vagabonds'.
Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.
I’m still confused though. Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth? Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?
> Thanks for so vividly exposing the enabler mindset.
Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.
> Do you like vagrancy, violence, drug abuse, and filth?
Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.
> Or is your misplaced resentment of the communities that refuse to tolerate that trash some kind of extreme cognitive dissonance?
Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?
> Aha! You have me dead to rights. I'm an enabler, because I don't think that these problems can be solved by just dumping the problem people to the next town over.
Yes, I know, I'm capable of noticing clear objective truths. Big city policies demonstrably enable these social ills. You don't have to get defensive. You just observably believe that it's better to tolerate anti-social behavior than to put a stop to it. We disagree on this point, but perhaps you take some comfort from knowing that your co-urbanites also inexplicably like to live surrounded by filth.
> Less than you, since you seem to think that the right thing to do is for your community to export it to its neighbours.
I never said any such thing. I said I don't believe such a thing is even happening. You have failed to provide any evidence of a systematic push of rural undesirables to cities. Rather, all the evidence indicates that urban policies, that city-dwellers reliably vote for and thus observably want, are attracting undesirables. Furthermore, those policies are enabling people who might otherwise live with some semblance of social responsibility to fully embrace an anti-social manner of living.
> Those communities create 'that trash', and then don't deal with it. If I just start dumping trash on your front lawn, because I don't want to pay the cost of garbage pickup, which one of us is the problem?
The policies that city dwellers support are creating the trash. There is no rural conspiracy to ship undesirables to the cities. Individual vagrants may be attracted by urban enabling policies, but that's the responsibility of the vagrants and urban policymakers, not rural communities. If city people don't want more vagrants then they shouldn't support policies that enable them.
Please link me the free bus tickets to SF/LA from flyover country. I’ve done my googles and can’t find the program where I get my ticket. I don’t believe it exists without evidence.
Any actual evidence of such a program where rural areas are shipping out vagrants. I’m not talking about lateral moves from one major city to another as should be clear from the comment history. Perhaps a local newspaper ad offering free bus tickets?
> Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]
My wife literally used to do the same thing... It was a 3 hr commute to and from work (6+hrs per day), if all the services were up; but they never were in SF. At least twice a week it would take her 4 hrs one of the ways.
That's why we moved, her commute is now 10 min.
You're kind of making my point, everyone where I live has a higher quality of life than they do in SF. They have more space, cheaper food, fuel, breathing less pollution, etc.
Just FYI you're talking a 1-3% difference in life expectancy between most of the states. That's probably within the margin of error. It appears to have more to do with wealth than anything, but that's neither here, nor there (The bottom 20 states have lower life expectancy and that's where smoking is more common and legal indoors).
> Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.
> But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)
I can tell you're living in a city. It's FAR easier to make it in the suburbs than either a city or the country. It's also FAR easier to purchase land than people think. You can get land at $4,000-$6,000/acre within 40 min of most cities. You can build a $180,000 house on that land that's larger than the vast majority of residence in major cities (I know because I've developed said land repeatedly). So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon.
People experience misery in cities because the citizens of that city don't care. If they did, they'd tighten up the laws and encourage people to get jobs and prosper. That's not what SF does.
> So we're talking what, $200,000 for a house and a couple acres. You can afford that on $35-40k a year, which you can make at walmart or Amazon
This is misguided. When you are making that little it is extremely difficult to save enough money to buy a house. Most of your income will be going to expenses, and pray you don’t get hit with health complications, periods of unemployment, broken down cars, or any number of other rolls of the dice that could zap any/all savings you’ve managed or drive you into debt.
Not to mention, even if you manage to buy a house you can still get screwed by a period of bad luck making it impossible to keep up on your mortgage.
The average income in my area is less than $35k / year. ~80% own homes.
I find it funny when people tell me "this is misguided" and they have no idea what they're talking about.
I've lived off <$35k / year for about a decade; really not that hard. You don't take trips, you limit purchases. It's the way most of America works.
Let me breakdown the math:
- $600 taxes / month (often get decent returns at year end, put that into emergency fund)
- $600 food / month
- $600 rent / month (1 - 2 bedroom)
- $200 gas / month
- $500 emergency fund / month
- $220 house fund / month
In 2 years, you'll have $5,000 saved for a house and $12,000 in an emergency fund (assuming nothing happened). That's for one person, and I assume you can either take public transit OR you already have a beat up car (you can often get those for free, I had a couple cars for <$1000 that worked fine)
If you're married (ideally, you would), you'll have $10,000 for a house and that's enough for the 5% down on a $200,000 property. Alternatively, you can drain some of the emergency fund (provided you have some) and you can put that down.
Now, with inflation and increasing gas prices; yeah these people are going to be screwed for the time being. That means, either multiple jobs, cutting rent costs, cutting the emergency costs, what have you.
You're not very serious if you don't realize that this is an extraordinarily privileged position based on your position in the socioeconomic ladder.
> I'm currently living a fair distance from any major city and can still get literally anything I can imagine delivered. It's cheaper, taxes are cheaper, food is cheaper, fuel is cheaper,
It's cheaper FOR YOU based on your job that you can do remotely, and comparing to the lifestyle you maintained in San Francisco.
Do you seriously believe that every janitor, parking lot attendant, nurse, and waiter, could move to the small town you are discussing and commute in for work? Here's a headline for you: "A 2:15 Alarm, 2 Trains and a Bus Get Her to Work by 7 A.M. Like many in the housing-starved San Francisco region, Sheila James has moved far inland, gaining affordable space at the price of a brutal commute." [0]
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-fran... or https://archive.ph/MNxzg
> San Francisco is fairly dystopian. I used to live there, walking over human waste, people getting head in the street. Naked women rolling around after a bender, a persons leg rotting off. This was my daily walk through SF to work. Now, I see cows, sit in the grass and still make more money and am away from the tragedy.
You're so close
> taxes are cheaper
But so far.
The reason why your new area doesn't have any people with drug, mental health and poverty issue is because you don't pay enough taxes for the social programs that allow these people to survive in San Francisco. Which, like Seattle, Vancouver, and LA tend to concentrate human misery in North American not because they attract misery but because they're the only places on the continent where these human beings can SURVIVE. Homeless people struggle to not die in the winter in most of the East. The Deep south has no social programs or jobs. Once you get to the SouthWest, the local policies is just to put homeless people on the bus to California.
Which is where everyone - from homeless to billionaire - has the best outcomes for health and life expectancy.
Yes, one way of dealing with human misery, is to be able to afford to put it out of your sight and out of mind, and not deal with the structural issues that create them. It's great that you get to ignore them to live your best life.
But don't think that a society can be created where those things don't exist, just by moving to a more pastoral/agrarian lifestyle. What you describe is not scalable to the rest of society without massive social programs the kind that don't exist across America (and likely never will)