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GotLag posted:This is something that European visitors to Australia occasionally don't quite grasp, as well. Back before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was a (then-novel) function on the website of either the Games themselves or some government tourism body to ask questions about Australia. One of them was something along the lines of "How long does it take to walk from Perth to Sydney?" Weren't people also asking about how to see the Vienna Boy's choir on that site?
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Nov 29, 2018 23:24
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GotLag posted:This is something that European visitors to Australia occasionally don't quite grasp, as well. Back before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was a (then-novel) function on the website of either the Games themselves or some government tourism body to ask questions about Australia. One of them was something along the lines of "How long does it take to walk from Perth to Sydney?" One night I had a Lyft driver taking me to another goon's house in Davenport and he was from South Africa. He had decided to move to America and travel the country from New York City to Los Angeles, only to realize that the country was much bigger than he expected and he'd actually need to pick up jobs to keep moving. He thought the distance between Ohio and Florida was about 4 hours, about 1/4 of the real driving time. I told him that it would take another 8 or 9 hours to reach New Orleans and I think it really started kicking in for him. God help him when he reaches Texas.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:27
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Epicurius posted:I guess , and maybe this is just the exhaustion talking, but my question is why? Why do people voluntarily live in a place like that? Is it just that they cant afford to live anywhere else, you know, where there are roads and sewers and services? Combination of things—farming communities, ghost towns where people are too old or stubborn to move, or otherwise own property in the area they're unwilling to move away from. There's places that service remote tourist destinations like National Parks, or make their living as one of the few stops in the vast, vast emptiness of the west. For some people, they enjoy the isolation, or otherwise make decent enough money that they don't feel like they have to or should move. Land is also hella cheap in those communities, with lower taxes, so it's easier to buy a shitton of open air if you're into that kind of thing.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:27
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Rural areas also have cheaper rent and often a lower cost of living, which is important if you're poor. People tend to forget as well how easy it is to end up too far from emergency services for it to matter in an emergency. If you're bleeding to death or dealing with a bear or human attack, even a 10 minute response time can be far too late for the cops to do anything but clean up the mess left over. Just looking at my location on Google Maps, it takes about 6 miles to drive from a highly populated downtown shopping district to a completely empty swamp and 12 miles to reach a tiny rural town with a population under 3000. Just 5 minutes of driving in the wrong direction can put you in the empty countryside. If you break down or get into any other kind of trouble in the middle of the night, you could easily be hosed. The average police response time across America varies from 4 minutes to over an hour depending on where you are. Self-sufficiency (including owning and carrying weapons) is just sort of a fact of life for most people, even if crime isn't a problem where you are. If there's an emergency, there's a very good possibility that being able to take care of it yourself means the difference between life and death.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:37
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You also have the not insignificant pull of your family being there and not wanting to up and abandon them all. I'm not saying you should stay put so you can go visit with mom on the weekend, but moving even a few hours away from family can cause some major drama with some people and sometimes people feel responsible for their relatives.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:40
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Rural living is expensive though, that's kind of the whole reason there's been a mass exodus from rural areas to the cities and suburbs. It's why small towns, much less the areas around them, have been continuously shrinking for over a hundred years. There's still some poor people left behind in a lot of places, but it's less and less each year because it really doesn't make sense for anyone else who's poor to seek out those places. People end up with a lot of extra costs, and the way those costs tend to stack up tend to further keep people from being able to afford to leave even as they can barely afford to stay.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:54
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I'm from Northern California (no, not the northern bay area, think more north, think State of Jefferson) and I used to get regular phone alerts about mountain lions being spotted near or on the campus I was going to. A elderly couple got attacked by one a hiking trail around a decade back and one of them almost died from the infections. And a couple years back one of them killed some alpacas at a elementary school while the kids were in their morning classes. As another sort of comparison here's a map of Nevada overlayed onto Western Europe:  The population density of Nevada is such that north of of Vegas (the bottom tip) and east of Reno and Carson City (slightly above the angled corner) there's one city (Elko) larger than 10,000 people, and there's only enough people to support 4-5 Walmarts and a couple Target/K-Mart/Sears competitors last I checked, and most of them are over near Reno. McDonalds are more common (10 last I counted, Elko has two) but not to the point that Nevada has the McFarthest Spot.
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Nov 29, 2018 23:59
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I’m grateful to this thread for reminding me of how much of the US is still a wasteland; having lived in cities all my life I find this fact amazing.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:09
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Beefeater1980 posted:I’m grateful to this thread for reminding me of how much of the US is still a wasteland; having lived in cities all my life I find this fact amazing. The west coast was still only occupied by scattered Native American tribes until fewer than 200 years ago, a time in which basically every city and village in England and France had been built and possibly lived in for a thousand years. During World War I, large swathes of rural America had no electricity or pavement and were still basically living the same as they had during the Civil War. Even now, it's shocking how depopulated the last states to get settled are. Orlando (the urban area I live in) has a population of about 280,000 and an urban area population of over 1.5 million, a density of 2,634.27 per square mile. The entire state of Wyoming has a population of about 579,000, a population density of 5.97 per square mile. There are entire cities with higher populations than states. On another note, I found this chart showing the change in American whiskey prices through the 19th century.  You may notice a slight increase around the 1860s.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:16
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Beefeater1980 posted:I’m grateful to this thread for reminding me of how much of the US is still a wasteland; having lived in cities all my life I find this fact amazing.  The green areas have 0 population.  The red areas are 80.5% of the US population (there's another 0.5% or so in the equivalent areas in Alaska and Hawaii, which aren't on the map). In total the red areas (including the missing Alaska and Hawaii parts) take up less than 4% of the country's land. There's about 275 million people in the red, 50 million in all the rest that isn't the green from the first map. fishmech fucked around with this message at 01:20 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 01:18
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chitoryu12 posted:The west coast was still only occupied by scattered Native American tribes until fewer than 200 years ago, a time in which basically every city and village in England and France had been built and possibly lived in for a thousand years. During World War I, large swathes of rural America had no electricity or pavement and were still basically living the same as they had during the Civil War. Good time to be a sutler
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Nov 30, 2018 01:27
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Humans should not live in isolated houses in the middle of no-where. It is bad and wrong, and I'm tired of people trying to pretend it's a legitimate life choice. It's fine to prefer a village to a city, but if you want to live hidden away from human eyes you are a scary ghoul and probably have a larder full of human torsos. I mean, imagine choosing the live in the desert. That's where centipedes live. "I don't like being near shops, and hospitals, and kindergartens. I like to get lost in my back garden and starve to death." Also any man who tries to get his family to live more than 100 metres from other people is a David Koresh in the making, and the government should take away his children.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:28
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It sounds kind of appealing to me every now and then, the emptiness of the deserts in the American west have a special allure. But I would undoubtedly get bored as poo poo within a week or two.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:33
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Beefeater1980 posted:I’m grateful to this thread for reminding me of how much of the US is still a wasteland; having lived in cities all my life I find this fact amazing. I wouldn’t describe it as wasteland. A lot of that is loving gorgeous and full of awesome wildlife. If you like the outdoors it’s amazing.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:35
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Mr Enderby posted:Humans should not live in isolated houses in the middle of no-where. It is bad and wrong, and I'm tired of people trying to pretend it's a legitimate life choice. It's fine to prefer a village to a city, but if you want to live hidden away from human eyes you are a scary ghoul and probably have a larder full of human torsos.  I will agree in principle about the isolation, but up that to 2km. That's enough for a body to compromise between some measure of privacy and still being sociable.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:49
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darthbob88 posted:Counterpoint: You are wrong, and every child should have 20 acres of backyard to run around in and build bonfires and boats and bombs and other things starting with "b". Suburbs are probably the unhealthy medium of these two options, where you can't actually do anything stupid enough to be fun, and you are not surrounded by nature and danger, but other suburban homes and chick-fil-as.
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Nov 30, 2018 01:58
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fishmech posted:
You can distinctively make out North Dakota.
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Nov 30, 2018 02:26
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fishmech posted:
What's that green block that looks about 150 miles north of big bend in what looks to be east Alabama, west Georgia?
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Nov 30, 2018 02:36
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Who wants to identify some medals! My dad’s old lady antique dealer friend picked up a few which she couldn’t identify probably because I assume they’re from ‘91 Iraq and her antique guides predate that. Phone posting so sorry for the link: https://imgur.com/gallery/Oixp1HV
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Nov 30, 2018 03:02
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The medal itself looks like a Liberation of Kuwait medal from 1991, from Kuwait (not the one from Saudi Arabia).
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Nov 30, 2018 03:15
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Milo and POTUS posted:What's that green block that looks about 150 miles north of big bend in what looks to be east Alabama, west Georgia? Okefenokee Swamp most likely.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:24
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fishmech posted:On the note of them, they went missing in 1996. The first body wasn't found until 2009. Thanks for linking this, it was a fascinating read. Having to do water-staging hikes before going back again to have a look really drives home how remote and inaccessible that place is.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:I wouldn’t describe it as wasteland. A lot of that is loving gorgeous and full of awesome wildlife. If you like the outdoors it’s amazing.        The American West is an exceptionally beautiful place filled with incredible scenery and awesome history. It's not just being away from people, it's about being in an environment where some of the greatest landscapes on the planet earth are in your backyard, and are there for you to explore.
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Nov 30, 2018 03:56
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Milo and POTUS posted:What's that green block that looks about 150 miles north of big bend in what looks to be east Alabama, west Georgia? I think what you're looking at is within the Talladega National Forest. GotLag posted:Thanks for linking this, it was a fascinating read. Having to do water-staging hikes before going back again to have a look really drives home how remote and inaccessible that place is. Yeah, they don't call it Death Valley for no reason. The guy's got a lot of interesting explorations on there, including his ongoing off-and-on search for a guy who went missing in 2010.
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Nov 30, 2018 04:18
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I finally managed to catch up to the new thread after the last thread self destructed and I managed to miss out on almost every conversation that I had any modicum of experience with. Acebuckeye13 posted:The American West is an exceptionally beautiful place filled with incredible scenery and awesome history. It's not just being away from people, it's about being in an environment where some of the greatest landscapes on the planet earth are in your backyard, and are there for you to explore. I'm way more familiar with the Mexican side of the American west around the state of Sonora but I agree with the general sentiment. It is both absolutely beautiful and ready to kill you dead at a moment's notice. It's not just the weather or lack of water that will kill you either, if it moves it's probably poisonous and if it doesn't it probably has either razor sharp edges or barbs that hook into your skin and are painful to get out. It's not a place for the unprepared and not really for me (those speedy Gonzalez accents drive me up the wall more than anything in the environment), but I can see why people live there, it is really otherworldly. Completely unrelated, however I recommend it to everyone, the book The Devil's Highway is a non fiction account of 26 migrants who got lost in the Sonora desert back in 2001 and tracks their story from leaving Mexico to slowly dying over the course of their trip is both a really good narrative and one of the most  books I've ever read. the worst part is it hasn't gotten better down there.
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Nov 30, 2018 05:05
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Epicurius posted:I guess , and maybe this is just the exhaustion talking, but my question is why? Why do people voluntarily live in a place like that? Is it just that they cant afford to live anywhere else, you know, where there are roads and sewers and services? My grandparents' dacha was in a village with two other households. Everyone else was either killed by the Germans or left during the war and never came back. Judging only by the holes in the ground where the houses used to be there weren't any households abandoned between the war and when I lived there, though. I guess when you have something, as little as it is, you're inclined to hold onto it.
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Nov 30, 2018 05:20
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Cythereal posted:Okefenokee Swamp most likely. That's definitely the Okefenokee, with a bit of north Florida in it as well. The other block, near Savannah, is Fort Stewart.
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Nov 30, 2018 06:26
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GotLag posted:This is something that European visitors to Australia occasionally don't quite grasp, as well. Back before the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, there was a (then-novel) function on the website of either the Games themselves or some government tourism body to ask questions about Australia. One of them was something along the lines of "How long does it take to walk from Perth to Sydney?" cause we're just a country of 23 million  
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Nov 30, 2018 07:19
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In Australia or the US, a hundred years is a long time. In Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance.
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Nov 30, 2018 07:31
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:In Australia or the US, a hundred years is a long time. In Europe, a hundred miles is a long distance. Depends on where you are in Europe. In Sápmi, that's the below par distance for a beer run.
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Nov 30, 2018 07:37
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C.M. Kruger posted:I'm from Northern California (no, not the northern bay area, think more north, think State of Jefferson) and I used to get regular phone alerts about mountain lions being spotted near or on the campus I was going to. A elderly couple got attacked by one a hiking trail around a decade back and one of them almost died from the infections. And a couple years back one of them killed some alpacas at a elementary school while the kids were in their morning classes.
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Nov 30, 2018 11:34
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Mr Enderby posted:Humans should not live in isolated houses in the middle of no-where. It is bad and wrong, and I'm tired of people trying to pretend it's a legitimate life choice. It's fine to prefer a village to a city, but if you want to live hidden away from human eyes you are a scary ghoul and probably have a larder full of human torsos. the desert is where i am from and i don't think i have a larder of human torsos in the basement but yes, every now and then in nm you find a weirdo with a 100 percent lovingly handcrafted doomsday religion and a shed fulll of starving kids. if you want to live on what the authorities will later describe as a compound you move either to new mexico or alaska
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Nov 30, 2018 11:37
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The American West is an exceptionally beautiful place filled with incredible scenery and awesome history. It's not just being away from people, it's about being in an environment where some of the greatest landscapes on the planet earth are in your backyard, and are there for you to explore. and die in. this happened in nm before i went to college and i remember the book coming out. they had been about five minutes from a road but couldn't find it. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Nov 30, 2018 |
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Nov 30, 2018 11:42
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Trin Tragula posted:Well, but you don't have the same people doing the same things, though. You don't appoint constables to go and pacify the natives. Let’s not forget that you can always ship the Metropolitan police up north en masse to beat the living poo poo out of
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Nov 30, 2018 11:50
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Ensign Expendable posted:My grandparents' dacha was in a village with two other households. Everyone else was either killed by the Germans or left during the war and never came back. Judging only by the holes in the ground where the houses used to be there weren't any households abandoned between the war and when I lived there, though. I guess when you have something, as little as it is, you're inclined to hold onto it. i was kinda about to mention russians: if i'm in a hostel looking down on europeans' attitudes toward distance and land, it always helps if there's a russian in there with me because they'll take my side
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Nov 30, 2018 11:54
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Epicurius posted:I guess , and maybe this is just the exhaustion talking, but my question is why? Why do people voluntarily live in a place like that? Is it just that they cant afford to live anywhere else, you know, where there are roads and sewers and services? Acebuckeye13 posted:Combination of things—farming communities, ghost towns where people are too old or stubborn to move, or otherwise own property in the area they're unwilling to move away from. There's places that service remote tourist destinations like National Parks, or make their living as one of the few stops in the vast, vast emptiness of the west. For some people, they enjoy the isolation, or otherwise make decent enough money that they don't feel like they have to or should move. Land is also hella cheap in those communities, with lower taxes, so it's easier to buy a shitton of open air if you're into that kind of thing.
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Nov 30, 2018 12:02
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going on a roadtrip or backpacking are very different to upending your life and living in a tiny community with no facilities long term
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Nov 30, 2018 12:14
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rural living owns, growing up i ran around in the woods and built forts and shot guns and built fires and camped and hunted and fished city living also owns for different reasons
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Nov 30, 2018 13:20
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How'd you steal the pictures off my phone?
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Nov 30, 2018 13:52
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underage at the vape shop posted:going on a roadtrip or backpacking are very different to upending your life and living in a tiny community with no facilities long term I think you’re overestimating “no facilities.” I mean, sure, if you’re living in literally the middle of nowhere in the backwoods of Montana that’s true, but the vast majority of people who live rurally are at most an hours drive from a mid-sized city and much closer to your random small grocery store etc. You’re obviously lacking certain amenities you find in cities, especially cultural stuff like museums and theater, but you also have a ton of outdoors opportunities that you don’t get in cities. The big sticking point is access to emergency services, especially medical. Even then it’s not a complete lack and more that you have a longer trip. Even THEN it’s not a death sentence or anything. This also gets much better if you actually live near a town. I’ve lived rurally and in cities. They’re different but it’s not like the poor folks out in the country are living precariously because they are in a Hobbesian state of nature while the city people have it made.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:13
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