Meanwhile, in Canada, the providers are starting to market 5G, but the data pricing is so terrible, 3G is more than enough and still requires ample rationing. I have to be careful not to stream too many podcasts. Forget music or video.
At least we have decent wired service in Canada. Out on the farm you can get unlimited gigabit service for under $100/month.
In some very specific places maybe (Wightman telecom? Maybe in Saskatchewan where they have the sensibility to consider telecom a public asset?
Ya I just buy a new one when my current one runs out of juice.
There is a story from my home town Vienna that a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new battery. That continued for a few months until some clerk asked her what she did with all of those and she was thus introduced to charging. I know what you are thinking now. The battery lasted 2 weeks!!!
Obviously an older story since I don't know of any recent phones with removable batteries. The modern version would be, of course, "...a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new phone..."
I was dumbfounded just the other day when i learned that tokyo is 38 million... So basically that one city has the population of caifornia. If i were a wantrapeeneur id be seeing what app services tokyo specifically from and economic and cultural perspective as if you can monitize just fraction of tokyo businesses......
So basically that one city has the population of ca[l]ifornia. The population of Canada!
Twice the population of the Netherlands. Almost seven times the population of Scotland.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who can work remotely who would love to live in a place like this, if it were either turnkey or at least if there were some collective action organization. Makes even more sense in Portugal, though -- you could live in a place for 182 days/yr, after putting 350k euros investment into it, with a grant of portugese citizenship. I'm sure there are similar villages/properties in rural…
Bollocks. It takes amazing amounts of oil to get the cheap stuff to the cities. The only reason these are more 'efficient' is because of arbitrary pricing - if we placed a higher value on oil-consumption, in terms of cost to the Earth, the cheap plastic junk wouldn't be being subsidised by our childrens future. I know its not a popular opinion, but the things that take so much oil to make and transport and deliver to…
>>instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away You should realize that population density makes it much easier to avoid driving long distances to get things, as distribution points can be centrally located. You seem to have an issue with vehicle-dependent suburban sprawl, which is justified, but ultra dense walkable "New Urban" cities are much better at…
Yes and no. If we're still shipping food to Wal*Marts, then yes. If we're growing food locally, then maybe no. I get the whole economy of scale and specialization argument, but not all costs are comparable. A rural community growing and eating food doesn't necessarily have to burn gas. They might be poorer than if they did burn gas to import and export crops, but they can make trade-offs to reduce gas consumption that aren't available in high-density areas.
If you want a village plus broadband, buy one in Romania. Still in the EU, less developed (but for this scenario, who cares?). Heck, it's probably going to be cheaper!
Moving to a small rural village comes with significant downsides. Say you have kids. How's the daycare? Is there any? Can they get a good education? Can you trust basic infrastructure to be there in the future? A lot of these places are dying. Then there's the issue of community. If you're going to settle somewhere, you probably want friends. You want your children to have friends. As a foreigner moving in, working r…
I've been thinking that if I suddenly had a large sum of money, I'd buy one of these villages, renovate it, add amenities and proper internet, and then rent the individual homes to people that work remote, or set it up as a kind of co-living and co-working space, like a company town.
And nobody will come if the closest hospital is a 2 hour drive and the closest store is far enough that whatever you buy costs double when you factor in the transportation.
And you can believe it is a great place to raise kids if you want them to be loners, 'cause there is no school or other kid on a 50 kilometer radius. A great place to live for a monk, not regular people.
Am I the only one who sees depopulation of rural areas as a good thing? It's an opportunity to rewild large parts of the continent. We don't need humans dominating every last square metre of the globe. That's part of what is causing most of our problems in the first place.
No, you are not alone. I see this happening on a smaller scale in my country and I see the villages that are depopulated are having poor infrastructure, very old buildings, no hospital reasonably close, no stores reasonably close. It is nice if you live on a mountain valley, not nice if the cost of rebuilding the houses costs more than building new ones and the society is hours away and the first snow of the winter will isolate you from the world till spring because it is simply too costing to open the road just for 3-4 people.
> very big city requires immense resources to keep it running Because they have immense numbers of people living in them? Anecdotally, living in a high-rise building, I am amazed how much more inefficient living in a single-family house is. From unused space and heat loss to the accumulation of junk in the garage/basement/backyard and constant ongoing maintenance of everything, it just seems to be so much waste of re…
>Because they have immense numbers of people living in them? Because those people do less to support their own survival locally, and therefore cities require immense intake of energy and resources every day, in order to maintain that lifestyle.
Specialization means that they just require fewer resources overall.
It's less resource intensive for me and my neighbors to have one person do the agriculture than for all of us to.
It's cheaper and more efficient still if I have 30 million neighbors.
If you want a village plus broadband, buy one in Romania. Still in the EU, less developed (but for this scenario, who cares?). Heck, it's probably going to be cheaper!
I agree. As someone from Romania who works remotely, I moved from the big city to a village about 50 km away, seeking a quieter life. Even there fiber had been run out. It only took a few days for the ISP to show up and run some fiber from the pole to my home, and then I was enjoying speeds as fast as I had previously had in the heart of the city. Romanians are lucky that this country saw an early broadband boom in t…
Your situation is still rare in Romania. Also consider how far are you from the closest hospital (if you are far from Bucharest, Cluj, Iasi or Timisoara you are too far), a decent school for your kids, a decent place to go out (not the village pub where alcoholics waste their lives) and so on. One can live like a monk, but not raise a family in a small village or even a city like Petrosani (very nice area, but zero amenities), Pucioasa, Pascani or Pecica.
There are not so many jobs where you can work from home, especially exclusive from home. I also work from home most of the time, but when I need to get to the office I spend 3-4 hours driving: not nice.