171–180 of 307 posts
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There's a town in Alaska where you need to have your appendix removed in order to live there because the nearest hospital is 625 miles away. https://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180810-villas-las-estre...
I'm pretty sure you can learn to remove your own appendix, how hard can it be?
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Last night I was on my way home on a relatively remote stretch in eastern Idaho that's 30 minutes from the nearest EMS and came upon a head on collision that just happened. Several others not involved surrounded the scene pretty quickly and started assessing the injured. I literally finished my Wilderness First Aid certification Saturday afternoon.
>> 30 minutes from the nearest EMS In even the most developed inner cities of the US, a 30-minute response time is not unusual. A car crash with injuries, blood on the street, would certainly be top of the 911 priority list other factors like traffic often mean delays. "In July 2019, it took the NYPD more than 20 minutes on average to respond to all of its 911 calls. This July, it was about 18 minutes." https://www.n…
Can anecdotally confirm. Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way. I love the mountains and freedom they offered me, the lessons t…
The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and…
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Although the story and your account are United States centric, I live pretty remote British Columbia, Canada and the same mentality, personalty types exists here as well. As the crow flies, I am less then 300KM to downtown Vancouver yet a trip to the closest town center for supplies is a 10 hour round trip in the truck and that is on a good day. I do not leave the house without chainsaw, firearm and various other sun…
How do you use the internet? Do you have a phone signal?
I live in a mountain town and it's literally 'Wild West': http://northwesttraveladvisor.com/northwest-vacation/western...
Winthrop is about as literally Wild West as Leavenworth, WA [0] is literally Bavarian. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leavenworth%2C_Washington (As explanation, both towns decided to become a "theme town", for lack of a better phrase, around the same time in the 60s-70s. Winthrop was inspired by Leavenworth, which in turn was arguably inspired by Solvang, CA.)
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The funny thing is that I grew up in London, then lived in Cambridge, Heidelberg, Seattle and Philadelphia - 55+ years of thoroughly urban living. 18 months ago I moved to a place where your opening sentence applies broadly. Yet somehow, I still learned how to do most of the things you list in your second paragraph before I got here. And I have neighbors here who are completely clueless about most of those things. Th…
Pretty much the same, I can re-wire a house (factory actually though it's been a long time since I trained as an industrial sparks), plaster, do basic joinery, plumbing, tiling, engine/motorcycle maintenance (I do my motorcycle and rebuilt scramblers when I was a kid), weld (not done it for a long time but it'd come back), sheet metal work etc all to a reasonable or better standard. I've never lived out in the countr…
As a rich guy I knew used to say, do what you do best, and give away all the rest.
I spent my 30s doing all the things you mentioned and more. There was some joy in it, I will admit, but I am vastly less wealthy than if I had focused on my consulting business and learned how to negotiate and supervise the outsourcing of those tasks.
I know a lot of 'do it yourself' types and none of them are wealthy. I know a lot of wealthy people and none of them are 'do it yourself' types. It sucks to admit it, because there is a lot of 'manliness' associated with self-reliance, but it is often a foolish pursuit. Comparative advantage is real and you can use it to get ahead in life.
> However, "openness to experience" is much higher, and the most pronounced personality trait in mountain dwellers. > "Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility," said Götz. "A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers." > those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreea…
They can't afford to take more risks.
Not sure if you'd expect liberal people to seed the place and conservative genetics to evolve.
Or conservative genetics to seed the place and stay strong.
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>> 30 minutes from the nearest EMS In even the most developed inner cities of the US, a 30-minute response time is not unusual. A car crash with injuries, blood on the street, would certainly be top of the 911 priority list other factors like traffic often mean delays. "In July 2019, it took the NYPD more than 20 minutes on average to respond to all of its 911 calls. This July, it was about 18 minutes." https://www.n…
I'd guess this is a case where the average (especially arithmetic mean) is misleading. suppose a hypothetical fire department gets four 911 calls in a day. three are for life threatening traffic accidents, and they get a vehicle on-scene in six minutes. the last call was for a cat stuck in a tree. the cat isn't going anywhere, so they take an hour to get there. they responded pretty quickly to the most serious calls,…