wheresmyusern

i hesitate to pursue a career of any kind, especially tech, because of all this. you have to have a pretty good personality and charisma in order to work well with your manager, or else you will make no progress which means you get fired. people are born with all kinds of quirks, peculiarities and qualities. while im a better programmer than most of the people who i went to college with, i have a special problem with my personality and charisma. i have absolutely zero intuition about what to say to other human beings. conversations with me are always like chewing sandpaper, unless they focus on some very narrow interests of mine. conversations that are very focused and intellectual always get a good response but i seldom meet people who want to have those even among engineers. 99 percent of the people i meet, even among "tech" people, i am rejected. i guess ill just scrape by.

i would say both renting and buying a house are bad ideas. when you rent, you have to pay a huge amount of money to pay for your landlords premium gasoline for his lambo. when you buy (in a city), you are having to take on the cost of every other person who bought before you -- nobody ever willingly sells a house for less than they bought it, so houses are like ratchets that go up and up and up in price. when you buy a house in a city you are also paying for someones premium gasoline. its an endless cycle of people buying the house and making it more expensive.

i would say that buying a remote home is where its at. with solar power, electric cars, self driving (even in its current state), and the soon-to-be mesh of satellites that will provide decent internet to every corner of the globe, along with a whole lot of other things, remote land and home ownership is a very exciting prospect indeed.

most of the cost of a house in a city or heavily populated area is in the land (location) and in paying for the profit margin of all the buyers who came before you. so building your own house on remote land is extremely affordable because there were few previous owners and its not close to anything -- you dont need financing like with a regular house.

i saw a story, i believe it was here actually, about a woman who bought a cheap house somewhere remote but good, and just did a four hour commute on the train. you can make just about anything work. and from my perspective, having your own land and a place to sleep that is truly your own is so fundamental and vital that extreme measures feel justified.

i currently share an apartment with a bunch of people. our complex holds at least 200 or 300 units. at an average of two thousand dollars for each unit, all 200 of them. the people who own this complex bring in almost half a million dollars every month before taxes. a while ago, a pipe broke in our kitchen -- a pipe behind a wall, underground that carries sewage. our entire kitchen and dining area were flooded with foul water. it took them almost a month to even get someone to look at it, even though i visited the office every day to remind them that half of my home was flooded with foul water. their response was that getting a plumber to do a job like this is very expensive, so they had to go though a bidding process instead of just hiring someone asap. i dont have a lot of money or free time so i was powerless in this situation. eventually, the pipe was fixed. when you rent, you are powerless. the power dynamic is obvious both in principle and in experience. why then are so many people eager to enter into this demented arrangement in which they are essentially a modern peasant?

i think everyone should own some kind of house somewhere because there is absolutely nothing worse than getting stuck without somewhere to stay. life is chaotic, rent is very expensive in many areas and housing can be difficult to come by and there have been times when i almost wasnt able to find housing. definitely one of the worst feelings ive ever experienced. unlike some people, i have no nets to catch me. if i had a remote home, not finding housing in the city would transform from a ulcer-inducing nightmare into a short vacation back to the country while keeping an eye out for good housing on craigslist.

this is what frustrates me. i cant afford a lawyer. from the looks of it, i cant afford to incorporate either. how is anyone supposed to bootstrap themselves these days?

i recently saw a paper that called into question the expansion of the universe. i think it was by a man called eric lerner. he provided evidence that seemed pretty convincing. is there anything to this?

can anyone give me advice? im starting a small online service that will charge customers -- i guess you could call it a "saas." i am the only person whatsoever involved with this project. am i required to incorporate if i start charging people for my online service? do i have to file taxes as a business? isnt there a clear and straightforward guide for this kind of thing?

i appreciate the effort to make video content accepted here on hn, but this is not video content that i think should be on the front page. this is flat out not very intellectually interesting.

do not buy an xps. i bought a thirteen inch xps and the linux compat has some minor issues and the power supply died on me less than a year after purchasing it. my next computer is a thinkpad for sure.

im not sure how you and every single other person who responded to my comment came to think that this was about saving resources. the only reason i dont want to use water is because water is a terrible way of taking care of waste on a mobile platform. water is super heavy and you have to use a lot of it each time you flush. and on top of that, the result is a toilet that slowly gets super dirty. plastic is better because you could store hundreds of "flushes" in a small box that doesnt weigh anything and because the toilet is totally and completely clean after every flush assuming all the waste stays inside the bowl and doesnt splatter up and out all over the place (which is a pretty good assumption). and lastly the waste can be stored with almost the minimum possible weight overhead and doesnt make its storage tank dirty or smelly. overall you have a lightweight, highly clean and maintenance free system.

in the end, water and plastic are largely the same thing. oxygen, hydrogen and carbon are all you need to make either. recycling plastic will, in the future, be trivial. same with water and all other substances.

we seriously need a better solution for toilets. toilets use huge amounts of water. if you want to have a toilet in a moving vehicle, or anywhere that is not directly connected to a sewage line and a giant water treatment plant, then you are just out of luck because all the mobile toilet solutions out there suck. it amazes me that a good solution has evaded us for so long.

when considering how to travel where-ever i want and for cheap i considered a van or rv. in both cases im stuck chasing after land installations that allow me to essentially use a toilet. with the rv, you have to offload somewhere and with a van you have to be near someone else's toilet.

the best solution i can think of is to have a special toilet that uses plastic bagging. a continuous sleeve of plastic is fed through the toilet and lines the inside of the "bowl" and is sealed at the bottom of the bowl forming a plastic bag. waste is collected and then the plastic material is rolled out -- so the bag descends and is replaced with new plastic material above. plenty of extra plastic is reeled out and a heating element comes in and seals the bag above the waste, simultaneously creating a new "bag" to catch waste and sealing completely the waste in the old bag. the end result is a completely clean bowl and fully contained waste. the waste bags could then be disposed of in an incinerator or a processing plant at some later time. the bag could be made biodegradable and a sterilizing agent added to the bag before its sealed to allow the bags to be disposed of without processing.

kids who are not raised well are usually the ones who turn to things that are not looked upon well by their community and society. or kids who have some kind of festering problem. there are a some kids who are given zero guidance by their parents in school or life, or who are sabotaged by their parents, and if those kids are not exceptional in some way they will fall behind socially and academically. in this society, falling behind socially and academically to the point where you feel like you cant catch up is sort of like being handed a death sentence. so if you have no future, or you are convinced that you dont, then what is the point of avoiding cancer? what is the point of anything?

i was riding my bike last night and was almost home when i came upon the four way stop in front of my complex. it was very late at night and there were no cars. there was not a soul there -- totally quiet. so of course i didnt stop for the stop sign and of course a cop pulled up right as i did it. i was pulled over, questioned and given a huge fine for doing something completely safe and well-intentioned. we need to change our laws so that cops cant pull over random black people and hand out huge fines to people who arent threatening the community.

this is a waste of time. besides all the great points made elsewhere, about the availability of land, there is the fact that this technique does not provide a good house. concrete houses are usually re-enforced with steel. where is the re-enforcement? concrete is supposed to have "aggregate." without it, you basically have a pile of hardened mortar that expands and contracts way too much when exposed to water.

im really excited about planes that have several smaller motors and props instead of one or two large ones. its a design that is only now becoming possible commercially because of EV popularity. really looking forward to seeing where it all goes.

this is absolutely fascinating. why cant these people just commute from pleasant hill or even lafayette? i had the same accommodations as these people and paid only 400 in pleasant hill.