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Comment by Zach_the_Lizard | Hacker News Reader

>I suspect you could scale the 'off grid' lifestyle to around 1/2 the US population without many issues.

As you spread out the population, the cost of FedEx deliveries is going to grow. Now you can drop off goods in a city via a highly efficient train, have that switched to a truck, and have it delivered to the end customer.

If everyone is off the grid in the wilderness, that train becomes a lot less useful to deliver goods. Now you've got to reach a larger area to serve the same number of people.

> Web + Fedex means a lot of jobs can be done remotely

A lot of jobs can be done remotely, but that doesn't mean they could be done remotely without cost. Many people are less efficient when working remotely. I find communication to be much harder when remote than when in person, especially as issues get more complex.

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FedEx works because people near you also need packages. The more packages they ship the more efficient they become.

Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today. Sure, it's cheaper for them to drop off 10 packages at the same apartment complex, but even fairly remote areas can be surprisingly profitable.

>Fedex works because people near you also need packages.

That's exactly my point. The more people who need packages around you, the less it costs to deliver a package specifically to you. Going off the grid in remote corners sounds great, but part of the reason we moved to cities is because sharing infrastructure costs makes things more efficient.

>Also, the US population density is ~100 people per square mile so chances are good someone within 1 mile of you also needs a package today.

The US's population density is 100 people / square mile, but that doesn't tell you the full story. We don't live all over America, we are clustered into cities and towns, mostly on the coasts. There's a lot of desert and Alaskan wilderness with no one around bringing down the average. NYC alone is ~6% of the US population. The Northeast megalopolis is ~17% on ~2% of the land.

There are less than 4 million miles of road in the US. At 1$ per mile you can send a truck down every one 6 days a week for 1.3 billion a year. (Note, there would be some backtracking but also some roads are avoided.) FedEx's revenue is 45 billion a year so the last mile is not a problem as long as the volume is there.

On top of that if you live in the middle of nowhere they simply don't deliver to you. So, if more people moved to the desert for whatever reason there costs stay more or less the same.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_in_the_United...

The drivers alone probably cost more than $1/mile, then you have gas and maintenance. FedEx had $45B revenue with $2B net income, not exactly huge margins.

Obviously there is more to package deliver than just the raw cost of getting a package from a local sorting center to the end of a rural driveway.

At the moment, a lot of the cheap rural shipping is being subsidized by the USPS.

> but even fairly remote areas can be surprisingly profitable.

This is only true because they subcontract these rural deliveries to USPS [1]. Without USPS, who's already required to go there anyways to deliver traditional mail, it isn't profitable.

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-mail-does-the-trick-for-fede...

Except we're talking about remote areas where those "near you" could be miles away.

I was surprised that UPS will now do overnight delivery of Amazon orders to my mom's house in rural Oklahoma (she's at least a mile from her nearest neighbor), even though the truck originates from Lawton, OK - 50 miles away according to Google Maps.

Her "broadband" connection is a 2-6/2Mbps Wimax connection via an antenna on the roof to the nearest town a few miles away. It's still weird being able to sit out "in the middle of nowhere", talking to friends online, and order stuff I need and still have it show up the next day. Was a lifesaver when I stayed there for two weeks back in March after she had a hospital stay, and I needed a proper office chair and a folding table to act as a desk rather than using her kitchen table.

Was still able to work remotely just fine (most of my stuff was SSH to remote servers, and a web browser).

More surprising is that when I did the same thing earlier this month to help her after knee replacement surgery, that I could get T-Mobile LTE inside her house - back in March, I'd only been able to get it while sitting on the front porch.

Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."

> Quite a change from a few years ago when all she could get was 21.6Kbps dialup, and I had to send her a literal pile of USR Courier modems with instructions "if you have a lightning storm and the modem won't work the next day, throw that one in the trash and plug in another from the stack."

With all due respect, that seems very decadent. Back when we lived in the sticks, the (simple) rule was to just unplug (from power as well as POTS) all electronic equipment when not in use. Never lost a modem to a thunderstorm in those days!

This was at a point when most people already had broadband, and used dialup modems were dirt-cheap on eBay (e.g., that's why she had a stack of USR Courier V.Everything models instead of Sportsters). IIRC I got a few of them from toss-out piles at ISPs I worked for, and some were my own stash from before I went to ISDN then cablemodem at home.

I couldn't depend on her to unplug everything every time there was a storm.

Lots of rural communities, like the one I live in, have a central mail box location where we go to collect our mail. That one location services about 50 properties. FedEx or any courier deliver to the local post office in town. It all works quite well, and it's not so bad having to go out to get your mail, since you usually need other things from town too.

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