Ask HN: If you could work remote where would you live?
In the current climate it appears remote working will be more common. So where would you want to move too? Or would you become a nomad? Or is current home, perfect?
Walk North and you are in the Presidio and see the Golden Gate Bridge. Walk West and you are at the Legion of Honor or Lands End and watching the sun set over the Ocean. Walk East and I can hit up a hip hop or funk night at the Boom Boom Room or go to the Fillmore. You can dance at Madrone Art Bar or see an indie rock show at the Independent on Divisadero. Walk a few blocks South and you are in the Panhandle walking by some beautiful Victorians, then stop and catch some jazz at Club Deluxe. Walk a little more and go up Corona Heights or Tank Hill and you have breathtaking panoramic views of the city. Or head down to some of the pubs in the Lower Haight. And that's just within a 2 mile radius. For some reason, everyone focuses on the Tenderloin and SoMa though. The city has major problems, but there is also so much to enjoy.
I have made many interesting and creative friends here who are from all over the world. I get to work on mobile games, but there are many other opportunities around. Among my coworkers are digital artists and painters, musicians, engineers, hip hop dancers, drag show performers, people who party all night in the Castro, a muay Thai boxer, mixologists, and more interests than I can list.
I lived in Seattle, Portland, and Austin over the previous 2 decades -- all great places -- but still find myself happier in SF.
Before coming back we tried pretty hard trying to find somewhere else we could go live (and be much wealthier, afford a bigger house, etc) but we couldn't and decided on going back to Oakland.
I think south bay you get less of the above with better weather.
Citation: https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/08/when-it-comes-to-the-... "89% of residents say homelessness is an extremely or very serious problem — up from 79% the year before"
Advocates for homeless people think homelessness is a problem. People that oppose dealing with homelessness tend to portray homeless people as a problem.
What doesn't solve problems is creating a false BS dichotomy between "homelessness" and "homeless people" as if there are two major groups of people who are actively combatting two different problems. It's ridiculous. If the people who view "homeless people" as a "problem" aren't advocating helping "homeless people" as solving the problem what exactly are they advocating?? How do you solve the "homeless people" problem without helping "homelessness?" Don't be stupid, these things are one and the same problem with the same solutions.
This is a play on words inserting false malice where there was originally and obviously no malice intended.
Instead the origin of the malice is @dragonwriter intending to use a play on words to start a witch hunt.
I think ultimately a lot of the negative stuff I said about San Francisco pissed off some people who love the city. I wasn't trying to paint San Francisco in a bad light. I was trying to shave off some of the excessive and illusory positivity of the initial post because San Francisco as great as it is, is a city with deep issues and deep problems. To solve these issues and to solve these problems one has to first admit that they exist. Acceptance is hard for many, especially those who have lived here all their lives, and I think this attack was just an aspect of that.
Move to Noe Valley or Bernal heights
Aside from the limited parking it is a decent area that does not smell like “San Francisco”
All the “unlanded” are sharecroppers, some better paid than others. Time for some solidarity among the renter class.
Everyone being housed is effectively a signal to landlords that rent is too cheap.
We obviously produce enough capital to ensure everyone is housed and fed, yet housing costs simply keep rising with productivity because, well, why wouldn’t they?
Zoning/NIMBYism doesn’t help either, but even with perfect zoning, prices would still rise with productivity.
If you prefer more equal ownership of capital there is nothing wrong with that.
But that is completely orthogonal to solving 'the problem' of homelessness. Please don't confuse the two issues.
People are made homeless because housing costs rise arbitrarily high along with productivity. To the market, the definition of “the correct price” for housing is when there is “a little bit” of poverty.
If you happen to earn enough to land above that price then you are paying for your overpriced apartment. If you happen to fall below that line, you are homeless.
The “force” at play is a broken pricing scheme which allows/encourages landlords to continue raising prices as high as they can possibly go, which in a super high productivity area like SFBA or NYC is extremely high.
Places with less inflated housing prices had a 'homeless problem' as well until they made home a basic human right.
Hence empirically I doubt you can 'fix homelesness' by fixing the housing market. You can fix the housing market but will still have homeless problem - until you make home a human right.
San Francisco is still held to Martin vs. Boise. They need to either build sufficient homeless shelters for all of the homeless in SF, (lol) or allow them to sleep where they please in public places.
I am not a lawyer, but I got an A in Political Science 101 and I read the news. This is not legal advice, but my personal advice is that cities in California oughta build more homeless shelters.
Oh, please, god, no.
California desperately needs more actual housing. That's a huge issue in California.
More homeless shelters just drags out the problem. It doesn't solve it.
There are mentally ill people in housing. They don't generally follow you down the street and scream at you when they have housing.
Being homeless is enormously stressful. It is itself crazy-making.
Lack of sufficient housing supply is a root cause of high housing prices and of homelessness. California has been under building for decades.
In the meantime, I will keep harping on best practices for this planet as I best understand them.
More generally, your comments come across and smug and sanctimonious — everyone has an interest in solving the problem, and falling back to “homelessness is a housing problem” amounts to tautology which is not particularly insightful.
Given how much lower the average lifespan is for homeless individuals, we are more or less killing them.
Being from the tribal origin I've been conned by city dwellers a lot before I wised up. In tribe we trust everyone, there is no need to be shrewed and sense of community and living together in harmony is valued above everything else.
UK data from 2011:
Homeless die 30 years younger than average
The new research found that the average homeless person has a life expectancy of 47, compared to 77 for the rest of the population: a startling difference of 30 years. The life expectancy for women was even lower, at just 43 years.
https://www.nhs.uk/news/lifestyle-and-exercise/homeless-die-...
I think this is US data from 2017:
The average life span of a homeless person was shorter by about 17.5 years than that recorded for the general population.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5739436/
In tribe we trust everyone
Yeah, my dad was part Cherokee. I can be sort of stupid at times about thinking the best of people and I've been burned by that.
But I also think my native heritage helped me survive living in a tent for nearly 6 years and helped me profoundly in other ways.
That sense of community is very life giving and it tends to be lacking in most modern American places.
There seems to be this strange idea that people put forth that your options are simply between living in the most expensive city in the country or being homeless in the most expensive city in the country.
How about Modesto? I think you would find plenty of support from people who genuinely would like for those people to have somewhere to live. The problem is that the opposition wouldn't accept it. It would come off as some perverse form of gentrification, under the implication that anybody "deserves" to live anywhere. I personally have always found the argument that "I should be able to continue living here, because I lived here previously" to be incredibly uncompelling. What about people who weren't born in fantastic cities?
The fact that the Tenderloin is where it is, in what would probably be some of the best real estate in the city, is absolutely insane. I think you would find that there is all the good will in the world from people, if the proposed solutions make sense. They just don't.
The city of Vienna Austria has a fantastic social housing program. The city owns and manages 220,000 units of housing and indirectly controls another 200,000 units of private properties developed under a city-regulated process [1].
This could be done in SF. And then even people who are not very wealthy could potentially move to and live in the city. I reject the notion that individual wealth should be the sole or primary way that we allot housing to people.
Instead of complaining about tents, we could (through our taxes) build these people homes. Instead of stepping over people sleeping on the ground we could make sure every person has a roof over their head. San Francisco is a very wealthy city. We could certainly afford to build this kind of housing.
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/pdredge/pdr_edge_featd_articl...
The problem is I can't possibly afford to live there. If you can live there, cool. For many people, it's just too expensive to make it into a nice experience.
All those restaurants nearby are only cool if you can afford the high cost of housing and have enough money leftover to still eat at restaurants without worrying that you are cutting your own throat in terms of retirement savings or something.
In short, it's great if you are wealthy enough. It's not for most other people, even if they find parts of it enchanting.
I no doubt bought other stuff. I also enjoyed "How buildings learn" but I don't think I bought it that day.
I run r/CitizenPlanners and there are some links there to videos and what not.
Personally I found the book a bit long and repetitive: although the examples were varied, each was used to restate the same basic point. But that may be my own problem. After all, if you're trying to support a generalisation using case studies, it's not enough to breeze through one or two and assure the reader that others exist; you need to go into detail about as many as you reasonably can.
It was written in SF post-gold rush to answer the question of why the obscene wealth generated by the gold rush resulted in abysmal quality of life and skyrocketing inequality in SF. Sadly relevant these days.
I left California more than 2.5 years ago. I don't plan to return to it.
[0]: There's a slight tilt towards owners (54%). If property prices continue to become less affordable, it seems reasonable there will be less owners in the future. https://datausa.io/profile/geo/california#housing
If prop 13 were to die, you'd think it'd be this year with all the budget problems coming up. It won't though. Politicians would face a mass exodus even if they kept in an exception for primary homes/business-locations. There's no way they'd all stay in office.
It'll be much more expensive to hold commercial real estate without it yielding income, so it should reduce the commercial vacancy rate.
This can (a) raise a whole lot of revenue, relieving local/state budgets so they can hopefully stop needing as many stupid short-term workarounds which have proliferated the past few decades, and (b) allow future commercial property taxes for newly purchased commercial properties to be lower than they otherwise would be, encouraging more turnover, especially for underused properties.
The obvious follow-up would be to also change the law for residential properties owned by large-scale landowners (say, companies which own large apartment complexes or dozens of homes).
Prop 13 is a voter-passed Constitutional Amendment and, therefore, can only be repealed by the voters. So, the politicians that would be voted out for repealing it are...the voters.
Most of this has to do with settling down and thinking more about a family than myself and career. My body also can’t recover from those nights in SF as well as I get older.
SF is a Peter Pan city though, you can stay young there forever and do fine. I know people who still go to the same bars and hang out with the same crowd they did a decade ago.
Actually just got back from a very similar bike ride.
Being mostly in Seattle for about 6 years now, this is what I enjoyed the most about being based in SF and is what will likely make me return to it.
Seattle feels to be a town now comprised of corporate campuses and the suburban neighborhoods in between. It's also great if you love outdoor hobbies, but I prefer the vibrance of cities. The creative culture here feels substantially more lacking than it is in SF, and it feels extremely challenging to make new friend that aren't in technology. Of course SF has its tech-bro startup culture; here it seems most people that live around me work for Microsoft, Amazon, or Facebook. At least there were easy outs in going to galleries or clubs or art/makerspaces or various meets for non-tech things in SF and I have never been able to find enough of those in the Seattle area. The COVID-19 crisis will likely choke them out further.
I hear the same thing about New York and to that I wonder:
1) Do people actually like these things
2) or are they a just a way to virtue signal their cosmopolitan bona fides to the other graduates of selective universities?
Perhaps I'm just an unsophisticated public school grad, but I've never met anybody that actually takes part in these things even when they live in New York, etc.
Also I think London is slightly cheaper. Still, working remotely from London proper is probably a terrible idea given the extent of public transportation. Just live in Croydon and catch overground to London when necessary IMO.
* no, London is much much cleaner than SF. I'd rather take a stroll in London.
* there's very little amount of homeless compared to SF. Again, I'd rather take a stroll in London.
I was paying 1300GBP (so around 1500USD) for a one bedroom apartment in Battersea (so zone2). I am now paying 3350USD for a small one bedroom in Castro.
Are we talking about the same London and the same SF? I went a whole week in London riding the subway several times a day without seeing anything gross.
Also, in contrast to NYC, you can easily string together a day where you're in Muir Woods, then hit a winery or two in Sonoma, and be back in SF in time for the Symphony. Sure, I don't do stuff like that all the time, but on occasion when I have visitors in town.
Downsides are the high cost, the absolutely insane homeless and feces filled streets, and the monoculture.
California is amazing, but the NY metro area has a ton to offer with a much lower drama factor.
I'm really baffled, I have no solutions to offer, I'm just baffled that everyone can see that SF is in a very very bad state and yet nothing is improving.
Basically everyone (me included) is just completely baffled why nothing is improving and just sitting there waiting for something to be done.
I recommend the south bay if you want to escape the poverty, it's not as bad down there.
I won't deny there are some horror stories coming from Mexico, but I'm a European and have been living here since 2009. I've never seen or experienced anything even remotely violent. I paid for a mordida once, that's it. I've lived in Mexico City, Estado de México, Veracruz, Cancún, and now near Querétaro. I've travelled to most states either for tourism or work. Although I'm from Spain I totally look like a gringo so I never pass unnoticed.
We live in a little village about 3 hours from Mexico City with almost no crime at all. We only lock our door when leaving town. We have 200Mbps fiber. We rent a 3bdr house with garden for about $500 USD. Life is really good for us.
My wife is Mexican and her mother passed away a couple of months ago so we're now planning to go back to Europe in 2-3 years once my gig starts generating some income. There is not much here for her and I'm a bit bored of Mexico. We also don't like how the political situation is changing with Amlo.
For anyone else besides me who was unfamiliar with the term, it's a bribe: https://www.tripsavvy.com/definition-of-mordida-1588821
(for those that do not speak Spanish: embarazada = pregnant)
Could you expand on this? I'm not keeping up with Mexican politics so I don't know much besides him being left leaning.
He is surrounded by incompetent and bootlicker advisors.
This administration is one of the most corrupt and violent in the past 20 years.
He has three pharaonic projects to build an outdated infrastructure that only "benefits" the president's home state.
He is actively stopping the construction for renewable energy projects and foreign investment.
A more accurate description would be “he surrounds himself with incompetent and bootlicker advisors.”
At the presidential level he appointed all of those people
With the combination of COVID and the current political situation, Mexico is going to plunge into the worst recession it has seen in modern history. I wouldn't be surprised if Mexico becomes the next Venezuela in a couple of years.
Oh! Thank you for teaching me this word.
https://www.as-coa.org/articles/approval-tracker-mexicos-pre... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/amlo-is-me...
>we're now planning to go back to Europe
Where in Europe are you planning to relocate?
Also nod to NL, as other poster. Lived there for three years. Again, stuff works.
Yes!
Both Switzerland and NL are at the top of my list.
As for getting money from abroad you have to declare it and pay a percentage to the state.
I can't help but wonder if a Spanish accent buys you some cred in Latin America that other gringos don't get.
Outside of touristic zones (Vallarta, Cancún, etc) Mexicans tend to like and be curious about people from abroad. There's actually a pejorative term called malinchismo for this preference for foreign stuff.
On the other hand, Mexicans use more diminutives compared to Spaniards and have lost the informal plural "you", always using what would be the the formal form of address in Spain. Mexicans often also say "¿mande?" to acknowledge you or request that you repeat yourself, but this more literally means something very servile like "order me" or "what is your command?", a remnant of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. For this reason, Mexicans sometimes sound excessively polite to Spaniards.
Of course, these are just broad stereotypes and it's entirely possible that pier25 has not experienced any of this. Possibly simply due to being foreign and the generally unacknowledged racism we have in Mexico (white is pretty), pier25's experience may have been entirely positive.
Also, pier25 may look like a gringo but he's not a gringo. In Mexico, only people from the US are gringos, regardless of their appearance. Obama is a gringo; Trudeau is not a gringo (other countries use the term "gringo" differently). As soon as pier25 speaks, no Mexican would call him gringo. Gachupín is an older somewhat pejorative term for Spaniards in Mexico, but I think it's rarely used nowadays.
That's so interesting. I'm from Brazil, and to us Continental Portuguese sounds pompous, much like what a British accent sounds to an American listeners.
Different languages, I know, but interesting contrast considering both cases are related to the Iberian peninsula :)
Yes, this is totally true.
Also Mexicans generally try to speak properly unless they are with friends or family. They typically shush bad words, use more polite substitutes, or they start a sentence with "excuse me but...".
In Spain nobody cares.
> pier25's experience may have been entirely positive
Yeah, totally. I've lived in different countries so I adapt very quickly to different customs and forms.
> As soon as pier25 speaks, no Mexican would call him gringo.
You'd be surprised. Most people in Mexico associate Spanish accent with Madrid accent (eg: hola como eshtash) and since I don't have that accent they think I'm a gringo with a weird Spanish accent. Dozens of times Mexicans have insisted speaking to me in English even when I was speaking in Spanish to them. Once I even had to insist that I was from Spain and the answer was "¿Pero español de España?" :)
With my wife we've joked about making a t-shirt for me that says "Que no soy gringo joder!".
Jajajaja me encantaría ver esa playera.
FWIW, I've been living in Budapest now for a year and is quite nice, I like Europe overall too, but we'll be returning to Canada :-)
Mexico is safer than the US - some will find that unpaletable. Get over it.
This is quite verifiably false?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_homicid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mexican_states_by_homi...
edit: fixed link
Also, even comparing apples to apples those stats don't paint the day to day reality of living in Mexico. Very often murders are from fights between narco gangs, or between narcos and the police/military.
Edit:
It's also true that crime and narco presence is not equally distributed.
See Queretaro vs Boston:
I stayed in various of the "safe parts" of Mexico for three months and felt much safer than in any of various cities in the US, both experienced as a European traveller.
But I'm hopeful that will all return in 18 months.
And so in my idealized remote setup, the balance I want is:
A) Work environment optimized for deep work. I run a company, but I've found a way to do that with very few meetings and very little email. Most weeks I just have one meeting and many days I don't send a single email.
B) Living environment optimized for people and culture. While a lot of restaurants are obviously going to have to declare for bankruptcy, I do think that people working from home are going to crave a social life and so I think the demand for pubs and restaurants will return.
NYC people resonate with me because I experience them as a diverse group of ambitious people. I'm constantly running into people in different industries, but who still share my basic interest/ambition to figure out how to succeed.
In order to make this work you need to have a decent office setup. But I'm sure that coworking will be able to meet the demands of people that want more work/life separation. That's a pattern that people who work for me often use: remote worker at a coworking desk. But I have a nice office setup for myself already even though NYC apartments are small.
(I am coupled, but we are intentionally child free.)
People say it's expensive but they act as if you get nothing in return for what you pay, which is certainly not the case.
when I talk about "culture" in my city, I am usually referring to how often I will end up at events which broaden my perspectives, simply by tagging along or following the suggestions of friends/acquaintances. For example: wine tastings, art gallery/museum openings, open mic amateur stand up comedy events, [specific thing, e.g. cactus] festivals, and so on. (in my experience many such events are free/inexpensive)
When I said culture I was thinking to myself a lot about diversity. This is a major outpost for movie production, tv production, theater, music, dance, comedy, art, writing. And so we end up with both the high end version of those, i.e. broadway, and also all the supporting versions as people climb the ladder to the big leagues or even just need smaller place to test an idea.
It's so intwined with the city that I run into it everywhere. An element of that diversity is that I experience a lot of surprise. I'll see something or meet someone and learn something that I didn't already learn.
A smattering of experiences:
- My partner has a season pass to an off broadway theater and had Hamilton tickets before it was on Broadway.
- Twice now I've lived directly above major magazine editors. One was the #2 at Real Simple and now is on Medium's internal team and my current downstairs neighbor is at the Atlantic. How do they think about current events and how to best explain it?
- Janene Garafolo is trying to start a comedy club in Brooklyn and it's a very relaxed and easy night out that's only a few blocks from my house.
- I ended up friends with a guy now on the air at WNYC right when he was making the transition into radio. He'd take me to Moth Story Telling Competitions and sometimes he'd win which led to him getting much more serious about audio storytelling. But when I first met him he was dirt poor and sharing a very shitty car with my now girlfriend.
- I ended up at a lot of parties with one of the lead dancers at the Paul Taylor company. She's probably one of the top ten dancers in the world. And this was just a run of the mill house party, maybe ten people sitting around drinking.
- The artist who did Obama's presidential portrait is on the permanent collection at Brooklynn Art Museum and his urban men restyled as Renaissance paintings kind of blew my mind.
- Almost everyone here is up on a current museum exhibition, theater thing, or writing. So culture is just part of the conversation here.
- I was sitting at an off-broadway play and ended up making small talk with the person sitting next to me, Deborah Eisenberg. I had no idea who she was, but she had just had a book reviewed by the NYT. She looked bored because her partner is a famous actor (recognizable by anyone who saw Princess Bride). And so he was fending off a fan and she looked bored. Later I saw her speak at a non-fiction center near our place in Brooklyn and the audience was almost all writers.
- The TV show Dirtbag on Amazon seems pretty well known. (It's also great). I saw her do a one-woman show version of season one. It was about 90 minutes with just her performing. Tina Fey was sitting right in front of us, which is part of the pipeline thing here. Performers are out checking out other performers.
And then on top of that, yeah, I go to the movies and see mainstream movies and what not. Or I used to in the "before times."
I'm very curious to know what your secret is!
NYC is great. But keep everything you care about in three suitcases, and be ready to haul ass at a moment's notice. And for heaven's sake, don't sign a lease, much less a mortgage.
The beach is like a couple of miles away. The mountains are also quite close and its very beautiful and its very much untouched nature. It's also very hot and humid but I am fine with that.
Also, they get fiber so the internet is faster than where I live in the Bay Area.
The only problem was that there were no jobs there but with the Facebook announcement, that hopefully will change for the better.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@8.0832685,77.5565189,3a,75y,326....
Traveling through India for a couple months is on my bucket list, and now Kerala is part of that.
Kindly note though that the distance from the point I chose to the state of Kerala (not the city) is roughly the distance from Miami to Boca Raton.
It's one of the five biggest cities in the US but most people routinely look past it.
First of all it's fairly cheap, less than half as expensive as SF even in the nicest parts.
It's got the best restaurant scene of any city I've spent time in (and almost all are free BYO).
It's got a great art scene including a ton of amazing live music. 4 sports teams with passionate fan bases.
It's racially diverse (no racial majority), mostly safe, and has plenty of young professionals.
And if you really need to you can get to NY in only a few hours.
The only reason I'm not there is that the tech scene sucks. If I could be remote I'd be there already.
Something that folks on the West Coast might appreciate: flights to major European cities are roughly equal to flights to SF or LA, and often cheaper.
Oh, and it’s a 6 hour drive to Montréal.
Granted, with corona... that’s all dreaming.
That's exactly how I feel about philly. Especially after spending several years in LA.
Rabid. They have rabid fan bases.
I live in the small city where I was born, so within 30 minute walking distance of my parents, one of my sisters, and a few of my friends.
It's amazing because our kids can play together and we can easily have the proud grandparents come over for help. Plus, friends can come over for a drink and then walk back home.
I did live in Singapore, Vietnam, and the Canary Islands for a while, which was also great, but for different reasons.
I'd say the focus on travel in here just shows that most HN readers are younger than me, so they don't have to plan for kids yet.
The importance of family and friends comes once you realize it actually doesn't really matter that much where you live (unless it is downright terrible to live there). Life is what you make off it - this goes for your "place" as well. And for some people, their friends are essential to do that. For others not at all.
I would have never moved for family unless it concerns my household. I only moved once because of "friends"/people I knew when deciding where to study. Wasn't really stupid, just the wrong reason. It is never easier to make friends than as an 18 year old beginning your studies.
I always intended to move after studying to work abroad for a few years. Scandinavia or California would have been awesome.
I prefer not to move at all now because I/we prefer stability in life now as parents. The doctors we know, the shops we know, the handymen we know - and life isn't that terrible where we are and the daily struggles interesting enough. I would work remote to be able to stay where I am right now, just as an example.
Having moved across the continent as a kid I don't fear moving - I just prefer not to unless really necessary. Moving across the country in a few years, to a place I know more "adolescent-friendly" and with "nicer people" to build a house is still an option for me though - but harder for my partner to feel comfortable with.
I guess a lot of people (including my dad) are more adventurous and need to see the "foreign land", but everyone has their own incentives and anchors.
My mom, sisters, long time friends, family, beaches, scenery, mountains, hurricanes, etc. I’ll take it all.
I would need to be able to have and run a central AC like here though. All I hear from friend is how hot it is right now.
Right now we're a in a similar situation, albeit renting sharing with flatmates. Auckland/Airport is just 20-60 minutes away if need to. Marina is just 15 minutes away. Internet is not excellent but 60mbps VDSL is enough. Maybe 5G will change that.
On longer term - offshore cruising. I recon there might be a boom of that once Starlink constellation is operational and finally sat net is affordable for smaller boats. Big decision here is whether it's catamaran (2.5x living area, 3x cost, 2x speed, 2x maintenance, 2x comfort) or monohull (2x safety, 1.5x versatility).
Japan is out there too. They've recently announced visa programme for startups so immigration options might be more feasible. That said I've got spoiled by rural living and Japan is incredibly dense so no idea how big of a house I could find there. Also I'd move far north as summers in Tokyo etc seem unbearable.
While I don't have an ocean view, and only about 2ha of land, it's a wonderful place to be. However, there are pretty significant drawbacks in getting gigs as there just aren't many local firms doing anything at all intellectually challenging and US firms still just apparently aren't interested in talent in this country who don't want to suffer being forced to relocate to awful places to live.
I don't see that changing, either; the fact is that people who really place proper value on a quality lifestyle tend to be older, and few firms really place much value on older talent either. Younger people are cheaper and more willing to suffer abuses such as moving to unpleasant, expensive metro areas in countries with alien values.
The cheese shop is fine! I know Keith and Marita who have owned it for many years, they are good people - Ad Clarijs who founded it still occasionally runs cheesemaking classes, his place is not far from mine. Also worth a visit is the amazing Cafe Eutopia next door - https://g.page/eutopiacafe?share - which is a marvel.
It just boggles my mind how US firms don't realise how poor a value proposition - especially to people of an age to have a family or strong community ties, like the roots I have here - they offer to developers in AU/NZ when demanding that people relocate to work for them, and I'm not really optimistic that COVID-19 will really bring any significant change to their corporate cultures. I am hopeful that perhaps more firms in AU may cotton on to the fact that there's a substantial pool of exceptional veteran talent in NZ who are really underutilized, which really represents an opportunity for them if they were to make a serious attempt to hire here and let people work remotely.
Utopia cafe looked dystopian as it was closed :D
As a young, unmarried guy, there's no need for me to get a mansion. The homestay family I live with have taught me so much about living with young children, it's been a blessing to learn whether that's a challenge I'd like to take on.
Most people who want to make lots of money moved to Australia, so those left in NZ usually care about more important things in life.
I also have high hopes for Starlink, not just for NZ (we have enough submarine cables) but for other countries e.g. Zambia, Georgia.
The new 5G plans are pretty much same as 4G - it's not realistic alternative for broadband. Meanwhile in most Eastern European countries you can get truly unlimited data plan for less than $100 (we've got one for a 100 boat + 8 cameras marina).
What specially you miss when you say "NZ is quite boring from cultural perspective" ?
For me Auckland is about the minimum size (1.5m people) I'd want to live. I have a minority hobby (chess) that barely exists in smaller cities, let alone towns. Similarly as you go to smaller places you lose those other niche things that need a huge population to support. For example outside of Auckland/Wellington most towns have perhaps one Tech meetup group, not one for every topic.
The outdoor stuff is an occasional for me. Living in the Auckland I can get to it in an hour or two dring while having two good bakeries in walking distance for my house.
People are a bit simple. You'll rarely have discussion on politics, economy or philosophy. I suppose there's a reason - so many here can enjoy sailing, fishing, hiking, golf and much more than us in Northern Europe - things that are sort of luxury. We were bound to stay in deep dark cellars, listening to weird electronic music and eating pills like pacman.
Also housing supplies are a bit ridiculous. Laundry is good example - cold water, horizontal tub that at most gets rid of smell, but not stains. Also what's up with those stainless laundry sinks that every damn house has to have it? Right now we live on a property that's valued over $3m but we ain't got a damn heat pump...
I'd give serious consideration to the Mackenzie Country too - Ruataniwha, Pukaki, and Tekapo are all amazing places.
Would only trade for something directly on the seaside, or a little more to the West (Cascais, Guincho) for a slightly cooler climate, but those usually imply driving (which I detest) and lack “big city” amenities (most of which I can’t enjoy right now).
Have zero intention of ever going back to an office (have been remote on and off for years, hot-desked, worked at customers, etc.).
The current situation (despite the pandemic and weird working hours) is perfect for me since (nearly) all my colleagues and customers are outside Portugal.
How's the tech scene?
Seeing the answers in this thread, I think people should get out of the US and visit cities like Lisbon to understand what it means to live.
- Chill and relax
- Awesome people, polite and clean
- Best place in the world to work from cafes. Many cafes shops welcome people who works for long hours. They also care about cafe ;) I actually prefer to work from cafes than co-working here
- Surrounded by nature, mountain, sea, river are within 45minutes reach. Hundred of trails around Taipei.
- Metro / Bus system is top notch, no car needed, it's flat so you can bike everywhere easily. The bike sharing (uBike) is everywhere. I use it daily.
- People are genuinely kind, friendly, curious. Did I mentioned people 2 times? They deserve a 3rd mentioned, they really are.
- Visa is easy to get if you are employed (aka not freelancing), and earn more than usd5.5k/month, or work in a "trendy" field, you can get the "gold card" visa for 3 years that comes with a work visa, that is not attached to any company! Is any other country has such a perk to attract talent? I'm not aware of.
- Great healthcare (and the best best country that managed the coronavirus)
- LGBT friendly
- Warm (but humid)
- Convenient , 24/7 convenience stores, within 2 minutes walk from everywhere, really often, 2 convenience stores face each other (no kidding)
- Awesome international food scene , you can find any western food , and local food is amazing. Japanese food is amazing, as good as in Japan, but cheaper (it's an old japanese colony, and the favorite destination of japanese people)
- It's a better China (I lived in China for 4 years)
Cons:
- It is so relax / chill that it somehow bugs me. I sometimes worry to become "soft", staying here bc it's too convenenient
- Wish the startup / tech scene was better
ps: if you live in Taipei hit me up :)
pps: People often think Taiwan is China, but it's not. It has a totally different vibe and Taiwanese has a totally different personality. The only thing in common is the language
I've been studying Mandarin here for a while after being a software engineer for a few years. Been thinking about what I'm gonna do once I feel comfortable in the language. Working remotely would be great if I could pull it off.
The other way is to qualify for any of their "talent" needs. Blockchain, VR, IA, and have proof it it (publication, work, projects). They have 8 categories of people that can qualify: https://foreigntalentact.ndc.gov.tw/en/cp.aspx?n=128B875DE9C...
Just keeping my options open at the moment.
I don't think you mentioned gyms. The Taiwanese are an oddly sports-oriented people. Throughout asia I can't think of an equal in terms of availability of cheap gyms. Public sports complexes are also sometimes good enough (but I've also found myself working out in a cramped room with a bunch of senior citizens on occasion :)).
I think you also didn't mention proximity to other countries for visiting. It's a very good location, and EVA is one of my favorite airlines.
Edit: Note that the things that make Taiwan great for living also, almost by default make it a "boring" country to some types of people. #1 for remote work possibly, definitely not #1 for thrill seeking, nightlife-type interests.
Nice point on being one of the hub for flying in Asia. It's connected to everywhere within 1 or 2 hours reach(Philipine,China,Japan,Korea, SG etc...)
What I'm wondering is how worried are the people of Taiwan about China encumbering on their sovereignty in the near to mid future? Or is this something that people over there do not give too much thought to in their day to day lives?
Chiang Mai has terrible pollution every year Oct-Nov due to burning crop residue. It affects all of Thailand and neighboring countries, but Chiang Mai and Northern Thailand gets it particularly bad to the point of needing smoke masks. You might be better off looking at Hua Hin if you don't mind trading mountains and cooler climate for a beach.
Agreed on cons, it's so good it softens you which is an overindulgence if efficiency problem.
Agreed startup scene is hurting. Ironically amazing for hiring and even in high tech. Taida is a serious school and companies like TSMC are here so serious engineering gets done. Ifni was in hardware I'd look to here as a black sheep vs shenzen.
Say hi if in Taipei!
Not to mention zero new local cases a month now! Enjoying restaurants and life daily :). Shhh don't share about Taiwan
I’m not surprised no one has said it but it’s a really great city. I’m slightly biased in that I grew up in Sacramento but it’s really well located. 2-3 hours to everywhere in the Bay or to anywhere in Tahoe. The American and Sacramento Rivers run through Sacramento and there are miles upon miles of walking trails along them.
The rents are significantly lower than in the Bay. Depending on how far you go from Downtown Sacramento, you can rent a 3bd/2ba house in a great area for $2k/month.
The downtown area has really been revitalized since the opening of the new arena. There are a ton of fantastic restaurants in the area and plenty of things to do, and the homeless population isn’t as bad as in SF.
The weather can get really hot (100F/38C+ during peak summer) but those are just opportunities for a day spent on any of the various waterways.
Growing up here I definitely went through the same struggles as the character in Lady Bird- hating the place and thinking there was nothing to do. But it’s really been transformed and since leaving I’ve really grown to love this city. I’m definitely planning on moving back here in the long term future, but if the new WFH policies allow me to move back here sooner than I likely will.
If anyone has questions about Sacramento I would be happy to answer.
1. People are very closed-minded. They're against education, labor, the government, LA, other countries, etc. Anti-vaxxers/homeschoolers are for real in the surrounding metro. I knew very few people who went to elite colleges and institutions from my high school. I just recently spoke with someone who threw a birthday party for their kid, no masks, no social distancing.
2. Homelessness. My barber's neighbor, a hair salon, recently went on Fox News to talk about property damage because the city won't do something.
3. Desperate poverty. You described the nice areas, Granite Bay and Folsom are hella rich. Go to Del Paso or where I grew up playing baseball on Watt Ave. Drugs, domestic abuse, shootings. Prostitution is basically an open secret.
4. Tech is nowhere to be found. I learned to code at the Hacker Lab, a local tech meetup non-profit, and got the hell out as soon as I could. There are literally no employers.
Yes, you can find a "cheap" place but for what you're getting the cost is way too high. I'm glad I left and I'll do my best to never go back.
2. I’m sorry that your barber’s neighbor had to go through that. The homelessness doesn’t really seem all that bad to me compared to SF though. My experiences are from my passing observations and I’ve never really been accosted by the homeless.
3. I didn’t grow up in either of those areas but I did grow up in a middle class area so my biases might be showing here but to me it seems like most larger metros have pockets of deep poverty. Yes, Granite Bay and Folsom are the upper class areas but I think there are more middle class areas than there are impoverished areas. I’m not super in tune with how local government is doing in the impoverished parts either.
4. In the context of working remotely I’m not sure how much this matters besides I guess being able to meet other people in tech. There’s also a decent amount of tech transplants moving to the area from what I’ve heard.
The tech scene might be "nowhere to be found" compared to the bay, but there are plenty of tech jobs. Folsom is practically founded by Intel, HP has a campus in the area, Cisco has something here, there's an Apple presence in Elk Grove, and there are also plenty of smaller companies.
Would not recommend for Francophones to end up in the Flemish side of the country unless they also speak English or Flemish - there's some cultural stigma, or was at the time.
So, answer: slow nomad. It's been a good life, although I've found it difficult to prosper to the extent more connected people can. (But I believe this is more me, than being remote.)
I don't like the idea of bouncing around a lot - a month here, a month there - it feels superficial. On the other hand, between reading and talking to a lot of people, and exploring the hell out of wherever I am by bike, a place can start to feel old... I've been here in Bend, Oregon for 5 years, and have ridden more roads and trails than some who have been here much longer. It's difficult to find new stuff to explore at this point without driving further afield. I kind of miss the sensation of it all being new, yet to be discovered (by me).
Im a US citizen - lived in Mexico and the Islands of the South Pacific
Apart from applying for an education visa and learning Thai (unsure that actually grants work rights?) or an actual work visa with associated FT job, you'd be on 1 month tourist visas with repeated border crossings and in legal grey zone at the whim of regulators.
Vietnam you can apply for extensions up to 1 year and everyone leaves you alone if employed remotely or running your own business abroad. Central Vietnam is a beautiful place.
I've been living there 6 months out of the year the past 3 years and plan to get the elite visa once the pandemic settles down. Vietnam is another favorite spot of mine but Thailand has always been my #1.
That said, wasn't the biggest fan of KL when I visited. It gave me "trying too hard to be Singapore and failing" vibes. Was much happier chilling in Langkawi. For a big SE Asia mega-city, BKK or Saigon are far more livable than KL, Manila, or Jakarta (and the associated crime, traffic, etc.)
On the bright side, they're likely to be the first spot in Malaysia to get 5G, so that will bode well for an emerging tech scene.
Expats love it because sin items (tabacco and alcohol) are not only tolerated, but duty free. People buy a house right next to the airport and fly to KL / Singapore for their once a fortnight big-city fix.
Theres few options available to someone trying to work in Malaysia remotely:
- Get business visa sponsorship for a local job, be treated terribly and earn a bit more than local dev rates which are still lower than what you get flipping burgers in the West and work your remote job on the side.
- Apply for the Tech Entrepreneur visa which is inward looking and needs to either employ locals or be focused on the Malaysian market to be successful.
- Third option is buying a house and getting a 10 year renewable visa from that, the recent situation with the government banning permanent residents from returning home due to covid shows how little value PR actually grants you.
Not really conducive to remote workers moving there to live. Internet is great though and most services are well provided for.
I couldn't live in KL longterm, was there for most of a year and it really wasn't for me, there's some nice suburbs and all that but the pollution and soulless aspect of the city really gets to you after a while, it's so car-centric with malls everywhere being the only place you are encouraged to be a pedestrian.
For someone like me who likes to go out and drink a bit it's incredibly expensive. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day costs basically nothing though which is amusing as a non-smoker. It's also hard to justify living in and supporting a country where people pay different prices for the same house based on their race along with a myriad of other race based laws, it's very backwards in a lot of ways. Everywhere has problems but these ones seem quite in your face once you live there for long enough. Bumiputera laws are bizarre and counterproductive to any semblance of a healthy society.
Penang is charming though and has a lot going for it, along with a big expat community, fresh air and always close to nature, Langkawi is a cheap 15 min flight away, it was once the "Silicon Valley of the East" but never really capitalised on that, regardless there's still a lot of tech manufacturing and associated industry.
Our homegrown tech scene is nothing to shout about. That's why realistically I positing a case for remote workers of foreign firms instead. Who knows, maybe the "right stuff" will spillover locally after a decade.
The bumiputera nonsense is outside our control, however unless you have to frequently deal with the government, most people won't even notice.
Homegrown success stories like grab eventually move to Singapore because it's just easier in a lot of ways.
I find it sad, been in and out of the country for nearly a decade and there's some real opportunities to lure in foreign remote workers or startups but there's little political will to do so. The concept that a foreigner could work for a US company from KL will just upset locals who would demand they do the work instead.
Know plenty of expats and nomad types from over the years and even basic things like accommodation is a nightmare. Monthly rentals are rare to come by apart from airbnb and that is banned in many apartments. Everywhere else in SEA you can walk up to an apartment and have a monthly lease signed in under an hour.
When I first moved in for the first week every security guard in the complex demanded to see my lease and accused me of using airbnb, was quite a shock.
other factors
-Food is cheap but novelty wears off eventually and you will want to cook. Apartments are mostly expensive and small [in BKK] so kitchen is small. Western style groceries are expensive.
-Its too hot. Traffic is really bad. Public transport is air conditioned but walking to skytrain etc is tiring because of the traffic, pollution, heat around you.
-Wework or similar remote coworking spaces are not cheap
-Language barriers
-Time difference with clients back home [major one]
I did one month in Hanoi, Vietnam and hated it. Places with infastructure worse than Thailand make it awkward if you have to work everyday 9-5
I think it can be fun if you move around and do it in episodes. I'd like to do some time in SKorea and Japan Perhaps Taiwan too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23297378 (but then also see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GIndXSfawA)
+ incredible night life with some of the best bars and clubs I've ever seen
+ from downtown to the most beautiful beaches in just 3 hours by car
+ more dream islands and beaches just 1 hour by inland flight away
+ several national parks in range for weekend tours
+ super easy and cheap to hop to exciting neighboring countries (Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore) for a few days
+ actually there are many super nice coworking spaces for around $120/month and many cafès allow sitting for hours
+ probably the best dating scene in the world for white and black men
+ Thai people are probably the friendliest, relaxed and most easy-going people in the world
I did the nomad thing for a couple years and loved it, but I sort of got it out of my system. The lifestyle can be lonely. And at this point in my life I'd rather cultivate a life of my own instead of running around enjoying little bits of life elsewhere. Not that I wouldn't take advantage of the ability to travel much more freely!
My friends in Portland are all intentionally dismissive about it and for that reason I'd never suggest Portland to anybody I care about as a place to live.
The suburbs can't escape cars, but I bet we can make Portland proper a utopia for pedestrians.
I already barely use cars. It's wonderful compared to Orlando (where I happened to grow up).
The city has a growth boundary and there are a ton of national parks and awesome nature. There is nowhere to expand to, so we have to use the land we have available to us.
I moved out of PDX because of both, still return a month a year but man, the traffic is so awful.
When the big one does hit though, there's definitely a long list of people who are going to be totally entitled to a good "I told you so".
So I basically hope to find a small house on the Cap of the North and work from there.
Can you tell me more? I've been reading more and more about avalanche safety recently.
This summer I'll do some work on data preparation for machine learning for the Norwegian equivalent, which will hopefully turn into a master's project.
I think it's a great industry, because there's lot of interesting tech that's relevant to work with (both SW and HW, mostly radio related stuff, but also infrasound and seismologic detectors), it's so small that you work internationally from the start, and the people working are ranging from mountain guides to database administrators.
* Ithaca, NY
* Chatanooga, TN
* Bend, OR
* Willamette Valley, OR
* San Luis Obispo, CA
* Bellingham, WA
* Santa Fe, NM
We've now lived in a small village 25 miles south of S.Fe for a year! The village itself is ridiculously packed with famous artists and writers (the guy that designed the Kindle, too, at least some of the time). It's beautiful, incredibly dry, endless sunshine, amazingly friendly people. It's also "Disneyland for the 65+ crowd", gets invaded by Miller Moths in May (ugh, this year was so bad), there are wasps and other pests constantly bugging the house, and there are not many roads for cycling. Lots of poverty in NM, and poor education.
Before the virus hit, our village was incredibly social ... now this aspect of life here has taken a backseat, and I'm not quite sure how it comes back.
Developing software and living here in general is pretty wonderful, but it's hard to know what the future holds. My wife misses water, and maybe (amazingly) even humidity. If I could afford somewhere in southern CA, I'd probably have picked that, but it's just absurd.
I don’t think you are missing out, since in my experience you usually only find “pub” friends to drink with, who often have unhealthy drinking habits and don’t become actual friends (albeit I’m faux British: in New Zealand!). Any activity (sport, hobby, work) where you hang with locals gives you the chance to make healthier relationships.
For anyone looking to make friends in a pub, you want to find a pub that is social. Some signals to look for: (a) a very wide range of ages that go there, (b) casual drinkers who are there to socialise rather than get drunk, (c) a single woman can drink at the pub comfortably without getting hit on, (d) not heaving full but rarely empty, (e) no loud music - or even better no music - if any live music it is quiet enough to talk over, (f) not a “popular“ place but a place for locals, and (g) it “feels” like someone’s house rather than a bar. That style of pub is dissapearing, and they are hard to find in large cities, but they do exist and they have a completely different culture.
Edit: if anyone from the Isles can comment on their take on this, I would appreciate it.
True in the past, but a non-issue these days, especially with younger colleagues.
> Also, being "white" helps, I think
Maybe in very provincial communities in parts of the country but not in the major cities - at least not since the 90s onwards. If anything I'd say the UK is one of the more open minded countries I've seen.
I have a sort-of-cousin who lives there now, and he loves it , though he did find a way into the university crowd anyway.
I would like to try living in Europe someday ( Switzerland would be awesome ) but I don't make enough money to do that yet. And there are visa issues too.
If I were forced to live back in the states, probably Boulder, Co. Maybe Brunswick Maine.
Honestly though, health care keeps me from moving back to the States.
There's a good community of hospex (was CouchSurfing, now hopefully BeWelcome), including weekly meetups in Taipei, Hsinchu, Chiayi, Tainan, and Kaohsiung.
How did you manage to find a remote company in Japan?
Without connections you're gonna have a tough time.
1. Weather
2. Transportation
3. Discrimination
The climate in the Nashville area was very hot in the summer and damn cold in the winter. My family wasn't very well off. I had a Wal-Mart coat that wasn't so great. I remember freezing my ass standing at the bus stop every morning to get to school, and being a dumb kid, I thought that was "normal", as in, I didn't know that you can have warmer jackets or clothes to stay warm.
Growing up in Nashville (K-12), I literally believed people of my skin color and origin were actually inferior to white people. The South can be hospitable, and I don't mean to generalize. Regardless, the folks who don't want to welcome you are very clear about that and have the loudest voices. One of my best friends in high school wasn't allowed to come over my house. I certainly won't accept my children having to deal with that non-sense. In grade school and middle school, I was bullied often and being the only non-white and non-black kid, it was sort of like being treated as a pariah.
This was all back in the 90's to 2000's. I don't mind living in the West coast, and I think my current city is amazing except that housing is extremely expensive.
Nashville and the surrounding areas are a beautiful place. I assume they've become more progressive in the past 25 years, but I don't know. Unfortunately, the "God fearing Christian/Real Americans terrify me.
The transportation system is pretty shitty, traffics pretty bad and theirs not any plan in place to improve it beyond making the roads bigger.
The discrimination I'd say is still here honestly. Some areas are more diverse like east nash but on average I dont know if I could say its improved since you lived here, but than again I'm white and have only lived here for a few years.
If ya got any questions about how its changed or what its like living here just lmk i'd be happy to answer
I own and run a DevOps consulting company, so the lower cost of living and zero state income tax is all just gravy. What area of Nashville did you grown up? I am in Germantown.
Later I went through another phase in which I imagined finding the perfect place and establishing an amazing existence there in an environment uniquely suited to my temperament.
In the current (perhaps final?) phase I realized that everything I want to do and which is important to me is connected with the place I happen to be.
The grass is greener on the other side for me. I always feel someplace else is better than here.
When I lived in Seattle in the 1990s, I cared about the problems I saw/knew about in the PNW. When I lived in Philadelphia for 22 years, I really didn't care about the problems. Seattle felt like paradise. Philadelphia just felt like a place to live.
I work remote and live in Los Angeles, despite all the drawbacks of living in California, because of family, friends, and my overall support network. Moving somewhere else would mean having to start all over again.
Downsides are poor public transport (cheap Japanese imports mean everyone chooses to own a vehicle), expensive food compared to EU or USA, and few jobs outside of the tourism & service industries.
The background check was pretty epic, though. I had to prove that I was indeed in a relationship with my girlfriend, who was a New Zealand citizen. This was probably because I didn't have a job lined up or a degree or skills to offer. We turned over about a year's worth of letter's we had mailed each other, many of which were pretty intimate. Supposedly someone flipped through them. Then I had to get a chest X-ray and some other medical exams, along with a drug test, to make sure I wasn't just coming over to freeload off their medical system or sling dope.
I imagine it would have been much easier if I had the skills and income that I have now. I was actually kinda shocked that I got permanent residency as easily as I did. From what I was told, I should have been pessimistic.
I went to a few other places, then stayed in Taiwan for 4 years. At first it was going to be 2 years, but at year 1.5, NZ changed their rules to requiring 3 years. Then 2016 happened, with all the political problems in the UK and US. Everybody from English-speaking countries is trying to move here, and the waiting times have gone up dramatically. The 4th year in Taiwan is because I met my girlfriend. She also wanted to come to NZ, but she couldn't even get a Working Holiday visa (there's only 600 per year for Taiwanese).
Now I'm losing hope that it'll ever be possible. I've put in so much: emotionally, financially, and in time, towards this dream. If it does fail, I will be devastated and probably never be able to settle anywhere. (I have nationality issues and can't just "go back to your country").
I'm pretty sure it would be Talinn, Estonia. Everyone there has a high competence with English, the entire society is built with "online first" and usually offered in three languages.
It has a good economy, is friendly and has reasonable social policies and a lovely wilderness.
Bit cold in the winter though. :)
But I feel like I'd want to winter much closer to the Mediterranean, or somewhere in the Southern hemisphere.
It was too expensive to live central in Helsinki so I lived in Vantaa. This was not a problem as the public transportation is not over-capacity and is very punctual. When I lived there though, there was only one underground "Metro" line- not sure if that changed.
Getting to Vantaa requires an overground inter-city train.
As for the experience: everything felt very "human"- like it was designed for comfort and ease. I didn't speak any Finnish (and the little I did I could not pronounce well enough to be understood) but otherwise it was truly lovely. I even lived through the Winter there and it was still quite nice.
The only Barrier to going back is that, as I said, it's rather expensive :(
When I was in Helsinki, I could tell the entire place had been designed to take care of people. When we first arrived, we tried to buy train tickets, and were then told that families with strollers ride for free!
I didn't see any homeless people, and the one sort of "off-balance" person was clearly still getting food and health care.
The entire place just seemed like a place where everyone cares about everyone else's well being.
The nature of the argument does imply that they know each other.
I lived in London for 6y and it’s comparable.
The public-transport is first-class, with a single system for the local rail, trams, and busses. Even in winter they're almost always on-time, and in good-shape.
The place is clean, the people are generally helpful if you need assistance, although the stereotype of Finns being "closed" and noncommunicative is pretty true, in general.
The city feels well-run, and well-organized, and the child-care is first-rate. Where I live I'm two minutes from the sea by foot, and the back of our apartment block faces a large park which contains our allotment on the far-side.
Many of the apartment buildings have children's play-areas, sandboxes, swings, etc, in them, and I guess we're lucky that where we live there are about ten children ranging in age from 1 year to 7 years. So there are always neighbours to chat to, and company for the children.
I found that 2-3 years is the sweetspot where you can absorb the culture, learn the language and start to get kinda bored of your surroundings - so that's exactly what I've been doing.
I feel that digital nomad doesn't really work as you can't really get to know the place you're living at in few weeks or even months and staying in a single place for longer than 3 years is a severe underutilization of remote benefits.
Assumptions: Timezone matching isn't a constraint. Political administrations within a nation oscillate, but in general little substantive changes as people pick between two similar options. Proximity to other specific humans isn't a constraint (this seems to be a common requirement expressed in this thread). Alternatively - assume international travel is restored to normalcy.
Rationale: southern hemisphere is desirable for air quality. Politically stable (relatively). Good soil - volcanic, non-polluted. Low population density. Affordable & sizeable parcels of land - sufficient to generate food and maybe income - within commutable distance of a sufficiently large & sophisticated metropolis. Within those criteria, also easy to obtain a location at least 10m, preferably much more, above sea level. There are other considerations but they make me sound a tad paranoid.
At some deep level, the less centralised approach appeals to me.
I've worked in Melbourne for weeks at a time, but never really lived there. (I've lived in Sydney most of my life, and did 5 years in London.)
Everyone has their own list of things they want around them - that's why I included my rationale. If given the choice to live anywhere the idea of choosing to live in a city would be anathema. But I'm probably in the minority there.
There is a really good food and arts culture, they get test matches and 6 or so AFL games a year, good coffee in the city and an amazing array of outdoor activities a 45 min drive from Constitution Dock.
Real estate isn't as cheap as it used to be and some things can be hard to get (eg Ikea style furniture, whenever my relatives get the boat to Australia, they nearly always go to Ikea and fill the car up with flat pack things)
Great place!
Work wise it has been OK remotely consulting, but that only worked because I usually enjoy whatever someone is paying me to work on. I also write some books, but that is mostly for fun, not revenue.
In the last 22 years, I think I have averaged about 15 hours a week working, which seems like a good compromise between career and spending time with friends and family.
EDIT: I did do a full time onsite gig 2018-2019 managing a small deep learning team. My wife and I saved a good fraction of that income, and I still support that company for the 100+ US patents I worked on.
I know a lot of people who make their living off of tourism, so I tend to look favorably at tourists and will often halt a hike for 5 minutes to talk with tourists on our hiking trails.
We passed through so many beautiful places on the trip though, places that you immediately felt an affinity with and could see yourself living. From Jervis Bay to Tilba Tilba or Eden in NSW, all of the beautiful bays in East Gippsland. Anywhere in Tasmania, but particularly the west along the Pieman river - the forests there are older than birds and the air is the cleanest in the world. To the outback farms around the Grampians, the south eastern wine region of SA and the desolate Beachport, Kangaroo Island, up to Wilpena Pound. Esperance and Denmark (wow!) in southern WA, I took sand from every beach I visited and Cape le Grand was the whitest. It is like snow. The epic surf beaches from Hamelin Bay to Margaret River (and route 250, in my top five short drives in the world!) Way up north to Exmouth and Ningaloo Reef, home of the whale sharks, and then onto the sweet smells and rich colours of tropical Broome and the otherworldly Dampier Peninsula. The interior is possibly less-livable (but then I'm an ocean lover), but it is remote and beautiful, so it ticks boxes.
The world is an amazing place. More power to those who choose to test the boundaries a bit.
BYU being close is great because the town has an amazing food and music scene for it's size. BYU has a great art museum and does concerts regularly. Bands you've heard of like Neon Trees, Imagine Dragons, and Kaskade all got their start in Provo.
I think there are probably countless places that are 30 minutes from a large University that would check all these boxes.
Unlike living in Silicon Valley, where even when I'm walking distance from a major downtown, that getting around is a nightmare, the UK is way easier for commuting.
I would be more likely to change jobs if remote working becomes predominant than I would be to change where I live.
No doubt that as a tech worker you can make a decent living pretty much anywhere, and I guess you are lucky enough to not be a woman or fall under the LGBT umbrella to be able to see the uprising of "family values" as a good thing.
And as a person with the same "family values" and traditional Orthodox Christian mindset as Russians, I have an immediate affinity with them. I can understand why you wouldn't like Russia if you didn't have similar values.
There are some Russians who look at Russia through Western eyes, and therefore they only see the bad. And indeed most of the world looks through Western eyes because of Hollywood, and that's why they see Russia as a pariah.
You seem to say that you gain immediate affinity with russians for having the same "orthodox" mindset, yet you are ready to dismiss any russian that doesnt think like you expect them to as "not really russian". People in russia are varied, just like everywhere else, there is just one voice which overpowers all the discourse.
Edit : I don't think people who criticise their country see "only the bad". They criticise because they care, so they probably see the good as well, what do you think?
But there are also blatant lies in the Western media narrative about Russia. For example, the West claims that Putin's "regime" suppresses all alternative viewpoints. However, from spending a lot of time watching Russian media, including official TV channels like Russiya-1, and YouTube standup comedians like Данила Поперечный [1], and seeing memes on Russian social media, I see a lot of diverse anti-government voices in the Russian landscape, which are NOT suppressed. Actually, I find the Western landscape to be more suppressed. Try to be pro-Russian, for example, and see what happens in America.
I find the Russian political landscape, including social media, to be more educated, informed, reasonable, diverse, and intellectual compared to the Trumpian world of American politics.
I personally evaluate Russia using metrics that they value, such as family values. I am not even Christian, I am Muslim, but I have very similar values. But I find that even Russians who are not Christian are still more understanding of my family values than Westerners who look at me like a backwards idiot. In that sense I actually find greater tolerance in Eastern Europe.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=387&v=IfTlqfHq1d...
I have been myself quite surprised by how Americans or Europeans seem to think that eastern europe is backwards on every level based on how they judge russian government.
One stupid example is : someone believed that all soviet made devices were bad quality, when actually a lot were manifactured without the idea of planned obsolescence built-in, which made them very durable. But they had a bias for everything russian being shitty because it is supposed to be a backwards country, and didnt consider different metrics to evaluate things.
I largely agree that there is a huge amount of caricature being made about russia, but I would also argue that the government is partly at fault for that because of the monolithic image they try to project. They erase all nuance about russian people and life in the country on purpose.
Having said all of this, however, I am also very aware that my experience here is very different from the average Russian. Being an expat, from the US, speaking English, and being able to afford a comfortable lifestyle in the center give me a much rosier perspective than if I were a low-income worker having to commute 1+ hours to get to work. I'm ethnically Latino and look obviously not-Russian, so people here are curious about me and act extra nice - especially when they find out I'm American. It's not uncommon for someone to approach me on the street, a park, or a bar just because they heard me speaking in English. On the other hand, however, immigrants from ex-Soviet countries (particularly Central Asia) face discrimination and racism, as do non-European Russians (eg: Russians from the Caucasus region, or the east of Russia), and it's not uncommon when looking to rent an apartment to see the words "FOR SLAVS [white Russians] OR FOREIGNERS ONLY", something that would be completely illegal in the US. Don't get me wrong, as an expat from the West I find Moscow to be just about the perfect place to live, but I totally understand the perspective of many Russians or some immigrants that criticize it harshly. I love this city, and I think loving it means also being aware of its shortcomings.
Also interestingly she is half-Mexican and I speak Spanish fluently so we have some things in common with you.
I don't think they're issuing visas rn due to the pandemic, but I imagine they will resume consular services this year, and then you can just apply through your local embassy/consulate, just look up the required documents and submit them, it's fairly straight-forward and does not require an interview, proof of income, etc.
Also I'd like enough rooms to have a proper office (big desk, many screens, drawers filled with Raspberry Pi's, I love computers), now I work in my sons room. I'd also like to have the space to put something like a car wreck on my land, so the kids can explore it. You know, create a rich learning environment, outside and inside.
Edit: Just like Deanna and Riker on Nepenthe [0] but with other people within walking distance ;)
Relatively speaking, are very few places in the world where you can live a "normal" life as an LGBT person.
Living in a city is awesome for us; we don't have to drive, can walk to almost everywhere we want to go on a daily basis, and have super close access to all of the nature, culture, and the like we could ever want.
That would be my dream at least. For those that have been to northern Norway, you'll get this. For those that haven't, you'll just scratch your head.
I really do want to visit Norway though, and it might well sell me on switching the dream to there.
Yeah, the fjords are desperately pretty. I had a great time driving around Geiranger and the Atlanterhavsveien. Trollstigen would have been nice if it weren't rammed with caravans.
But otherwise, no thanks. It's extortionately expensive, there's nothing to do there, it's a breeding ground for billions of mosquitoes, and there's nothing good about such extreme seasonal differences in day lengths.
After having lived in Scandinavia for seven years, I think there's an enormous delta between expectation and reality when it comes to Scandinavian Winters.
But it's definitely the case that whilst the Scandinavian lifestyle often features as best life satisfaction/happiest/whatever, it's definitely down to personal preference. These countries also tend to score low on happiness/life satisfaction for immigrants, which shows that the benefits are only perceived/received by some.
It is very beautiful up in Norway though, and the Norwegians are nice people.
But I imagine you'd probably go there to get away from things, and just rely on internet when absolutely needed.
Which is still pretty mind-blowing.
No one wants to use satellite as their daily driver, but almost by definition some of the best places on the planet are necessarily a long way from a) people, and b) modern infrastructure. Everything is a tradeoff.
Most video games are perfectly playable -- but I suspect you meant most multiplayer video games, and yes, that latency's not going to work for you.
I'm too excited for Starlink capabilities for offshore sailing and working (though sailing is involved enough that working on the side didn't work well for me before).
However, if you're earning a good salary, I would suggest Lake Hawea if you want to still be part of society. (and you should still be covered by the nations gig fibre network there)
But I have a 5gz wireless connection from Netspeed that works just fine for video conferencing and collaboration. It's more expensive than fibre and it comes with data limits, but it lets me work from where I want to live, so I consider the extra cost to be worth it.
I would certainly take the first flight to my country and try to stay close to those I love the most before it is too late.
I thought I’d stay in the USA forever but the call of home is getting stronger.
The way things are right now I think it’d be a final decision as I’d be unlikely to get status again.
Either that or finally go for citizenship before that door slams too.
One of the reasons I came back to the UK was that work/life balance seems to be a bit more of the norm then it is in Japan. The nature over in Japan is really something else, though. Miss it almost everyday.
I love the lack of traffic, my giant backyard and deck, how completely quiet and pitch black it is at night and that I have yet to meet a software developer. Nothing against devs, but getting out of the tech bubble is nice.
I can go to Detroit, Chicago, the Great Lakes and many other places if I need a change of pace.
Of course it’s only been a few days at this point, but very optimistic. We lived in San Jose for 5 years and it just was not for us despite trying really hard to learn to like it.
I am still working for the same company.
Winters are harder for those who don't own a car -- and many don't, but they manage fine by just bundling up.
Anecdotally one hears of people leaving Chicago for a warmer climate, but it's more common for people to leave the city to move to the suburbs (better schools) or to neighboring Indiana (lower COL) -- where there are no weather advantages.
For most of us who live in the northern parts of North America, winter is something we're used to and is not the push factor so many believe it is (those who do see it as a push factor tend to be outspoken about it, so their voices are amplified, which skews perceptions).
If winter was indeed that terrible, the northern North America would have been depopulated. But if you talk to the locals here, many would tell you they prefer to live in the north. (of course some won't but not as many as you would think)
It snows a lot, but it's often hovering around 32F, so the snow on the roads melts fast. A really cold day might 15F, but it's not that common.
Summers are gorgeous and I miss them living in SF. Being able to go out in the evening in shorts while it hovers in the high 70's is fantastic. Super lush and green.
If it's for a short term, I will go back to Philippines, the life is really sweet and enjoyable there.
Just don't dare to speak up about the air pollution. It's bad, but trying to do anything about it could get you in trouble.
I'm curious why someone like you, who likely speaks even less mandarin than me would want to live there?
The multiculturalism there makes for good food and interesting people, and as an intellectual milieu it's not bad -- lots happening on University Ave. I don't mind the weather at all.
Unfortunately it's fairly expensive.
Working one day per week while travelling should earn enough money to do this perpetually if you don't spend a lot.
Take friends out of consideration, and I'd either go back up to Louisville (where I grew up) or somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest. I'd need to do a little more visiting up there to decide exactly where, though.
If I could move overseas? Edinburgh. Wasn't able to spend anywhere near as long there as I would've liked on my last UK trip, but it seemed lovely. Although I'd probably need to do a little more European and Australia/New Zealand travel to be absolutely sure. So, maybe I'd go nomad for a while before choosing where to settle down (don't really have any interest in doing the nomad life long-term, though).
Croatia, Greece, Montenegro, Italy, Spain, South France, etc. Maybe Tunisia or North Morocco.
Depends on which culture makes the best impression, and after that, I would settle down for 5-6 years.
My 2nd choice would be the Carribean, but the countries are more hit and miss, small islands means everything is expensive, and hot weather year round sounds nice in theory, but I'm sure I'd get tired of it within 3-4 months. I like seasons.
It's a bit like California: all the parts of it I'd want to live, I can't afford, and all the parts I can afford, I don't want to live in.
Californian coastline is ~850 miles.
Also, much, much lower COL in certain countries, obviously going up for premier destinations (like Ibiza, etc.)
California coastal properties are ALL mind-blowingly expensive. I don't work at FAANG so CA property is a non-starter.
At the moment at least, the government is moving the right directions, and their recent performance for COVID-19 was astonishing from a public health perspective.
East is where the new opportunities are. Singapore provides developed world life in that part of the world which being extremely safe, high quality of education and a lot of overall convineice of life.
Even then - I did like San Francisco a lot but only the parts you could get a nice place in. There are many areas of San Francisco that I don't like because they're just not nice. (Lots of crazy people yelling in the street, trash everywhere, bad smells, crime, loud in general, etc.) If I was able to afford living somewhere like Twin Peaks - I'd consider it... But last I checked, I'm a few million short.
So, even if I was remote and made a lot of money, I'd probably still choose SF if I could while I didn't have kids. If I have kids and stop going out - I might like to live somewhere on the coast like Pacifica or Santa Cruz (Opal Cliffs). I want a very large workshop at some point - so I might have to move into the mountains. I've spent some time in a nice house there on a cliff in Santa Cruz - wouldn't mind that... But, again, missing a few million...
But now? I'd probably stay right here in the Bay Area, only because my wife's family is here. I wouldn't want to take my kids away from their cousins.
Although my wife's brother has been pushing for the entire family to move somewhere cheaper. He keeps pointing out that if we all sold our houses in California we could buy a mega-compound in Oklahoma.
I hear one opened up in Plano that might be just right for you!
For income: work on projects when I can from the Van :D
I know I wouldn't "earn" on it, heck, I wouldn't even cover my expenses, but it would be soo much fun.
I've seen first hand how the frothy Bay Area property market has caused founding families in the area to completely disperse.
My wife's family are all from San Jose and San Francisco. Been there since at least 1830 - there's even a road named after one side of the family tree.
Today, not a single member of the current generation lives there. Not a single one. It just boggles my mind that the entire clan have dispersed across the US to cheaper states.
I'd say another 20-30 years and there won't be anyone from the family left there at all.
* Most likely: somewhere between Austin and San Antonio TX.
* Alternate: ~45 minutes southwest of Denver, CO.
* Wildcard: Minneapolis, MN.
* If U.S. adopts laws like what Hungary just did WRT LGBT people: Iceland.Enshrining legacy views of the world not supported by research so politicians can pander to conservative religions is a bad sign in general and harmful to many of my friends in particular.
A good way to describe Cape Town is San Francisco Lite - The same tech, central rental price, homelessness & drug problems (with crime too!), just cheaper. Pretty place, but not sure I want to keep dealing with that. Then there's also the general wanderlust. Ideally, I want to do the digital nomad thing while traveling through Europe, then decide on a "permanent" place to have as a base, then maybe keep traveling and see what else there is. Currently eyeing Amsterdam, Lisbon (local salaries are only slightly higher than CPT though), Talinn. Athens also has quite an urban flair to it as well, and coming back to it with a fresh pair of eyes for a few weeks last year made it enticing to go back. But alas, I'd rather not waste 9 months of my life in conscription.
(In my case that's Vitória, Brazil.)
I moved out for the work opportunity, to a city a mere 6 hours away door-to-door over air travel, or 12 hours by car. It's been 10 years now.
I visit frequently, about 5 times a year. I spend summers there every year, at least 15 days straight, sometimes 25. I'm happily married with a son. I made new friends.
Yet, I very much miss the frequent contact with relatives and longtime friends.
But, within the US? I'd be tempted to buy a plot of land in the Appalachians, maybe outside Roanoke VA, build a little chalet, and just chill out. Money no object, I can fly to NYC or London when I get the itch to do culture.
Edit - in DC metro now. It has a lot going for it, but some massive flaws too. I'm an hour from the mountains, which I love. 3-5 hours from several beaches - I could live without them, but it's nice to have the option. The city itself is pretty good for culture and dining. True four seasons, to keep it fresh. But, August is miserably humid. And while not that far north, by the time February rolls around, I'm ready for long summer evenings. Traffic is terrible. But, I walk to work.
DC just seems a little boring after you visit the museums a few times. No skiing, the beaches are too far, etc.
Any fun ideas? I guess maybe my life is different having a family of four, but DC just seems like it doesn't have much of a real culture to me.
Great place to live too.
It's basically the Silicon Valley of Canada with plenty of opportunity, beautiful trails, light rail transit, amazing food from all around the world, and a burgeoning event scene.
Plus, it's a 40min drive to Toronto, and <2hr drive to beautiful sandy beaches on 3 great lakes (e.g. Wasaga Beach, Long Point, Goderich).
Once the kids are gone, we are likely to become nomadic.
Geoarbitrage is the easiest way to increase your wealth.
Ideally, it'd be my home-base to afford a good amount of nomading. Low taxes, low cost of living, excellent food scene (UN City of Gastronomy), and a great craft beer/wine/whiskey scene to boot.
It's not perfect, though. You can acclimate to the summer heat if you put the time in, and you'd be rewarded with our amazing monsoon thunderstorms.
Our college sports team is seemingly in a constant downward spiral. But the University is second only to Raytheon/Air Force in power and influence.
There's a fair amount of gentrification happening; as the case with anywhere, there are good spots and less so great spots crime wise.
But having lived short-term in various places around the country, Tucson is always my home. Happy to answer any questions you may have.
My wife and I found that we would frequently vacation outside of cities after living in them for about 10 years; so we figured we might as well try to live where we find relaxation (especially since we rarely take advantage of the perks of urban life).
The only real downside is the lack of good broadband. There are a few local providers (DSL, Cable, etc.) - but I'm fairly unimpressed. Right now my hope is to build a hobby / side-business delivering Internet in the "just out of reach" areas around town.
For most of it, I've been living in Thailand (almost 8 years). Lifestyle here is pretty laid back, but you need to be more aware of your own/your family's safety, in a whole lot of different ways. It's also not particularly easy on foreigners if you want to run a company here, but it's doable. I believe Americans will have a slightly easier time with this, due to an agreement between the countries.
There is a somewhat-formed plan for us to move back to Australia at some point, and we'll almost certainly end up somewhere outside of the major cities, probably one of the larger towns in Victoria.
Definitely will not miss the humidity/heat. I'll miss the weather being fairly constant though.
Also, no to Qld. We want to move back to Australia, not move back to the 1920s.
Portland is nice, but Port Fairy is possibly the best little town along the West coast. I grew up in Warrnambool, but spent a few months house sitting an old whalers cottage there.
I get your point about Queensland. Maroochydore might be slowly modernising. They're building a new city centre from scratch on what used to be the golf course. They've recently connected to the Japan-Guam-Australia South submarine fibre cable and the council are marketing that pretty hard. Saying that, it's still largely seen as a place to retire; evidenced by one of the largest contributors to the local economy being healthcare (which includes nursing homes).
The old growth forest parts are amazing and you used to be able to camp some places in there and even take along the dog. I live within walking distance of a comparable waterfall but can't take the dog due to its park classification.
On top of a job that is truly remote, I am also waiting on my wife to trust that we could live there safely. That day may never come, despite anything I say.
This is a difficult decision to make, not the least of which because of tax concerns. I am already a nomad, having not paid any rent since 2015. Right before the pandemic hit, I was preparing to change tax domicile to South Dakota. As soon as I no longer have a financial reason to stay linked to California, I am resuming my plan.
For something more rural, I like Taos, New Mexico and a few cities in the area north of there in Colorado, the San Luis Valley. The entire area is rich in natural beauty, inexpensive and not very crowded. The drawback is that due to my fairly disturbing collection of serious illnesses, and worrisome history of having to go to emergency rooms, I would be better off being close to a really good hospital.
I don't really like Málaga but Granada is also a solid choice if you can bear the hot weather.
The social safety nets is not so much for myself, but being surrounded by others who are struggling is unpleasant but also leads to societal issues overall (crime hotspots, etc).
I long ago decided that settling in the USA would be great if I ever magically become rich, but until then since I have no roots in the area it's nice to visit but I'm not sure I'd stay. One definite benefit though is that the states vary a lot in culture and feel so you can probably find an area that suits you.
And to make you SF folks jealous, I bought a 2200 SF house, on 1/2 acre, with a view of the bay, for less than $500K.
PS: I smiled at your username.
The cost of living is next to zero. It's relatively safe for an emerging economy. Still reasonably safe. You can get a 3 month Visa each time you fly in and out. So a quick trip to a neighbour country and you're set for another 3 months.
Do that for 3 years. Live like a king on less than $10k a year living cost. Return home with 3 years salary minus taxes and 30k living costs.
Plus it's a great part of the world. Very fun to explore.
EDIT: Though, at the moment the sun doesn’t go down til 22:00. I may have a different view if asked during the miserable bloody winter when the sun barely bothers rising at all. I am now wondering if it’d be practical to work remotely from Barcelona or somewhere from November to January...
NYC is my place to be.
It needs to be a place where there's a good music scene that I can participate in.
Several spots in British Columbia, Canada come to mind. Other possibilities include the Netherlands, maybe New Zealand.
I've been a slow nomad over the last 15 years or so, with stints in Nevada, SoCal, Texas and the Pacific Northwest.
Although I'm settled down now, someday I'd like to have a couple places in different countries or locales and be able to work from either one.
I would love to move to Japan instead, but the chances of that working are slim to none, and the wife does not really like the Japanese culture anyway, so.
If I can move with a community that wants to be nomadic I'd try that.
If not, Vegas, here I come :)
The twist is I could probably arrange that, but my daughter lives in So Cal.
1. Los Angeles, where I am from. Slightly cheaper and I would be close to family. Even though there are plenty of beaches in the Bay Area, they are not as easily accessible as they are down here.
2. Mammoth/Eastern Sierra. When I was in grad school and working as a consultant, I lived there for two years summer and winter, despite not being a skier. I wouldn't mind spending a few weeks working remote here and there (I have a place there), but I couldn't live there again. It's tucked away, snow is a pain, and you get sick of the tourists really fast.
3. Hawaii. I love Hawaii. But, it's a long flight to get home and the Bay Area is already far enough away for me. It's also expensive and I imagine it would get boring quickly since I am mostly into biking and hiking rather than water sports.
The only wrinkle is that I do like my legal weed; going to a store and buying a nicely packaged edible or a preroll is leagues above buying it off the street.
> going to a store and buying a nicely packaged edible or a preroll is leagues above buying it off the street
If you want to fit in in these cities you need to drop this American fixation with commercialisation and bubble-wrapping every experience to make it "comfortable".
The smell from making my own edibles in an apartment would probably not endear me to my neighbors, and sometimes I would rather use an edible than roll a joint.
I don't think this is about some broader cultural thing around convenience, is it? Isn't it just about legality? Some people actually depend on marijuana on a daily basis, and for those of us that do it's really annoying to have grind up, dry, decarb, cook, strain, etc. every few weeks.
I lived there for six years and I can't imagine another place I would want to live.
The local population is (very) old, everything is overpriced, culturally its a place where you have to keep spending to do anything.
The beach is (not this year) always overcrowded with tourists and skiing is so many hours of painful driving away.
I don't feel its charm anymore.
But now, no real human can afford to live in Boulder, and many other wonderful places are either deserted and dying, or overrun by strip malls. Bah.
A world class city where you can buy a single family home in a nice neighborhood for less than $750k.
- Auckland
- Taipei (Taoyuan and Kaohsiung are very close by HRT)
- Sydney
- Helsinki
- Stockholm
- Oslo
- Amsterdam
- Copenhagen
- Toronto
- Dublin
- London
- Paris
- Berlin
- Barcelona (or Madrid)
- Lisbon
My criteria were things like Gini coefficients, diversity, democracy indexes, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights. Most places in Asia got bumped because of poor LGBTQ rights, and the US got bumped for poor gender equality (representation in government is a big component of the formula). Diversity is just generally difficult to find, even in major cities, and when you do de facto segregation is almost certainly an issue.
I used to live in NYC but left--the COVID-19 outbreak didn't make that easy--and have been plotting on where to settle for hopefully forever. Toronto's at the top of the list, but it's hard to say no to Europe, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand. What a privilege to have options like that though, what a time to be alive :).
My hometown has a great one [0], the only way to improve that would be a beach where it's summer all round the year.
Some people (and some cultures) value their time with co-workers.
I decided to stay in Seattle. Sure, we have our issues (homelessness, high rents) but we also have some perks (close to nature, beautiful weather 8 months of the year, fast internet, cheap power, roughly sane state government).
Single-payer health care, really good public transport
I've done alot of time in Manila, PH and love it, and across some USA Cities - Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Tampa, NYC and they're great but it's still the USA.
I have been a nomad for the past 2 years, kinda but I position myself down for 2 months at a time because it's hectic to get anything done if you do it every week/few weeks or worse - weekend.
I find that I need a solid week to a week and a half to get used to an area, even if I know it pretty well. Airbnbs are all over the place and no true area is the same as another.
Bonifacio Global City is a great starting place, 25,000 pesos should get you a one bedroom.
Then On the highway south, Alabang, Las Pinas, and such easy enough.
I love Manila because of the ease of networking, making friends and then the raw nature, hiking once you're out of Manila itself into the northern provinces.
It's really a LCOL city, if you know how to handle yourself and minimize on electronics purchase - some big purchases I would suggest a flight to HK which was as inexpensive as $1000 round trip.
You can purchase a car in Manila/NCR area for about $3000 USD/150K pesos, they're low mileage for older examples and you should know how to work on a car for best value (I got an older CR-V that I'm not worried about the resale value at all vs a new car which can't go offroad at all.)
Most Filipinos don't know their own history or travel out of NCR (from NCR of coure) so I always enjoy trips where I can agument USA history to PH history, though it's always fun to learn something new - but it's great to see all the quotes of "those who don't know history end up repeating it" and general ignorance because... the country is ripe for opportunity but the overall level of ignorance is extreme and you can make parallels easily to USA and other parts of the world. It really reshaped my way of thinking.
So that's why I enjoy it. Easy of connectivity to locals, easy to do arbitrage of retail products once you hang the hang of things and low out of pocket and more emphasis on your conversational skills to get things done - so self reliance.
If you have children then obviously you can't be nomad and cheap places like southeast asia are out of question, because you want your children to have best education, healthcare, enviroment etc. (which is reason why I moved from China ASAP after my first child was born)
If i were single young and healthy I would consider Southeast Asia - still externely cheap, good or reasonable internet, good cuisine, pleasant weather, you can find private hospitals with travel insurance, though you can get fed up with locals long term because of different culture (if you are from west)
Since I have children and I am EU citizen obvious choice was return to EU, my original intention was Vienna regularly winning surveys as one of most livable cities in Europe/world, though my budget didn't allow me to buy apartment without mortgage plus it's not that easy to find English speaking jobs there and I am not strong on my German (the one company I interviewed there offered me instead job in US, which I politely declined) and I have to consider also my wife's employment options in future, so I went for poor man's Vienna - Prague. Still extremely safe, quite reasonable prices.
My other options would be Bratislava, which is basically nontouristy small town suburb of Vienna less than hour way, Budapest is quite OK, but since Orban is at power that's not an option and we already see for years which direction they are hading, maybe Berlin (very cheap real estate to buy) although Germans are for my taste already too brainwashed with leftist/eco stuff and way too many non-adaptable migrants from different cultures.
Other EU countries have way too different culture for my taste with too many illegal migrants, not so safe and also not affordable or too socialist (micromanaging your life) for my taste.
When you get older, or have pre-college kids you have to think about a nest somewhere. If there is one thing this COVID-19 crisis has shown me as well it pays to live near good medical systems. But for now I want to wander!
I'd love to go spend a year teaching software engineering in Costa Rica or New Zealand. Settling permanently? I dunno. I've ripped up what roots I've had multiple times now, and I don't really want to do it again.
You should go out and travel! I'm planning on doing so because a home purchase is not overnight - and even then I could never really settle down somewhere. The world is accepting remote work - take the opportunity and worse comes to worse you have a family in the area.
I was just looking for cheap rent, decent internet, a grocery store and a few eateries, basically. The town is a lot nicer than I expected it to be and I've really enjoyed living here so far.
I can certainly imagine scenarios where I would relocate, but my preference would be to shape this town into more of what I would like it to be.
The surroundings are great, schools are OK, the big city with its hype and hospitals is nearby.
That wild be the dream location.
Property prices are the killer, but the actual cost of living isn't really that high over there and the public transport is fantastic so you wouldn't even need a car.
If not SF, I'd move out of the US entirely to avoid the healthcare disaster and increasing anti-intellectualism.
With these criterions and bay area pay, I'd move to a coastal town in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia or India. All cheap, all developing countries and all with decent internet and healthcare.
But I'd be happy just to leave Brazil. I hate this country.
People like me are so common that they even have a name here: vira-lata.
Is Portugal possible? You already speak the language.
I don't have many reasons to live in the city but because it's really comfortable as I don't have the need to commute. If I could work always (or 3-4 days / week) from home I'd move to a town. More peace and a better house, instead of a flat, for the same price at the city.
There are rougher places to live.
Once they're gone, though, my partner and I have talked a lot about spending 2-4 months at a time in different parts of the world.
We have a list of places on basically every continent that we'll want to visit. Semi-nomadic is probably the way I would describe the ideal situation.
I've enjoyed numerous trips to the Netherlands, but one thing I did NOT like is that, as a 5'10 guy who dresses like a typical American (i.e. not so well), I felt even shorter and less attractive than the very well dressed, handsome, and uber-tall Dutch men. I know it's silly, but it does create an inferiority complex.
It wasn't as bad living in German, but it still made me realize that there is a huge advantage to being bigger, stronger, than average.
When I lived in India, not only did I enjoy the benefits of being white, but I was also taller and far 'bigger' and stronger than most other males, due to 30 years of eating more protein.
Which is kind of interesting now that we're all talking about our dream locations. I would definitely choose somewhere where 5'10" is taller than average and caucasians / Westerners get an automatic status bump. It does make life easier.
But on top of the corona situation I also have some pending life stuff that's still to be resolved. Depending on the outcome of that and my company being cool with full remote (no reason not to bring it up), I really wanna move somewhere cheaper.
When I need to retire back in my native land I will stay where my grandpa farmed. Last house on the electricity line, birds everywhere etc.
* good to high abidance to rule of law
* little to no speculative investments in real estate
Main issues I have right now is low quality of existing indexes, and lack of anecdotal data for potential candidates. I'm not just talking about countries, but specific areas also.
I've always wanted to make this move but I never cared for the nomad life.
Too bad HK left that club, otherwise I'd also consider it.
A construction worker is a commodity.
A construction worker that does church restorations from a specific era isn’t.
So while trafiic may be better and certain violent crimes lower, rural crime is a serious issue; specifically property crime.
What don't you like about Melbourne? I feel it is usually over-hyped.
I currently live in in Tokyo but have visited Kobe many times and loved the more relaxed atmosphere and smaller size of the city compared to Tokyo. You are also very close to Osaka and Kyoto and even getting back Tokyo is easy with the shinkansen.
Had to turn down jobs at tech companies in the past because they wanted relocation to popular tech cities.
There just aren't a lot of places in the US that have nice winters. Those that do are already overflowing with people. Part of the reason that the bay area is so expensive is because the weather is so nice. People are on to your little scam of avoiding winter ;)
You left off Puerto Rico.
I know many Americans who have moved to Central/South American countries without much trouble. Costa Rica is so popular they're worried about gentrification. Ecuador is up and coming for expats.
Later I could see myself living in Portugal, or Italy, or Spain.
If I could live in Nara, I feel as if my life would become instantly tolerable whilst simultaneously beneficial to those immediately around me.
Having a family that wants connections with other family means that the full nomad thing just isn’t practical.
When I ignore taxes and cost of living I also like Hawaii.
As an aside, I am shocked how many of the responders here effectively say they will willfully violate local labor law in one or more countries and get their employers in potential legal trouble.
Full time RVing has been an interest of mine too, but with the COVID thing and RV parks closing and some RV people feeling a bit misplaced. So seems owning land somewhere could be beneficial... Full time RVing seems to have it's pros and cons, but I think maybe part time RVing would be a little less stressful.
Also if you lived somewhere with cold winters, maybe RV a bit in the warmer months for a month or two then during the winter head off to Arizona or something... Like I think Utah would be a cool place to vacation in the summers since a lot of beautiful places to visit like Zion, go off-roading, mountains, etc... But probably not the first choice to live year around since I'd love to escape cold depressing winters but if I did could use the RV to do a bit of snowbirding to like AZ, TX or FL. Otherwise I think Utah is a near prefect state as an outsider prospective in general and sounds like in the future they might attract more tech but if more and more companies go remote then moving to an area based on jobs but other things in life you care about is a bonus, and might even make other places compete more for gaining more residents who are looking to find a new home town.
I think snow is pretty but haven't had much snow lately just cold and after a while it gets old quick... Always wanted to try snowboarding too. There's someone from Utah I like, so that kinda makes me change my mind a bit, and seen that Salt Lake City is on some list for startup hubs haha but I don't think they are as successful as say maybe Austin, Texas is at this point.
I kinda want something different, since bored of where I'm from and not as much opportunities as I'd hoped, seems to be a problem in the midwest in general and people call it the brain drain problem. Like there's a company in Philadelphia I'm a fan of and thought of relocating since they even offer a bonus but seems almost the same stuff just another state over...
If you could get decent internet, working from cruise ships sounds interesting too! But I think being a nomad and working a regular 9 to 5 job online wouldn't be enjoyable and hard to balance work and play... That might work better if you manage your own company remotely or some other passive sources. I know there's world cruises that are like half a year along that sounds fun, only have to unpack once and see the world but some sea days multiple in a row so that'd be some downtime to get some work in since being a longer cruise you'd probably already seen most of everything the ship has to offer anyways.
I'm currently planning an or-exit, but it'll be a few years. At this point in time, the wife and I are thinking Arizona (somewhere Payson-ish, up high where the weather is nice).
Biggest hit I'm going to take is giving up my 1gbps fiber connection for at best starlink. Maybe I'll win the lottery and will be able to pull in my own fiber connection. While I'm wishing, I want a race car and a pony.
This after working remote for years, from all over the world.
Currently live in Brisbane but i'd love to live in the middle of no where for months at a time any where in this country if I didn't need to be anchored any more.
I'd love to bounce between the Kimberleys, Tasmania, rural Victoria and everything in between given the chance. They'd be a lot of appeal of doing the same to New Zealand and South East Asia too given the chance.
Close to Denver. High elevation town at 8200 feet, homesites to 9800 feet elevation. Adequate internet. Cheaper than Evergreen, and a bit higher. High elevation is good for health. Wildlife (deer, migratory birds, elk, foxes and the occasional Black Bear). Small town but has what is needed. (Grocery, vet, medical, dentist, car repair, chain saw shop) Same distance from ski areas as Denver. Lots of snow in winter, and mild sunny summers.
If I were to work with an American company as an engineer then London/Oxford is really good. The timezone difference is quite appropriate to take meetings without asking for too much rescheduling and adjustments, and the London food is way better than any city in the US, plus the location is quite appropriate to travel anywhere within Europe. It's not cheap, but city life is worth it. I don't quite like Oxford, but my family lives in Oxford, so it's kind of nice to be home and everything is taken care of yourself.
If I was in meeting heavy role like Product Manager, then Mexico City is impeccable. Good food, bay area weather, reasonable cost of living, just a quick flight away from bay area if you have to visit and easy to get visa as well. It's not at what you see in the news, and there are more starbucks on Reforma than they on Market St. in SF.
But only if I can find a house in Rione Monti.
I’ve never been to Palm Springs myself but have heard good things.
Ventura is also reasonable considering what you get: beach, proximity to LA and right next door to beautiful Santa Barbera.