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Comment by medion | Hacker News Reader

In Australia I moved to a very rural place, buying a house based on where I could get wireless broadband as part of our nationwide broadband rollout - I now live in a beautiful remote place overlooking the ocean with 50/20mbps Internet. Before here, I lived in another rural place near the ocean, however there was no broadband and 4G was too expensive. I ended up making friends with someone who had a 1gbps fibrelink 10km away - we spent weekends building a point to point network, and I ended up with an extremely reliable 20mbps connection for about $300 in parts over Mikrotik routers.

As other people have said, you can make it happen if you really want!

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Ok you got me with "overlooking the ocean". I will admit, I was a little bit envious. But then I recalled the great Terry Pratchett quote that you are living on a continent where pretty much every animal, except for maybe some sheep, is equipped with some venom and actively trying to kill you. Plus some of the plants. So I guess it's fair play.

Move one more island over to New Zealand. The animal kingdom is much more friendly.

Rubbish. I went to New Zealand once and the fucking mozzies were the size of a golf ball.

I'll take the one redback encounter every 5 years in Australia thanks.

Haha, an Aussie complaining about the insects from other countries. That's rich!! When the mosquitoes are that size, they are easy to see and catch. Here in the southern part of the US, we have to keep our small kids on leashes lest the "mozzies" carry them away.

Well as a kiwi I remember at the tender age of 11 going to Australia for the first time and finding a stick insect on the footpath about as long as my forearm the first time we left the hotel. That was fun.

Actually I lived there a couple years in my late teens and you look up at the power lines and see big spiders in them but that's about it.

I've been far more terrified of my encounters with Suzumebachi and Mukade in Japan.

And the one time I went to the USA I nearly had a panic attack as soon as I left the hotel and didn't spend more than 2 hours outside the whole 6 days I was there cos the idea of a lot of poor, disenfranchised, mentally unstable people with guns just freaks me out.

The seriously poor won't have guns, they're too expensive. Generally the (...mentally present...) homeless are terrified of getting injured, because of course no health insurance. They're not doing muggings.

Knives and sticks are a different matter.

Los Angelino here I gotta say the homeless are absolutely 100% not afraid of being injured and are only on this plane of reality in a physical sense. Take a drive down Venice boulevard to Skid Row and you will see encampments of a symbiotic nature - literal fused together tents with working lights on the ground level of skyscrapers with garbage fires to keep warm. Australia has the reputation for killer bugs, a walk into south side Chicago is exponentially more terrifying than any wildlife encounter as at least animals follow patterns and will typically leave you alone if vice versa. We are an unhinged and well armed people with lack of affordable healthcare. But I do have 90 mbps download and upload speed so I kinda just keep my head in the clouds.

They’re only actively trying to kill us if we’re actively trying to kill them. So long as you don’t wander into the bush like an idiot, your encounters with dangerous critters are limited to whatever the cat (literally) drags in.

This is part of a global 5G/Soros/Gates conspiracy to keep Australia uninhabited - I've never been bitten by anything - maybe a bee when I was 12? And I spend the majority of my time walking, hiking, surfing, sailing, camping, etc.

Minor nitpick, bees don’t bite, they sting. Biting happens with the mouth (ants, beetles, etc) not a stinger.

It is a very much overdone reputation. I've lived in Aus all my life, much of it rural and I don't know a single person who has been bitten by a snake or shark let alone died. Spider - maybe but most a very shy. But again some bitten, not one died that I know of.

Compare to the USA. Cougars and bears should scare you MUCH more than anything in Australia. And rabies. We have no rabies.

Some rabies-like diseases but you would have to be extremely unlucky to get those (lyssavirus from bats for instance)

In the USA you might also just you know, get shot.

It took all of two minutes to find a shooting incident in Australia from last year, showing not only that youre wrong, but that yet again gun control stops law abiding citizens but not criminals.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/05/729901315/deadly-shooting-sho...

I'm wrong about what? The grandparent made a joke about dangerous animals killing people in Australia, I made a joke about guns killing people in America. Also picking out a single data point is a strange way to prove your point and try and start an argument about gun control in the US vs Australia, a debate I don't care to have since I don't live in either country.

Ok so you have no care about the subject, no care about either country, you saw it fit to respond.....

And yes one datapoint is all it takes to show you can die in Australia from a gun just like in the US and nearly, if not every, country on earth. What a wonderful thing to joke about.

Well tone is hard to convey over this medium but you saw fit to hijack this thread and push whatever adgeda you have about gun control.

That you don’t care about.

Honey bees are the number one venomous killer in Australia.

From an Australian perspective, the USA can look like a place where the earth might suddenly turn to jelly and knock your city down, or giant wind vortexes could descend from the sky and carry you away - things which seem more terrifying to me than a few animals I can easily avoid.

I kind of assume those things are blown out of proportion in media much the same way our wildlife is.

We should take into account the fact that Terry Pratchett lived in England where there is very little in the way of either deadly wildlife or significant natural disasters.

Those are generally problems in the warm parts of the US. If you can survive snowy winters, you won't see much of the more exciting natural disasters. There are no hurricanes or tornadoes in Maine.

Heh Heh Heh. Well, Isaac Butterfields response applies:

https://youtu.be/t1uZZ_xRYvQ?t=153

Snakes and spiders are pretty much it. Snakes are very rare to see unless you travel to the bush. Spiders though, are common outside.

Once you've learned not to turn over rocks in your garden (with your bare hands anyway), you're fine. :)

> Once you've learned not to turn over rocks in your garden

You have no idea how ridiculous that sounds to me.

It's the kind of thing you learn as a kid in Australia. It's super common to have "red back" spiders under rocks, logs, or pretty much any object that's stationary on the ground for more than a few days.

Red back spiders are poisonous, evil looking little buggers! ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redback_spider

Funnel web spiders are a thing as well, but they seem to be less common here in Victoria (south eastern Australia). Red backs though are everywhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_funnel-web_spider

That is creepy. I could not relax in such a garden, let alone let the kids play in it.

I just moved out of Sydney to somewhere regional (not rural). NBN installation is turning into a joke (probably a month or two off due to tree roots growing through a cable) so I have turned to 4g. Telstra now do 200gb a month for $75, which has allowed me to stay here working (work only data usage is 100-150gb a month). Didn't think I'd be grateful to Telstra ever in my life, but here I am.

That sounds very interesting (I am also in Australia). Would you mind sharing (roughly) where you live?

Let's say, beyond 42deg south.

Oh, based on your comment I was also expecting more or less a place in QLD. What were your main reasons for Tassy? Climate? House prices?

Climate, house prices (rather, value - acreage overlooking the ocean surrounded by trees, for less than a suburban shitbox on the mainland), remoteness, no traffic, etc. etc.

Many places along the entire east coast would match. And Tasmania.

BTW while checking that latitude (southern half of Tasmania), I found this interesting website.

https://birrraus.com/

"(Better Internet for Rural, Regional and Remote Australia)"

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