Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmarschner | Hacker News Reader

I don‘t get it. The two of you now live closer together, but what about your spouses? What about the friends of your kids?

View on HN

It depends. If (big if) previously both were far from their family, now one of them is not. Net positive.

We live very close to my in-laws, and there are lots of benefits from that, even if my parent and brothers live far away. But some months ago my brother moved close to my home and now we see each other every weekend, we both have small children that now have the time to play together and form new bonds. It's really great.

My friends are now in different cities or distant neighborhoods, we make plans every now and then, but it is really complex to maintain closeness when physical distance gets in the way.

If everyone they are close to also moved to where this guy and his brother live--and so on--they could have quite the 1 easy trick to found a new megacity.

Unicity? Because this will be the only city in the world :)

Or not "the City", but "THE city". I am failing to come up with more ideas, maybe we need help from some crack marketing teams

We'll just call it "NYC" ;)

New New York?

Here's the plan: you and 5 people closest to you move to the same area. Then each of those 5 people moves 5 of their closest people to the same area. Repeat ~13x and we can all finally be together.

So if a mega-city had a billion people. Maybe that's too much, let's say a 100 million people. Let us say this may be possible this century with some innovations in our habitat. So with a 100 million people in this mega-city, how many people can actually live close to each other? Even if you go 3-dimensions (connected skyscrapers), not sure this model will bring people close. Will it?

I’m curious about this too. My partner and I are both from different cities and live in a third city. We have friends and family in the original two cities and friends in the third city. There’s no way to make it work for both of us, and in fact the neutral third city is probably the most fair option despite being far from the best for either of us.

The implicit definition of "fair" as "equal suffering" is always a bit concerning to me.

I get your point but the compromise isn’t “suffering”. We’re perfectly happy in the third city. It’s the moving to the original cities that could cause one persons suffering for another maximisation of their happiness.

> The implicit definition of "fair" as "equal suffering" is always a bit concerning to me.

For family peace, it may be the best thing. My personal anecdote:

I'm from city A. My spouse is from city B. We lived in city C. Our parents were fine with that.

My mother-in-law developed a rare disease. She had no children nearby. Now we live in city B, close to her.

In city A, despite having two of my siblings nearby, my parents absolutely resented our move. They were quite hostile at some point.

That sent my spouse to therapy and there's been no contact between them since. I'm fully on my spouse's side, especially given what my parents said and did.

But the move has taken a real toll.

Life gets complicated. We’re in a similar situation - family and friends are mostly in cities A and B (in different countries nonetheless). We lived in a compromise/neutral city C until we needed help with the kids and it’s impossible to choose where to go for the long term.

One solution is to spend all holidays (as opposed to half of them) at the other city.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com