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Comment by Ralo | Hacker News Reader

Canada has always seemed like a unique situation. We're a massive country with tiny population. This opens the door to cheap remote land. Lot of cottage land in northern Ontario goes for pennies and has acres. Infact a lot of it so rural that they don't belong to RMs and don't require building permits or inspections. Building a cottage is straight forward just building it.

I figured if you're living off grid and working online, you can just acorn and get way ahead. Moving to a major city for a job that pays 2x more usually isn't even worth it when you factor in cost of living. Obviously, you cannot have kids. This is for a young kid-less couple.

It's not ideal. Our parents many years ago would just buy a home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore. You will never get ahead doing that.

Working online really is a unique situation to get ahead now.

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The solution to the affordability crisis shouldn’t have to be withdrawing from society and homesteading in the woods.

Humans are social animals and social connection is essential to our health [1]. This strikes me as trading one problem for several.

You lose access to quality food you don’t have to spend all summer growing yourself (too bad if you didn’t harvest enough for the long, long winter; you don’t have a passable road). Good luck raising children with no help, and no education beyond Kahn Academy. You must purchase a ton of equipment and learn how to use it and maintain it for self sufficiency. And on and on. It is not for the faint of heart.

[1] https://www.who.int/teams/social-determinants-of-health/demo....

> This opens the door to cheap remote land. Lot of cottage land in northern Ontario goes for pennies and has acres.

Where do you look for this? Those don't typically show up on MLS/realtor.ca I'm guessing.

> you can just acorn and get way ahead.

autocorrect/typo?

A lot of it is private sales and there's a couple sites selling this land specifically.

Not a typo, I meant like acorn away your savings.

"Squirrel away" is a far more common metaphor for that concept.

Google search results for me turn up ~4k hits for "acorn away", vs. nearly a million for "squirrel away".

Similarly on Google Ngram Viewer: <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acorn+away%2Cs...>

Though "acorn away" seems to have had some currency in the mid 19th century:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=acorn+away%2Cs...>

Though not in the sense you are using it best I can tell.

"Squirrel away" seems to have gained in prevalence after the 1950s, for some reason.

RM is rural municipality I presume?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_municipality_(Canada)>

That's fine for a single person. Fine you you can be off the grid, but at least to build a road it's already $100k.

> home in the suburbs and do their 9-5 but that isn't enough anymore.

Enough should be what we want. A happy middle-class life avoiding the extremes of poverty or excess.

> You will never get ahead doing that.

Join the escalation against yourself (the joneses): a zero-sum ladder climbing game where everyone is a loser.

One oddity of modern society is that even the "winners" are often losers - become a sociopathic CEO or entrepreneur - win toys with more bling but lose other critical things. Being a country leader doesn't look like fun to me.

Weirdly enough modern society is pretty good at sharing: winners have there same phones as I have and commonly the same entertainment media.

And one important resource (time) has a hard upper limit for us all.

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