Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9rx | Hacker News Reader

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> Good quality healthcare providers, or sometimes even any healthcare providers that will schedule an appointment before you die, for one.

Yeah, specialists aren't commonly found in small towns. But it is not like cities are walled off. What's the practical difference between driving for 30 minutes across town to get to hospital vs. driving 30 minutes into the city? From anything I've ever observed, the specialist hospitals are generally located on the arterial entranceways into the city, no doubt for good reason.

If you need urgent specialist care, they have helicopters that can fly astonishingly fast. I'd love to see actual numbers, but I'd venture to guess in an average scenario you could actually get to the hospital faster if you were in the rural area as the helicopter can land more or less right beside you instead of you having to navigate city obstacles to either go to somewhere where the helicopter can land or go directly to the hospital.

> ...has no good quality restaurant when I don't want to cook, as another thing we could consider being infrastructure. And so on.

The original comment was about moving to "a small town", not moving to "a specific small town". Absolutely there are small towns that lack infrastructure, but there is no reason you have to choose those specific ones. If you decided you were going to move to a small town, you'd pick the one that you like.

> Worth noting I live in Slovakia.

And, sure, it is possible that every small town in Slovakia lacks infrastructure, but is staying in Slovakia a hard constraint?

30 minutes? In what place is this 30 minute drive from a rural area to the urban center an actual thing? I live in a small metro and it takes 20 minutes driving to get to these things and that is good time compared to a lot of other places. There's not some abundance of rural areas that are somehow within about the same distance.

> In what place is this 30 minute drive from a rural area to the urban center an actual thing?

Where is it not a thing around any major centre? Every city is ultimately going to have rural area outside of it. I suppose you can find some city that has poor geography or ridiculous suburban sprawl that impede access. There are always outliers. But in general?

Of course there are also rural areas further away, and maybe if you were trying to work in some kind of local industry (mining, agriculture, etc.) you'd need to be further away, but since we're just talking about WFH...

> There's not some abundance of rural areas

How many do you need, exactly?

Something I've noticed from living most of my life in rural areas but part of it in cities is that urbanites have very strange ideas of what rural life is like (at least in the US). Rural people usually have some idea of city life because they lived in a city for some time, perhaps while at college or pursuing a career in their youth before moving back to the country. But urbanites often have no personal experience of rural life at all, so their notions come from entertainment media created by other urbanites. They end up with a weird caricature that has more in common with Deliverance than it does reality.

I used to try to educate them, but then I realized that would just encourage them to move to the country, so I stopped.

> But it is not like cities are walled off.

Sadly it is, once you live in another district they can and will refuse to treat you.

> If you need urgent specialist care, they have helicopters that can fly astonishingly fast.

Oh no, my comment was not about urgent care, it's just often people get appointments with specialists a year or more in the future. Or you pay out of pocket and get it much faster but again those specialists are only in big cities.

> The original comment was about moving to "a small town", not moving to "a specific small town".

Sure, and my comment is representative about small towns in Slovakia.

> but is staying in Slovakia a hard constraint?

For me currently it is, but many people are moving away.

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