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Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I'm skeptical that software made for 2 people on a boat in international waters is going to generalize to people living on land under the ongoing American situation

It's good for them, but the only person I know who owns a boat is richer than me, and I'm already richer than basically all my friends

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The vast majority of people living on boats are very, very broke. You can buy an old sailboat for about the price of a second-hand car, fix it up yourself, set sail, and now you don't pay rent/mortgage/utilities...

(source: I grew up on such a sailboat, and we were broke as shit)

I agree with your first paragraph, but there are lots of basically-broke people who live on boats

Old sailboats can be had for practically (and in many cases actually) nothing. If you’re reasonably handy and willing to learn you can do all the maintenance they require yourself

Boats can be some of the cheapest housing there is, even more so if you want to live somewhere picturesque

(There are, of course, significant downsides)

I've met people who live on boats, they work odd jobs to buy scrap parts to fix their boats themselves and eat mostly fish that they catch. Just like travelling in general, you can basically do it on nothing if you wish.

I'm sorry but no this is fantasy, unless you plan on everything failing in under decade to actually look after your boat takes money. Even salvaging a boat that's sunk can be very expensive.

For example, a through-hull needs replacing. Sure you could find a secondhand one that fits, but you still need to have it hauled out to replace.

I have only very brief experience from once owning half of a 15 foot fibreglass runabout fixer-upper, but if you've got a 30 foot yacht then can't you just stick it on a trailer yourself? I feel like you're imagining a much bigger craft.

On top of that, dry docks are a common free amenity in boating/fishing towns, just using the tide to do your dirty work.

They thoroughly document their lives, you could just go check whether this skepticism is warranted.

Very often people doing this kind of thing neglect to mention a significant safety net (e.g. parental wealth) that radically changes the kind of things you can do even when you never touch it.

It’s fair to question the funding sources of lodgings in a pragmatic way, and doubly so when one lives on a boat.

In the case of 100R, they seem to have had a lot of help from Patreon folks (per Wikipedia), though I don’t know if this was their sole source of income or funding for their lifestyle. It’s interesting that folks can live like this and share it with the world, and I don’t think that these particular folks have any ulterior motives, and I have not heard anything bad about them. They seem like they’re fairly aboveboard (pun intended).

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

"To buy Pino Devine & I each got a 10,000$ bank loan. We had savings, but didn't want to be left with an empty account after the purchase."

https://100r.co/site/buying_a_sailboat.html#bankloan

If you go read their logs you'll find that they come across as people that aren't aware of such a "significant safety net" if there is one so even if it exists it is unlikely to have had a relevant influence on their work.

They've been excruciatingly open about their experiences and what they've learned along the way, including pecuniary matters.

> If you go read their logs you'll find that they come across as people that aren't aware of such a "significant safety net" if there is one so even if it exists it is unlikely to have had a relevant influence on their work.

On the contrary, they read exactly like people in that situation to me. How many people like that do you have experience with?

Yes, I have, and they were not as meticulously frugal as the 100r couple have been. When they've described having contact with family it's been things like this:

"We got a message from Iridium saying our account was about to be suspended. We think we may have used up all our data. We can't check the weather, but SMS still work and we're trying to get in contact with them to append more minutes. Devine's dad is also helping us with it. What a shit show. We should have purchased more, but also, I don't know how it is possible that we went through it all. We did have some issues with the device, with it stalling during some internet calls... maybe this ate up extra minutes. Either way, this situation is shit, as we don't know what's going on out there and we can't broadcast our position."

"We received a message from Devine's dad, saying that he'd contacted the customer service at Iridium and that we had indeed, run out of data. Our plan was topped up, and we're able to update our position on the live map, check emails and to check the weather — finally!"

It's been much more common that they've made friends at sea and earned knowledge and help that way, besides the business they do.

“Ugh, we made a silly mistake; it’s ok, Dad paid to fix it.”That is certainly not evidence against any such safety net?

These people seem to treat it as hipster bs art and not a means to actually get work done. For real work I'd say the solution is still the same, use tech that doesn't change every week and avoid needing internet for installation such as a package repo we know won't exist a few years later.

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