You can. There are extensions and scripts for exactly that. I never use the app, only browse via the web, even on mobile, just with a user agent switcher.
My partner and I did exactly that. She let me choose. Ended up with the surname from one of my favorite literary characters. Changed my first name to match as well. Happened to be a childhood nick name anyway, so I've always answered to it.
My score was an 8. Depression of course. All the usual problems.Thought I was unhappy because no one loved me. Turned out to be the opposite. Found my own key to a joyful life at 31. Had my first child. Cared for someone else more than myself. Cut off all contact with my family 13 years ago, except my kids. Second best decision I ever made. Best was choosing to raise my girl on my own. You cant fix toxic people, but you can leave them. Later I met a woman who can tolerate me. She prefers to work, is very happy she met a man who would rather hang out with our kids than work. I read "The Happiness Equation in my late 40's, had already stumbled into my own life solutions, but that book really helped explain WHY I felt my life had improved so much. You can get to a mental place you feel safe. You only get so many trips around the sun, take them with a smile, never waste a moment comparing yourself to anyone else. Best of luck.
If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ. The county has an opt out permit program as long as you have at least 4 rural acres. You can build whatever you want, no permits, no inspections. There are some restrictions. No bank will give you a mortgage, can't sell or rent it out within 2 years. You can live in your RV while you build, for 2 years I think, with a 3 year extension possible. Lots of sun for solar. Rooftop water collection for water. There are some septic options, composting, or traditional. All legal. A few dozen people on youtube building all kinds of off grid natural buildings. They get together once in a while, let you tour their build, ask questions. A little snow in the winter, not many days above 100F. 4000+ feet elevation. Fiber laid in some surprisingly rural areas. No paved roads type areas. Weird, but cool.
I did the full time RV bit in a class A. Hated it. Too small to live in, too big to travel in. Hate that black tank. Had to leave great camping spots once a week to dump and get more water, or hook up to some sort of developed campgrounds. Sucked. Regret not going for a small schoolie to travel in, large house on 5 acres to live in. That's the new plan, anyway. Best of luck.
Average rainfall 11 to 41 inches per year -- more than I expected in AZ. Still, to have reasonable water year-round for 2 people you'd need to collect across maybe 10,000 square feet? That's not a small installation.
I was going off 100 gallons per day per person, which is typical, but can obviously be improved upon. But that said, I don’t want to pay $7000 per year just for water. Plus living remotely like that is just terribly inefficient in general: food, trash, heating/cooling, transportation, water, and just everything all take much more effort/resources to produce in a solo venture like that. I’m not saying I don’t see the appeal, but the Earth could not (even remotely) support everyone living that way.
No idea of the situation there, but rural areas in our part of the world tap underground sources for water. It gets pumped and filtered on premise. Septic is a big tank with a field up front for dispersing fluids/liquids. Commenter below mentioned trash, but if you are applying some basic sustainable living techniques, the amount of trash produced should be minimal to none.
If you’re buying land in AZ without a reliable well or utility hookup, you’re buying a nightmare.
There is plenty of land with reliable water there.
Rainwater for irrigation, maybe. But the reality is, most of AZ gets monsoons a couple months a year, and then essentially zero precipitation. So unless you have land favorable for setting up a dam or something, you’re going to have a hard time living off that kind of setup.
Flagstaff and Phoenix/far south being a bit different.
> If you're looking for some inexpensive land that can be fairly remote you might do worse than Cochise county AZ
It's pretty hard to do worse than "the very small amount of water is being sucked dry because there are no regulations around water use." Once the water table compacts, it never comes back...
> Rooftop water collection for water.
It's one of the dries parts of the country. Good fucking luck.
A growing number of people in AZ and NV have to have water trucked in, and that is insanely expensive.
I'm not endorsing it as a sane idea, but for people who think the idea of living on Mars is cool, living in areas like this could push forward development of compatible technologies- like retaining and recycling all water.
Like right now my mind is trying to imagine a solar powered desiccator and water recollection device that could dehydrate all compost and bodily excretions.
I lived in Tempe for five years. That's all the Arizona I need. I like temperate climates with dense deciduous forests and fresh, clean lakes/rivers. Deserts are beautiful places, but I don't ever want to live in one again.
The worst part about any long-term RV situation is the tanks. Full hookup is great, but generally only existed at the kind of campgrounds I try to avoid, where everyone is crammed together. I spent most of my time at state park campgrounds, which usually have decently-large sites, but rarely have sewer hookups (even when they do have water and electric). I got a Rhino tote to empty my tanks without moving the trailer. That helped a lot. It's still both tedious and gross, but it's a lot less time and hassle than moving the trailer. That's only really viable if there's a dump station in the campground, though. I've used it while boondocking, putting the tank in the bed of my pickup, but that sucks a million ways.
I'll probably get sick of full-timing pretty quickly. I'm already sick of it this summer. The past two summers, I wasn't working, and it was a lot less stressful.
Do you know realistic property prices and acreages in Cochise county?
A quick google image search shows a very hot Arizona.
As someone who enjoys following a lot of youtube self-builders around the world I get the impression that most channels I follow have to thread their way through some pretty convoluted and not-self-build nor budget-friendly rules :(
Do you know of any other places in the US that have similar easy-to-self-build but are more wooded and temperate?
When I think remote wooded area my mind goes to western NY around Allegheny. I know (and helped) someone who self-built a house in that area but am not sure about what approvals they needed/sought for it.
Places with water (and therefore trees) tend to be already spoken for in most of the US. Alaska, maybe? But that's not temperate at all, and is not great for the solar aspect.
Without access to a water supply, living in the middle of Arizona is just DUNE cosplay.
I do know that there are water condensation machines that could be fed with solar power, but at that point will likely be too expensive for a single family.
Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation. They eat,buy food clothing, cars. Every immigrant child is a net negative to the state,at least until they turn 18. But it isn't even. Net neg per kid of maybe 800 a year, positive of each adult of 1200-1600 are the numbers I've heard on freakonomics podcast. Their guests proposed solution was to have the feds pay the states per an immigrant child to offset who bears the costs. I don't think it's even a debatable position that each immigrant is a net economic positive, in the long term. Some political groups worrying about losing their culture is a completely different kettle of fish.
This net economic benefit of immigrants varies based on their background and skill sets. In Denmark for example, MENA immigrants are a net drain throughout their entire productive work lives.
> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation
This isn’t true in general and depends on the local economy and the immigrants country of origin. MENA migrants are a net loss for Germany, for example.
Even if economists agree, the money these immigrants spend lands in the pockets of rich capitalists.
The entire topic is far more nuanced than you make it out to be.
> Economists say every immigrant is a net economic positive to the nation.
This can only be true if they sustain themselves on their own work. An immigrant that does not work and only lives on subsidies can hardly be called a net positive.
This is not behavior exclusive to immigrants though. Either way the welfare state is not very strong in the US. There are 75,000 homeless people in LA county for example.
There's an enormous welfare state in the US through what is essentially jobs programs.
Health insurance companies, for example, are a negative drain on society, yet they employ hundreds of thousands of workers, in what can only be explained as a make-work program for pointless bureaucracy.
Lots of this in the DOD as well. And the homeless program administrators, which you mentioned.
It's just not explicit welfare to the poorest of the poor and there are a few implicit steps, because otherwise it looks bad.
Violating laws against attacking and robbing ships at sea is terrible. Violating laws protecting imaginary property rights is quite another. Don't get them confused.
Taking something without paying for it is morally wrong, there's no justification for it. You aren't stealing bread to feed your family, you're stealing a tv show.
You keep using words that inherently equivocate between transfer-of-property acts and copying-of-property acts. Choose your words more carefully, and then make the same argument.
No amount of definitions will change your mind. Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't. I think it's wrong but I do it anyway, that's intellectual honesty.
> Either you think downloading an mp3 is wrong or you don't.
No, I don't think my sense of morality inherently has anything to say about downloading an mp3, one way or the other. There's no instinct in humans that pattern-matches on the idea of copying information that someone else created being a particular "cultural touchstone" or "human right", nor of it being "disgusting" or "taboo."
But something being "not immoral" doesn't make it okay. Without a clear sense of moral value to an action, that action's worth comes down to an ethical question — a question that has to be resolved with ethical arguments, questions of utility and harm and fairness and "the curtain of ignorance" and so forth.
And my point is that you're failing to make those arguments.
Again, you're leaning on a moral intuition about theft of physical property. The problem Best Buy have, in that situation, is that they would have to themselves buy another copy of the DVD in order to then have the stock of it to sell. It's shrinkage, like stealing a TV.
This does not pertain to downloading an MP3.
Like I said: make an ethical argument, not a moral argument. Stop attempting to rely on moral intuitions; there are no good moral intuitions for this, any more than there are good moral intuitions for e.g. the ethics of someone who can "fork off" copies of their mind, forcing those copies to merge back together with them. It's just not something that ever came up in our evolution!
The record companies can claim they compensated the artist, even if the math is bogus.
See Steve Albini’s open letter to the music industry for the full accounting…from the nineties when labels made their artists •really• dance for their shekels…
