Choosing a place to live
I am approaching a point in my life where I will soon have the financial freedom to choose where in the world I live. I want to discuss various criteria for criticising different places. I am currently a citizen of New Zealand and UK.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.I want superior water quality for drinking, bathing, etc.
This means I need to live somewhere sufficiently advanced to be able to provide and service high quality reverse-osmosis water filters. Otherwise I would need to be somewhere that I can directly access spring water, which I think is much more difficult.
All the areas in the US I have lived in have terrible water quality.
Thankfully the US has reverse-osmosis water filtration options pretty much everywhere.
I could have multiple homes around the world that I move between throughout the year. This way I can make the most of geographical and seasonal advantages of different places.
I want to live close to thriving cities (say, no more than 60 minutes away on an average day).
I want access to good quality food, particularly good quality meat, dairy, and fruit. Ideally the place I live has a growing culture of eating well (for example, in Austin, many restaurants are now making it a point not to use any seed oils in their cooking.)
You may want to check out Instagram account jacbfoods. He used to be opposed to seed oils, but when he got his master’s degree in dietetics, he changed his mind.
Thank you for sharing. Skimming his content, I’m not finding any criticisms of the biological explanations I currently hold that reject polyunsaturated fats. I will dig deeper later on.
I haven’t yet found good criticisms of Ray Peat’s ideas regarding unsaturated fats, so those are the ideas I am currently living by.
Avoid the US for this. Food quality is worse than third world countries. The food is no where near as organic. Unpopular opinion, but I don't think food should be industrialized.
I’ve found that if I stick to Whole Foods type places the quality of food is quite good, including some options that aren’t available in NZ.
But yes, the mainstream food options are crap, including the majority of restaurants.
The current industrialisation of food is problematic, but these are parochial problems. There is nothing about industrialised food production that is fundamentally and irredeemably flawed. Problems are soluble!
I disagree. In case of mass starvation, GMOs and the like make sense. But besides that, I am for eating food that grows without human intervention.
GMOs are great outside of mass starvation, too. If we can genetically modify foods to be better for us, why wouldn’t we?
… I am for eating food that grows without human intervention.
I don’t think that’s possible unless you go deep into a forest somewhere and eat some wild berries you find (which is dangerous anyway). You’d die trying.
GMOs are a marvel of food engineering. But ‘GMO’ as a concept isn’t coherent anyway since people have been genetically modifying foods through selective breeding for millennia. There’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. That’s a good thing. For example, ‘natural’ bananas are a pain in the ass because they have seeds you need to remove before eating. Those bananas are also tiny. https://youtu.be/VRbITN4qlRs?t=121
You seem to think that whatever’s ‘natural’ is good. That’s not the case. I think you’d do well to avoid organic foods and specifically seek out GMO foods:
https://news.immunologic.org/p/gmos-and-genetic-engineering-are
Organic food is a scam. Participants in double-blind experiments can’t tell what’s organic and what isn’t. Organic food hasn’t been found to be healthier than non-organic food. The ‘organic’ label was never even meant as a health endorsement. It’s just a way for stores to charge you more. Don’t be a sucker.
https://news.immunologic.org/p/organic-foods-are-not-healthieror
From what I recall, it’s a scam in Germany, too. From skimming the article, ~all of its criticisms apply there as well. For example, “Organic food has a larger impact on climate because of the greater area of land required to farm it.” I don’t see why that would be different in other countries.
Food quality [in the US] is worse than third world countries.
That seems like a wild claim to make, seeing as you can safely drink tap water in the US but not in third-word countries. That tells us something about the concern for the safety of consumables in the US. I cannot imagine that food safety in the US would be anywhere near as bad as it is in third-world countries. I mean… India? Nah.
I want to live in places that are mostly sunny, most of the time. This is for health reasons.
In terms of climate, California might be the best place on the planet to live in. But the downside is that you live in California 😂
Yeah. Kidding aside, although California is gorgeous, taxes are a serious issue. Politicians have floated the idea of a future exit tax. Retroactive, I believe (!). It’s made me think twice about moving back there.
I want to live somewhere with a more libertarian culture than average. I want to live somewhere where property rights are respected more than average, and people are left alone by the government more than average.
If America is an option (you mention Austin), the non-coastal Western US could work.
A lot of those states get good water from the Sierra Nevada or the Rocky Mountains.
Those states have either no or low state income tax and largely leave residents alone. (For example, the difference between CA and NV during Covid was night and day.)
Southern NV gets a lot of sun throughout the year. NV has no state income tax.
I’ve heard good things about the area surrounding Las Vegas, though I haven’t been myself.
New Mexico could be good for high altitude (I think).
I second that about Las Vegas. If you don't mind the provocative posters, southern Nevada, southern Utah, Northern Arizona is a great place to be.
I would like to have kids one day. I should find places that allow kids to pursue their interests with minimal or no legally required education standards infringing on that.
I’ve heard good things about New Hampshire in this regard. I think they have no compulsory schooling.
Do you care to be around people that speak your native tongue?
No. If living in the best place on Earth requires me to learn a new language I will happily do so. Thankfully I have an interest in languages so it wouldn’t be a problem for long.