Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

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My nephew lives in a very isolated rural area on the east coast and I think you're overselling the "people in the community learn emergency medicine" part - he has no idea how to handle much more than stopping bleeding for a cut (his answer to any size cut is to slather it with antibiotic ointment, which the doctors then have to scrub out before they can suture) or maybe stabilizing a broken leg enough to move someone to the pickup truck.

Likewise, while he does repair things, I wouldn't say they are done well -- his electrical panel is a mess, I spent a couple weekends trying to help bring things up to code (and I'm not even an electrician), like replacing taped hand-twisted wire splices with junction boxes - the tape was melted on one of them from overheating.

He does own an impressive set of guns, but his car has a hole in it after accidentally shooting it while cleaning a loaded gun, so gun safety is not his strong suit.

He has a 4WD, but it's been a 2WD for the past couple years because he can't afford the parts needed to fix it, he cruises junkyards when he can to try to find what he needs.

His closest neighbor is a half mile away and lives in a glorified shed where the water comes in on a hose and electricity comes from a generator when he can afford to fuel it.

I can believe that there are well trained survival handymen out there who are well equipped to survive on their own, but I doubt that most isolated rural people are that well trained.

He did romanticize the whole situation. The situation he's talking about could easily be the rural south or Appalachia. As someone from one of those areas, let me assure you, the "ruggedness" isn't beautiful, it's because there is a lack of service. And the ruggedness shows on the people and their homes.

I grew up in Alaska, and I think I disagree in a philosophical sense.

There's a lot of stuff hacked together in ways experts in the relevant fields would certainly not find beautiful. Expanding foam is probably not in the toolkit of very many master architects; most people have never read an electrical code (and in many places, there's no entity imposing one); many boats, snowmobiles, and other vehicles have been adapted in ways that would make the engineers who designed them want a drink or three.

Most of it works though, like that shell script you hacked together as a teenager from random mailing list archives to automate some task that still needs automating 15 years later. It works and it enables people to do things they could not otherwise do (the economics to support the relevant professional services wouldn't work). I see a beauty in that.

Just as long as the romance is tempered with the reality of the occasional house-fire.

It is, but those usually stem from the need for heat in the extreme cold, which is often achieved by the old fashioned method of burning wood in a stove.

Most wood stove fires aren't directly because of the stove, but people who have gone years and years without ever cleaning their chimney or try to slow burn lots of shit wood like pine. And when the chimney builds up with tons of creosote it can then catch on fire and burn inside the chimney, seriously overheating it and causing a fire.

Speaking of pine, it's harder and harder to find decent firewood that isn't mixed with pine. We mostly cut our own from felled trees on the lot, of which there is no shortage, but sometimes it's handy to buy the odd cord and boy has the quality gone downhill.

Yep, I live in the Rockies and it's all we have here. Everybody in the mountains are burning pine. Just season it the best you can. Burning wood is also the main way to go because gas is too cost prohibitive up here.

I'm curious to understand why gas is prohibitive in the Rockies, if you don't mind. It's (at least, it seems to be) so ubiquitous in the Sierra's (where I am right now) that I kind of assumed it was like this every where in the mountains today.

There is beauty in a utility shell script. But I guarantee you, no one in this forum wants to work at an org or in a society where everything is a mishmash of shell-scripts. It's sometimes nicer to have things that scale and are standardized across the board.

No doubt. Rural life does not scale past a certain point, which is why cities exist.

I genuinely enjoyed your story about your nephew, but it's bit like telling an anecdote about an incompetent engineer and then saying there isn't a large number of engineers that are good at solving problems.

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