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kleinbl00  ·  1311 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: New Maps Show a transformed United States

So the problem is, the most reasonable thing to do is to move. But you're talking about 160 million people. And the selfish thing to do is move before everyone else. And squat on the land that's about to be valuable. People are already getting itchy in Alberta because the farmland is being snatched up by foreign speculators. meanwhile, "we used to farm in Kansas but now we're trying to farm in South Dakota" is the Dust Bowl II and that much population on the move is called a refugee crisis. As with most things, it will happen slowly, then all at once, and there will be tension. Syrian Civil War tension? Probably not? But if Texas is going to be Saudi Arabia in 30 years it's gonna fuck shit up royally.

The issue, which uhsguy is also glossing over, is that it's not about whether or not you should move. The issue is that half of the goddamn country is wondering the same thing. And as with most events involving large numbers of people, 95% of them will do it in an orderly, calm and calculated fashion but 5% will fuck it up badly for the rest of the country.

Every city I've been in, there's a thriving community of happy, healthy, white people of means who bailed on New Orleans after Katrina. I mean, I hired one. Meanwhile there's a desperately poor core of minorities who couldn't afford to bail on New Orleans... yet.

Friends of mine bought their dream home. It's three miles up a dirt road in the Santa Fe National Forest. You need 4x4 to get in and out when it snows. And they can't buy insurance. Literally no one will sell them insurance because statistically speaking, it will burn to the ground in the next 15 years. Period.

They got a great deal.

I follow a house on Redfin. It got eaten by a landslide. It's oceanfront. For a while? It was sold as a "fixer-upper." Then for a while? It was sold "as is." Talkin' a red-tagged uninhabitable structure with a 50-foot cliff above it that has a demonstrated proclivity to fall on the house.

It sold two months ago. Someone got a great deal. All it took was two years and a massive influx of stupid money for strivers to buy a deathtrap that will never be permitted.

There's an arc within Nomadland of this lady who lost her job at 50 and works Amazon warehouses as a migrant worker while living out of her Chevy Astro and at 58, she makes a downpayment on an acre of desert half an hour outside of Gadsden, AZ. No power, no water, but it's her own private idaho and boy howdy at 58 she's going to homestead the Sulphur Valley.

And even Jessica Bruder - who spent 18 months tooling around with itinerant hopelessness - presents this as a happy ending. Not as a "here's how this mummified corpse came to rest here" cautionary tale.

Yes. Moving to Canada is the most reasonable thing to do. And the most reasonable will do it now, the less reasonable will do it later, the unreasonable will do it too late and the reasonless will dream of a time they could have done it. And everyone will be fucked, including the Canadians.