Arcata, being our college town, is the most expensive town here. I would consider other nearby towns if being cheap is important. Try Blue Lake, where I am (I'm outside town), it's more rural but under 10 miles from Arcata.
We moved here 25 years ago....back then, a 1000 square ft house with an acre cost us $800a month. I've owned my home since then, so I'm out of the rent loop, but poking on craigslist looks like around $1500-$2000 for a decent house, with some more, some less depending on what you get. Nice 2-3 bedroom homes seem to be about $500000 now with some property.

Our gas is the most expensive in the country consistently, over $4.

Beyond that, it's pretty cheap. Property tax is 1%, food is reasonable, entertainment is mostly nature and community, fishing, hunting, hiking, boating, surfing, diving, even back country skiing 1/2 hour up hill, so free, although there are paid events too, we even had GWAR play a few times in Eureka, but no opera or ballet.

My wife and I live on $30k....we have 4 cars, pets, vacations, a large pond, hot tub, etc. Because I have room, I grow a lot of our produce and we have around 40 fruit trees. We aren't putting any extra in the bank, but aren't depleting our savings either.

We are the marijuana capital of America, if you know the right people, it's maybe $100 an oz for A grade, $10-20 a gram for wax/oil.

All in all, it depends on your lifestyle. It would be easy to spend all you save living here on gas, or easy to not have a car at all if you're in town and will ride a bike in the rain. While there are certainly cheaper places to live, I'm not sure there's better. Our forests are gorgeous with skyscraper redwoods, the ocean is cold but clean here, the rivers unspoilt and full of fish, our air is some of the cleanest in the lower 48, water is too, and our summer daytime temperature is mostly 70-75 F, winter is low 50's- freezing, but we have very few freezing days.

Mckinleyville, just above Arcata, was (still is?) the largest town in California with no police, only highway patrol. They got a multiplex before police!

We have a ton of immigration from the bay area, but more often than not they move back because they miss the fast pace and abundant services and entertainment....I didn't.

Hope that helps. We love it here, but we're slow paced and super cheap bastards. If you are too, come check it out.

I disagree that there is net benefit from illegal immigrants.

Yes, they do pay taxes. They do not collect retirement benefits.

They also tend to not pay for medical insurance and their jobs do not provide it (for the most part). Generally when they have medical issue, they either go to a free clinic that is there for poor people or they go to a non private hospital emergency room. They cannot be turned away. This cost gets passed on to people paying for their insurance and hospital costs because Hospitals hike up insurance costs to make up the difference. It also causes massive delays at the ER, making it harder for them to deal with people really needing emergency care.

They do utilize public schooling without paying similar amounts of costs. For example, here in Austin, most of the areas that are predominantly Hispanic do not have to pay the same level of property and school taxes as I do. I don't even have kids, but if I lived in East Austin, my taxes would be significantly lower. It has led to East Austin starting to have a Gentrification problem as people/businesses move their to exploit the lower taxes.

Many illegal immigrants carry the minimum or no insurance. My wife's car was totaled some years ago, almost killing her, by an illegal immigrant who had no insurance. We had to use our insurance for her treatment and for the replacement of her vehicle. The man who hit her disappeared.

They utilize fake id and ssid to get welfare benefits. They do get caught now and then, but they flee the area and get new info.

They also do get married to citizens and then, if they get divorced, they flee to avoid child support/alimony. I know of at least 3 friends/acquaintances that had this happen in the last 10 years.

I don't think they are more likely to commit crime than anyone else, but they are more likely to flee the country if caught.

The money they do earn is, in many cases, spent at local ethnic shops that usually are also owned by illegal immigrants. It has become so prevalent that many local stores have tried to modify how they are setup to attract illegal immigrants.

It has been shown that they save and send money out of the US, many times doing their best to avoid any custom duties that would be attached to larger sums.

Because they are violating the law and crossing the border, we spend a massive fuckton of money trying to stop them. This is probably the largest outlay of cost and the one everyone feels, even people living outside of a state affected by illegal immigration.

To be fair, maybe I am getting a skewed picture as I live in a city that has basically said "Fuck the laws, ya'll c'mon in and live here!"

Honestly, if we aren't going to stop them or deport them, then just fucking give them legal status so they are treated like everyone else. At least then they can be hounded by bill collectors too.

So it IS just the Donald making a mess of things (again) for a personal peeve, I was not sure, thanks for confirming.

What next, mass imports of east european women? All US embassies converted to Trump Towers? Do we get a wall (or a war?) somewhere in Europe next? Follow the tweets!

Maybe not, maybe its all just some oil price hike scheme.

Hard to have a discussion when the basic psychological concept that is endemic in society is not understood by one side of the conversation. Not really worth trying to dig out of that hole, in my opinion.

I do like your idealist view of how people SHOULD be. We aren't that way, of course. I wish it for all our futures.

Including men, and the internalized messages they get that warp their view of the world.

I have contended for years that men are in a much worse psychological state than women. We at least are encouraged to delve into our emotions, with varying degrees of success. Poor men are told to buck up and be "men". What a horrible thing to say to a little boy, or a preteen, or a teenager, or a young man entering adulthood, or a grown man dealing with a difficult world. No wonder men die earlier than women. The pressures they are under are enormous, with no way to relieve that pressure.

Generally speaking. There is a movement that has been gathering steam that is encouraging men to become more fully themselves.

The hike was great, albeit too short. We don't have great big waterfalls here on the Olympic Peninsula. It has been raining a lot lately. The waterfall that we visited was THUNDERING. I have never seen a thundering waterfall here.

Then again, I don't normally hike in the winter.

As for the weather... some Norwegian told a friend of mine -- There is no bad weather. Only bad clothing.

My clothing was fine, aided by the fact it started raining after we headed back home.

You may not buy the concept of internalized sexism, racism and homophobia. Doesn't make it any less true. Mental health professionals who have studied the human condition as it exists, rather than how we want it to be, have helped identify the phenomena.

And yeah. I call it "dueling monologues." It is tiresome, isn't it?

Thanks for engaging with me.

I'm off on a tiny hike today. Apparently with all the rain we have been getting, the waterfall near Brinnon WA is a gorgeous torrent of water. And someone else is driving, so that is good!

I just now saw this. My yahoo email account sometimes disappears things on me. I lost another email about the same time.

I absolutely agree with everything you say. Biology is biology. There are differences. Sex is in the workplace, of course, and women bring it there.

I can agree with all these things, and still be creeped out by the indulgence, the wallowing, of only hiring very attractive women.

There is a long history of that in America, and it was creepy then, too. Stewardesses and what they were subjected to in the workplace is a great example. They would lose their -- THEIR WORK -- if they gained five pounds, is an example of really inappropriate use of a woman's appearance as a job qualification. These people are responsible for the safety of the passengers if a tragedy strikes. I love reading stories about how women are heroes and professional when an accident happens.

A shooting range is not a strip club. Wanting to be surrounded by women in your business who COULD work in a strip club is creepy.

Creepy really isn't the right word. It is shorthand for a complex interplay of gender roles and abuses and complicity that is endemic in our culture. I just like the way it feels in my mouth -- I found that Japanese word for it that perfectly explains my pleasure in using it. I am still pleased to know that word exists.

Gitaigo: Onomatopoeia that describes states of being, not sounds.

Creepy perfectly feels like my state of being around this video.

We are all biological beings who like to look at pretty people. Tall men make more money. Attractive people of both genders make more money. We will never be free from those responses.

But lets keep it unconscious, shall we? Let us work to be better human beings than people who reduce ourselves to walking genitalia looking for constant stimulation.

The rest of your points... yeah. I'm right with you. I am not someone who criticizes men for "looking." I find myself looking and I'm pretty firmly on the hetero side of things.

It came up the other day on a hike through the woods. A woman passed me wearing some sort of body hugging stretch pants. There was natural jiggling from her movements, which caught my eye. I found myself staring, I became aware of how perfectly proportioned she was, and how the rest of her was lovely in every aspect (I had seen her a few moments before, walking in a different direction.) I almost called out to my friends -- my god, that is the most beautiful woman. All triggered by a chance glance at an objectively beautiful rear-end.

Biology. It happens. I have no problem with it.

And those shooting range owners want to stimulate that reaction in the workplace, 100% of the time. And that, my friend, is creepy.

I'm torn by videos like this.
On the one hand, they're gorgeous and expose many to the graduate of wild nature.
On the other hand, they totally ruin that experience for anyone who went through the expense and trouble to actually be in that natural wilderness.

Imagine you've spent thousands to travel to Iceland, and after days of travel you finally get to the pristine wild you were hoping to find....then HRRRRUUUMMMM....the next few hours are spent listening to the loud noise and scenery ruining of a large drone flitting about, almost following you through the wilderness, ruining the whole experience.

Exactly that happened to my wife and I in Iceland. The assholes went so far as to pass the "do not pass" signs and not only flew around, but set up and stood directly in front of the amazing waterfall we had hiked to see, for hours, even when asked to move.

I think there need to be severe restrictions on drone flying in natural parks and wilderness areas...like 4 days a year when it's allowed and no other times or something. Your beautiful video shouldn't trump the enjoyment of the others who took the trouble to get there, far from civilization.

I really enjoyed this video about hiking in the back country.

Thank you my friend. Weather spoiled my wife's present of help-boarding, but I had a fun day going for a short hike, some wine, some beer and an epic meal!

A great way to scare off bears and loose dogs while biking or hiking is to carry an air horn. Walmart sells them in the boating section. A can of compressed air with a loud, shrill blast. Boaters use them sometimes to signal bridge keepers to raise the drawbridge.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

I do that watching rodeos.

The only people I feel sorry for are the clowns that get fucked up trying to save the testosterone junkie. They're like the S.A.R. teams searching for the idiot who hiked into the mountains with shorts, t-shirt, $500 sunglasses and a half bag of trail mix.

I totally agree with her that environmental concerns turn "conservatives" off on any argument (funny, since it's conservation of the environment that they can't abide).
I think she should also be using financial phrases, because done properly, renewable energy saves you money in the long run. My solar system, for instance, paid for itself in the first 8 years of an expected 20 year lifespan, so I get 12 years of 'free' electricity and ignoring rate hikes, but most right wingers would claim it will never pay for itself and is nothing more than pie in the sky hippy fantasy because that's what Alex Jones and his ilk told them.
Showing people that being responsible will actually save them large sums of money is the number one way to convince them to change their behaviors, it's far more effective than any philosophical arguments. It's the main reason I bought my system, and is also a main reason I want an electric car.

Side note: the 'sit in your car in your garage' argument is the same one I use against anti-smokers. I tell them, "you sit in the car you drove here in to complain about some smoke with a hose from the tail pipe going into the window, I'll sit in my car smoking, and we'll see who dies first.". This is to illustrate that their complaints about the dangers of smoke are ridiculous and negligible compared to their own polluting behaviors.

and now all the hikes I've done have just become nightmares because I've heard that noise near me and thought it was a damn bird....

FU mother nature... FU

But Rotorua also had all the volcanic parks. They were awesome, geysers galore!
Queenstown was the epicenter of excitement when I went in 88. We bungied there, rafted and jetboated the Shotover river, flew to a glacier (Cook?), and hiked the Milford track starting and ending there. Good times....thanks dad.