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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Lol definitely mottean, but I think there's no real substitute for doing an actual 'vibe check' and living in an area for a while. But knowing what you're getting into is good.

Absolutely. I'm going to be doing some traveling this semester and next, visiting the areas I'm particularly interested in. I'm planning on walking around the area near where I would potentially be working, as well as checking out the areas I might live in. It's going to be a bit of a pain in the ass, but as you said, there's no substitute for an actual vibe check.

A mild pro-tip on this point is that moving somewhere with a lot of retireees tends to vastly increase the availability of local medical resources.

Good tip, thank you.

I also don't mind gambling a bit that as a younger, healthy guy I'm unlikely to need any major medical services and so the quality of hospitals is demoted somewhat in my general hierarchy of needs.

I differ from you in this for two reasons. The first, my hobbies include activities that put me at a noticeably higher risk for needing emergency medical care. I'm a particular enthusiast of competitive shooting (2-gun my beloved), as well as hiking and camping. I've done what I can to give myself an edge if something were to happen - I got my EMT-B several years ago and have mostly retained the emergency trauma lessons, as well as a Stop The Bleed course. My friend group recently had a competition where we had to record ourselves putting on a tourniquet from wherever we keep it in our daily lives in under sixty seconds. We're uh... weird. But fun. Anyway, so I tend to want to have good quality medical care in the area for that reason. The second, I'm hoping this next move will be my last for some time. I'd like to put down some roots. So, with an eye to the future, I take medical care into account. I thought about accounting for primary school quality as well, but I figure I'll either be somewhere with good schools, or I'll be making enough that I can afford to put my kid(s) in private school.

I've also pulled the trick of befriending guys with actual experience with trauma medicine and having them around me a good portion of the time.

One is previously a Navy Corpsman who has stitched up bullet wounds in Marines, the other was previously an EMT and now a fireman. So long as I have one of them around I can be relatively certain I'll make it to the hospital if I'm not killed instantly by any particular event.

My health insurance is geared towards catastrophic events (and paying for lost wages from being unable to work) so I do have to make sure I can get to the emergency room.

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