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The US may be one of the places which make it uniquely easy and attractive. There are ways to make decent money without maintaining a career if you're not afrai

The US may be one of the places which make it uniquely easy and attractive. There are ways to make decent money without maintaining a career if you're not afraid of hard work (fishing boats in Alaska etc.) and also there are places which are dirt cheap with good climate, so that you can live in a shack and not freeze in winter or spend a fortune on cooking. If I were to try to do it in Poland, I see at least a couple obstacles: - the country is relatively densely populated. It's not easy to get a dirt-cheap place where you can settle (legally). Also, the construction code is strict so it's very hard to go low budget by doing unconventional things (like living in a yurt etc.) - the winters make a lot of those unconventional solutions less applicable anyway - you need a decent heat source and a house that has some level of insulation - Manual labor doesn't pay too well and you work with alcoholics and people with terrible personalities. Although arguably, after joining the EU, you can go for temp jobs in EU countries and make money that will last you for months of frugal living in a Polish village - the people in the countryside are often backwards, alcoholics and have a mentality of a serf (Poland had serfdom until mid XIX-century, and also the Communism treated people like serfs, so a lot of people exhibit traits of learned helplessness, have no initiative and expect to be taken care of by some institution - when it doesn't happen, they just get bitter and complain, but are unable to take any initiative). They're the opposite of the rugged, self-reliant American farmers, and would unfortunately make for a poor company or even neighbors - e.g. expect them to steal stuff from you.

vagrantJin 6y ago
> They're the opposite of the rugged, self-reliant American farmers To be a farmer you must have money, land, equipment, likely history of family farmers, technical agricultural know how, a government that protects and promotes your farm. Oh also old farming lobbies to twist the legislatures arm and a Government that uses their trade/military clout to push your products into developing countries - which the WTO seems not to care about. If Polish people dont have these things readily available, I guess yiur statement about them might be a tad harsh.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  Yes, they're definitely a victim of circumstances. Like I wrote, they were literal serfs until 1863 - somewhere between a free man and a plantation slave (for example, the lord could torture or kill them without any consequences). After serfdom was abolished, these people mostly hard very little capital and no education (illiteracy was the norm). Over generations, they tried to slowly crawl out of their miserable state (incl. millions who emigrated to US around the turn of the XX century). but it was not easy in a country that was, until 1914, partitioned by foreign powers who didn't want to invest in local population and were happy to keep them weak and ignorant. Add two absolutely brutal world wars on top of that, the great recession between them (Poland was one of the hardest hit countries in the world, through the thirties constant hunger was a sad norm across the country), and later Stalinism and less ominous forms of Communism, which, while lifting people out of the depths of misery, planted some very harmful ideas in their heads along the way. After all that, came 1989 and introduction of radical free-market ideologies straight from Chicago School of Economics (as advised by Washington "consultants"), killing state-run mass agriculture which was the only employer in many rural regions of Poland. The people who worked there mostly never recovered and are those angry, resentful, ignorant alcoholics that could be your neighbors if you move there. Of course it's not their fault, they were just unlucky to be born in a shitty place at a shitty time - like the majority of regular people throught the history of humanity.

vagrantJin 6y ago

> They're the opposite of the rugged, self-reliant American farmers To be a farmer you must have money, land, equipment, likely history of family farmers, technical agricultural know how, a government that protects and promotes your farm. Oh also old farming lobbies to twist the legislatures arm and a Government that uses their trade/military clout to push your products into developing countries - which the WTO seems not to care about. If Polish people dont have these things readily available, I guess yiur statement about them might be a tad harsh.

burntoutfire 6y ago
Yes, they're definitely a victim of circumstances. Like I wrote, they were literal serfs until 1863 - somewhere between a free man and a plantation slave (for example, the lord could torture or kill them without any consequences). After serfdom was abolished, these people mostly hard very little capital and no education (illiteracy was the norm). Over generations, they tried to slowly crawl out of their miserable state (incl. millions who emigrated to US around the turn of the XX century). but it was not easy in a country that was, until 1914, partitioned by foreign powers who didn't want to invest in local population and were happy to keep them weak and ignorant. Add two absolutely brutal world wars on top of that, the great recession between them (Poland was one of the hardest hit countries in the world, through the thirties constant hunger was a sad norm across the country), and later Stalinism and less ominous forms of Communism, which, while lifting people out of the depths of misery, planted some very harmful ideas in their heads along the way. After all that, came 1989 and introduction of radical free-market ideologies straight from Chicago School of Economics (as advised by Washington "consultants"), killing state-run mass agriculture which was the only employer in many rural regions of Poland. The people who worked there mostly never recovered and are those angry, resentful, ignorant alcoholics that could be your neighbors if you move there. Of course it's not their fault, they were just unlucky to be born in a shitty place at a shitty time - like the majority of regular people throught the history of humanity.