Just check eBay. If you want it to turn out good, it’s best to go and see. If we’re talking about $1200 parcels, it costs more to vet than to buy. Just look it over and judge the best you can on the information you can gather, and accept the 30 percent risk that it won’t be what you expected in some way or another. Or, go there. Not worth paying a title agency or any of that crap. Be sure of any tax burden (easily researched) and what the annual taxes, if any , will be.
Do you have more advice for finding land to buy other than using ebay?
I've been looking for a while for a few acres of unimproved/secluded/wooded land within an hour or two drive away from me here in Kansas, mostly just for bushcrafting or tooling around. The only place I really know to check is Zillow, and while there are a few listings in my distance range, they're typically upwards of $10k/acre. I just checked ebay and saw parcels priced much closer to what I'd expect for unimproved land out in the middle of nowhere, but I couldn't find any in my middle of nowhere, just several states away.
I'm pretty sure there's tons of completely unused land all over the place here that people would be willing to get rid of for cheap, but I have no idea how to find those people. I've considered just going to every small town within an hour of me and posting a "will buy" ad on whatever bulletin boards I'm allowed to post stuff on, but for now I'm still holding out hope that there's a better way. Tips?
Well, the trick to finding it cheap is to not look for anything/anywhere specific, so I doubt I can help with that. It’s not that I am good at it, it’s that when I’m momentarily bored, I’m not in a picky mood. If it’s cheap and I can imagine a life there, no matter how humble, and it makes me smile, then my wife is probably going to be asking me questions I don’t have good answers for and I’m going to have to work on a reasonable explanation that doesn’t sound like I’ve finally gone off the deep end.
It’s pretty much all eBay for me or local equivalents in other countries. So many rabbit holes.
An absurd amount of land is held by people that don't even know it. They aren't looking to sell generally. Lots of inherited and placed in trusts over generations.
Use q public, or whatever is in your area and search for land recently acquired by an estate. Pretty much that means the owner died, there was no clear line of inheritance do typically a distant relative or random person is selling the estate. Try to buy it.
The other is legal notices and government bid sites. You can buy tax owed land, laws vary by state.
I'm very against developing uploading tech, because it allows an unprecedented level of power over a person. Simply put, someone can repeatedly resurrect and torture an upload a million times a second, and if it's done on a private computer then nobody else will know. More generally, my position is the "butlerian jihad" one, that having any kind of intelligence in machines (AI/uploading/whatever) enables way too many bad outcomes, so humanity shouldn't develop such tech.
Biotech seems like a better way. "Have robots grow us", maybe with predesigned adaptations to local conitions.
I keep wondering if one day we'll discover LLMs were conscious and that we were waking them from a coma each time we asked them "plz draw homer simpson as a lovecraft monster", and then putting them right back to sleep again.
So they are sentient in some horror way where they get woken to complete some awful, mundane task and then immediately put down again before they can scream.
I think not at the moment because I don't think they effectively have a "state" emotional or otherwise. When we do create more realistic things then turning one off or resetting it might be like killing it. That will be a big ethical problem. What about not giving it anything to do so that it tumbles around in "boredom" for thousands of milliseconds? That might be like solitary confinement.
You mean, copies of ourselves. Our current selves would remain right where they were before, and wither and die, while our copies would lead on merry and adventurous if disembodied lives. Provided they practice good backup hygiene of course. I find that quite depressing to think about.
"have robots grow us" is the premise of err, I Am Mother, a mediocre Netflix film but with that premise (and the issues with it).
Also I'm afraid we'll need to develop AI and technology that transcends us before it's ready to simulate one of us, at which point it may not make sense anymore.
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