Anime, Boarding Houses, and Our Future

I am an Anime fan. I like them because Anime use different conventions, different cliches, and aren't shy about discussing certain topics that are considered much too controversial in America. Like teenagers living apart from their disruptive cheating angry divorcing parents. That's controversial. Like kids having sufficient ambition to go to a school specializing in that in High School rather than waiting years more for college. Like teenagers getting jobs because they can see their education is a waste, that school is just a breeding ground for single mothers, shame, and bullying. That's controversial.

Japan is very interesting in a Meta level because that culture has already gone where we are heading, so in a manner of speaking, looking at them is a lot like looking at the future. America's real estate crash in 2007, combined with Peak Oil price spike of oil to $147/bbl got the ball rolling on our own collapse, as money shifted from construction jobs and economic growth to permanent economic shrinkage, to reduced hours, to unaffordable health care and declining living standards. Japan started on that path in 1989 with their own real estate crash, and 24 years later still hasn't recovered.

For most of us, being poor is the future. We will be living on very little money, forced working hours under 30 per week thanks to the loophole for employers in the Obamacare program scandal. I'm not sure how you plan to live on 25% less money, but it looks like we'll have the Dream of the 90's. Working part time, couch surfing, and painting birds on random objects and calling it Art. Ahem.

Couch surfing is not nice, from what I'm told. You use up your friendships. I'd rather have friends and live within my means. It is a shame that Defunding Obamacare is just a fantasy. The amount they want to defund is less than 1% of the total cost. The rest is already set to Bankrupt America. Both from the top and the bottom. In light of far less money to live on once it goes into effect (after the Election), we should be thinking about only have half as much money to live on. Half. Maybe less. Think about what that means. Its going to force young healthy people to pay for health insurance out of pocket, by law, a plan which will statistically drop premium costs... except that it won't. What it will actually do is make young people really angry and ask themselves why they voted for whom they did.

Whatever living space you've got now, you can either get a roommate to pay for half the rent, since you'll only have half the income in 2014, or move somewhere that costs half as much which means small or a bad neighborhood or both. If you're a miserable cuss, have sketchy friends, or are really loud in bed (snoring or sex), that may be best. Many people are NOT suited to living with others. Often, the right answer to roommates is not owning stuff worth stealing, having a completely different work schedule from your roommate so you aren't home at the same time, and having a good lock on your bedroom door. That's barely enough to not kill each other. If you have a family? Well... you're screwed. Should have voted for that other guy.

Living in a tinier apartment as cheap as you can get means a boarding house, or a studio apartment. Japan has many anime which take place in boarding houses and apartments. Hidamari Sketch is for high school students attending the art high school across the street. Pet Girl of Sakura-sou is also an art high school boarding house. So is Mahoraba, though only some of the residents are attending the local school. Anime classic Love Hina has a large boarding house with half a dozen residents and a central shared kitchen and laundry. Honey And Clover has several boarding houses near the art university they all attend. Places so tiny and poor you have to go down the street to take a bath. No really.

We have those art and technical schools in America, but most of them are ripoffs, designed to get you to accept debt to pay the high tuition, then leave you stranded after graduating with no job prospects and insufficient knowledge about business to start your own. In the real world, small business with few employees are the right answer to the modern jobs situation. Due to the costs of Obamacare, cutting employees workweeks to under 30 hours means employers don't have to pay for it. That's a 25% cut in your income if you didn't realize. And then being forced, by law, to pay for health insurance means you're out that money too. What I'm hearing is $1200 each, every month, for health insurance. Spending that much, you'd better go see the doctor, several times a month, to get your money's worth, which will massively drive up costs, thus raising premiums even more the following year. This is inflation. Mandated inflation. At some point, the system breaks. This is not a good thing.

What's left goes to food, car insurance, gasoline to get to work, and housing. Rent is often the most expensive part. America had boarding houses during the Great Depression, but I suspect we learned we didn't care for them much so don't have them anymore. The big downside to tiny row house apartments is you either pay too much for a condo and can't make improvements and are stuck with ever-rising rates for the upkeep of the grounds, or you get some roach infested ruin owned by a Slum Lord like you find in Oakland, a big part of why Oaklanders are so angry all the time.

Around here, there are granny units, often on propane which is $270/month including delivery charges, bad enough that many people get wood stoves to cut heating costs. Those SOUND great but laying a fire when you're freezing cold in the morning and need to go to work? And you can't leave the fire burning in the stove while you're gone because it might burn down the house. Not fun. Really not fun. Fire at night, propane in the morning might work, but its expensive when you use it, and the delivery charge is not small. If your road isn't paved, it costs more. I totally expect people to put in Pellet Stoves running on marine deep cycle batteries charged up by solar for those times when the power goes out. With the ever expanding poverty of the current Regime, outages are the inevitable consequence of too much poverty. What a shame.

The upside of living in a boarding house is that's a job for a PT maintenance man, living on the site, and a cook and laundress, for a nominal fee. It lets you live cheap, reusing one of those silly mansions on a postage stamp lot, so long as people are reasonable about the cars, with cuts in rent if they bike or scooter or public transit instead. I imagine a room in a McMansion including board (food and laundry) would be around $350/mo. and still make the owners money. Not great money, but enough to pay the mortgage if its a typical 5 Bedroom house like McMansions often are. If the cook and maintenance are a couple, that's one room instead of two and better wages for them as well. There's 3 car garage spaces there. What if you kept one of those, and put a workshop with a store front in the big one, building out onto the driveway about 10 feet. That would give you around 25 by 19 feet of shop space. Fixing something or selling something. Maybe a small restaurant/cafe. Maybe a fruit stand. Or selling hooch. Its the future. Hooch is fuel, after all.

I wonder if couples will form to run a boarding house together? If they'll dream of someday running a B&B with fancy meals and high dollar tourists. If they'll have side businesses to raise the capital, such as a food delivery service and small engine repair shop out of the garage. It would make sense. Its simple enough. You don't need an expensive adult-babysitting education in the arts or sciences to do that. Just access to YouTube and Wikipedia and RecipeSource to figure it out. Go from nothing to a future, even if its a modest one. Maybe this is the best ANYONE can hope for?