It's not uncommon to hear these stories in LA because the math generally works out very favorably. That 280k house in Riverside easily goes for 2-3x where he works in Norwalk. If you could effectively triple your pay by "working" an extra 3 hours a day, would you do it? Especially if those extra commute hours are by train where you could be doing a wide variety of leisure activities, like reading, games, crocheting. No part time second job that I know of can be more enjoyable than a hobby on a train.
There was a slightly more complicated calculus for the main person, she had to give up participating in her children's before/after school life except on weekends/adopt a 4.5 hours sleeping regimen, and she had to / wanted to earn enough of a cushion in earnings/savings because a Los Angeles job with seniority paid more than any job she could get closer to her home in Hemet including commute costs. I can feel the pain in the writing about what sacrifices she made so her children could have a better life, but it worked out for them all it sounds like.
Alan Hale Jr used to live at the edge of town. Bill Murray's mom lived in town for some reason... A couple movie sequences and music videos shot there, as well as a sex scandal before they were even popular.
> If you could effectively triple your pay by "working" an extra 3 hours a day
6 hours a day - the commute is 3 hours both ways.
In other words, she works 9 hours a day, commutes 6 more, and then has 9 more hours to do with what she will, like sleeping (which normal folk like to do for 6-8 hours). So she has about an hour-three hours a day of actual non-work involved free time.
Additionally unstated is the fact that she is in all probability using the weekend hours to informally catch up on the sleep deficit she's building up during the weekdays. Nor does it account for the unbooked health costs associated with such a lifestyle which will likely see her lose an additional N% off her total lifespan, and substitute some of that pay off into america's err... interesting... health system.
Which is a sinister part of the whole "buy a nice house far away & commute". The further from work, the less time you even get to spend at that nice house...
The benefits of that nice house (and the neighborhood, schools, etc.) are ostensibly more so for the benefit of the family than the long-commuting employee themselves -- whether misguided or accurate.
When one is single and (relatively) unattached, the calculus is different, as Silicon Valley neatly shows.
This breaks the HN guidelines by being flamebait, by being partisan battle, and by not doing this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do better when commenting here.
Edit: you've unfortunately also posted a ton of unsubstantive comments to HN. Please don't do any more of that.
Problem is, the only trains here in Southern California go in the L.A. → San Diego direction. I would love if the 91 had a railway running in parallel, but unfortunately that doesn't seem likely.
