food bill is a bit of a chunk of the inelastic spend, but really the biggest one is rent... best to go as far away as you can from the center of a town to find cheaper stuff, and maybe even put up with a slightly less secure neighbourhood, since you aren't gonna fill the house with desirable, marketable items for burglars

i always found it completely unacceptable that in Australia typical rent cost was 1/4-1/2 of your baseline income, and i struggled to get work in australia because of the combination of the welfare system and the excessive costs of accommodation and having rebelled against an increasingly tyrannical education system at the time i was finishing to get my university entry score (i got OP 15, enough to get into general sciences but not CS, which required a minimum 9) - and that all happened due mainly to one pivotal event where an english teacher specifically started to target me with the use of an early form of social credit score system they introduced just as i got to year 11

at first it made me drop out altogether because i excelled at sciences and arts but i almost always was late handing in my english assignments because they were so brain meltingly retarded, both the content we were supposed to absorb to do it, and the subject matter in the case of creative or other types of writing

note that i was also able to touch type by this time... i could churn out text faster than anyone else in my class but i just had no mind to concoct the kind of trite garbage that i was expected to write 

 Rents are worse now.

I've found,  with school work, you've just got to tell them what they want to hear, not the truth. Find out what they think and tell them that. 😂 

 that's not education... you probably won't be surprised that i decided i probably was better off because it probably wasn't gonna get much better in a university 

 Totally agree, there is no free discourse, just a cookie cutter thinking. 

 a society built on this kind of "education" system would never have produced computers and the internet

the most advanced society in the soviet block in this regard was Bulgaria, a country full of outlaws and geeks, and they had the most advanced PC hardware back in the 80s - clones of the apple 2 and z80 zx zpectrum lol 

 Society needs that 

 the only mistake i made was not getting the fuck out of the country the moment i had that dutch passport in my hands at age 27

between then and age 36 my life was at a standstill, i made no progress at stacking cash, didn't get married, it was just shit... and that's what i mean when i say australia is a socialist country, and every place socialism is entrenched, there is no economic mobility and no real innovation in science

even the japanese are less socialist than australia 

 Yeah in my 20's and 30's I spent all my money on women, booze and travel, the rest I just wasted 😂