> people taking those buses enjoyed life more than most do today
Benefits of being rich.
A £150 round trip ticket in 1957 is the equivalent of £4,600 today, and in an era when average wages were around £400 per year [0].
Taking months off to bum around the hippy trail in the 1960s spending almost half of the average person's salary would have put you in the upper middle class to say the least. Alternatively, imagine spending £15,000 on a multi-month trip in 2026 like going to Antarctica, ascending an ultra, participating in the Dakar Rally, or racing the Iditarod.
Plenty of Brits in the era (especially the lower middle class and upwardly mobile) would have decided to spend that money on a ticket to move to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or America instead.
Especially when it was £20 to move the whole family (kids were free) to Australia. My great uncle and aunt did just that, after national service he was in business working for Walls ice cream. Took himself and two kids off in early 60s, were in a a Nissen hut for a few weeks til he found a job over there.
Commonly known as the "Ten Pound Pom" scheme [0] which ran from 1945-1972
An incredible return on investment. I bet many ended up with higher wages, better health, better housing etc (though I think about 1/4 ended up returning, at a large expense)
> Taking months off to bum around the hippy trail in the 1960s spending almost half of the average person's salary would have put you in the upper middle class to say the least.
Worth noting that a substantial amount of people doing the overland route were hitchhiking with any vehicle than came along, or were sharing a ride with another westerner who charged less than a commercial bus. The journey was so accessible that Yugoslavs, not a poor nationality but not a rich one either, were a prominent group on it.
I know a couple people from my parents' generation who did the hippie trail in their early 20s and they certainly aren't rich. Basic Austrian middle class.
From there you can easily extrapolate how much it deviated from contemporary wages (roughly 30,000 Austrian schillings a year for a Viennese industrial laborer with a union contract in 1964).
A lot of people who think they are from middle class backgrounds are actually in the upper cream of society but never realize it.
Here's economic data for wages and household income in Austria back in 1965 [0] (page 2 and 11).
Not completely true. I had a friend (now departed RIP) from a working class background who managed to get over there, before the Beatles. He worked his passage on a ship to India before heading inland. It could be done.
I'm curious about the passengers on the bus and doubt everyone went the full distance on it.
The class system in the UK is not entirely wealth related. Therefore you could be rich enough to afford it and not upper class or upper class and not able to afford it.
Upper class in traditional British usage refers to old money — the titled, old landowners, gentry etc.
I’m sure a lot of working people would enjoy life more if they didn’t have to work as much as they do in order to provide shelter and food to their families.
Tailscale is an overkill solution. Opening ports 80 and 443 for a reverse proxy is enough security provided your apps don't have broken authentication. I've been doing this for years now.
Validating every single service I run on my home server for security (currently at 30 containers + other non-containerised random crap) vs. enabling the built-in Wireguard server on my router (which is more or less as simple as setting up Tailscale). I have a very different idea on which of these is overkill.
What makes you think simply throwing random crap on a home VPN network is secure?
Tailscale/Wireguard is overkill because it is not needed where access controls work fine which is true for the majority of the popular self-hosted apps. And you now have to install a VPN client/cert on every device you want to access your services from. That's a major oof.
Great! Another shallow dismissal is just what everyone needs right now! I don’t understand this kind of gate keeping.
AI has been changing more rapidly than any other technology I have encountered in my life. It’s absolutely nobody’s fault for not keeping up with it or arriving late to the party, and telling them they should rather just stop because they won’t get it anyway is just awful behaviour.
Because, obviously, you should be spending all of your waking time thinking about LLMs, agents, and how you can integrate them into every part of your life. If you have been living properly in the age of impending-AGI, you would have already been desperately seeking more opportunities to interact with these systems. That desperation would have led you to independently discover agents and all the ways you could couple yourself to them even when away from your computer. Are you a parent stuck at home experiencing life with your kids instead of sitting at your desk? Why not escape such a hellscape by whipping out your phone and building a SaaS from your phone while your offspring annoys you with requests for attention and meaningless affection?
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Really, this whole environment of 'coding from my phone with dozens of agents while I'm doing the laundry' feels like satire of the sorts of things we used to laugh at on Linkedin.
My goodness, these people are fighting as if it were about controlling the next Apple App Store. These are just a few watch faces for a watch that only a few thousand people will ever use—how can they lose perspective like that?
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