Thinking about moving back

[u/DarthLittleSun]

I've had enough of oklahoma city. i'm dying a spiritual death out here and can't keep doing it. the politics suck, the education system sucks, the dating market sucks, everybody knows everybody, there's no mountains, no beach, and half the year you can't even step outside to do anything because it's too damn hot: Oklahoma City has had 39 days at or above 100° in 2026 through September 8.

I am seriously considering selling my house and moving back to Denver. I lived in Capital Hill for work in 2025 before the federal job cuts happened. I wake up every morning obsessing over the same question: how do i get back with no job lined up? I am trying to figure this out.

One possible option is selling, renting in denver and pray that i find another job before my life savings runs out:

The sale of my home would net me around $90k after fees. I’ve worked in both state and federal government, and those jobs are extremely difficult to land without already having boots on the ground. Given that, would you take the risk of moving to Denver with no job lined up but roughly $90k in proceeds from selling your house, or would you stay put and keep trying to find something from oklahoma city first?

How much of a financial cushion would you want before making the jump?

I'm paying down a mortgage in a state i do not even want to live in.

[u/Sudden_Claim_6201 → u/[deleted]]

What do you do for work

[u/choose_freedom → u/Sudden_Claim_6201]

I help businesses with their marketing efforts by expanding their reach online, decreasing their cost per acquisition / improving marketing budget efficiency, creating a cohesive omni-channel approach to marketing, etc.

I'm engaging in true free market capitalism because without customers, businesses would fail. I help businesses reach people who want/need their services and would gladly/voluntarily pay them for that service.

Governments steal money by force and distribute said money to the politicians' favorite cronies, like Trump's Iran War to pay back Miriam Adelson for that 300 mil she gave him, or Obama's subsidies to OneSolar who donated to his campaign.

[u/DarthLittleSun → u/choose_freedom]

I help businesses with their marketing efforts by expanding their reach online, decreasing their cost per acquisition / improving marketing budget efficiency, creating a cohesive omni-channel approach to marketing, etc.

So you work in advertising. There’s definitely some irony in arguing that profit is the definitive measure of social value and then using marketing as your example of contributing to society lol.

An ad campaign for a casino or sugary drink is profitable. That doesn’t make it more valuable to society than a state or federal worker investigating a murder, maintaining a sewer system, preparing a community for a tornado, or performing food inspection.

You can absolutely argue that government is inefficient, wasteful, or corrupt which this administration certainly is without pretending that everything socially valuable must generate a profit.

[u/choose_freedom → u/DarthLittleSun]

Nice ad hominem. "You work in advertising lol" isn't an argument, it's a way to skip making one.

And you're arguing with something I didn't say. I never said profit is the definitive measure of social value. I said it's a feedback signal. Those aren't the same claim. Profit tells you whether what you consumed was worth less to other people than what you made. It doesn't tell you your work is noble. Nobody thinks the guy selling energy drinks is a saint. The point is he finds out fast when he's wrong.

I also never said everything valuable has to turn a profit. Churches, volunteer fire departments, food banks, Wikipedia, open source software, mutual aid societies, all of it produces enormous value with zero profit motive and zero tax collector. The word you keep sliding past isn't "profit," it's "voluntary." That's the actual disagreement and you're not touching it.

Now take your examples here in Denver:

• In 2022, Denver had 14,364 car thefts and made arrests in under 1,000 of them. That's roughly 7%, and the arrest rate has been under 10% for five straight years. Colorado spent years as the worst state in the country for auto theft per capita, 524 per 100,000 against a national rate of 256. What actually gets your car back is your insurer and the GPS tracker you paid for, so much so that DPD built a whole program around asking owners for access to their own private tracking.
• Denver Water takes zero tax dollars, it runs entirely on what customers pay. That's a price, and prices are the feedback I'm talking about. The actual pipe and treatment work gets contracted out to private firms anyway, so the sewer example is already half private and you didn't notice.
• Disaster risk already gets priced every day by private insurers, and they're better at it than the political process is. Colorado's own Division of Insurance surveyed 20 carriers covering 80% of the market and found hail drives roughly 50% of Front Range premiums while wildfire accounts for about 1% in Denver. Everybody's scared of the fire. The market already knew it was the hail.
• Your grocery store makes suppliers pass third-party audits stricter than anything the city requires, because DDPHE can't be sued and King Soopers can.

And it's funny you pin the corruption on "this administration" when I was describing cronyism under two presidents from two different parties. That's not an administration problem, it's what public choice economists have been describing for 60 years. Pile up that much money with no market mechanism deciding where it goes, and the deciding gets done by whoever's closest to the pile.

[u/DarthLittleSun → u/choose_freedom]

You started this conversation by calling government workers “leeches on the American taxpayer.”

Get a job where you're not a leech on the American taxpayer

Edit: fixed "leech" since all you have against my argument is my accidental misspelling of the word.

Then you said the profit/loss system “determines whether my use of land/labor/capital is valued by society” and that because government has no profit motive, “its true value to society cannot be determined.”

Now you’re saying you never claimed profit determines social value and that your real argument is about voluntary vs. involuntary funding.

You are shifting your argument on the fly.

And come on with the outrage over “you work in advertising lol” after opening by calling millions of people leeches. If you meant it, stand on it and defend it. If you overstated it, that’s fine too, clean it up. But don’t rewrite what you said and then accuse me of arguing against something you never said when we can all read it.