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moridinamael comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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Living in a van seems like it could decrease your cost of living a lot more than it decreases your quality of life. Getting set up in a van would cost about $12k, so it could pay for itself in a year. Here is a good guide on this.
One could also consider going completely homeless; here is an article by a math student who did that.
Until a few years ago, students were permitted to sleep overnight on the ubiquitous couches in the university student center of my Alma Mater. There are tales of a student who eschewed paying for housing and simply slept on the couches of the student center, and used locker room showers, for an entire year.
Unfortunately this individual's munchkinism led to the policy being revised to prevent this behavior - or so the tale goes.
When I was a grad student, I preferred to spend time in my office and go home only to shower once every two or three days (especially before TAing a class, when I would also put on shoes). This annoyed some people, and eventually they got through a policy that the building was closed for 8 hours at night, told only me, and enforced it only against me. My TA union went ballistic when the campus police got involved; in the grievance process, we eventually settled that I only had to maintain a residence outside of the office (or something like that, I don't exactly remember, but anyway it was something that I'd been doing anyway), so a victory for labour solidarity!
There was another person around at this time, a munchkin dedicated to gaining XP in studying interesting mathematics. Actually being a grad student had too many distractions, and he quit that before I got there, but he continued to hang around and collaborate on research with one of the professors. Every few years, he would take a sabbatical for a few months to get some money by coding, but mostly he slept in my office and ate a microwaved mixture of rice, cheese, frozen mixed vegetables, and spices. He did what I was only accused of doing, and I don't know why the authorities never went after him; I think that his existence just couldn't be classified in their consciousness. (It's been a few years, but I'm pretty sure that he's still there.)
Yeah, I'm a grad student now and we get a note about once a year from the school telling people not to do this.
A friend going to the local Academy of Fine Arts did this for months at a time, having set up his living quarters in his classes' studio. His lodgings were certainly posher than my 32sqm apartment, but he had to build his own shower from a bucket and a clothes hanger.
In my last bout of studentdom, when I found myself being a student politician at a bottom-end university, one of the others pretty much did this, camping out in the SRC offices for a month. We were seriously tempted to a blanket party for him. Don't be that guy.