There are ways to work high-salary jobs in low-cost-of-living areas if you're willing to deliberately seek them out.
That's not true in a more than trivial sense. Nobody literally means that the low-cost-of-living area has no high-salary jobs; what they mean is that the distribution of jobs in that area is more weighted against the high--salary jobs. There will always be individual high-salary jobs in that area--but there will be fewer of them. The reason that you can only get those jobs if you spend a lot of effort finding them out is that since there are fewer such jobs, the easy-to-find ones have all been taken already.
Pointing out "I found one" doesn't generalize. There aren't enough for everyone to find one, and if everyone did try to find one, they'd end up having to make even more effort than you (since you probably took one of the hard to find but not hardest to find ones), and the next even more, up to the point where there just won't be any left at any difficulty level.
That's a very good point; I should give a more specific recommendation. I've found that the monthly Hacker News job postings often contain a fairly decent number of companies offering to pay high salaries for remote work. It's not going to give you the Bay Area lifestyle if you work outside that area via internet, of course, but if your actual intention is to live frugally so you can donate to charityworld optimization efforts, you were probably avoiding the Bay Area Lifestyle anyway.
Update: The fundraiser has been completed! Details here. The original post follows...
(Cross-posted from MIRI's blog. MIRI maintains Less Wrong, with generous help from Trike Apps, and much of the core content is written by salaried MIRI staff members.)
Thanks to Peter Thiel, every donation made to MIRI between now and January 15th, 2014 will be matched dollar-for-dollar!
Also, gifts from "new large donors" will be matched 3x! That is, if you've given less than $5k to SIAI/MIRI ever, and you now give or pledge $5k or more, Thiel will donate $3 for every dollar you give or pledge.
We don't know whether we'll be able to offer the 3:1 matching ever again, so if you're capable of giving $5k or more, we encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity while you can. Remember that:
Please email malo@intelligence.org if you intend on leveraging corporate matching or would like to pledge 6 months of monthly donations, so that we can properly account for your contributions towards the fundraiser.
Thiel's total match is capped at $250,000. The total amount raised will depend on how many people take advantage of 3:1 matching. We don't anticipate being able to hit the $250k cap without substantial use of 3:1 matching — so if you haven't given $5k thus far, please consider giving/pledging $5k or more during this drive. (If you'd like to know the total amount of your past donations to MIRI, just ask malo@intelligence.org.)
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