Patterns of Death in the South Still Show the Outlines of Slavery

For one, family farms have largely been replaced by agribusiness, which tends to be far more economical.

For another, employment and home ownership trends are bad for small towns. Employment is now more short-term. There are hardly any "jobs for life" now. This makes those with limited employment prospects (in that there are few employers in their area) particularly vulnerable to change. Home ownership makes the labour market as a whole less flexible/mobile.

The solution to these problems is urbanization.

What's more, the suburbs formed in WW2 with the explosion in private vehicle ownership and, for some reason, governments actively subsidized it. People will often declare (here and elsewhere) that they like to live in the suburbs. It's cheaper, the lots and houses are larger and so on. Thing is, no one is paying the true cost of this in terms of all the infrastructure to support it, be it roads, railways, utilities, schools, hospitals and so on.

If you look at the major urban centers, they tend to generate a surplus and that surplus is used to subsidize those that live outside that city. It's true in NYC. It's true in London.

At some point I expect this to end, which will strengthen the trend towards urbanization.

One problem is that construction pretty much everywhere is becoming unaffordable. This applies to housing and infrastructure. Homeowners get excited about their rising property values but that's pretty short term thinking. There was an article posted here last week about how all the cheap eats are disappearing from SF. Well, real estate costs (land + construction) are an input into literally everything. You simply can't have cheap services in an area with expensive real estate in the long term.

Construction costs are a real problem eg [1]. Australia, which once had a great standard of living, is now ridiculously expensive in local times. Honestly, it's like the whole country is Vancouver. IIRC the median house price in Sydney is now A$1.1m (up from ~$650k ~7 years ago).

[1]: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2017/04/why-is-affordable-hou...

It's not hard to look up that google maps census dot map. And then go find prisons in Google Maps and find it on the census map. Might be pretty surprising what you see... then again, might not.

Hint: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/ Turn overlays. Go to Indianapolis, then look to the West side towards Avon and Danville. There's a dense green block (green dots = Black people) due south of Avon. Now, go look in Google Maps as to what's there.

Wash, rinse and repeat all across the US. You want evidence? There's pretty telling evidence right there.

Hell, I would go over the comment limit on even an abstract on this topic. We're talking 300+ years of history just in the US and colonies.

No, the real reason here why I'm being downvoted is because of a popularity contest. It certainly doesn't have to do with content, at least here. But some people are considered "unpopular". So we see rapid point swings and -1's. To me, its just some of the backward-ness how this community works. Every community has something like this. Grain/block of salt, and all.

However I disagree that slavery - as the term is usually meant to mean - still exists in the form of incarceration.

We as a society have decided that certain things are illegal. The black community, because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws and so there is disproportionate incarceration.

Slavery is the root cause of this disproportionate incarceration, but we should not blame the fact that we have a system which punishes criminals, or equate the enforcement of laws with slavery.

Instead we should be trying to eliminate outdated laws - the illegality of marijuana for instance - and also reducing crime in the black community.

I grew up on island in Alaska. Completed my last two years of high school in a small farming community in North Carolina. Joined the military and after ten years separated from southern Turkey, yet, somehow I was able to land a job as a data scientist.

I joined the military due to a lack of academic discipline though I still was accepted to the state schools in North Carolina, just choose otherwise. I have friends who did the same, though one did attend Chapel Hill on academic scholarship he received while graduating in Alaska. I have another friend who is now an anesthesiologist who graduated from University of Washington's medical school.

A few remote workers will do wonders for rural America in the short and long term. Saying you need to live in a major city to be successful is hogwash.