> "We feel the prejudice in the cities against supporting small towns"
No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.
Rural Kansas is dying
41–50 of 160 posts
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#42The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point…
How do we know that remote telecommuting work isn't working? If you could telecommute to work and could live virtually anywhere, Kansas would not likely be at the top of the list due to a somewhat harsh winter climate. I'd imagine people would locate somewhere remote but with a temperate climate (i.e. Central California coast, Florida, Colorado, Western Washington, or even Costa Rica, etc.).
Your argument doesn't make sense. The OP says he himself wants to live in a small Kansas town, but can't because it's so difficult to find remote work. I'm sure the majority of people agree with your statement, but not everybody.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'd love to live in a small mountain town, but finding remote work (even as a software developer) is significantly more difficult than finding in-person work in a larger city.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#43The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point…
It is interesting to consider why there is a preference to work physically together. The hive metaphor could shine some light here. Is telework effective/possible when there are workers and managers? In my experience managers resist telework.
What if we had a pervasive culture of self organization and direction?
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree that the promise of remote work hasn’t quite panned out, yet. However, the article is also noting something related: > Today, operators sitting at computers hundreds of miles from the farm can easily steer gigantic harvesters via satellite. Kansas’s agricultural landscape needs fewer and fewer human caretakers. In a way, they are realizing “telecommuting” for harvester operators and impacting local population.…
The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.
Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler.
I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graphics/gamedev/VR work itself. When working on complex graphics-related projects, you still have to download and build someone else's code; nothing yet that's as easy as just going over to someone else's cubicle and looking at their build on their monitor. Maybe one day we'll have a distributed multi-user layer on top of the Unity Editor or its equivalent.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#45The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point…
It is interesting to consider why there is a preference to work physically together. The hive metaphor could shine some light here. Is telework effective/possible when there are workers and managers? In my experience managers resist telework. What if we had a pervasive culture of self organization and direction?
The bandwidth in person is much higher and the latency is much lower. This is particularly important to managers, yea.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#46I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen. PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.
Johnson county, in Kansas City, has crazy property valuations. Lawrence, where the university of Kansas is, similarly high. So that's not a very meaningful measure to kansans.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#47It is cruel, but as long as they continue to vote Republican, they'll see themselves stomped to bits. The reason Donn Teske can't get much out of the Republicans in the legislature is that he's no money to offer them. There's little left for the large businesses to steal from except their land and they'll get that through automation and debt. There's few public services to privatize into the hands of Republicans' spo…
I think you have drunk too much of the anti-republican and anti corporate koolaide. They are not the entirety of the problem and it's weird that you think they are. A counter example is Texas: majority Republican and a very strong and growing economy.
It's entirely possible that there's an area the size of Kansas inside Texas that has experienced negative growth in the last few years.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#48This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and across many industries.
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.
> Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing. It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed. Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.
Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).
Re: Rural Kansas is dying
#50I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen. PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.
That's probably because all those farmers own land and farming equipment. So it has a lot of net worth (capital), but return on capital isn't very large. It's kind of like people who have lived in the Bay Area for years and whose house is now worth a million or two. Yes, they are millionaires, but that capital is only useable (in the "I'm rich!" sense) if they sell their house and move somewhere cheaper. And if farming is your career, you'd have to switch careers to use that net worth, which is daunting and maybe not very likely to be successful.