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Rural Kansas is dying

newfoodeconomy.org

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Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#91

Post by Bahamut »

chrissnell wrote: post #70

I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee sho…

For me, weather is a big issue - I’ve spent 4 years in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois, and I got sick of winter the first year I was there (two weeks where the high was -15 F, and the low was even lower than -30 F).

If the weather were better, I would seriously consider it, but I tired of suffering through that cold real fast.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#93

Post by madengr »

coleifer wrote: post #46
Retric wrote: post #2

I 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.

Not really. The typical $250k house here in JOCO would be $2M in the Bay Area.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#94

Post by theseus7 »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #14

It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them. Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international economic migrants do.

The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return.

Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move.

This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#95

Post by niftich »

sudosteph wrote: post #84

I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets? When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they…

The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit.

Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#96

Post by AdamM12 »

Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#97

Post by beaorn »

chrissnell wrote: post #70

I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee sho…

Also live outside Manhattan, KS. While there are plenty of areas of rural Kansas with poor options for Internet, some here might be surprised to know that there are a fair amount of local / rural telecoms in Kansas that have extensive fiber buildouts covering their entire service area including very small towns and rural areas.

WTC is a small local telcom in the Manhattan area with fiber built out in the nearby small cities and rural areas and they are now bringing affordable fiber with gigabit speeds into Manhattan for businesses to easily out compete expensive fiber costs and contracts from Cox and AT&T: https://www.mhk.business/trending//wtcfibermanhattan

Multiple coworking spaces have launched here in the last couple years: https://www.manhattech.com/spaces.html

Its been interesting to find out about some of the things other people are doing remotely from here.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#98

Post by dajohnson89 »

walrus01 wrote: post #61
abakker wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A personal theory of mine is that one reason telecommuting is hard is that is really screen-real-estate bound. I've been remote for 5 years, full time, and in that time I have come to rely on an iPad Pro, 2 laptops and 2 30 inch 4k monitors, all on all the time. I'm on the phone maybe 4 hours a day, sometimes up to 8. (I don't work in coding, FWIW). I have so many documents, projects, collaboration windows, schedules…

Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity. I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes…

how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#99

Post by niftich »

DanAndersen wrote: post #18

The 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…

Telecommuting "succeeded" in the form of offshoring. A seemingly dissimilar form of work, offshore workers nonetheless provide talent at a lower cost, in a locale that's far removed from the home office, but managed closely by supervisors at the remote site. Widespread telecommuting -- in the sense of independent workers with no on-site supervision -- would lead to the same labor cost arbitrage. You wouldn't be working in Kansas. You'd be out of work, with a very smart guy in Romania or Belarus doing your job.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#100

Post by walrus01 »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #98
walrus01 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity. I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes…

how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?

It's big enough that I manually tile things. The pixels per square cm (or ppi for americans) is about the same as 1920x1200, 16:10 aspect ratio, 24" display from 10 years ago. It's just a lot more real estate to work with. I'm using a fairly recent version of xfce4 and don't need to scale UI elements as would be necessary on a 28" or 30" size 4K display.
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