Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you, and you are often living year to year on whatever your income is (which you’ll need to use a lot to either pay down loans or save so you don’t have to take out loans). And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go?

Old farmers can probably retire, but what about young ones? They often just give up and move. This has been talked about a lot in the last decade, there is no big mystery or open question about it.

Other countries have it even worse than America; eg Japan.

The appearance of opportunities. Sometimes the opportunities are real, usually not. Plenty of people move to California in hopes of becoming a star, where opportunities are abound, but only end up in dead-end jobs. It is quite likely that those people would have been far better off in a mundane job where competition isn't fierce and where living costs won't destroy you.

> this never had anything to do with “fashion”

Fashion is very much driven by the rich, through hopes that dressing like the rich will result in riches. It has been for as long as we have historical records about fashion. Nobody goes out of their way to dress like a hobo, unless the rich are dressing like hobos for some reason.

An elected politician is not a monarch or a benevolent dictator or an altruistic philanthropist. He is a representative of those who voted for him.

And re: why is this wrong? Because the politicians necessarily have to lie and or fudge facts or back track on promises because there is a fundamental conflict of interest.

A great example of this is California Proposition 1A aka Governer Brown’s bullet train to nowhere. Voters approved $9 billion bond money in 2008. The estimate is 77 billion now. And nothing is done.

That’s money we could have spent locally and to improve our roads and infrastructure. There is no more local governance and only the tyranny of regional governance. We are not homogenized constituents and our needs vary greatly.

Another example is school funding and LCFF..local control funding formula. Which is anything but as it’s a melting pot of school funding and then redistribution. Schools in highly taxed..high density cities are deteriorating with their infrastructure crumbling. With education tied to property taxes, there is so much pressure to create more and more housing stock in Silicon Valley towns that are already beyond carrying capacity. Afterall, a 2 million $ matchbox condo home sold in Cupertino delivers more tax $$$ to the state coffers than a home in Manteca..so why build roads and maintain freeways and create networked public transport to allow the work force to move freely?

My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the evenings.

Being an obvious foreigner can signal you have money and power without you having to say a word about it. In contrast, relocating to a small town in the US wouldn't bring such perks of establishing that the poverty stricken locals should defer to you and cater to you. Instead, you would be an outsider trying to "prove" yourself and get an in socially.

Going to a less developed foreign country allows some people to impose whatever mental models they desire on the landscape without having to try to understand local culture or respect it. To their mind, a less developed country is a social clean slate and folks their should just be grateful a rich Westerner has showed up with money to spend.

If you do run into problems, you can blame it on cultural misunderstanding and try to get a free "out" that no one would give you in a small town in your own country because you are expected to know better than that, even though the laws vary to some degree from state to state within the US.

For example, articles about Westerners drinking alcohol in a Middle Eastern country and being arrested for it are generally viewed sympathetically in the west. Readers are generally on the side of the person who drank alcohol and are critical of the "backwards" country forbidding alcohol. In contrast, if you smoke marijuana someplace where it isn't legal in the US, you get vastly less sympathy from most folks because you are supposed to know better than that.

The idea of moving to some other country that is super cheap and where the living is expected to be easy if you are a Westerner is rooted in historical colonialism. It's really rooted in an expectation of taking advantage of the locals and of their country while telling yourself you are doing only good things for these uneducated heathens -- so viewed because they are not educated in the same things you are educated in, a point of view that stands in part because of your own unquestioned ignorance of their culture and history that you probably think isn't worth studying.

I have considered relocating to another, cheaper country, both because I come from a multi-cultural household and haven't been out of the US in a long time and because I currently have a limited income and the idea of magically solving my financial problems by moving someplace vastly cheaper sounds like a wonderful easy answer. So I understand the appeal.

But I think a lot of people make it work for reasons I find problematic and can't mentally replicate, in part because my mother is an immigrant, so I can't manage to see the local economy as some kind of clean slate that I can impose myself upon and that appears to be a large part of the appeal for some people.