Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 164 posts

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#71

Post by jonstewart »

rayiner wrote: post #68
jonstewart wrote: post #67

There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired. I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the 25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps upload. There’s a cell tower only…

Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit. What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in…

Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased.

The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is another matter.

Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots of places it doesn’t.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#72

Post by hnaccy »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #69
ForHackernews wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town America to replicate those experiences.

There are probably a lot of other reasons that it would not be socially acceptable to admit to. 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" you…

I don't see why it must be exploitive, it's just natural extension of moving within your native country to maximize opportunity/cost of living.

I imagine most expats aren't in the business of resource extraction like old colonialism.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#73

Post by paulsutter »

ascar wrote: post #58
paulsutter wrote: post #41

More remote-first companies are the best way to bring jobs everywhere. Remote-first working is a separate and new skill that needs to be developed.

I'm not sure that there is enough demand for remote work. Many people enjoy and even require the social interactions provided at a workplace and don't want solitary remote work.

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — Western Union internal memo, 1876.

“The problem of TV was that people had to glue their eyes to a screen, and that the average American wouldn’t have time for it.” − The New York Times, 1939

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#74

Post by ForHackernews »

Retric wrote: post #51
ForHackernews wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town America to replicate those experiences.

Exotic locations stop being so after you live in them for a few years. Time zone issues can end up as a real pain, which makes the US rather appealing. Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people actually doing so.

Hawai'i is "surprisingly affordable" only relative to the Bay Area. All labor is at first-world American rates and so many things have to be shipped in.

Maybe it's an option for wealthy Silicon Valley escapees, but it's surely not a solution for the economic woes of middle America.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#75

Post by seanmcdirmid »

randomdata wrote: post #62
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very well studied and the effect is very real, see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/best-states... 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…

> You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you There are other ways to acquire capital. I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence. > And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go? The neighbour retires. If you are the neighbour, why would you sell…

> I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence.

That is just the Green Acres phenomenon, they are doing it because they have capital from other professions, not because they make a lot in farming.

You have a very strange interpretation of farming in the USA, if you could provide some links/articles that back up your understand, I would take your argument more seriously. I can find a hundred articles on why farming is dying profession, and not any on why it is booming one as you seem to suggest.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#76

Post by CalRobert »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #65
nindalf wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So politicians have to deliver Why do they have to deliver for people who don't vote for them? If they're some altruist who wants to do the Right Thing (TM), wouldn't they get replaced real quick by someone who knows who their constituents really are? But even assuming that they do, why is that so wrong? You make it sound like it's terrible to think about our neighbours, whether they can vote or not.

They deliver promises to people who can’t vote because they spend money and earn money and pay taxes anyways. 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…

I see that you're not a fan, but there are many among us who support HSR and more housing in places like Cupertino. The fact that it's $2 million indicates it's desperately needed.

Though I agree that HSR has been suboptimal. I'd have preferred to have a massive improvement in medium speed rail than a focus on HSR specifically - just make the Coast Starlight take 8 hours from downtown SF to DTLA, not 13, and you'd have a reasonably viable service.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#77

Post by DoreenMichele »

hnaccy wrote: post #72
DoreenMichele wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are probably a lot of other reasons that it would not be socially acceptable to admit to. 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" you…

I don't see why it must be exploitive, it's just natural extension of moving within your native country to maximize opportunity/cost of living. I imagine most expats aren't in the business of resource extraction like old colonialism.

it's just natural extension of moving within your native country to maximize opportunity/cost of living

Extending something far enough can fundamentally change it's character. This is why we have concepts like predatory lending, a term we apply to loans whose terms are naturally extended to maximize returns.

Economic extraction doesn't have to involve resource extraction of the exact same type as old colonialism.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#78

Post by seanmcdirmid »

randomdata wrote: post #63
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn’t that they are copying the rich, they are going from places where there are few opportunities to where their are many opportunities. The Great Migrations, for example, involved African Americans moving from poor southern areas to rich northern cities because they had nothing going on back home, just pointless sharecropping. And you know what: their descendants are probably much richer than of those who stayed…

> It isn’t that they are copying the rich, they are going from places where there are few opportunities to where their are many opportunities. 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 bette…

Moving to california because you want to be a star is not "fashion", its a dream.

> 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.

Or they would have regretted the rest of their lives not taking chances when they were young instead doing poop work on the farm or working a dead end job in a small town.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#79

Post by rayiner »

jonstewart wrote: post #71
rayiner wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable. You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit. What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a differentiating factor that even someone in…

Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was until after we purchased. The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland. Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other of 1600. In…

I'm trying to tease out what you value, in an economic sense. Khanna is proposing to spend a bunch of taxpayer money building fiber in rural areas, in hopes that it helps economically revitalize these places. But you're someone who already works in tech, and judges a house to be "closer to the ideal across a range of factors" even though it has nothing faster than DSL. If someone who already has a need for fast connectivity won't use connectivity as a dispositive factor in deciding where to buy a house, how valuable can fiber access really be? If people won't pick Town A over Town B because Town A has much better connectivity, what does that say about the value of Town A spending a bunch of tax dollars to build a fiber network?

I think this is an important point, because we shouldn't make policy based on platitudes. If fiber really has the value the platitudes ascribe to it, we would see places with fiber being measurably more desirable than places without it.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#80

Post by randomdata »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #75
randomdata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you There are other ways to acquire capital. I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence. > And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go? The neighbour retires. If you are the neighbour, why would you sell…

> I see a lot of people who were doctors, lawyers, and tech professionals in the farming business. That is probably not a coincidence. That is just the Green Acres phenomenon, they are doing it because they have capital from other professions, not because they make a lot in farming. You have a very strange interpretation of farming in the USA, if you could provide some links/articles that back up your understand, I w…

> That is just the Green Acres phenomenon

I am not entirely familiar with the reference. I have heard of the show, but never seen it. But indeed they are able to start farming because they are more likely to have the capital than someone who is barely making ends meet. Nobody is questioning that it takes capital to start farming.

> You have a very strange interpretation of farming in the USA, if you could provide some links/articles that back up your understand

Well, my understanding is based on being a farmer. I have no idea what I would link to? Anything I have ever read about farming online is so dumbed down that it is basically worthless. It is a lot like when the mainstream media tries to write about tech.

> and not any on why it is booming one as you seem to suggest.

I don't know if it is booming. It can be lucrative. It is certainly not for everyone, but what is?

Post reply on HN