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Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

nytimes.com

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not "all" small towns are racist. Saying so is just ignorant. I also think of all the values small towns have these aren't the forefront.

So which small rural town do you know of that is welcoming to non native Americans, minorities, or non straight people?

I think it's more a question of the number of newcomers, and their desire to integrate into the community versus their desire to change it to be like their place of origin. Some small towns seem very happy to accept hard working immigrants who they perceive to have compatible moral values.

For non-straight, I'm occasionally surprised by how well integrated (and even beloved) some non-straight inhabitants have been in the small towns I've lived in (Wisconsin and now Vermont). The problem might be that a town which is 90% welcoming may have the effect of being extremely non-welcoming depending on how much the 10% objects and behaves.

Earlier today I posted what I thought was an interesting small town Iowa immigration story: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-27/two-towns.... I was surprised by how welcoming at least some parts of the town were.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#132
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons why I love the bay area so much is that not only is it not hostile, it's actively supportive. Like people talk about their favorite tech companies the way people talk about football teams in other parts of the country. Moving from Yolo County to Santa Clara county, for me, was going from a place where being what I am made me an outcast, to a place where being what I am made me... valued to an irrat…

I grew up in the east bay, and my experience at school wasn't great, despite being lucky enough to go to one of the most technologically advanced school districts in the state at the time. Anyway, everything else doesn't follow, because culture isn't a thing that can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of the…

>Anyway, everything else doesn't follow, because culture isn't a thing that can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of the environment.

my argument is that history and values are culture. "everything else" is just physical infrastructure, which is comparatively easy to build, compared to getting people who value the things that need to be valued if you want a tech hub.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is that while cities may be rich, the people living there are not. It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes, but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to be lower . This suggests that you have some people doing really well, and a whole lot of people doing not so great.…

That would suggest that it is not worth it for people who are only going to make a small amount of money over minimum income to move to SF, and that they shouldn't. Alternatively, put a tax on rental income then use that to found more buildings. I am not a fan of taxes, but since rents will always expand they aren't a bad subject to tax.

> That would suggest that it is not worth it for people who are only going to make a small amount of money over minimum income to move to SF

Although, to be fair, it is debatable if most high earners even benefit from the move. It is not like you can't easily make $150,000+ in rural areas as well if you have the developer chops that the Bay Area seeks.

As unfortunate as it may be, poor areas are poor largely because of who lives there and them moving does not change who they are.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you think to yourself "I spend all my time on the computer, it doesn't really matter where I live, I should go somewhere warm and cheap"

Sure. It's all about you and what works for you. No need to spend a nanosecond wondering how you impact the fabric of society by your choices. (She says as she sits here wondering if anyone will get the irony of a rebuttal saying, in essence, "I'm not callously mistreating anyone! I was only thinking about me, me, me, me, me when I made this decision! I gave others no thought At All, thus my behavior couldn't possibl…

How does your comment not also apply to any immigrant including those who move to wealthy nations?

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#135
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no.

>As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no. so, my understanding is that most of the farming that happens outside of CA, cereal crops and the like, is super capital intensive, but not very labor intensive. On the farm I was speaking of before that has been in my family for some time (though it has consolidated; there's one…

Many points. I will address them and this is just my 2c:

1. I think there has to be local food and food security in the form of local urban Ag even for big cities. Why?

2. Because. Supply chain is convoluted. We are entering a whole diff timeline when fossil fuel based Ag is just not going to be sustainable.

3. We are losing habitat and degrading environment by compartmentalising Ag. Even in rural Ag areas, watertable is polluted and the pristine fruit orchards have to be spared. Even if you practice organic ag(assuming), just the act of timing releases fungal spores from the soil causing valley fever. It’s a big deal here in central California. Children of farmers suffer high rates of asthma. They are obese and farmers are increasingly diabetic. Obesity from fast food is also a form of malnutrition.

4. It’s ironic that in the Bay Area, we have built housing on the most fertile soils in the country..the world even. It beggars belief!

5. During a drought, most of our Ag went outside as exports. Our food came from South America. The commodity crops of Midwest was exported or sold for ethanol or HFCS or as fodder for hogs which is another water thirsty commodity. Everything we do, we are not taking water into account. It’s the next ‘gold’ and will be scarce and climate change reliant. These are serious issues.

6. Another reason food must be grown in cities for local food security as well as wastage is because billions of dollars lost every year because of supply chain. Too long. Everything is from elsewhere.

7. It’s easier now because of technology and indoor Ag. We must start protecting watersheds and aquifers..rehabilitate soil and start redirecting. It’s possible now because we have knowledge and awareness ..and we have technology to make up. What we need is a change in attitude and the political will as in the people demanding politicians that we can no longer have ‘politics as usual’. Politics of water..politics of development...politics of food and trade in food.

8. Cities are quietly allowing zone changes from Ag and protected lands to real estate development. In CA..developers lobby has tremendous clout and want to challenge even CEQA..which is our California environmental quality act.

9. A lot of Ag land is actually owned by foreign investors. China, Middle East investors especially. How can Ag land be owned by foreigners? But it happens. Farm REITs are tapped into by investors for pension funds and insurance companies.

10. The entire economy of the USA must go to Gamblers Anonymous because it’s run on speculation. And it’s not even intelligent speculation.

11. If I were the Queen of the world(sadly..for the world..I am not)...I would make sure half the land is returned back to nature. I wouldn’t incentivize procreation of humans at the cost of other species. There is a certainly a cost to introducing more humans to this planet. I would look into technology to produce more without destroying our planet. Until then, we must tread carefully.

12. I don’t see a future in farming unless we automate farming. And it’s possible. But right now, it seems like what we do is just fine. It’s not because the price we have paid for farming wrt loss of soil biome, pollution from petrochemical based Ag processes and subsidied food(esp grains and dairy) and the reliance on animal based food that has introduced a greater problem than co2. Methane. Loss of carbon sequestration from lost grasslands and forests. Not to mention the staggering number of species loss and habitat destruction.

13. Without pointing fingers, we must move forward and implement new strategies. Live on half the land mass and return the rest to nature. We now have technology and know-how to do least harm and still live well.

But why don’t we do that?

Please don’t delete anything you wrote. I enjoyed this opportunity to share my thoughts(even though some of them were digressions) as they have been weighing heavily. I wanted to buy a 40-100 acre farm some five years ago and not being a generational farmer, I wanted to get my toes wet, as it were..in a small acreage. As I framed my little acre and spoke to other farmers and read more about what’s happening, I don’t think I am interested in farming unless I can do it differently. Farming as we know it is wasteful and harmful. In more ways than one.

This will likely be my last year if I can’t find a whole systems design for intelligent automation in farms. It makes me sad but I can’t be part of this circus. I am losing anyways.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#136
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near. There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has…

>Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)? If I inherited a bunch of debt-free land and equipment from my dad rather than a bun…

Perhaps I wasn't clear, but my comment wasn't really about agriculture specifically. What I meant was that you are able to make more in the Bay Area doing tech than doing tech in points outside of the Bay Area because of it being the centre of tech. Farmers are able to make more in rural areas than they would doing farming in the city because rural areas are the centre of agriculture. Farmers would not make more money farming in the Bay Area simply due to it being a densely populated area. Quite the opposite. They would take a massive pay cut if they tried.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#137
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near. There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has…

>There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? all incomes? are you seriously going to clam tha…

> all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this

Tech workers make up, what, about 5% of the workforce at best? I know software developers only make up 0.8% of the workforce. We are talking about an exceedingly small group of people. And not all of them are doing well. There are a lot of low-paid tech workers around, especially if you look beyond the Bay Area and outside of software. The lowly network admin working at Mom and Pops in Nowheresville is probably not even making the median income.

In the US, about 35% of the population graduate with a four year college degree or more, and 45% with a two year degree or more. That is a lot of people. Practically half of the population. They are in no way they are all seeing their incomes rise (beyond inflation). Incomes are stagnant and have been for many decades.

There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#138
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. It's all about you and what works for you. No need to spend a nanosecond wondering how you impact the fabric of society by your choices. (She says as she sits here wondering if anyone will get the irony of a rebuttal saying, in essence, "I'm not callously mistreating anyone! I was only thinking about me, me, me, me, me when I made this decision! I gave others no thought At All, thus my behavior couldn't possibl…

How does your comment not also apply to any immigrant including those who move to wealthy nations?

Generally speaking, we see poor people going to rich countries as trying to take advantage. This is one reason Trump wants to build a wall.

But wealthy folks going to poor countries typically don't see themselves in similar terms at all. They typically feel superior to the people they live among and feel like they are clearly and unquestionably adding value and should be appreciated, obviously.

I did some research for a piece I wrote about a massacre of Native Americans that is little known. Natives hunted, fished, etc and lived lightly on the land. They were a mobile people. They had campsites they routinely used, but no permanent settlements.

Trappers and fur traders were the first to show up. They weren't that different from the natives. The natives were tolerant and welcoming, figuring there were plenty of resources to go around.

Then settlers came. The natives still saw no problem. They welcomed them.

But settlers built fences and homes and claimed land. Once they staked out a parcel of land, they saw the natives as tresspassers.

The early settlers took the best parcels. Soon, the natives were extremely restricted in where they could hunt and gather and were consigned to the least productive tracts.

Looking back on it, in order to protect themselves, the natives really should have murdered every trapper and settler as they showed up. They shouldn't have saved the settlers at Plymouth.

The Europeans coming here did not see themselves as theives taking the lands of the peoples who already lived here. The natives had traditional areas and an alien culture. The Europeans saw only open, undeveloped land free for the taking.

As the settlements grew, the natives became increasingly impoverished and we're soon begging for food from the settlers. The American response was to send in the military and massacre them. They were viewed as behaving badly, as troublemakers, as theives, as lazy, as unproductive.

The real theives were the oblivious settlers who did not see themselves as having taken anything from the natives.

People from developed countries routinely go into less developed areas, improve their own lives at the expense of the existing locals and then frame it like the locals are uneducated, stupid, unambitious, etc. They typically fail to acknowledge that they victimized them.

It's not quite that simple. The reality is that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle requires large amounts of land to support every individual. So tribespeople that live that way often have fairly brutal practices for limiting populations. Agriculture supports larger populations on the same amount of land and modern agriculture even more so.

Life expectancy is also generally higher in developed countries for various reasons. Quality of life can also be higher, though it isn't necessarily evenly higher.

But those gains frequently come at the expense of doing terrible things to local natives, natives who often helped the intruders initially survive at all. And this is how we repay their kindness.

My mother is an immigrant. I would love to spend some time in another country again before I die. But I'm not comfortable pretending that locals should just be thrilled I'm there, bringing my money and superior ways with me and so forth.

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#139
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries. The bulk of the massive subsidy received by farms is crop insurance premium assistance though. No doubt a huge benefit if you have a weather disaster, but not anything you see directly until you have a disaster, and that only provides stability in those freak years. I am not sure that alone is keeping…

Crop insurance is 8.5 billion out of $23 billion in subsidies directly given to farmers. Divide by 3.2 million farmers and that’s 7,200$ per year each.

[deleted]

Re: Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas

#140
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which small rural town do you know of that is welcoming to non native Americans, minorities, or non straight people?

I think it's more a question of the number of newcomers, and their desire to integrate into the community versus their desire to change it to be like their place of origin. Some small towns seem very happy to accept hard working immigrants who they perceive to have compatible moral values. For non-straight, I'm occasionally surprised by how well integrated (and even beloved) some non-straight inhabitants have been in…

I think it's more a question of the number of new comers, and their desire to integrate into the community versus their desire to change it to be like their place of origin.

How will a non Christian “integrate” into rural America and “share their values”, by converting to Christianity? How will either a gay couple or an interracial couple “integrate” where some Christians think their “lifestyle” is a sin?

https://www.newsweek.com/20-percent-america-thinks-interraci...

But if you are a really lucky minority like I was and went to a predominately White Christian conservative school and knew the music, the hobbies, and “integrated” well enough you might get the reward of “not being like most Black people” or “being really articulate”. But still, don’t try to date our daughter.

As far as your article that says just the opposite of what you intended.

When you walk out here in the central park, if it’s a warm day, they’re sitting around on benches out here. I mean, it’s like Europe. They don’t stay in their apartments. They come out in the street, and they sit around and talk, and it’s all in Spanish.

They aren’t doing anything illegal. They are speaking to each other in their native language but it makes other people uncomfortable.

I don’t speak a foreign language, but I’m pretty good at “code switching”. I speak a lot differently when I’m at work where a lot of my coworkers are non native English speakers - I don’t use a lot of colloquialism, I speak slower, and I don’t reference a lot of pop references from 10 years ago. I also speak differently when I am back home - I am not as attentive about not letting my southern accent out.

When I am around my Black friends who are all professional software developers who live in the burbs, the last thing I am concerned about is “integrating” into my surroundings.

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