131–140 of 318 posts
Hey we should talk! The county I live in has pretty good fiber with a population under 20k. I’ve been tossing around the idea of creating a curated list of properties for sale here. There isn’t a tech community here yet but the property prices are cheap ($325k for a house and 40 acres, also has city water). What made you interested in rural communities? What would make you likely to move to one? It’s quite a differen…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just wanted to say your walls of text are very offensive, inaccurate, and read as someone who has never lived in a rural community.
Wow
I'm also a big fan of StrongTowns, and I don't think what the grandparent is describing accurately reflects rural life.
> I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city In a lot of cases this is true - and it's not just about tech. Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity. Cities also mean that there's often a critical mass for many interests and minority groups. Are you LGBT? Are you a religious or racial minori…
> I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city In a lot of cases this is true - and it's not just about tech. Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity. Cities also mean that there's often a critical mass for many interests and minority groups. Are you LGBT? Are you a religious or racial minori…
Crime is lower, family activities are more readily available.
If you like outdoor activities, hobbies that require lots of space, or less light and noise pollution, rural areas are nice.
There are advantages for both. You can be happy in either location, so long as you play to the strengths of your locale.
There's a small village (250 people) in rural New Mexico that until recently was home to both the 2nd programmer at Amazon and the main inventor of the Kindle. That was close to 1% of residents, but the kindle guy left :) More seriously, I'd say that I love doing "tech work" out here. Almost none of my neighbors know anything about what I do, and most of them don't want to know. Suits me fine. I'd rather talk about t…
Uk Oxford and Cambridge are bona fide tech hubs, and towns of ~150k people but in either you can totally live in a village with a 20-30 min bike commute. We’re talking cows in pastures and dark skies. Hell, I know someone who helped raised some cattle on a common in return for a share of the meat... while actually within Oxford City boundaries.
Can you actually see the Milky Way anywhere in Oxford? I was never able to when I lived there.
There's a small village (250 people) in rural New Mexico that until recently was home to both the 2nd programmer at Amazon and the main inventor of the Kindle. That was close to 1% of residents, but the kindle guy left :) More seriously, I'd say that I love doing "tech work" out here. Almost none of my neighbors know anything about what I do, and most of them don't want to know. Suits me fine. I'd rather talk about t…
What part of New Mexico?
> I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city In a lot of cases this is true - and it's not just about tech. Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity. Cities also mean that there's often a critical mass for many interests and minority groups. Are you LGBT? Are you a religious or racial minori…
Not to fault you, but you're a seriously urban-centric thinker. Rural productivity is vital to urban concentration. Raw material does not come from the depths of the subway system, nor do the land and seaports magically produce goods. Food, fiber, fuel, etc come from the rural reaches. Flip this on it's head and we see that rural communities are providing a huge subsidy to urban communities in the form of labor and commodities.
There is a gross misunderstanding between urban and rural citizens of the complexity of their interactions, and it's near the core of our current political polarization.
> I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city In a lot of cases this is true - and it's not just about tech. Rural communities are often more religious, more conservative, lower income, lower educated, and have a lot less access to opportunity. Cities also mean that there's often a critical mass for many interests and minority groups. Are you LGBT? Are you a religious or racial minori…
It seems peculiar to me that there is no standard process for the winding down of city governance when population dwindles. It's probably just the human element. I don't mean to be promoting some sort of libertarian "self-governance is great!" philosophy, just thinking out loud. Imagine a city building game where city expenses increase with each population milestone (due to new positions in local government, new depa…