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Rural Kansas is dying

newfoodeconomy.org

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Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#51

Post by jcranmer »

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.

Household net worth would include the value of your house and the land you own. If you're a farmer with a square mile of land (that's in the region of median farm size in Kansas), that's $1 million of net worth right there.

That median net worth sounds high, but most of that is captured as land, and the actual income and liquid wealth is quite poor.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#52

Post by mrguyman »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #4

TThe only mention of corn in the entire article: While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the crowd. Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn’t even touch upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn’t mention corn subsidies that keep corn prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how…

Sorry, but this is wrong. Wheat production is also heavily subsidized. Corn prices have also dropped precipitously since 2012.

The problems described are endemic to both crops.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#53

Post by imnotlost »

danharaj wrote: post #45
bsiemon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is interesting to consider why there is a preference to work physically together. The hive metaphor could shine some light here. Is telework effective/possible when there are workers and managers? In my experience managers resist telework. What if we had a pervasive culture of self organization and direction?

The bandwidth in person is much higher and the latency is much lower. This is particularly important to managers, yea.

For those that do seagull management... yea.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#54

Post by sykh »

ryanx435 wrote: post #35
kevin_b_er wrote: post #23

It is cruel, but as long as they continue to vote Republican, they'll see themselves stomped to bits. The reason Donn Teske can't get much out of the Republicans in the legislature is that he's no money to offer them. There's little left for the large businesses to steal from except their land and they'll get that through automation and debt. There's few public services to privatize into the hands of Republicans' spo…

I think you have drunk too much of the anti-republican and anti corporate koolaide. They are not the entirety of the problem and it's weird that you think they are. A counter example is Texas: majority Republican and a very strong and growing economy.

To be specific it's Brownback and people who think like he does when it comes to economics. Such people are overwhelmingly Republican. I don't know the percentage of people who are Republican who think similarly though so I can't say that a majority of Republicans hold similar views.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#55

Post by niftich »

jonknee wrote: post #5

This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities. We love to romantici…

I disagree. The decline of mechanized agricultural America makes for an enlightening comparison to the fate of the mechanized manufacturing Rust Belt and its eventual decline. After all, the common thread does seem to be that mechanization and automation results in productivity gains with fewer workers, but nearly everything else differs, and yet the results are quite similar.

As the article lays out, in some ways the farmers were victims of their own success, while in others they were fighting a losing demographic battle against out-migration and lack of opportunity to retain talent. Studying why things ended up this way is valuable.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#56

Post by abakker »

DanAndersen wrote: post #44
chrischen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.

Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler. I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graph…

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, emails, calendars, and checklists open all the time that it is easily more productive to add more screens.

One thing I have learned is that collaboration and individual productivity are kind of opposing forces. To do one well, I do the other poorly. As a result I split my time between them (I manage a team, so I try to push for more collaboration so that they can work efficiently more of the time). When I am working solo, I prefer the untethered laptop with one screen. When I am collaborating, I would gladly double what I have now.

I say this because I can see a day in (in my mind's eye), when I have augmented reality glasses that provide infinite, location/object-fixed screen real estate around my house and office that I can use to collaborate better, and then simply set aside when I don't need it. I really want to be free to have the room around me be a canvas on which to work and collaborate. I'm interested in VR, but I prefer the experience of the AR solutions I have seen so far since I don't need to contend as much with focus and motion sickness.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#57

Post by mwcampbell »

jpao79 wrote: post #34
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…

How do we know that remote telecommuting work isn't working? If you could telecommute to work and could live virtually anywhere, Kansas would not likely be at the top of the list due to a somewhat harsh winter climate. I'd imagine people would locate somewhere remote but with a temperate climate (i.e. Central California coast, Florida, Colorado, Western Washington, or even Costa Rica, etc.).

Surely I'm not the only one who would prefer to live and work near where I grew up, regardless of the weather.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#58

Post by walrus01 »

jonknee wrote: post #26
mobilefriendly wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the internet, small towns should be more viable in places like Kansas.

You need more than internet access (which is probably not all that great in much of rural Kansas!) for people to want to live somewhere. I mean you can get that anywhere, why pick perfectly flat wheat fields? The small towns were a byproduct of needing a lot of people to grow wheat, they weren't destinations that people chose.

If I were going to pick a boring, flat land wheat farm type of place with ultra low cost of living to telecommute from, I would not pick Kansas. You can buy a pretty decent house in Ritzville, WA for $100k, it is on I-90, and it's not a ridiculous driving distance to Spokane or Seattle. And numerous mountainous hiking/camping/skiing/4x4ing locations within a 2 hour radius.

Also in the wheat farming sort of region, some random small town 45 minutes from the moscow-pullman metro area in SE WA. Pullman is a nice welcoming college town. Can buy houses for $100-120k.

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#59

Post by enervate »

wyclif wrote: post #49
jonknee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing. It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed. Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.

Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).

Are they just sitting on it until the price goes up? Why not sell for whatever they can get and then re-invest the money?

Re: Rural Kansas is dying

#60

Post by lisper »

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…

You should put some contact info in your profile.
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