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Outsourcing To Rural America
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is running a story about Rural Sourcing, a company attempting to make outsourcing to rural America as cost effective as sending jobs to India."
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Treat them like ignorant foreigners, so why not?
I'll move from Manhattan to somewhere in hicksville for a job in no time. Fresh air, no subways, no bums. I'm down. Where do I sign up?
What I'd like to know is how much money the "inconvenience" factor counts for . . . Sounds like a catch-all category for costs that is used to magiacally make rural sourcing as cheap as outsourcing to India.
Yet another language barrier to surmount.
At least the guys in Mumbai are *trying* to enunciate.
(I grew up somewhere that has a native accent thicker than Brooklyn's, and currently live in North Carolina, so I have a legal right to make these jokes)
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Like you, I am from the rural midwest, but was blessed with the opportunity to move back to my hometown and run a good sized network.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
The difference? You can follow your job to Indiana. Even better is that rural areas have lower costs of living, thus making $50,000/yr a very good wage to have.
Honestly, this isn't anything new. In Wisconsin, we had several big companies move (American Family Insurance, Lands End, etc.) because they could run their operations far cheaper while still being within driving distance of Chicago. It's really a win-win situation for everyone.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
As the self proclaimed slashdot rep from oklahoma, I would like to announce that Oklahoma gladly welcomes our Rural Insourcing Overlords.
Dell just located a 700 person call center here and plans to double it's size...... Come on over...
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley: Get paid $80K, pay 28% federal tax plus 9-10% state/city tax. House costs $500K-$1M.
East Buttfuck, Wyoming: Get paid $50K. Pay 25% federal tax plus 0.0% state tax. House costs $60K-$100K.
If you've saved enough money for a down payment in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can buy a house for cash in rural America. And if you've been there long enough that you actually own your house in the People's Republic of Kalifornia, you can sell it, buy a house and a Ferrari, and have change left over for a fucking Porsche in rural America. That's right.
Wanna visit the opera? Hop in the Ferrari on Friday after work, tear up the asphalt (long live long straight highways featuring speed limits defined only by the words "reasonable and prudent" -- it's like the American Autobahn!), party your ass off all weekend, and come home on Sunday.
One look at the horrible things he's done to a Ferrari should make any self-respecting geek aspire to make John Romero our bitch. The best part about rural America isn't that a middle-class IT geek can enjoy such a lifestyle -- it's that he or she can pay for it on the interest and tax savings alone.
Who is John Galt? When you leave a high-tax state for rural America, you are.
No, land of the fundamentalist Christians. They all used to be Democrats!
Yes, it's true, they used to be democrats, 40 or 50 years ago. But now that the Dems make their left wing social platform such a large part of their platform, they're becoming republicans.
They're tired of hearing that America sucks and that people who still hold onto the idea of morals and values are a bunch of bigoted idiots.
People who mock those in rural areas really need to get an f'en clue. Most of the idiots on the coasts have hardly been outside their metro areas, and when they do leave it's just to go to some other city. The people you mock are the most honest, real, hard working people in this country.
"If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a hand gun" - Dan Rather
I live in a small town of about 600 people. A small shop like this (even just 10 workers and a single support person) would make a big positive difference in our local economy.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Face the facts. If you say that India is a outsourcing success story, look at the reasons why. On average, goods in India, barring housing and cars, cost only 20% (or less) of what it costs here in USA. On top of it, the standards of a good life and luxury are far lower than in the US.
In California, you call yourself middle-class if you have a 0.5 mil house, a boat, 2 cars etc. In India, most middle class folks consider a car with a boot as a luxury car (i'm not joking, Hyundai Accent, Ford Ikon, Fiat Siena etc. are considered high-end luxury cars). Even a person driving a small hatch-back considers himself/herself as having acheived something. This is why the big multinationals can afford to pay 10% of what they pay in the US, and still manage to retain a happy workforce!
Add to that, an abundance of intelligent, hard-working, English speaking people, extremely willing to slog for 12 hours a day so that they can save enough over 3-5 years to afford a Maruti Suzuki 800 (yes, it's a ~780 cc car), who can compete with that? Yes, there's still issues, such as infrastructure, accents, timezone differences, etc. and lots of bad apples in the workforce too, but it still doesnt overpower the cost advantage.
It's a bit like how the x86 architecture took over the computer world. People assumed initially, and rightly too, that x86 was inefficient and too cheap. What they didn't count on was that as x86 sold more and more, it also innovated and improved, and very soon, offered a double-whammy cost AND performance advantage over the other proprietary systems. Again, people pad up the costs by factoring communication cost, travel cost etc. What they don't realize is that these costs are firstly, marginal, and secondly, reducing over time.
The cost of living in the midwest or in rural America might be somewhat less than the metros or the coasts, but it cannot compete with the cost advantage offered by countries like India, Taiwan, China etc.
IMHO, rural america can compete effectively with other IT companies. Only, they need to sing a different song. They have to be flexible and play on their natural strengths and not on their weaknesses. For example, if a lot of techies in the small towns and villages got together, formed a virtual company or organization, and offered standardized software solutions to local businesses and institutions, there is NO way that the big city businesses or another country could compete with them. Don't compete on cost, compete on value.
In India, we get that country's best and brightest doing our tech support -- the equivalent of our best universities' students, looking not only for good jobs, but hands-on experience with users for a future career in IT.
But in the US, we wind up with the dregs of society. I'm sorry to say it, but it's true. Our best and brightest do not need to take tech support jobs, nor do they remain in places like rural Mississippi.
So if you're wondering where those errors on your credit report come from, originating from typos and common misspellings...
Look, I'm all for reducing the amount of profanity in the course of normal conversation, but if you mean bitch, then say bitch. Otherwise, use another, perfectly valid, word such as complain, gripe, whine, or even speaking in an extremely negative manner. Creating a klunky euphemism is just, well, klunky.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
I don't think the idea is to pay Americans the same wage as Indians. I think the idea is to have the same effective cost per employee. The fact that Indians are half-way around the world tends to result in a lot of hidden costs. These hidden costs add up and make an Indian worker just as expensive as a cheap American worker.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Even better is that rural areas have lower costs of living, thus making $50,000/yr a very good wage to have.
Of course, those same jobs that paid $50,000 in the big city are only going to be offered for $40,000 in the rural areas.
Sure, you'll be able to afford more housing for the buck, but lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products) cost about the same all over the country. You could actually end up with less buying power by following a job out to greener pastures.
Some of us in the rural midwest speak perfectly good english.
;-)
You can't always say that about the urban northeast
I've lived in rural and I've lived in cities. I prefer cities. Rural people do, indeed, *tend* to be honest and real hard working. There are good reasons for this. They also tend to be bigoted and intolerant of strangers. (And there are good reasons for this.)
City people *tend* to be different along those axii, and there are reasons for that. Good, logical reasons. (Like they encounter new people and ideas more frequently.)
I like and admire honesty. I try to be honest. This doesn't cause me to admire bigotry. And I find bigotry too high a price to pay for achieving honesty. (Also an unnecessary price.)
As for hard working...people who are desperate will work themselves to death. That's no moral good. People who are working for themselves will work quite hard for years on end. That may or may not be a moral good, but it's also enlightened self interest. People who are being taken advantage of will slack off whenever the slave master isn't looking. And I consider THIS to be a moral good.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If you look at the school system ratings you will find that best schools tend to be in the more rural states. Here is the top ten by % of students that graduate. Only one state New Jersey could be called urban.
Graduating a higher percentage doesn't mean better schools. In fact, it could mean lower standards...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
This is a topic which has been brought up on /. before, however, I think it is important as the US dollar is currently tanking. I always hear about sending jobs to China and India, but really, why not West Virginia.
I am orignially from a medium town in WV. It is rather poor, but there is a University , we have highways and a small airport. Columbus, Cincinatti, Lexington, Pittsburgh, and a number or cities in North Carolina are not that far away.
We have all the same stores in the Mall that bigger cities do, and we can get stuff shipped from newegg.com just as fast as anyone else. There are virtually NO taxes and the air is relatively clean. There is a low crime rate, you can build a mansion for the same price as a shack in larger cities, and you can camp in your back yard (literally depending on where you live). The water tastes good out of the faucet, the education system is decent (low numbers of students per teacher as well). You can even invest your money in the same stock market as people in larger metropolitian areas if you are so inclined.
Sure you will make less money per hour, but who cares....In the end you will have more. I say tax the shit out of companies that outsource to other countries and even better make them pay American minimum wages to workers there. After all they are working for an American company, dont they deserve to make at least an American wage?
Now, I'm not going to put up a big fuss about the advantages and disadvantages of any kind of outsourcing, whether you source jobs from india or Tennessee. But I will take exception to several posts here praising the idea of moving to some rural area and getting away from the city.
I'm not following anyone anywhere damnit. I like where I live. My family likes where they live, and damn a CEO to hell if he doesn't have some small sense of true guilt at the pain he would cause my family if we had to move.
Mothers and fathers don't always work at the same company, so if you move one parent, the other must follow, or the first one must quit and find a new position. And kids establish a lot of bonds in the school they go to, and uprooting most kids like that is emotionally distressful, no matter how trivial such things are to adults.
The problem with "outsourcing" is that it's done for only one reason, to cut costs. Sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's bad. And sometimes it hurts people, and sometime's it doesn't. Change always hurts, but let's get some balance and empathy here in the posts.
Everyone's so excited about this, but this scares me just as much as outsourcing to india. In fact it scares me more, because it's even more tempting and easy for small companies to take advantage of. I don't want to move to the deep south, I hate it there, and I'm presently very pissed at southerners for handing the election to Bush. I'll stay right where I am thank you.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I worked at a development shop in Little Rock, Arkansas for a couple of years before getting married and moving to a very large U.S. city (I think it is #4 currently) when my wife was accepted to medical school here, so I think I'm qualified to do a bit of comparison.
I think that there are a lot of cities in the U.S. in the 100,000 - 200,000 population range that people don't really consider for whatever reason, either as places to live or for corporations. Little Rock, for example, had most of the shopping, dining, etc. of a larger city but without nearly as much pollution and traffic and with a lower cost of living to boot. To respond specifically to some of the comments I've seen in this thread so far: we had Starbucks, pizza delivery, clubs/raves (if that is your thing), a symphony orchestra, and a minor league baseball team (the only thing that I would miss if I moved back would be the professional sports).
I think there is rural, as in one gas station, one stoplight, and a Sonic...and then there is "rural", as in "not one of the 50 largest cities in the US", and I think businesses would do well to look more closely at the latter.
I think the bigger point is that you are more than welcome to sue the ghosts of Infantry's pasts for delivering government-supported beatdowns and the ghosts of many now-dead politicians for their bad decisions. But your ability to compensate for past offenses decreases over time because everybody who was actually hurt as well as anybody related to decisions made is dead. Somebody probably got away with murdering one of my ancestors back in history. If I walk past their descendent now, am I entitled to any sort of compensation? Will I even be able to know that they killed my ancestor long ago?
Gentoo Sucks
I've been working with outsourcing for over a year and 1/2 now. We've been talking about how we should move to some rural area with low taxes, property values, and housing costs for a year now. It just makes sense IF you can get quality individuals working for you. And it will happen more frequently as fed up highly talented individuals get tired of the rat race and decide to move somewhere, uh, less rat racy. I know of one person on the team who now works from Idaho after moving from Chicago. Do the math, Idaho cost of living is < Chicago and they experienced no pay decreases! Another person moved from Chicago to rural Wisconsin and kept the same pay. If the company is willing, you'll see a migration from the cities to the small towns over the next few years. I personally think it's great. The 80's and 90's were an era of migration from these rural areas where the jobs had been drying up rapidly (I'm a case in point, couldn't get a job in my hometown doing what I do, still can't). Hopefully that trend will reverse somewhat. America is loosing it's small town / rural heritage and I believe that heritage is part of what made America a great place in the first place.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
And US citizens wonder why so many want to kill you, at whatever cost to themselves...
This is exactly what the country needs: "Blue" business/culture centers connecting directly with "Red" labor centers. More intercommunication is the only way to bridge the unsustainably deep divides between Blue/Red communities. American strength in diversity relies also on rural areas, perhaps homogenous internally, but part of the landscape that makes America a microcosm of the world. Why should American globalism rest on a hollow foundation, ignoring the interior solely to harness the exterior?
--
make install -not war
Bad public schools are a myth. There are, of course, exceptions, but it is not the schools that are bad, but the parents.
Private schools appear to be better than public schools simply because the parents care enough to pay for what they percieve to be better than what they could get for free. These parents that care take part in their child's education to a much greater extent.
In my home town there were 4 large public high schools and 1 large private high school, all 5 about the same size (there were perhaps a half dozen small private high schools as well). The public high school in the nice part of town produced 12 national merit scholars the year I graduated, the private high school only produced 4, the other 3 public high schools combined to produce 6. The funding and administrators were the same for all 4 public schools. What could account for the difference in performance? I submit that it was the families. The well to do are more likely to be well educated, the well educated tend to care more about their kids education, those who care about education tend to have kids that do well in school, because they put an emphasis on it at home, they help their kids with their home work.
Do you honestly think privitization will solve anything?
Do you think kids who don't do their homework in public school will do it in private school?
Do you think parents who don't go to public school PTA meetings, will go to private school ones?
The only thing that will happen when we start sending kids who were failing in public school to private school in large numbers, is that the private schools will suck too.
-Tamman2000, proud product of Peoria public schools, district 150.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
...would have a point. Unfortunately for your argument it isn't.
It's true that the US and Canada did conquer many tribes and take away a lot of land, but most of the remaining tribes weren't conquered, rather they tended to settle with the US and agreed to a series of treaties. Eventually the US government decided to settle with the tribes uniformly so they could co-exist with the states, while being bound by federal law.
Now, if I can address you last comment.
Personally, I think the Indians should feel lucky that we gave them anything at all instead of just assimilating them into our society as just one more ethnic group in the already-growing melting pot.
If you were an Indian, that statement would probably sound a lot like: Personally, I think the Jews should feel lucky we didn't gas and incinerate them all.
While saying circumstances could always be worse is technically a valid point, it's appalling and bad form to use it to play down culpability for any atrocity.
I don't wonder why, I know why: they want what we have.
Sure, you'll be able to afford more housing for the buck, but lifestyle items (cars, DVDs, even most food products
That really depends on what you buy. While it is true that a car will be relativly more expensive with a lower cost of living, you must also factor in that insurance rates are consideably higher, and fuel is probably more expensive than rual areas. Also parking costs are either non existant or trivial. For the rest of the stuff, they purchasing power just does not offset how much you save in cost of living - unless you have very expensive taists or buy a LOT of shit.
Probably the only thing to REALLY watch out for is debt. Moving from the big city with a lot of debt is not going to help much if you cut your pay. Suddenly college loans are the same, but you can't contribute as much money back. Unless of course you are aquiring debt because you happen to live in the city...
Cool! I'll be by soon to shoot you and take your land. You might mind, but I don't care! Fuck you, you fucking fuck! It'll be mine soon, 'cuz whoever has the most guns wins! I'll also kill your whole family, just for kicks. Yeehaw!
Nope. Many of those same states also tend to have high ACT/SAT scores too. The schools are certainly not the giant kid warehouses that you'll find in many metro areas. It's not uncommon to have teachers that not only taught your older siblings, but probably taught or went to school with your parents (depending on the subject, with the same books - our algebra teacher didn't want to get new books. The 20-30 year old ones were still in good shape and had harder problems than any of the new ones). The good ones will use this knowledge to make sure the students do not slack off. If you don't pass a grade, they have no problem keeping you at that grade level until you do. There was a new kid from the east coast one year. He was 17, but had just been passed along from grade to grade. Once he got to our school, the teachers moved him back a grade level until he was actually competent with the subject matter. Sure, he was 6 years older than everyone else in the class, but for the first time anyone gave a damn that he actually learned something in school. Not to mention that in many rural areas, the students have a good motivation to study hard: not a lot of jobs.
I never knew of anyone at home that couldn't read or write. It was unthinkable. I'm in a metro area now were at least 1/4 of the population is illiterate - and that's not counting the illegal immigrants.
You wrote:
/rant.
Anyone get the feeling the uber rich of the world are majorly screwing the middle-class and trying to make the divide bigger.
Maybe come next election, the people should vote out all the corporate ho's in congress, senate and the white house. It's time the people get represented, instead of getting shafted. Most of the time projects fail because of bad managers. Who are the bad managers? The guys at the top define the culture and it goes down from there. Those people come from rich families with lots of inherited wealth. So while these idiot asswipes fire a bunch of workers for cheaper workers, they double their own salaries.
throughout history, it's always been a struggle between the rich and poor. any pretense otherwise is wishful thinking. The uber rich can get richer by farming out the work to other countries.
I think you have it exactly right. This article no doubt is a product conceived and created in some corporate think tank, designed to be a smoke screen, create some sort of wedge between sets of Americans. Just another foul product of the rightwing propaganda machine, funded by billions of dollars from billionaires and megacorporations. The rightwing propaganda machine consists mainly of think tanks and foundations (Heritage, Cato, American Enterprise Institute, et al.), and has thousands of scholars, writers, media consultants, etc, in its pay.
What is really sad is that you seem to be the only one here who has seen this article for what it is.
See my homepage (via my sig) for more on the rightwing propaganda machine.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I live in the State of Washington where indian casinos are all over the place. I have to say that the casinos don't help the average indian very much.
The tribal elders get a nice kick back from the big gaming companys ( Trump, etc.) but that doesn't pull the average indian up any. They may get a yearly profit sharing check but that just means that they can have a plasma screen and DirectTV in the single-wide. Few of the actual members of the tribe get good jobs out of the deal. You will see a few dealers that are indians and the pit boss may be an indian but those are not jobs with a future. Not jobs that are going to create a strong middle class in the tribe. Not jobs that are going get their kids interested in collage.
I rarely gamble in them as I find them depressing.
I think that the tribes would do much better for their people if they could get some kind of high tech industry to set up on their land. Some of them own very valuable land like big lots in the middle of Tacoma. (small city to the south)
If the tribal elders could convice Dell or Google or Gateway or Intel or someone like that to lease a building and hire/train/educate the members of the tribe in exchage for a sweetheart deal they would be doing a lot more good for their people then just setting up another casino.
Every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward - T. Edison
Now if we can just change a few tax loopholes to make a Government incentive to move to the country instead of over seas? Who knows? We might start another Civil War!
But really, as jobs move to rural areas, housing prices will increase there, and tech jobs will probably wind up moving from town to town, just as textile jobs used to when I was a kid in Alabama. A town would offer little better deal and the company would move a few miles to take advantage of it. I don't think anybody won in that game, except the lawyers of course.
Well, that's an interesting question. Let me give you what might be a relevant example.
... and suddenly, there was this big manufacturing plant stuck in the middle of nowhere. Across the street was a grain storage operation, and next door was a tractor dealer. Interestingly, most of the workers were women: farm housewives for the most part that otherwise would have been sitting at home watching TV. They made less that comparable city workers but the cost of living was much less so that balanced out. These folks were highly motivated, and the company got much higher quality employees than they would have found anywhere near a big city, paid substantially less in property taxes. The company did spend a lot of money providing training for these people (some of the positions were pretty high-tech) but it paid off in a big way. In fact, one time I was there I heard an announcement over the PA system, "Notice to all employess ... there will not be any overtime this weekend." The chorus of "awwws" was deafening. The only drawback, I suppose, was the increased transport costs but since this outfit shipped parts worldwide it wasn't an issue.
... the Indians do not speak better English. At least not the ones I usually get on tech support lines. Not even close.
Some years ago, an auto parts manufacturing company that I did a lot of contract systems development for moved from Illinois' second largest city (Rockford, some sixty miles from Chicago) out to a completely rural area a hundred and twenty-odd miles even further away from Chicago. I mean, I had to drive out there a few times to upgrade some equipment and I was amazed at just how rural it was. I passed farmland, cows, grain silos
And believe me
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I can tell you from experience that our rural school is much better than the urban school our children used to attend. For instance, instead of doing everything they could do to avoid helping my son who has asparager's, the rural school (Pine River) is doing everything possible to help him -- and he's thriving. I just can't say enough good things about them. I wish I had gone there as a kid.
By the way, accusing the rural schools of having lower standards is silly. The gummint works hard to keep standards uniform -- for better of for worse.
In summary, the test sample I have seen supports the claim that rural schools are better. Your mileage may vary.
Graduating a higher percentage doesn't mean better schools. In fact, it could mean lower standards...
l e_2.htm
Yeah California and New York have high education standards hehe.
The mods take down the guy who posted facts (here they are btw) http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_31_tab
and mod +5 the guy with the "but, but..." retort that has absoultly no basis in fact. I'll ofcourse now be modded down for pointing this out. I love it
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Left "my" country when I was just over 17. Knew nobody in the new world. Learned the lanuage and cultutre, went to Uni., etc. No problem. ...
After a while I went to Japan; yet another "alien" culture. Learned the language and some of the culture, worked, etc. No problem.
I am not special and nowhere near unique; there are millions of people who do this kind of stuff all the time
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Do you really think of any of these call centers and server farms are going to stay in the sticks? This has been happening for years. Companies frequently take advantage of tax and free money perks and move on when the new VP or the like convinces enough shareholders or the CEO that slightly more profit could be made elsewhere and then again somewhere and then again somewhere... you get the point. Just ask Kalispell City. Four million in government incentives down the drain, an expensive upgraded infrastructure that no one is going to use, trashed wilderness from the sprawl that popped up and was abandoned, etc.
The welfare needs to be tapered off to zero, especially the "have a baby, get a dollar" welfare programs. Education must be imposed. Actual jobs created - even if they are artificially created - and those that do not work, like the rest of humanity, get to starve. Those that do low quality work, also get to starve, because they get fired.
Our government is King Turd of Shit Hill when it comes to artificial job creation; "Pork" is the middle name of darned near every senator and congressman in Washington. Surely they could find a way to put some manufacturing into South Dakota, Montana, Arizona, Harlem, Watts, etc. It beats heck out of sending checks there for the welfare mommies to burn while the welfare daddies hawk drugs on the street corners.
I absolutely do. There is a big difference in the level of motivation infused into someone who is waiting for this month's check to arrive, as compared to someone who is waiting for this month's bills to arrive. The TV goes off, the lights go off, the heat goes off, the water goes off... all very, very unpleasant. Guess what? Time to go to work!
The "poor baby" approach doesn't work. We know it doesn't work, there isn't a welfare ghetto in the country that has turned into a half-decent success story without "urban renewal", AKA "we're throwing all you lowlives outa here." And all that does is move the problem somewhere else.
Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he can feed his family forever. That's one hoary old saw indeed, but it is sharply on the mark.
Welfare doesn't work.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sounds like you must live between Billings and Hardin... when I lived in MT (20 years ago now), if you lived on that reservation you could not buy life insurance, because you could get someone offed for a measley five bucks, and it happened fairly often. So everyone there was considered too high-risk to insure.
And I totally agree with you about the welfare system!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I live in Lead, South Dakota, near Deadwood. Have seen firsthand the conditions of the "Native Americans" both on and off the res. I concur. Stop the welfare, and give these people a chance to solve their own problems. These are bright, intelligent people. But, welfare handouts seldom do anything other than enable them to fall into a lifestyle that is destructive and degenerative. Go to the Pine Ridge, the Rosebud, or other reservations and SEE what the conditions are. More "free" money is not going to make the lives of the people better, except perhaps enable some to buy a better quality of booze, and a nicer car to trash. All the damn do gooders who sincerely want to help think that they can solve these problems by giving more money.
To say or imply that people can come to the United States from various third world repressive shitholes in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe, with no or limited english language skills, immigrate to the United States, and within several years be a functioning succsessful and contributing part of our culture, yet think that the Native Americans somehow need more "help" in order to succeed, is to denigrate their entire race. I am sure that there are some exceptions, as I have met and seen a few of them, but, overall, the results of government handouts is a failure.
As for the rest of this tread, we moved here to get OUT of a big stinking, crime ridden metropolis of 2+ million. Cost of living is so much lower, and a traffic jam is what happens when a herd of deer of flock of wild turkeys need to cross the road... It was a total quality of life improvement, although if you measure the results in dollars, we are now down near poverty level income. It is amazing, however what so little money can do, when you are debt free and don't have a mortgage or car payment. No way I could have a semi retired lifestyle if I was still in the Denver Metro area. For an equivilent lifestyle, I would need to earn many times what I can get by on here, since I would still be trying to pay off a 200K+ mortgage. Instead, we have 3 houses, with 2 of them rented. We have found that living in a rural community gives us a life, and the big city was slavery, where you worked 60+ hours a week, just to pay for the basics. I have also noticed that many who have never been lived in a rural area think that what you have out here are just a bunch of dumb fsck hicks. I have found that a major portion of the residents are well educated, and a large percentage have moved here from the big cities for the same reasons we did. No, we don't have the opera, 12 screen theaters, 500 restraunts and clubs, and large shopping "mauls". But, that is something we didn't really care about since (because of working 60+ hours a week) we didnt have time for, or enjoy anyway. We have instead, clean air & water, no commute, happy safe children, decent neighbors, almost zero stress, bike and hiking trails, downhill and x-c skiing, hunting and fishing, and the time to enjoy it all.