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Can Tech Save Small Town America?
theodp writes "Declaring that small town life no longer has to be separate from financial success thanks to technology, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos told North Dakota state officials to take hope in people such as Napster's Shawn Fanning. Interesting remarks, considering that Fanning conceived Napster in small-town Boston and the jobs Amazon's brought to rural areas don't exactly scream financial success."
I think ultimately whether a town (small, that is) can be a place to be financially successful depends on:
Limited anecdotal cases show one can set up shop and make money in small town, USA, but a lot of what drives economies and business requires socially connected communities, typically large (larger than small towns).
People are still social creatures, business products are still tangible, and communities larger than small towns provide optimal management and distribution. I'm not sure this will change much in the forseeable future.
Yes, some people may make their fortune in small towns, but it remains the exception. And some big-money companies may toss a financial bone at small towns, but it remains only that. They're not developing a community, they're saving money -- it's little more than rural out-sourcing.
And for IT folks considering putting out a small town shingle, you can do it, but you'd better be good, and you'd better be prepared to sacrifice most of the small town life you'd anticipate, because, to land big-money gigs, you're going to have to be good above and beyond to assuage the suspicions of clients, and you're going to have to travel a lot, because they're still going to want to get a lot of face time with you.
On the yes side: It is nice to have access to things that you wouldn't before the internet. You don't have to travel to a mall or specialty shop. This makes living in a less urban city not nearly the negative it used to be
On the no side: The mom and pop shops have dried up, losing a lot of the local economy. Towns that cannot adapt die. Neighbors do not talk to neighbors as much (why go outside), and the "homeyness" goes away.
Bottom line: Things change. For those who can adapt, it is a good thing. For those who cannot it is bad.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
could be rural america, not india. but this secret hasn't made it to the executive washroom yet.
Can technology ever solve social problems?
And now, for no additional charge, I provide the answer!
No!
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Translation: we can drive down wages and increase management bonuses if we do this. This has nothing, I repeat NOTHING to do with saving small town America. CEOs don't give a rat's ass about small town America. What they do care about is increasing their profits, and if they can use our nostalgia for the past to get it, all the better.
We don't need to have people live everywhere. Not every small town should be looking for salvation. Maybe some places should close up and fade away. Typically these local salvation projects are built on eminent domain, sweetheart deals and the promise of an economic upturn that never materializes. If you are a one-company town, there are structural problems that won't be solved by your local government no matter how much you want to believe. We are not meant to have thriving towns everywhere.
Where are you going to find knowledgeable development/admin,etc staff in an Amish village somewhere?
All of these articles drive me crazy. I ran a business in "small town" America -- it was a retail store. I made sure my prices were just as competitive as Amazon or other dotcoms, and the local customers loved it to a point.
Yet the small town was the reason I had to leave the business. They wanted more sales tax revenue (which made me less competitive than the dotcoms once you factored in almost 9% additional cost). They wanted to raise minimum wages, which made it impossible to stay competitive with the dotcoms. They wanted me to add a bathroom once I doubled my square footage (I was the most successful ma-and-pa retail store in that town's history). They wanted me to add an additional handicapped parking spot (which ended up occupying more than 22% of my total available parking spots even though I had never had one handicapped customer in 4 years of business -- we sold sporting equipment).
In the end, I wouldn't surive even if a paperwork error forced us out of business anyway. The demands of small town USA made it so I couldn't be make it in small town USA.
People move to small towns often to get away from the high overhead of living in the urban areas. Rural living can often mean rural salaries. Yet the rural communities that I ran 2 out of my 3 retail stores in were trying very hard not to be rural. Taxes went up (sales, property and residual regulatory user fees). Citizen services went WAY up (volunteer fire and ambulance squads because taxpayer funded unions).
In the end, small town USA will destroy itself by pretending it can mimic the high debt, high tax world of the big city. The only thing they don't realize is that they will chase away the customers that drove to small town USA to save a buck or three. Who will pay for the "gentrification" changes then? Tech companies? Ha!
New communication mediums (namely the internet) decreases contraints on small towns as far as their ability to collaborate with other like minded tech people and their ability to get information. A large percentage of tech discourse takes place on the internet, and with a computer and an internet connection any small town nobody can get all the information they need to begin a project of their own or join up to help another team. We're not talking just small town USA here, but small town anywhere. India, Africa, China, wherever. As long as you can log on to the internet, you're good to go. Welcome to the global economy.
Fed up with slashdot? I am too.
Jeff is more wrong than he is right. Tech companies are going to spring up in areas where techies are, that means mostly (good) university towns. Also, if the startups do get lucky, I think the newly minted founders would rather live in a nice(?) area than some backwater where the only hangout is some spit-and-saw-dust joint.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
In high school I worked for a local ISP that became the states second-largest. They were, and are, very successful. They now offer wireless to most of the southeastern part of this state.
Yes, this state is in the midwest. It is not impossible to be successful in a tech business in the midwest. There are a lot of success stories you don't hear about. One area that has a lot of potential and success stories is call centers. People from the midwest have a very neutral accent and make good people to talk to on the phone - and have a far lower cost of living than many other areas of the country (exclusing possibly the south - not a shot at the south, its where I'm living now).
-everphilski-
Technology can save old small town America, but it will be the technology of the past. Organic farming will play a large role, as will the re-opening of hospitals and schools in smaller centers so there are shorter distances for people to travel. The Internet will lend a hand of course, but improving communication and the need to go large distances for some school classes where there are good teachers for some subjects. It will also spread problem solving, for things like how to combat thistle without spraying. People will work in the fields, and live healthier lives with better locally grown food. The field work will give jobs to children looking to get into trouble if they can't find something interesting, and a way to make money to boot.
If we want to keep what we had, we have to find new ways to bring about how we were doing it in the first place.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Did anyone read this link from the summary?
The folks get to ride a bus for 3 hours each day to/from work. Their shift is really a 12-hour shift because of this, since they get it at 15:00 and get home around 03:00. The day shifters get 9.50$ US/Hour, and night people get 50 cents more (a whole 4$ more/day; 1,040$ more/year).
Given 52 weeks with 5 business days, 8 hours/day, gives a salary of $19,760 before taxes for the day shifters. Is that above the US poverty line? In Saskatchewan (where most of basic healthcare is taken care of, and things like food are a bit cheaper), our poverty line is around $16,000/year. Any medical problem in the US is going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars -- I've seen what your drugs cost at the corner store. If you adjust it, I'd say they're probably pretty close to the poverty line.
Adjusting the 8/hour wages for the true 12/hour day with commute, the poor folks are actually earning $6.34 an hour, which is a lot closer to minimum wage. You can argue that the time on the bus isn't lost to them, but I don't see them being able to pursue most hobbies, clean their houses, or be there for their children in that time.
So, in fact, tech is not saving small town America. These folks are just as poor and not well off as any inner-city folks who have to bus for hours to work for almost nothing, while their children are home alone. They live in poverty, and they have no time to themselves for self development.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
'Small towns' dont need your 'saving'. Some of us like 'small town America'. We moved away from the city for a reason. you can keep it, and your concepts to yourself and leave us alone. We dont need the crime, filth, taxes, traffic jams, etc.
Sure mod me down, but im not alone in my feelings.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think it was the Canadian government that did a study of the benefits of internet access to small towns.
They basically found that it helps people find jobs in the cities faster, thus accelerating the exodus from the rural areas.
So yeah, I guess it helps small towns - by reducing the unemployment rate and breaking the cycle of despair and addiction that plagues so many of the people that live there.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
For example, a manufacturing plant generally causes money to enter the area through wages to local employees, taxes, local services the factory utilizes, etc. A national chain retail store will cause money to flow out of the community because people spend money to purchase things brought in from outside the area. In retail some of this loss is offset by the wages the store pays, property and sales taxes, local services used, etc.
In the case of online shops, it is like chain stores except very little of the money is recouped (I suppose a little bit from shipping services), as online stores don't maintain a presence in the places they serve, avoiding paying local employees, local income and sales taxes, etc. All money spent on an online store is money leaving the local economy.
The only glitter of hope is that online stores will allow rural people access to information and technology which used to only be available in large cities. It is possible that the in-flow of ideas and equipment will revitalize the spirit of small towns, and that will help to offset the financial loss suffered by losses to local businesses.
Just another datapoint.
Not to rain on this particular parade, as I'd love to see certain areas I've lived in remain viable, but one of the issues for knowledge-economy is intellectual openness. How many small towns are going to put up with educated outsiders full of "Ideeers" coming in and changing things? If they have some experience (i.e. upstate NY, which used to have Kodak, Xerox, etc), then it's a return to a more profitable era, but for other regions, it's going to be "you dress funny, eat the wrong foods, don't worship our God often enough and we won't even get started on your foreign car". The school systems are also generally in need of upgrading to attract the type of workers that IT or other high-tech needs, and that starts even more conflicts. In modern societies with functioning educational systems, this idea might work. In many parts of the US, it's probably not worth the trouble.
Look at places such as Binghamton/Owego NY (I'm sure you have your local equivalents); even with a moderate-sized public university present, approximately 3 hours from NYC and Philly, very reasonable property, and a skilled workforce downsized from IBM, you can't attract enough investment to do better than limp along here. No local tech business of any size has been started to replace what's been lost, and the local governments aren't willing to take any meaningful steps to either encourage entrepeneurs or relocation by established businesses. Extrapolate this experience to some former wheat depot in Kansas, and you begin to see the problem.
I would put more money on relocation to the inner-city, gentrification, and reuse of brownfields than I would outsourcing to rural america. A cleaned-up Joiliette or Gary, IN, would be far more attractive than Snakenavel, KS.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
Can Tech Save Small Town America?
The real question is, can we keep technology from ruining small towns... You can't save something with one of the problems.
I just moved from Washington DC to a small riverfront town in Maryland to start my business. A large component of this decision -- aside from the reduction in stress -- was the ability to function on less money than I could in the city. A new business doesn't make a lot of money, but when your overhead is low you have more time to make it work for you. In the city, my overhead would have been too much. It's also cheaper to buy property in a small town than a city like DC.
While it seems good for business to cluster all its activity into one campus, the effect on the employee personal life is terrible. Spending three hours commuting for eight hours of work, for example. I personally don't believe an employee is most effective working alone from home, but working in smaller satelite offices is probably the right answer.
I don't quite understand the editorialization on the summary. Theodp tries to make it sound like Amazon.com's hiring practices are bad for rural America. But his links don't support that. They talk about having to bus workers in from out of town (as far away as the next state) to work seasonally in the warehouses.
But it's not like Amazon is turning down local workers in favor of out of town workers. According to one of the articles linked "more than 85 percent of the yearly labor needs are supplied by the local labor pool. Staff management works with local employment agencies, recruits at colleges and works with high schools to provide jobs for graduating seniors," and "we first start with the local labor pool, then broaden our search." Amazon is employing the locals and out of town people (which also help the locals by staying in hotels paid for by Amazon and patronizing locals businesses).
Amazon has also set up education programs to help potential-workers complete their GED, and supported other local programs. "Amazon.com has partnered with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce, Team Taylor County and Kentucky Adult Education to form the Go, Earn, Do program, which helps people earn their GED." According to an Amazon spokesman, "we've hired several graduates of the program so far and as the program grows we hope to hire even more."
So I really don't see Theodp's snarky objection to Amazon and Bezo's stand on how tech helps out rural areas. If anything, the articles he links actually support Bezos' claims.
Bezos' remarks on Shawn Fanning are on the mark, too. Sure, Fanning was in a Boston dorm room when he wrote Napster, but it's not like he needed the massive infrastructure of a huge city to do it, just an Internet connection. As Bezos points out, "that's the kind of thing people can do anywhere. They can do it in Seattle, they can do it in North Dakota."
So pretty much all of the editorializing in the summary is wrong, and doesn't seem to server any purpose other than to troll us. I guess I bit.
(An off topic ad hominem: theodp@ aol.com ? On Slashdot? Puh-leaze. I see September still hasn't ended.)
Stupid like a fox!
Maybe it doesn't scream financial success to you, but the something like a call-center job is pretty good compared to a lot of small-town jobs.
The jobs cited in the article are temporary ones that occur due to the Christmas rush. Amazon's order volume more than quadruples over the holidays. It's just not practical to employ those people year round; furthermore, if every man, woman and child in that small town signed up at the FC, they still wouldn't have enough workers.
:)
A FC doesn't employ as many people as a traditional factory, I'll grant you that. But it's still a shot in the arm for many of the small towns in which they're located, and provides the kind of foundation industry that supports a richer local economy. Hey, look at all the money those motels are bringing in from temporary workers.
Most workers in unskilled (so to speak) labor get around that much. Infact they probably get paid more then inner city jobs. Most inner city jobs barely pay 6.50 per hour before taxes. Also i've lived in ny and even if you live outside of manhattan like in queens or something renting an apartment costs a huge deal more (2-3x more) then in rural areas.
Hmmm... Pie...
That leads to some weird staffing. You get a lot of inexperienced college grads to don't have to move, just stay in their college apartment. Once they get married and want to move to the 'burbs to raise a family and find afordable housing (which is now over an hour away from Boston) the company in not such a convient location, commute wise.
...finally, there's good news for the Silent Hill chamber of commerce.
For a company as big as Amazon, having distribution points around the country works great, much like Netflix. But if you are a small time company trying to get started, getting your goods to your location which is 500 miles from the closest airport might not work very well. Your profits become less because it is all going to shipping.
With my company, getting our products cheaper means saving for us, better prices for the customer, and a better ability to survive. We wouldn't be able to do that if we weren't near a major port.
Fear Is the Only God
If several companies relocate emploees to small rual towns, thee towns will grow, becoming the dreaded "medium size City" these cities have all the urban problems like crime, taxes, clogged roadways, condtant swelling expantion and so on with none or little of the good stuff in the big cities like the arts, recreation and nightlife, dining, shopping and society in general.
A lot of people make fun of Indiana but don't realize what a great place it is for tech companies. Especially Indianapolis and Bloomington. There are many many internet backbones that cross our paths and have access points in Indy and Chicago. Then it is also generally safe from earthquakes (unless you count New Madrid fault), tsunamis, hurricanes, and then the problems with bigger cities like terrorist attacks, etc. The cost of living is much lower here and you can use those savings to build up a more competitive business on the net against companies in higher cost areas. There is a decent talent pool here that is just waiting for high tech businesses to start up. Bloomington itself is a very liberal place not unlike New York or the west coast. There are already several online businesses based out of Indiana, I'm hoping more will pop up soon. Especially tier 1 datacenters, etc.
One of my goals with suso.org and other businesses I'm building up is to turn this area into the tech center it deserves to be. I'm currently working hard to release a unique and highly desired product that will help bring more attention to this area as a viable location for strong tech businesses.
I welcome you.
There are other concerns than cost of living. Namely, the quality of people you live arround. Rural areas have rightly garnered a reputation as being ingorant, intollerant and petty. If you're the weirdo in a city, there's a good chance you can find people like yourself. In some depressed backwater, if you can't escape...you are the pariah.
I mean..durr...Remember John Katz?
Blar.
Serious.... why would we want to save small town America? It's like asking if tech can save hunter and gatherers.... Small towns are a way of life that are dying out for a reason. What we should be doing is making the transition as painless as possible....
If someone calls your inbound call center, it's because your web site didn't work for them. As web sites get better (not "Web 2.0", but really good order tracking), there's less work for the call center. Of course, many call centers are already offshored. So that's a dead-end job.
I grew up in Greensburg, KY, about 15 minutes from the Amazon location in that article. The main source of jobs in the area used to be a Fruit of the Loom plant in Campbellsville, and when they went out of business unemployment in the surrounding counties soared. Amazon is I think the largest employer in the area now, and people in the area are glad to have them there.
That article was talking about there being so many jobs during the christmas rush, that they can't fill all of them locally and have to bus people in from elsewhere. The locals who work there are happy with their jobs & pay from everything I've heard.
Firat off... Boston a Small town? WTF???
Boston is NOT a small town unless your definition is whacked. Small town = 10,000 or less residents. Most prople consider small town around that range.
And unless you are in a small town that is wired very VERY well you cant get broadband there making ECommerce damn near impossible based out of othe small town. sorry but managing your online business model with a 33.6 Dial up connection (22.4K if youre lucky and the sun is shining but usually lower and never near 56K because of distance and line quality) is completely impossible.
Get fat pipes cheaply into small town rural america and then you can see that happen. until then. having your own business in a small town = buying a gas station, running a service that the small townspeople need, or a resturant/store. Computer shops in small town america = out of business because they do not have the $$$ to blow $600-900 every year on that useless Pee-Cee thay have for the kids. Making $40,000.00 a year in small town rural america = upper middle class typically. (compared to the $120,000.00 a year in Detroit and Chicago. you can live the same lifestyle just without the useless things like a BMW or Mercedes) I had LAKEFRONT property with 2 jetskis and a powerboat on that salary as well as was able to afford to hire a maid. In Detroit, you cant touch lakefront for under $250,000.00 a year and I hope your spouse has a +100K job as well you poor sap.
It is nice to have access to things that you wouldn't before the internet.
Location doesn't really matter for a lot of professions any more -- software development being among them. I had a former boss who liked to talk about a particular project in which three people were in Europe, one in Asia, and two in North America.
I hear a lot of griping about outsourcing, but not about the benefits granted by that same technology. You not longer have to live in Manhattan to get a high-paying job -- you can do that same job while living in Podunk, Kansas, and have a fraction of the living expenses
It's silly to commute an hour each way for a job. That's two hours a day wasted, when you could be working remotely -- and who wants to work ten hours a day for the same pay instead of eight? It's not as if your employer derives any benefit from you sitting in a car for a chunk of each day.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I live in a small town in the Midwest. I was recently laid off by a small company that isn't doing well financially. I'm educated, I have 11 years of experience in the software industry, and I would come (comparatively) cheaply for someone with my experience. I haven't found a company yet that wants a telecommuter, even for short term contracts. Given that my former employer is basically the only local place that is suitable and I don't expect them to make it to the end of the year, I foresee a return to the west coast for my wife and I.
It just makes no sense, given that software is the ideal telecommuting job, that so few companies are willing to work with that arrangement. Maybe I haven't spent enough time looking, but I'm not optimistic.
Small towns would otherwise be a viable place to perform many tasks that are now outsourced to 3rd-world nations. Outsourcing has instead resulted in jobs that require a high-degree of human interaction, and this means big fat smelly crowded terrorism-prone cities. Offshore Outsourcing has screwed us.
Table-ized A.I.
If everybody is wired up, or has wireless access, many people benefit.
Small towns are located in counties who are responsible for infrastructure over a wide area. The ability to have utility meters, and things like lift stations be monitored from afar. School busses, inspectors and police with laptops can report in. The combo of GPS and wireless is a boon to farmers.
Wireless co-ops should be a big thing in rural areas.
But they don't try to force you to follow their religion by encoding it into law.
I haven't heard of any black people in cities dragging white people behind their car.
I haven't head of any city people beating the shit out of a homosexual, and having their neighborhoood stand up for that action.
Very few cities are interested in making it difficult for poor people to get abortions. They may be apathetic, but at least they don't go out of their way.
If you have some links, I sincerely would like to see them.
I find that rural people do have a better sense of community. But only because they are all alike. Similar racial make-up, monolithic culture, fewer outsiders. Make that mostly white/maybe-black population more diverse and you see the same problems.
People aren't that much evolved from our tribal origins. We like to be arround those like us. Those dislike us cause stress on some very primal level (in my opinion).
Blar.
Since when was Boston a small town?
The problem here is that the technology "capable of saving small town America" is also available to everyone NOT in small town America as well. In fact, the same advantages that make large towns work better than small towns make the Internet work better for large towns than small towns. How many small towns have cheap and widely available broadband Internet access? Geography and demographics play an important role in availablity here. Sure, the cost of living and real estate may be cheaper, but the prices to bring high speed internet to Colby, Kansas might not be attractive. The theory is that even better technology can help fix this, but so far I haven't seen anything worthy of mention.
Another problem is the attitudes frequently found in small town america. There are people who worry that success will drasticaly change the atmosphere, either through large jumps in population, building and the likes, or that prosperity itself will destroy the values and way of life they appreciate. There's even a few who worry that prosperity will bring an increase in taxes. You can see the influence taxes wield in small town america just by looking at the local school district budget. Expecting entrepeneurs to spring forth from this environment is silly. For most of the guys I know that come from small towns, they'd just as soon live in a large metropolitian area and make a million dollars a year than do the same in their hometown. And even if there was a couple entrepeneurs thinking of a product on the national level, there simply aren't enough local human resources compared with the suburbs a few hours drive away. Try finding a competent graphic designer for hire. Or webmaster. Better yet, try finding an unemployed network engineer that lives locally. And you'd really have troubles convincing a potential hire with a family of three to move.
Napster was successful because he saw a common problem and came up with a fairly common solution. Napster didn't invent mp3 trading; he took the already prevailant method of ratio uploading and FTPs and mp3 search engines and combined them all, removing the designations between client and server. And he couldn't have done it without access to subsized internet from his University dorm room. Furthermore, all the guy did was invent a better way to steal things; there wasn't even a profit motive! Universities are the one place small america can look to for a pooling of young mobile talent; but Uni towns rarely resemble the small town america we know. Firstly, they're not exactly small. 30 thousand students alone means we're starting to break the definition, and doubly so once you figure in people in jobs serving those students etc. Manhattan, KS for example, has about 40 thousand people living in it. Sadly, the cost of living is almost the same as the suburbs of KC in Johnson County. If you've got an idea that needs a lot of part time people though, Manhattan's your place.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Who says small towns need to be saved..? Is financial success the only way to be saved..?
Went to college in Nashville, TN for a year, big mistake. Often went home on the weekends with friends, as the whole school emptied out and driving back to CT didn't help...well I didn't have a car anyway so I was stuck.
I've visted Caldwell County, Kentucky. A few places in Alabama. There is no culture. Life revolves arround church and the highschool sports teams. The towns would shut down during a fucking highschool football game. I mentioned in passing that I liked De La Soul. I got some weird looks, and someone said they didn't like Mexican music. Good thing I didn't tell them that De La Soul is black!
If you like simple, salt-of-the-earth people, then good on you. But sorry, marrying your highschool boyfriend and pumping out babies ASAP is no way to advance our species. For some reason they kept asking me how many siblings I had...everyone down ther ebreeds like three or four. I mentioned my only sibling, and that I would likely only have one or two children. Suddenly I was being lectured for being 'selfish'.
Yeah. Selfish. Whatever. I have no interest in people like that who just live for the purpose of existing and making more of themselves. Get a fucking goal.
Blar.
The challenge for small towns is not growth, per se. Small towns don't want to attract retirees, for example, because they use a lot of civic services while contributing little to productivity. And, they tend to be bad tippers. Only the most economically challenged small towns want to bring in low-wage jobs. Most small towns are interested in growing in ways that will raise the mean wage. Most small towns these days are trying to attract professionals and creative entrepreneurs who can help build the kind of prosperity that feeds upon itself, attracting in turn other creative entrepreneurs and professionals, contributing to a sense of "happeningness," for lack of a better word. It's a challenge, though. Most small towns have a shortage of professional people, such as lawyers, doctors, accountants, and so on. Educated, sophisticated people tend to like city life. That may change as population pressures lead to lower quality of urban life, however. And, professionals with families are likely to find small towns appealing. Technologies such as instant messaging and essentially free long distance phone calls via VoIP make it very easy for computer professionals to export their jobs or relocate their businesses to small towns. I exported my dot-com work to a small town about three years ago, and now I can't believe I put up with the low quality of city life for so long. US history has seen a couple of shifts between urban and rural migrations, and while cities today are growing much faster than rural populations, I wouldn't be too surprised if Jeff isn't right -- wouldn't it be ironic if technology actually helps create another "back-to-the-land" movement.
If we're saying that due to Malls and people leaving the area, there are small towns which are drying up, then technology firms who locate in these small towns can indeed keep people there, keep the economy booming. Especially if all you need is a good comms infrastructure and, in the case of shipping goods, an interstate nearby.
But, a lot of the same enablers that could save small town America are enabling small town India to compete.
Silly child, the difference is I hold my opinions but I DO NOT TRY TO MAKE OTHERS ACCEPT THEM. I diss the ignorance I see, but I am content to let them live like that. These rural assholes are the ones pushing for laws which restrict my freedoms because their book of fairy-tales says so. They are so insular that they reject new ideas, and reenforce their existing ones. This is closed minded. I think this is a pathetic way to live, but again, that is their right.
I feel that the city IS a better place to raise a child. Exposure to differences (and not the two local flavors of Christianity) makes people better able to handle complex life situations.
Blar.
"Is the fact that temporary, low-skill jobs don't pay very much supposed to be news?"
No, but when it's spun to be news as if it were a breath of life to America's small towns, I think it's interesting to investigate the details.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
It depends on what you mean by "raise a child". If you mean getting that kid a good education, I'd disagree. Schools in cities are rubbish. If you mean indoctrinate children into the mind-hive collective thought that anything non-liberal is evil.... Well, they're already accomplishing that.
Who do I write too? Jeff, Steve, Mark Cuban? I live in the most amazing town in the world! Potsdam, NY. ROCK BOTTOM prices, 10,000 college students, 4 colleges, massive bandwidth, real estate everywhere, minutes from Canada. More PHds then you can count. Nature? Some of the most beautiful anywhere! By the way, a 1 bedroom, with all utilites, $375 a month. It drops to $140 a month in the summer. China? come and buy us! You can own the whole community for less then a million! Sorry for the rant! I just bought home more groceries then I could carry for $20. Mark Cuban, you get it! I'll treat you to a soy latte, and I have a couch. :-)
I visited NYC once, in the winter. I actually saw some homeless guy dead, frozen stiff, and urbanites just walking around him like it was trash in the street.
Sorry, in decades of living rural (mostly) I have never seen such callous, uncaring, non human behavior. I'm sure it happens, but I've never seen it. It was beyond disgusting, because I tried to get help, and no one cared, they didn't give a crap.
The US as a whole would be much better off if the top dozen large cities broke off (got kicked out actually) and became separate nations. Let them "trade" their way to staying rich then, good luck trying to live without actually producing anything important. In particular, NYC, LA, DC, San Francisco. Those areas do two things: screw up the rest of the nation to support their expensive lifestyles, and give the rest of the planet an very skewed idea of what it means to be a US citizen. We have the mainstream news and media concentrated there, clueless, no idea what's going on in the rest of the nation, yet all our laws and "news" propoganda centers around those areas. Why? And DC? We have a huge area where no one really works for a living, it's all a big fat skim from the tax payers once you distill it down, except for the ghetto areas they can't even deal with and are kept hidden of course. The globalists can't even run ONE city adequately, let they somehow think they are cool enough to run the rest of the US. I am not seeing it happen, but the opposite is happening. They are exporting stupidity, greed, malefeasance and criminality as being somehow "good". And you laugh at us?? for what, not being retarded greedy jerks? Having an accent? Where do people in NYC get off saying other folks have a weird accent?
Sorry, you can keep your big cities. They were useful one time way back in the past, now they are existing by inertia and so that ultra rich people can stay that way, by exploiting everyone else around them. The real estate crash and the stock market crash can't come quick enough for me at this point, those areas need a bitch slap of reality to hit them. We are sick of their laws, their globalism "free trade", the most ill named economic theory in existence, what passes for their "culture", their screwing with everyone elses economy, and their wars to support their lifestyles, and their condescending "news" that exalts all that previous bogusness as somehow being "good" and "so important it will never change". The "US" didn't get attacked on 9-11, wall street exploiters and the federal corporate government fascists got attacked, and odds are high that DC and NYC insiders pulled it off, let it go down on purpose, to promote even more of their takeover agendas. They eat their own, they are *cannibals*.
I will apologize for some of my more misguided rural associates who initially "supported" the current fascisitic regime, and others who thought "free trade and globalism" would "work" somehow. Believe me, that attitude is changing FAST now that they have seen what a few years of it did.
2 Years ago I voluntarily left Seattle/Redmond for North Dakota.
.com boom has ended, but i still feel like the "meat and potatoes" software developer gets no real exposure in this country.. programmers working at banks/insurance companies, doing factory control, doing embedded work for cash registers, engine controllers, etc etc etc. In many cases, these sorts of jobs are closer to the industries they support.. i.e. guy
Microsoft has an office here (we acquired Great Plains Software, which was a reasonably successful company in its own right) so it was a move I could make and stay with the same company (MS), but get a different setting/lifestyle.
If anything happens to this Microsoft office, or even my job personally, I am screwed. There is nothing anywhere near here paying MS salaries for software development. The closest would be Minneapolis, a 3 hr drive, and then you've got cost of living problems similar to the Seattle area.
That said, as long as it works, it's great. Lots of people here live on hobby farms 30-45mins away that are enormous. There's no traffic, people are friendly and non-uppity (try finding that in Seattle).
As far as technology in AG equipment.. yeah, its pretty cool. Multiple guys i work with wrote embedded software for AG machinery. Also, anyone that grew up here grew up on a farm so i've gotten to see what farm life is like via some friends i've made. Even the family farmer can debt finance used equipment that has onboard GPS. A friend of ours has a variable-track front-boom sprayer. This thing is like Optimus prime.. it unfolds and transforms and all kinds of stuff. It auto adjusts the fluid pressure in the boom to compensate for vehicle speed, and when it turns it slows down delivery to the inboard side of the boom (because it moves over crops more slowly). It uses GPS to partition your field into rows of travel and will tell you if you're veering off course (which can be helpful when you're driving through a sea of crops). The latest equipment will essentially drive itself along calculated GPS routes to cover an entire section of land.
This particular friend of ours also has a satellite weather/data terminal system. Pretty neat.. its a dedicated box that a normal PC mouse/kb/monitor plug into.. hooked up to a sat dish. It gives him 24/7 weather information, futures trading info.. crop yield reports from other markets, basically anything that would be interesting to a farmer.
Still, as much technology is available to the farmer, the family farm still struggles more often then it succeeds. Lots of operations are going with contract-harvesters.. companies that buy the biggest combines brand new, show up, and harvest your whole operation in a day, then move on to the next guy. This is good because the cost of these machines is outrageous.. and because they show up on the used market a few years later. It's bad because it's a loss of self-sufficiency for farmers.. and it suggests that equipment will continue to get more and more expensive even though technology is supposed to make things cheaper.
There are companies now that sell satellite thermal / IR data of field flybys.. you can say something about the productivity of a certain section of soil for a certain crop.. and take that data into account for how you do future rotations and plantings. If you correlate the previous years yeild data vs how much seeding you did there vs how much spraying you did etc etc, you can start to make some wise decisions about what plants will do best in what sections of land, on a rotating basis.
There's a lot of really, really interesting software work that can be applied to old fashioned problems, but nobody sees the glamour in writing software to do these sorts of things. The idea of "software developer" in my head is someone that lives in a big city, spends too much on coffee, has an Aeron chair.. and gets paid entirely too much money for what boils down to web surfing at work all day. It's less like that now that the
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I live in a "rural area." There are lots of small towns around here, granted, they are a bit closer to the charming variety...they have shops and cafes and local flavor... I've been through "small towns" in other areas that are just...well...nothing but houses, a grain bin, and a church. Even when they are the same size! So I suppose it makes a difference what regional culture you are speaking of, as in some "small town" isn't exactly dead.
Now, around here...lots of small towns, not much in the way of "city." But we do have lots of good connecting highways which we put to good use, towns are a short drive from each other, and each is different. Very few can be considered dying, maybe some could be considered "sleepy" but they at least tend to serve a purpose. The smallest towns providing additional places to live for people to work in somewhat larger towns (say, population 5000 or so) where the industry is. But yes, industry...lots of factories and shipping and processing and industrial repair...or maybe oil industry, or coal. Of course, the big transportation hubs tend to be bigger, 12,000-16,000 people or so. Jobs are plentiful, and the economy is doing pretty well. I can understand those regions where they have nothing that the economy might not be so hot...but it's jumping here. Oh and we've had tech for years, ISPs, small town computer stores/computer repair, cellphones, etc...none of it "saved/saving" the economy...just one more necessity. Heck, even farming is high tech these days, and they need internet as much as the rest of us. But it's just one more service that's out there.
And so when we get some bozo who suggests that all of rural America is dying and that only tech jobs can save it. Don't be a little surprised if some of us aren't just a little bit insulted by him. Then again....those city slickers will believe anything. ;-)
work ethic, intelligence, and problem solving ability are widely distributed across the planet. There is not a monopoly on these desirable traits in large cities.
There are people who are good employees and add to the bottom line of the company they work for, that have no desire to live in a large city. Businesses will be successful when they most effectively compete for the employee talent they need.
Also, I can see the monocultural effect* of large cities has already affected you. There are people that prefer not to live in large cities, for a variety of good reasons.
* despite places like NYC effectively implementing the "Mosaic of Subcultures" pattern (read Christopher Alexander), people born and bred in large cities are by and large socially dependant on others, and not necessarily ideologically different than their neighbors. Witness the solidarity of liberal/democratic voting in all the ubran areas of the US. I don't mean to suggest that you dont have an issue of monoculturalism but with the opposite political slant in rural america, but for problem solving ability, self reliability, and work ethic, i will choose someone raised on a farm _every time_ over a city-slicker. When you grow up solving all of your own problems just to be able to _eat_ reliably, or teaching yourself how to repair broken equipment in the middle of a field because nobody else is there to help you, an office job is trivial, comparatively.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Actually i'd say large municipalities are much worse about demanding conformity via legal action. My understanding is that it is effectively impossible to get an apartment without paying an apartment broker in large new-england cities, and there are laws to support this. In Massechusetts, it is apparently illegal to do construction work without police officers present, so you have cops parked in cruisers whereever there are construction sites. Street parking infront of your own house? -- illegal. Hell the "small" city of Redmond, WA requires a building permit to move your refrigerator to another outlet (true story!)
As we know, the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.
I'd much rather live in a place where conformity built a sense of community, but one could choose to swim upstream with social ostracization being the only potential downside. Comparatively, "community" in large cities is about passing laws to try and keep your neighbors from doing things you dont like. If I'm going to go against the grain, i'd rather have people pissed off at me than cops arresting me. Wouldn't you?
As an aside - when i lived in seattle there was a HUGE uproar over a bunch of blacks beating the crap out of some white people during a mardi gras party in pioneer square. IIRC, it was just 1 or 2 whites.. women i think? And like 10 black people just beating them senseless. Because it was black-on-white violence, the mayor/media etc claimed it was not racially motivated.
The idea that race violence, sex/gender violence, etc aren't problems in cities is patently false.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in Amarillo, Texas. I was interested in computers. I wasn't the only one, but it was rare to find someone who had either equipment or interest. There were no businesses, universities, or anything where you could go to, say, connect to the internet. There were a handful of BBSes, and not much more.
But when I made it to Austin for college, I found that the kids from Houston and Dallas who were also into Computer Science had already formed networks, knew about the internet, USENET, irc, the demoscene. They had access to the cutting edge, whereas I had access to mere leftovers. And the reason was because this kind of high-end knowledge happens where the technology centers are. Unless a small town is somehow already a tech center, with both academic and industrial support for it, there won't be the adults, which means there won't be the kids, to grow up in that enivornment.
Small towns just don't have the right environment to develop a Shawn Fanning. That person is much more likely to ditch the small town and move on to a bigger town where his/her interest is likely to have peers.
So no, tech will never save the small town. Not without cutting-edge high-tech industrial support in the form of both industry and academia, and the small towns that have that (e.g., Austin) have already benefitted from it.
You're still a MASSIVE hypocrite, and a useless sack of pig shit. And this is coming from a city living atheist. People like you make me cringe whenever you open your fat, hate-spewing mouths. Do all us blue staters a favor and shut the fuck up. We don't need scum like you on our side.
You can carve out a good living working from home, but never a career with a company. Telecommuting allows you to be a consultant, but not advance. Fact is that the people you don't see are always the ones you're first to give up when there's cutbacks.
This is rather old news. Over a decade ago, AOL outsourced their call centers to the lowest bidders, thus only having to pay near-minimum wage for the same thing a less rural area would require $10-12/hr.
Columbia House has done this for over twenty years, setting up their operations in places like Terre Haute, IN simply because it had one of the lowest incomes per capita in the nation.
I think it is more likely "Tech" will save small town India in this day and age.
That should get North Dakotans interested in those funny TVs with the detached screen -- speaking as someone who went to public school in North Dakota.
I just sense that this fascination people have in beaming product up from Little House on the Prairie is wrong in so many ways. And usually some urban guy's neo-hippie fantasy when he has never actually lived in a rural area.
Aside from the precedent of business being concentrated in metropolitan areas for the sum total of recorded history:
1. North Dakota isn't under snow from about mid-April to mid-October. Lots of luck recruiting if the idea is to bring labor in.
2. Nearest Starbucks -- 50 miles. That'll go over well.
3. What's your idea of "small town"? If it's much under 100,000 how will your salesforce feel about driving 50-100 miles through a blizzard to get on a national/international flight? Company near where I grew up felt they had to maintain a private airstrip, plane and pilot.
4. Is this a serious plan to hire the locals? North Dakota has had education spending ranks in the high 40s for decades competing with the likes of Alabama and Mississippi for least spent per pupil. When the bonding bill comes up for the school's shiny new computer lab how do you think those farmers driving into town are going to vote?
5. And can you honestly blame them that much? When you are talking about an area where the population density is that low there aren't enough taxpayers to build high-tech schools every 50 miles. Look it up in Wikipedia. You are talking about 183,000 square kilometers (360 miles by 210 miles) with the population of Baltimore City.
6. Last time I was in North Dakota, my town hospital had become mostly a nursing home. So when you are offered that job, go back and tell the wife, "Honey, when you go into labor, we'll have to drive 70 miles to the hospital" and see how it plays. And how much sex you get nine months before blizzard season.
7. The plasma TV is going to cost you. I doubt whether metropolitan people can imagine how many truly small towns don't even have a movie theater.
8. Think you are getting the kids away from bad influences? Rural/urban -- where do you think meth is made? You better hope the kids like hunting, fishing and school sports. If they're like me and my group we mostly amused ourselves with petty vandalism and pranks, drinking and driving, determining the top end on dad's hemi, whether we could touch bumpers at 90 mph and, of course, sex. That sort of thing.
Enjoy.
I've been a system admin for a company for 2 years now. We do a lot of outsourcing for companies. We have a department that does websites, I currently manage and maintain all of our webservers and we have something like 2500+ websites. We also have a department that does composition for books. We have a printing press and a warehouse for fulfillment duties. The company started out almost 6 years ago with 2 employees and we have nearly 40 employees now and we just did a little over 3 million dollars in sales this past year. This year we completely expect to almost double that as work has been coming in like crazy. The town I work in has a population around 300. We've been able to donate a lot of our money back into the town to spruce up the streets, help with the annual celebrations and just make the town look better. Granted, I don't get paid anywhere near what I could be getting paid in a city, but I do make a decent living in this area. I make more than a lot of people make who live here. I also grew up in this area so I'm not too far from friends I grew up with and family. The closest city is a good 2-3 hour drive from here so needless to say, I'm a little relieved I get to stay close by and still get to do the kind of job I enjoy doing. Rural America outsourcing is a good idea. We're not a bunch of mindless idiots out here who only know about cows and corn. Just up until recently a lot of the jobs we want to take are away from home, so we've had to move where the jobs are.
If you want a good small town to move your tech company to Ephrata,Wa is a good place to start... The fact the we have fiber optic broadband in the area provided by the PUD through many vendors... 16 miles from I-90..15 miles Moses Lake International airport which sports one of the largest runways in the nation... moderate temps... not much rain..
oh and close enough to seattle not to be to long a flight for executives. the only down side is the fact we have a high minimum wage in the state. I am sure the midwest is fine..but why move to bfe when you dont have to.
I may say things you don't like, but I do not marginalize the groups I dislike. I think religion is shit, but I do not try to stop them from doing their thing. I will try to stop them from putting their religious beliefs into law. The religious think abortion is shit. They try to stop it.
I live and let live. You should too.
Blar.
All sorts of religions, beliefs, customs, etc. I want them to know all about the world, and get as much of it 'in person' as possible. They are curious about Islam? Visit a Mosque. Judaeism, the same. Language, I live in a little crappy town in CT and I can walk a block and hear Vietnamese, Spanish, Hindu, Italian and German.
I want my kids to go to school with all sorts of people, so they grow up accustomed to the fact that everybody has their own view of the world, and that those who are 'different' are not 'lesser' or 'evil' or 'damned' or whatever.
Oh, and nice talk-radio talking points dude. I'm socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Sorry I don't fit your mold.
Blar.
Was it racially motivated? Who knows, because you couldn't get me a good article.
Blar.
I said that rural areas have a reputation for intollerance bigotry and racism (or whatever).
How come nearly all those school shootings happened in Rural areas? City violence is usually gang vs. gang or person vs. person. You fall out with your crowd, find another one no problem. In the country, if you aren't on board with school spirit and sports and shit, you are SOL. No wonder those kids shot up the school. Try being a big guy in a rural town that's hot on football...and you don't want to play. You can't even escape it at church...and you can't really go to another one without changing denomination.
Blar.
Sometimes when I make my way up to Seattle or Kahneeta from Portland I drive by towns that are no more than dusty, brokedown campsites. Some small towns shouldn't even exist as there probably wasn't any long term plans for them when they first went up. Example : some towns that were built solely because people came into a state looking for gold in the 19th century. Towns like that just limp along with no real plan or valuable infrastructure to stay vital (hospitals, clinics, farms). A lot of these kinds of towns should have gone the way of the dodo long ago.
first, only those with hot broadband need apply. a telco exec told a conference once (jokingly) that the plan to broaden DSL availiability in North Dakota was to move everybody who wanted it to Fargo at their expense. it would be cheaper than a buildout. changes in (smaller, cheaper) availiable DSLAMs provide a little more hope than that, but it's still pricey to do. no hope of running cable out to Southeast Armpit, and while satellite is there, the uplink is laughable and you have that 500 mS latency one-way to deal with.
second, you can't have another contract wizard in Zap when you already have one in Maza and one in Langdon and one in Maxbass... and on and on for about 200 small towns. just in North Dakota.
unless you break up, say, IBM Global Services and force all employees to move to some little burg with no stoplight, no gas station, and hold all their meetings by NetConference.
nah, totally bogus statements that supertech will save small town America.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Dude, the big cities are the only ones driving our economy. What does the US produce that it exports for profit? Software, music, movies, aero-space (tho not as much as 10 years ago). Sure we export some food, but our manfucturing base is shot. Shit, we have a negative trade balance! GM and Ford are in trouble. We have no fabric or steel industry anymore either. We are a service economy (which I think is bad) for better or worse. That's city-centric.
But by all means, break the coasts off. Most non-coastal states are in the red. They can't balance their budgets without handouts from the Federal government...and where does that money come from? The cities. I totally agree with you. Let's do it. The coasts will become more liberal, the center becomes more conservative. Without the cities providing the $ through the federal government for farm subsidies...can you still compete? South America is a strong producer of food. Maybe we'll team up with Venezuella and get some of that sweet non-mideast crude!
When I was in rural america I was under constant scruitiny. If I did not toe the line, I knew it by the locks and whispers. The city gives anonymity. It allows one to be whatever they want, without the artificial constraints of a tyrannical local culture. This is what I meant by intollerance and pettiness.
You have not denied my statement. In fact, you have supported it.
I wonder how the inter-racial couple next door would have fared in rural america.
Blar.
How come nearly all those school shootings happened in Rural areas?
You mean like Columbine/Littleton, CO? You know, the place where the school shooting that put school shootings on the map, and in everyone's face? The only school shooting that was about popular kids excluding kids that didn't conform (lots of the other shootings are about relationships, personal vendettas, etc etc. Columbine is the definitive "we were sick of being excluded" shooting)
Do you suppose that Littleton is a small, rural area, full of intolerant hilljacks?
Or, is it a posh suburb, with a bunch if uppity whites who think they're hot snot because they have rich parents? People with 0 dimensional personalities, who have nothing actually going for them and are slowly realizing their destiny of being mid-pack in the big money, big-city, anonymous, co-dependant, fruitless American "life"?
I can't say - I haven't been there. But, FYI, Littleton/Columbine are southwestern suburbs of Denver. They're even inside the interstate loop.
I can't see that you actually have any substance to any "argument" you've tried making. It's clear you think poorly of rural America. I don't doubt that you've had some bad experiences. Even so, the notion that cities are objectively "better" than rural areas is laughable. Just accept that people have differing tastes and get on with life.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Vegas was a small town 50 years ago, and in the beginning there was no shopping, nightlife or arts, but now there is shopping nightlife, arts and other ammenities of medium size city.
In the very-small-town my parents live in, there are two places to work: the Post Office, and the bait-and-tackle store (no kidding.) In the larger-small-town nearby, there are a couple of gas stations, bank branches, a curio shop or two, and five or six restaurants and bars. A hardware and small grocery store. Maybe an insurance agent, I forgot.
Probably 75% of the (employed) population of the larger-small-town has to drive to the local Small City (Pop. 100k) every day for work. Virtually all of the residents of the very-small-town work there. (Probably 40% of households in both towns are retired or semi-retired.) At least for these small towns, there are two career paths: Retail/Foodservice, and Small City Commuter. They are little more than suburbs, their economies entirely dependent on the Small City and the pensions of the retired residents.
The future of these two small towns is pretty obvious. The farmland is being carved up and sold off. The roads into the Small City are being improved and widened. Residents of the Small City are moving in, as are baby-boomer retirees. Taxes are rising, traffic is worsening, construction filth are is cluttering the landscape and no doubt the criminal element will follow.
"Saving" a small town does not mean turning it into a bustling urban metropolis. It means keeping it from being swallowed by one.
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
When the mandatory HDTV switchover comes in two years, many small towns (those that don't support cable) wont be able to receive antenna-based TV anymore. (those UHF frequencies basically are strictly line of sight) Satellite TV like Direct TV carries no local programming at all.. and is too pricey for poor rural dwellers.. many rural areas are also losing their schools as people have fewer children... The potential for manufacturing meat through non-animal processes could change the rural ecosystem still further as ranching for meat production might become less attractive from a health perspective (because of Mad Cow) and eventually, nonviable economically (its a very pollution-intensive industry, so this could be a good thing..) Its also obvious to me that the 21st century will see technology replace people in a lot of jobs.. making emplyment unnecessary for most of us, (unless we need the money of course, but 'jobs' will only be available to those with world-class creative skills) We could see a lot of rural land revert to its natural state.. naturally.. restoring watershed, forests.. etc. That would be nice..
I think the thing you are forgetting is thata mom and pop or even a small chain of mom and pop stores, resturaunts, etc find it hard to compete with larger corps because of the government.
Excessive regulation stifiles competition. When there are OVER 5000 different regulations and laws that affect a small retail owner (think workers comp, employees, building codes, IRS regs, local taxes, attorneys fees, etc) they have to spend an inordinate amount of time and money simply doing their best to comply with all of those laws. Now adays most small businesses MUST have an attorney and a tax accountant on retainer for normal standard operation of their business. That is expensive.
Well a large corp like Wal-Mart, or Dardin Resturaunts, or McDonalds, or whoever can afford to have tax accountants and attornyes IN-HOUSE! Those in-house legal-eagles are less expensive to the company working full-time in HQ for all of the operations than it is to the small biz keeping them on retainer. In otherwords the proportion of % spent on attorneys and tax accountants is substantially lower in a big business than in a small business on the balence sheet.
The fact is that big business likes big government. That might seem counter-intuitive but it is simple. If government is big and can decree excessive regulation to hold back the small business and individuals, then big business has an unfair advantage. Big business has influence in legislatures and local conucils everywhere and between them and the Bar Association, have made it almost impossible to do anything in business without having an attorney and tax accountant on staff or on high retainer.
On a similar and unrelated note this big government idea has extended into daily personal life as well. For example in many counties in the US you cannot do anything to your house or your property (short of painting the house) without a permit. This includes fencing, putting in a pond, pouring a patio, screen porch, replacing your garage door etc etc.
Anyway, the best thing for this company is to restrict and then shrink the size and power of government at all levels. I don't mean anarchy; that is absurd. But I do mean that we should progressively move to the original concept of government, small, limited, and mostly non-intervening.
Libertas in infinitum
In my last paragraph I said:
Anyway, the best thing for this company is to restrict and then shrink the size and power of government at all levels. I don't mean anarchy; that is absurd. But I do mean that we should progressively move to the original concept of government, small, limited, and mostly non-intervening.
What I meant was:
Anyway, the best thing for this COUNTRY is to restrict and then shrink the size and power of government at all levels. I don't mean anarchy; that is absurd. But I do mean that we should progressively move to the original concept of US government as set forth by the Constitution and Declreation of Independence, small, limited, and mostly non-intervening.
Libertas in infinitum