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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
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!
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
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
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.
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.
"Especially Indianapolis and Bloomington."
Of course neither is a small town. Unless you consider 69k for Bloomington small....
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....
Of course rural America understands technology. Let's see you operate or repair some of the newer combines, tractors, or farm implements. Rural America has always pushed the bill on farm and industrial technology. There is no reason why computers couldn't be next. Hell, Gateway sprouted up in South Dakota, of all places. If a tech company can come into fruition in South Dakota, it can happen pretty much anywhere.
hello dear sirs my name is jamesh i are india (bihar) can u guide me install red had linux 9?
I have to agree. Having been to Bloomington, I think that there are two ways you could confuse Bloomington with New York:
1 - You have never left Bloomington
2 - You have visited New York
since if if you had ever been to Bloomington and New York you would find ample evidence that the local university is not sufficient to provide even one or two legitimate tech based companies with experienced/talented employees.
You must be heavily invested in the local area.
Too bad.
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.
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
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.
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.
Oh please. 'Technology' extends quite a bit farther than your latest P2P client. Tractors with GPS, satellite infrared to deterimine soil composition, spreadsheet analysis to decide what, where and when to plant for maximum yield, automated milking machines.
Those rural hicks understand quite a bit more than you think.
Well, look at this this way: if your small town's population is dwindling because there is no financial opportunity, at some point, the town will cease to exist. So, while financial success is not the only measure, it is certainly a foundation - if you can't make enough money to live where you want to live, then you move to a place where you can live.
Technology put new life into the town where I live. To the west is a major computer manufacturer and to the west is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. Both have drawn other tech companies as the industry has grown locally.
The small rurual communities around me were dying out, but now they're booming - and still maintaining a sense of small town America as well. Maybe it's an anomaly, but it's worked out here.
-h-
"software is teh ideal telecommuting job"
What makes you think that? I don't want my developers working someplace where they don't have regular, daily contact with the end users of the software and other members of the development team. Outsourcing software development to Podunk, KS is just a stupid as outsourcing it to Bangalore, India.
It cannot be the answer, because in rural america people do not understand technology, but in India they do. Big difference.
That's the biggest line of bullshit I think I've ever seen. Typical of someone who hasn't spent a day outside of the city.
Having grown up in rural America, I can safely say that we understand technology just fine. Not just mechanical technology such as engines, combines, hay bailers, and other complex machines (which any farmer certainly knows better than you). There are plenty of examples of high-tech equipment that rural America understands better than you.
How about irrigation technology? With the price of water rights and well permits going up, farmers have to be especially concerned with water delivery systems. Farmers know what kind of irrigation systems deliver the most irrigation to the ground while minimizing evaporation. Do you?
What about the role of GPS in farming? How about Zaurus PDAs used in cattle herding?
Shall we talk about milk next? Technology in that field is fairly advanced, too.
Yes, rural America understands technology. You clearly don't understand rural America.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
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. ;-)
Let's see... Slashdot started in a small town -- Holland, MI.
At the time I worked for Andover News Network (later Andover.net, bought by VA Linux, which become VA Software and renamed Andover OSDN, then OSTG), which was in a small town not terribly far from Boston. I lived in Elkridge, MD, a small town near Baltimore.
Andover bought Slashdot. The original Slashdot crew moved from Holland, MI, to Dexter, MI, another small town near Ann Arbor.
I moved to Bradenton, FL, pop. ~55,000. Retirees are courted like mad here because they *don't* use a lot of civic services. Realize that schools are about the most expensive civic service we have, and retirees rarely have school-age children.
This area has a substantial number of creative loonies. I wrote about that phenomenon on my personal site.
I have friends in tech businesses here who are doing fine.
When Tropicana -- based in Bradenton -- got bought by Pepsi Cola and all the executive positions were transferred to Chicago, not many Tropicana execs made the move. They decided to stay here. And they found jobs.
In fact, this area has a negligible unemployment rate, down around 3%.
Not all small towns are the same.
And not all small towns are in the middle of nowhere. I live about 3 miles from Interstate 75, which runs to Atlanta and from there, eventually, to Detroit. Not only that, we have a local airport 10 minutes away and Tampa International less than an hour away. Tomorrow I'll fly from Tampa to Raleigh, NC on business. It will take me less time to get to the airport than it would take me to get to LaGuardia if I lived in Greenwich Village -- and I'll pay a lot less for parking, too.
I can be anywhere on the East Coast in four hours or less, including driving and airport wait time. I can be in San Francisco in seven hours or so.
If I have large quantities of physical goods to ship in or out, we have a huge container shipping port right up the road, and another one across the bay in Tampa.
I don't feel I'm exactly in the middle of nowhere, even though I don't live in one of America's largest population centers.
Our nearest Gulf Coast swimming beach is about 8 miles, and the nearest launch ramp for my sailboat is 1.4 miles.
Since "I'd rather be sailing," this smallish town is a far better place for me to be than NYC, just as skiers would rather live in New Hampshire or N. Dakota than in San Francisco.
We all have our own tastes. I was born in Los Angeles, and I've lived in San Francisco, Baltimore, and the New York (Long Island) burbs. I learned that I liked a smaller place better than a big one. And I like having salt water nearby. So I live where and how *I* want, which may not be how and where *you* want.
- Robin
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.
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.
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.
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.