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Comment by douche | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we could actually let people work remotely, and not waste billions of hours commuting. Then we could leave these fucking urban and suburban hellscapes, and go live somewhere with green grass, and trees, and mountains, and human-scale communities. Maybe people wouldn't be so neurotic.

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Because there are too many people that think good communication is important and that good communication is comprised solely of face to face meetings.

IME these people are universally poor communicators in the much more important text medium.

I wouldn't go that far. There's a host of conscious and subconscious things we can only get when we're in the same room as someone. It's not surprising people rarely get funding, make hiring decisions, etc. solely from text communication. It's unfair to characterize people / companies who value the additional information as being backwards or old fashion (you didn't do this -- just a general statement).

Sure, as long as you're willing to pay for the sprawl of infrastructure needed to support all those towns spread out everywhere, 'cause as an urban dweller, I sure ain't.

Small towns are awesome if you want to live a mostly self-sufficient life. For most people, who want cheap crap dropped on their doorstep every other week, food coming from hundreds of miles, cable TV with 300 channels and fast internet, they just mean more roads, more trucks, more driving, more heating, more pollution.

> pay for the sprawl of infrastructure needed to support all those towns spread out everywhere

You mean the septic tank, well, and solar panels? Plus the dirt road? Frankly the only infrastructure you really need is the high speed internet connection.

No, I mean the hospitals, schools, warehouses, postal service, shops, electricity generation and distribution, mobile towers, roads that can support the trucks that transport everything, etc - and then the human infrastructure: courts, police, administration, etc.

That stuff already exists. In many cases, it's the only thing that still exists. In the podunk little town I grew up in, every scrid of industry has been outsourced or regulated out of existence, but the schools, hospital, local college, government services, and utilites are still around, and are the primary sources of employment, by an overwhelming margin. If you could halt the brain and youth drain out of the area, and put some people that were making real money back into the community, you could support some actual businesses, besides the WalMart and the gas station.

I actually have faster internet when I go visit my parents up there than I do where I live in the suburbs...

That stuff already exists. In many cases, it's the only thing that still exists. In the podunk little town I grew up in, every scrid of industry has been outsourced or regulated out of existence, but the schools, hospital, local college, government services, and utilites are still around

Just because the buildings exist doesn't mean they're now free; they have to be supplied and maintained, each and every one.

If you could halt the brain and youth drain out of the area, and put some people that were making real money back into the community, you could support some actual businesses, besides the WalMart and the gas station.

But why would we do that? What's the point of having "some actual businesses" in a podunk little town, where they'll be cutoff from the wider industry and where everything they need and produce (assuming it's not just software) must be shipped a bunch of extra miles?

My whole point is that small towns are inefficient unless the inhabitants are willing to be mostly self-sufficient. Supporting the creation of businesses, which require by definition tons of infrastructure and usually transportation of stuff goes directly against that.

Here's the thing. We already have towns spread everywhere--just like in pretty much every country in the world. The US is a large country. I live in an exurban town that's adjacent to a couple of older/smaller manufacturing cities within an hour of a major tech metropolis (though my office is actually much closer). I have septic, pay for water, pay for trash pickup, etc. And, not that I object (as I go into the city a fair bit), but a lot of my taxes seem to go into urban infrastructure projects.

It's not black and white. It's not central Manhattan and the middle of Montana.

[ADDED: And, by the way, my town was founded in 1653. It's not some recent suburban sprawl addition.]

This. There are all kinds of rural US towns with existing infrastructure that are slipping beneath the waves because there aren't any jobs. Not everyone wants to live in Manhattan - if I could telecommute from a more rural location I would.

The town I live in is in pretty good shape because it's on the outer ring of the Boston commuting radius--with pretty good rail. Plus until quite recently essentially all Boston tech was west of the city anyway.

But this idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly.

New England, and indeed much of the East Coast, is a far cry from the rest of the country. The width of the entire state of Massachusetts is smaller than the distance between some neighboring towns in the Midwest.

Yes, but the point remains that all those spread-out towns already exist. Unless they're actually abandoned we're not going to bulldoze them.

The difference is that they're not within daily/weekly commuting distances of tech centers as are many of the outlying areas of most tech centers--the Bay Area being something of an exception. So living there would be true remote working as opposed to just not living in a desired city core.

Massacheusetts is almost 200 miles wide, I'm having a little bit of trouble picturing places that are that far removed from the nearest town outside of places like the empty parts of Nevada or Wyoming.

I guess it depends on your definition of "nearest town". By the official "settlement hierarchy", in which a thousand souls or more comprise a town, that's true. Once you get into 20k or 30k, though, it's pretty easy to find places in the West or Midwest that are more than 200 miles from the nearest town of that size.

There's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k".

Also I don't have any GIS tools handy but I started poking around with google maps and 200 miles is a long way even in the west, It looks like all of Nebraska is within 200 miles of a 20k city, and so is almost all of Texas except maybe down by Big Bend.

>There's a pretty wide gap between "1k" and "20k".

That's true. I was a little surprised 1k is large enough to be considered a town.

this idea that, if only we herded everyone into cities and stopped spending on other infrastructure, everything would be great is... silly.

As the person who started this thread, I agree, that idea that nobody argued for is indeed silly. All I said is that small towns are inefficient for the typical citizen. Nobody claimed that eliminating small towns would make "everything great".

Many jobs, like cutting hair, waiting tables, and changing car oil, are hard to do remotely. If your industry has options for remote work, pursue those instead of bemoaning your current situation.

Those jobs are hard to do remotely because they involve providing services to other people who live in the area - in the case of San Francisco, that's mostly tech industry workers who could work remotely but don't for reasons of industry politics. The hairdressers and mechanics and waiters required to service them act as a multiplier on the resulting population growth, but the cause is all the jobs that could be done remotely but aren't. Every tech firm that insists on operating from SF leads to a penumbra of non-tech workers around it being stuck in SF in jobs that cannot be done remotely.

That is only one of many factors involved. We are talking about communities. When a big new software innovation comes out people have meetups and talk things over. That doesn't work with a highly distributed workforce. No matter what employers do the same forces will be at work concentrating high end labor.

Most people aren't really high-end labor. If you're building a website or a glorified CRUD app or the vast majority of enterprise drudgery, you can do that from anywhere; sitting cheek by jowl with your coworker is not really any better than having an XMPP or Skype channel, and tens, hundreds, even thousands of miles between you.

We used to talk about things here, on the internet. We're doing it right now, in fact. I've had far more stimulating discussions with people here, and other places on the web, where you can draw people not just from one provincial area, but from the whole world.

I don't disagree that there's value to physical concentration and face to face. But not every talented engineer (and associated financial/business/etc. people) can live in Silicon Valley or wants to. It's a constraint. Yes, there are concentrating forces but, as an industry, we need to live with the fact that there are countervailing forces. Distribution, even if its not absolute, is the reality.

Meh, you can travel for a conference or to the city for the meetup. No different than now.

By the time we actually let people do that, we will have flying cars to commute with anyway.

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