Rural Kansas is dying
newfoodeconomy.org
newfoodeconomy.org
It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.
Kansas City is only a 2 hour drive away to go do bigger city stuff.
We happened to drive through Kansas on the way to a Colorado wedding, during prom season. It was interesting to see all these prom kids dressed up and meeting at truck stops to take pictures or carpool.
P.S. Answered my own question. Information may be out of date, but quite limited coverage residential plans from a couple of companies, and somewhat more but still limited coverage from a few companies business class offers.
Wish I had that many choices. ATT finally dropped a fiber line into our neighborhood, but it's not hooked up yet. Given what Comcast is doing to its cable Internet pricing, here, I'm a bit afraid to see the pricing ATT will offer us. By contrast, pricing out there looks significantly better.
Prior to this, our local copper trunk has been so old/deteriorated that DSL was marginal at best (they wouldn't sell it) and Uverse was a non-starter.
I might not want to be in Manhattan, KS, but I can think of some other towns -- maybe I need to look again.
A coworker told me he was getting symmetric gigabit from AT&T for $70/month so I decided to check them out. I switched from Comcast and everything has been awesome except for the supplied wireless router. My iDevices will not work reliably on it so I added my own.
My bill dropped almost in half and I got away from Comcast's metered, expensive, less reliable crap.
I am in Atlanta so the 'threat' of Google Fiber may explain the great deal I got. Not affiliated with AT&T at all and am honestly surprised at how good the service has been. YMMV
It's frustrating, and there are many places that are far worse off than us.
And the usage monitoring/scraping they keep wanting to do, and the upcharge for "opting out" of that. Especially as more and more online resources block access coming from/through commercial VPN's, AWS, and other convenient means of using a VPN as an individual, to bypass such monitoring.
The risk/frequency isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
If the weather were better, I would seriously consider it, but I tired of suffering through that cold real fast.
https://www.isws.illinois.edu/statecli/cuweather/cu-averages... says the record low temperature for Champaign-Urbana, Illinois was -25F "on four(!) occasions: 9 Feb 1899, 13 Feb 1905, 19 Jan 1994, and 5 Jan 1999."
To be sure, -25F is plenty cold. I've lived one place where the temperature got that cold, and in crappy student housing where we filmed over the windows and you could see the plastic bellowing in the wind, and where a 2L Coke bottle in the pantry froze. Not something I want to do again.
WTC is a small local telcom in the Manhattan area with fiber built out in the nearby small cities and rural areas and they are now bringing affordable fiber with gigabit speeds into Manhattan for businesses to easily out compete expensive fiber costs and contracts from Cox and AT&T: https://www.mhk.business/trending//wtcfibermanhattan
Multiple coworking spaces have launched here in the last couple years: https://www.manhattech.com/spaces.html
Its been interesting to find out about some of the things other people are doing remotely from here.
a) cooperative local government that lets you use the ROW (right-of-way) without a lot of hassle
b) 100% aerial plant, very little or no underground. Aerial is way cheaper.
c) relatively low cost labor for bucket truck construction crews to hang the aerial fiber.
I'd never heard of this WTC / Wamego before, not surprising since I do nothing facilities based near the midwest. But for those who are interested:
https://bgp.he.net/AS19504#_asinfo
Kind of surprising to find an ISP with that much v4 space that hasn't put effort into reaching a major IX point and actually peering with anybody yet... They have BGP sessions with Cox, and HE transit, and that's it.
The labeling system seems outdated. I live in an area that is rural, yet everyone in a 120 mile radius of me would say I lived in a city. A new classification of "rural city" seems necessary.
The pedantic version of rural America is dying a rather ugly death. There are still nice places in the Midwest, but the further away you are from a true city the bleaker it often becomes.
That said, a village with a hundred people doesn't guarantee rural, The City of London's 10,000 residents for example.
Agreed on the further away from a true city comment, that is whats happening in Western KS.
> It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.
I think you are confused to the core issue. Your situation is relatively difficult to sustain long term and I know of only 1 person (out of 20+) that tried it that have succeeded for 10+ years.
It is a bit anecdotal but, to me, it is pretty clear that the issue isn't "consideration" but "Remote work is genuinely offshored to cheaper IT resources in India/China/etc". Those of us who want US-level salaries find it extremely difficult to sustain a remote work situation indefinitely, particularly as they age into the 40s and 50s.
If I could be certain I'd hold down a job that pays 40% of what I make now, indefinitely, I'd have left the "Big City" 10+ years ago.
The truth is for "average" developers as we age, we get trapped between being "too expensive" (people start trying to negotiate you down except when the economy is at full employment) and the financial obligations a family represents.
To be honest, it is a large part of why LeanFIRE and FIRE communities are so popular with tech folks. Many of us want _out_ but the financial risks involved aren't practical unless we are wealthy enough to be effectively retired in a LCOL location. I doubt many (if any) of such people plan to actually stop writing code.
You should probably also keep in mind that "small town" Kansas (50k+, but not a major city) is not the same thing as "rural" Kansas (where there isn't 50k people in the county spread over a much larger land area than Manhattan, KS).
Demonstrate that you bring unique value to get your foot in the door, deliver on that value to stay in the game.
If you're just starting your career, it's going to be tough at best but if you have a track record and find the right team, it's possible.
Your career in Austin is the exact opposite of what I want. It is the very definition of a "big city" career.
It isn't finding 1 remote job that lets you work from a rural area that is the issue. It is finding 20 years worth of such jobs.
"I can do it so the majority can" is rarely true. Even when it comes to skills I would consider as basic as handling finances intelligently or cooking a decent meal or acknowledging one's limitations.
Be careful about assuming you are exceptional because most people aren't.
No tourism or things to do that are different.
Miles and miles of miles and miles.....
I might move back to my home state in the Midwest, if they got rid of their own Brownback equivalent... but Kansas... meh.
Sorry!
Poor: "Why should I go to university?"
Ok: "Are you going to university?"
Better: "Which university are you going to?"
Best: "Are you going to X, Y, Z university?"
In other words, how much does the community value education?
Red states as demonstrated by their budget choices do not value education. There may be a few local exceptions. As a general statement, Kansas budget choices has demonstrated hostility to quality education. Kansas has demonstrated that tax cuts > education.
However, the article is also noting something related: > Today, operators sitting at computers hundreds of miles from the farm can easily steer gigantic harvesters via satellite. Kansas’s agricultural landscape needs fewer and fewer human caretakers.
In a way, they are realizing “telecommuting” for harvester operators and impacting local population. I wouldn’t be surprised if one operator is able to command multiple machines in multiple fields, thereby reducing the total number of operators you need, even concurrently.
As for most “tech work” these days, I feel like we could absolutely do well with remote teams. In some cases I would miss the white boarding sessions, but that’s something you could fly people in for if it’s really needed or use myriad of other tools for.
That said, my team at a prior employer was distributed between our offices in LA, SF, Seattle, Bozeman MT, Toronto. We met in person no more than once a quarter and did everything else via hangouts, conf calls and slack. Even though we were very spread out, the team was one of the most productive in the org. I don’t know if any tech would have made us measurably more productive.
One argument could be made that we worked on an existing system, but we actually rebuilt completely, while also keeping the old one operational. There was a lot of greenfield work done and a lot of ideation. Periodic in-person sessions helped, but it’s really hard to make an argument that these same ideas would not have come to be without those in-person meetings.
Where I think you need the density you described is in searching for new work and/or funding/company creation. It’s pretty hard to sell convince someone to be your first customer when you never met face-to-face in person.
Hiring remotely should be pretty doable, but requires a leap of faith that many are unwilling to take.
If you're not considering the information you receive too heavily, then you'd probably want more synchronization and bandwidth to add value. Call center work, sales over VR (currently done over video phone) and the like.
But most of the working (academic) mathematicians I know, while they need some time in "quiet solace" or whatever, absolutely need to spend some time bouncing ideas off other mathematicians. Not unlike computer scientists, actually. And that's easier when the other mathematicians are local-ish.
I wonder if there's any potential in building VR-based telepresence tools specifically for those doing graphics/gamedev/VR work itself. When working on complex graphics-related projects, you still have to download and build someone else's code; nothing yet that's as easy as just going over to someone else's cubicle and looking at their build on their monitor. Maybe one day we'll have a distributed multi-user layer on top of the Unity Editor or its equivalent.
One thing I have learned is that collaboration and individual productivity are kind of opposing forces. To do one well, I do the other poorly. As a result I split my time between them (I manage a team, so I try to push for more collaboration so that they can work efficiently more of the time). When I am working solo, I prefer the untethered laptop with one screen. When I am collaborating, I would gladly double what I have now.
I say this because I can see a day in (in my mind's eye), when I have augmented reality glasses that provide infinite, location/object-fixed screen real estate around my house and office that I can use to collaborate better, and then simply set aside when I don't need it. I really want to be free to have the room around me be a canvas on which to work and collaborate. I'm interested in VR, but I prefer the experience of the AR solutions I have seen so far since I don't need to contend as much with focus and motion sickness.
I found that at a certain point adding more screens looks cool to view from afar, when not sitting, or to impress non technical guests. But in practical reality, the wider you spread things out, the amount of body and neck swiveling (like watching a tennis match) becomes highly frustrating.
At the time, Nextel and ICQ were good enough. That was a great team and great time.
I'm kind of in the same boat. I'd love to live in a small mountain town, but finding remote work (even as a software developer) is significantly more difficult than finding in-person work in a larger city.
What if we had a pervasive culture of self organization and direction?
I remember "telecommuting" in the 1980s with a fax machine (international phone at a buck a minute was impractical) and mailing floppy disks (weeks of delays for international).
The fact that it is organized differently than a traditional manager/worker org chart may be an interesting factor in its ability to successfully operate in a decentralized manner.
I'd guess that culture, needs, and language are diverse enough that it won't be a race to the bottom any time soon.
I live in Lincoln, NE, consult with SF startups.
Most companies are on Slack (or some sort of chat) and colleagues would rather Slack messages all day instead of walking over to someone's desk, making your case for remote work even more feasible.
If you find a job that seems interesting (even if remote isn't advertised), just ask.. Some companies may surprise you.
Here's my write-up on how to ask:
"How to Get a Remote Job, Even When Remote Isn’t Advertised"
https://medium.com/@aantix/how-to-get-a-remote-job-even-when...
A large list of job sites with Remote listings.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JfNAbUX_lN9K3MCNHO15...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...
While other northwest Kansas farmers were draining the Ogallala Aquifer to irrigate thirsty cornfields, Raile dry farmed. He likes to bet against the crowd.
Kansas is wheat country, and corn is king. This article doesn’t even touch upon this 800lb gorilla, it doesn’t mention corn subsidies that keep corn prices high while he author goes on for paragraphs lamenting how boosted production has dropped wheat prices.
Small towns were common 50 years ago in the rural Midwest. Farm sizes were much smaller on average then, and lots of people raised several children and made a decent living with 160 acres and some livestock. Now average farm size is somewhere north of 1000 acres, the kids move away for jobs more often than not, and the small towns are shrinking and dying. This is a loss for the country as a whole.
Is it? It seems like that’s the direct result of increased productivity. Even if it’s a loss for the people who would enjoy that life, it seems like tons of cheap food made available for everyone else is very much a gain.
tl;dr The losses of farmers in Kansas are large in Kansas terms, but small in United States terms. It seems a win for the country.
If the wind was blowing right we'd get hit with the smell of manure from the livestock research pens. Ever see a porthole installed on a living animal? Cool!
[1] https://www.google.ca/maps/@52.1325516,-106.6079861,14.25z
The problems described are endemic to both crops.
We love to romanticize the small farmer, but I don't know why we'd expect vast areas of farm land to support vibrant small towns.
Can you expand on this? Is it because you don't care about farmers in comparison to industrial workers, or is there a deeper meaning?
Given the same Internet, a larger, denser, more central location has a greater comparative advantage.
Also in the wheat farming sort of region, some random small town 45 minutes from the moscow-pullman metro area in SE WA. Pullman is a nice welcoming college town. Can buy houses for $100-120k.
As the article lays out, in some ways the farmers were victims of their own success, while in others they were fighting a losing demographic battle against out-migration and lack of opportunity to retain talent. Studying why things ended up this way is valuable.
http://www.masongaffney.org/publications/D1Rising_Inequality...
Farming is heavily dependent on labor and capital rather than land. Rural land is worth very little relative to urban land.
A broken tax system which assigns low taxes on land relative to taxes on capital and labor has resulted in higher land prices, increased the concentration of farm land ownership in the hands of fewer individuals, while shifting jobs and investment towards coastal cities where land values are highest.
Intra-national economic migrants are able to take their families with them, so they don't have the need to "send money home" the way so many international economic migrants do.
Since the United States taxes land rents much less than it taxes labor and capital, investment leaves agricultural areas where farming is heavily dependent upon labor and capital, and moves to coastal cities where land values are highest. It moves out of rural areas and into urban areas at an accelerating rate because that's where our broken tax system tells it to move.
This market distortion could be permanently corrected by replacing taxes on labor with taxes on land values.
PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.
That median net worth sounds high, but most of that is captured as land, and the actual income and liquid wealth is quite poor.
However those approaches seem to be taken very rarely, and you can imagine the attitudes of those residents who hold out.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=469705...
Today, it takes 2% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population - freeing the other 88% to pursue other, more lofty goals, such as "Instagram Model" or "Net Influencer".
Picking berries or being a "net influencer"? Where is our time really more well-spent?
Naturally one might argue that it would be better for society where it so that people put in their hours into other fields than those that seek to profit on people's vanity.
However, when the option is what would essentially be meaningless work when compared to a machine performing the same task, then for me at least I would prefer people to be Net influencers or Instagram models.
Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?
Suicide by Culture (http://250bpm.com/blog:113)
http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-n...
It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.
When I think of wheat, it's not just bread either. Breweries are a fast-growing industry that are springing up everywhere. I've seen so many of them become major boons to cities as they occupy formerly unused warehouse or industrial spaces. Maybe they could work out a cooperative deal with brewers to sell excess to them at lower costs to keep driving up demand for craft beer by making production more affordable. The real upside in all this, if wheat becomes cheaper maybe the places around me will make something other than ridiculously bitter IPAs.
Conversely, a massive, diversified corporation can better weather local circumstances than a farmer running a smaller operation. This favors further consolidation, as individuals get ruined and or want to exit the space, or they move towards higher-margin products. Current purchasing tastes favor high-end produce to be close to its consumption, so pivoting to Organic in Kansas may not pay off nearly as much as in New York, Illinois, or California.
The author claims she grew up in Kansas. I doubt her job requires her to be in Los Angeles. So, why isn't she in Kansas?
As a Midwest resident, I'm annoyed by patronizing West and East Coasters who claim fly-over country is dying. Many folks in the Midwest stay here precisely because the thought of living amongst smug nitwits like the author is so revolting.
No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.
It's not failing, they're producing more than ever. It's just automating. We've been doing that to agriculture since it was developed.
Coal mining isn't too dissimilar FWIW (except it would be great to not mine it at all!), we're currently producing way more coal than when coal country was in boom times. It just uses a ton less people than it used to.
You tend to see a lot more corn in storage (occasionally this is just huge piles of corn covered with a tarp!) right after harvest time, precisely because that's when the prices are the lowest. There's a surprisingly big market for huge containers that are designed to store crops for long periods of time.
Getting 100 people to decide that town X is going to be their telecommute hub and doing it is simply not that hard to organize nowadays--if people actually wanted to do it.
The fact that nobody wants to do this says more than any amount of development initiatives.
Cities are rotten.