The poverty rates and broadband service maps look like the other, except opposite.
Did you expect it to be different?
In my (rural) area, DSL internet is the only decent option, and I pay about $72/month for it. It's acceptable, streams netflix okay, but I could never be competitive in a FPS. But people around here are more interested in more traditional activities. I think their rate of watching TV and engaging with their phones and other similar measures would be far, far less than the national average. I simply think internet is not a priority; they'd rather be outside. At least in my small bubble.
In fact, I would usually just walk or take a train to these activities, and likely could commute to do them faster than people not in a city. Hunting is probably the main exception, but I don’t think it's meaningful for the point of this thread.
One of my primary hobbies in Boston was taking a bus to the Middlesex Fells nature reserve and hiking all day to find geocaches. Most people I knew also primarly engaged in outdoor, physically vigorous activities like kayaking/rowing, long distance jogging and bicycle riding.
City people drink their beer in a bar. Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.
The outdoor options for recreation are somewhat more sparse in urban areas.
The indoor options for employment are much more sparse in rural areas. White collar jobs are overwhelmingly located in urban and suburban areas. You've got teachers and dentists and stuff like that in rural areas but those scale with population so they don't affect the proportional difference between urban/rural.
I mostly agree that rural areas have a higher proportion of outdoor jobs, but it’s still a super small fraction.
> “The outdoor options for recreation are somewhat more sparse in urban areas.”
Do you have evidence for that? My initial reaction is that it’s very likely false. And if it’s not false, the actual difference is not enough to be meaningful in terms of population statistics of how much indoor time / outdoor time people spend as dense urban dwellers vs rural dwellers.
For example, in the northeast US, I exercise outdoors all year except when the weather literally prevents it. But then, it also prevents it in rural places too, likely more often given the city resources that can clear areas for running / biking that couldn’t be similarly cleared in rural areas.
Having grown up in the rural Midwest, I can only say anecdotally that people in large east coast cities exercise much more, do outdoor activities year round much more, go to public beaches, have large city parks, and generally spend more time doing outdoor activities.
Where I’m from in the Midwest, people exercise less, only use cars to go anywhere (even short distances), and the rural roads are such safety hazards that they can’t be reliably used for jogging or biking and people end up driving to fitness centers to do that stuff indoors.
Er, no, we mostly don't.
> Country people drink their beer standing around a pile of burning pallets.
I suspect they city and country people both mostly drink their beer outside of business establishments, though, sure, standing around a pile of burning pallets specifically may be more common for country folk.
Shows the positive side of local loop unbundling.
An internet connection isn't regulated as a utility. As far as the law is concerned, the internet is a luxury item so access/quality/cost is set by the market. Telephone companies (or I should say, company: Bell) operated in much the same way 100 years ago until state utility commissions started to regulate them as utilities and cap the price they could charge for local calls. Since the state had no jurisdiction over long-distance charges, those prices skyrocketed to make up the difference. In the 80's the DOJ finally wrapped up the antitrust case against "Ma Bell" that broke the company into several smaller phone service providers. With a lot of competing operators the prices were reasonable. More importantly, while telephone service was regulated as a utility the state utility commissions had largely required Bell to wire rural areas for service the same as they had wired cities.
It can be argued that internet access is more of a utility today than it was in the past, and is likely to become increasingly more crucial for folks to have. Many local, state, and national communications are over the internet, more and more jobs require it to some degree (and having internet helps find new jobs more than not having it). donald's 'official' communication mechanism is twitter, which requires internet access.
> The term utilities can also refer to the set of services provided by these organizations consumed by the public: Coal, electricity, natural gas, water, sewage, telephone, and transportation. Broadband internet services (both fixed-line and mobile) are increasingly being included within the definition