I think the fact Kansas's population is decreasing is likely a good thing. People generally prefer living other places and automation let's that happen.
PS: The average household net worth in Kansas is apparently $424,976 which is well above the US national average.
Average household net worth is meaningless. Charles Koch himself is worth ~$60,000,000,000 which comes out to a cool $55,562 per household in Kansas. And that's just one guy!
Such a large outlier! When rural farmers move out of Kansas, they increase the average household net worth in Kansas - when they move away, they stop "dragging down" the average. We shouldn't maximize this metric.
That's true specifically because the population is low. Someone is going to own the land and industry of the state. Extreme outliers are also part of the national average weath, but your u will find a lot more multi millionaires per capital in Kansas than most other states.
Johnson county, in Kansas City, has crazy property valuations. Lawrence, where the university of Kansas is, similarly high. So that's not a very meaningful measure to kansans.
That's probably because all those farmers own land and farming equipment. So it has a lot of net worth (capital), but return on capital isn't very large. It's kind of like people who have lived in the Bay Area for years and whose house is now worth a million or two. Yes, they are millionaires, but that capital is only useable (in the "I'm rich!" sense) if they sell their house and move somewhere cheaper. And if farming is your career, you'd have to switch careers to use that net worth, which is daunting and maybe not very likely to be successful.
Household net worth would include the value of your house and the land you own. If you're a farmer with a square mile of land (that's in the region of median farm size in Kansas), that's $1 million of net worth right there.
That median net worth sounds high, but most of that is captured as land, and the actual income and liquid wealth is quite poor.
This doesn't seem entirely accurate - Minnesota and Iowa, for example, are crawling with well-respected private liberal arts colleges. The problem historically hasn't been producing an educated population, it has been keeping them there.
It isn't accurate at all. The main reason is farming and agriculture, and the economics thereof. Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.
> Kansas is dying because its biggest industry is failing.
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.
Yes, but producing & automating != success. The article talks about how there's a surplus of wheat everywhere in KS. There are places where you can see giant mounds of three year-old wheat stored under tarps. They can't possibly sell it all (at least not at a price where it would be profitable at the moment).
If it's like corn in Iowa, yes, many just hold it and hope for the price to go up. It seems unreasonable, but commodity prices are just that low; selling at the wrong time can be worse for your bottom line than doing nothing. Especially since many farmers go into debt to pay for the initial costs of planting, fertilizing, ...
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.
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 town living has its own charms, and having lived in big cities, medium-sized cities, and small towns, my preference is for places that are 50,000 people or smaller, with a city over 500,000 population no nearer than 90 minutes away.
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.
Funny story, a few of my friends were moving out to the middle of Saskatchewan and I decided to room with them. So we pack our stuff into a hauling van and take off to the place one of the friends had gotten lined up for us. We roll into the city, take a rip through her and eventually pull up on this little duplex. The entrance was in the back so we go to scope her out and just over my fence is a bunch of cropland and bales. Right in the middle of a damn city.
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!
This is much less interesting than the rust belt decline or any other number of dying communities. Kansas used to need a lot more people to support farming and thus had enough people around for small towns to have a little life to them. Now they don't. It's a good thing that we can make so much food with fewer people, but it does mean even fewer people will live in rural agricultural communities.
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.
Did you live there? There was a definite vibrancy to the network of small towns in the Midwest that is being lost, similar to the rust belt. The cultures were very different, though, so perhaps one person's "bustling" is another's unmentionable adjective.
What is "bustling"? People lived there and enjoyed their lives, raised children, and participated in a culture. Who are you to look down your nose with "bustling"?
You need more than internet access (which is probably not all that great in much of rural Kansas!) for people to want to live somewhere. I mean you can get that anywhere, why pick perfectly flat wheat fields? The small towns were a byproduct of needing a lot of people to grow wheat, they weren't destinations that people chose.
If I were going to pick a boring, flat land wheat farm type of place with ultra low cost of living to telecommute from, I would not pick Kansas. You can buy a pretty decent house in Ritzville, WA for $100k, it is on I-90, and it's not a ridiculous driving distance to Spokane or Seattle. And numerous mountainous hiking/camping/skiing/4x4ing locations within a 2 hour radius.
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.
I wouldn't expect people to make that choice when there are better options. If I wanted to get away from urban life, I'd go move next to a forest with hiking, or near a ski resort, not near miles and miles of endless farms.
I disagree. The decline of mechanized agricultural America makes for an enlightening comparison to the fate of the mechanized manufacturing Rust Belt and its eventual decline. After all, the common thread does seem to be that mechanization and automation results in productivity gains with fewer workers, but nearly everything else differs, and yet the results are quite similar.
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.
Maybe we need Lyft to run a rural helicopter transportation service. So that people can live in a town or small city and have a fast, easy commute to distant farm operations where they work.
As far as I'm aware, there's no procedure or help for the orderly shutdown of a locality that is no longer necessary for the greater community of any level of government. I'm not even aware of there being such procedures in place in other countries, let alone the US where this has context.
You mean in terms of governance, or the physical presence itself? For the presence, there are precedents. For example where small communities in e.g. Alaska get government assistance to move and merge into other communities nearby.
However those approaches seem to be taken very rarely, and you can imagine the attitudes of those residents who hold out.
Cities can disincorporate when they run out of funds, or be disincorporated by the state when they are abandoned. In 2012, the State of Kansas officially disincorporated the city of Treece.[0]
In Maine, where I grew up, it's not uncommon for dying towns to disincorporate and revert to Unorganized Territories. Services formerly provided by the town revert to either the county government or the state departments.
The problem is quite direct: people do not wish to live there.
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.
The Ogallala aquifer is only mentioned once in passing, but that's the real reason rural Kansas is dying. With the aquifer being completely depleted in some areas, conventional farming of the usual cash crops won't be an option for much longer. See http://www.kansascity.com/news/state/kansas/article28640722....
It's the Pareto principle. People go where they feel they will have more opportunities, and they take their economic activity with them.
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.
The more general principle is that investors put their money where it generates the highest return.
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.
The failed promise of telecommuting is a tragedy of the tech world. I'm a Kansan born and raised in the KC area (suburban rather than rural), and I wish a work-from-home career was more feasible in my line of work. I'd like nothing more than to live in a small Midwestern town; the city-hives hold no real attraction to me. The Internet should have freed more of us to live where we want, but in the most connected point in the world's history we're clustering in tech hubs.
Agree that the promise of remote work hasn’t quite panned out, yet.
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.
The alternative to virtual density is real density (à la big cities like Tokyo, New York). In my opinion remote technology has not been able to come close with the bandwidth increases of real proximity yet. The promise of VR, telepresence, is still unable to match the benefits of real presence.
Don’t know if VR/telepresence has given any real benefit to typical tech work.
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.
I suppose the benefits depends on the knowledge work. A mathematician might benefit from the quiet solace of the country side, the human bandwidth being of marginal benefit, and instead focus on the problem. When they're ready, they transmit the proof, where it will be studied, reviewed and disseminated (if correct).
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.
> A mathematician might benefit from the quiet solace of the country side, the human bandwidth being of marginal benefit,
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'm just a math grad student, no claim to being a pro, and I can concur already that really digging into the meat of something, some new theorem, say, is MUCH easier with peers to throw off the wall ideas at.
Yeah -- my actual area of research/work is VR, hopefully for practical use cases, and it's hard to see anything in current VR tech that would help for remote working. For those who do remote teams, having something like Slack helps more, where casual channels for chatting can serve as the virtual water cooler.
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.
A personal theory of mine is that one reason telecommuting is hard is that is really screen-real-estate bound. I've been remote for 5 years, full time, and in that time I have come to rely on an iPad Pro, 2 laptops and 2 30 inch 4k monitors, all on all the time. I'm on the phone maybe 4 hours a day, sometimes up to 8. (I don't work in coding, FWIW). I have so many documents, projects, collaboration windows, schedules, emails, calendars, and checklists open all the time that it is easily more productive to add more screens.
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.
Go whole hog and buy a 43" LG 4K monitor ($700). Not a tv, has no tuner, has native display port inputs. Best thing I did all year for productivity.
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.
how do you manage multiple windows on a single huge monitor? some window manager? is the quality of screen resolution for 4k noticeably helpful towards productivity?
It's big enough that I manually tile things. The pixels per square cm (or ppi for americans) is about the same as 1920x1200, 16:10 aspect ratio, 24" display from 10 years ago. It's just a lot more real estate to work with. I'm using a fairly recent version of xfce4 and don't need to scale UI elements as would be necessary on a 28" or 30" size 4K display.
Anecdotal counter point: I've worked remotely for years. I do plenty of brainstorming via Zoom and Slack. It works just fine for me. I never felt productive in the typical tech office space-- open-plan or cubicles. When I was an office worker and really needed to get stuff done, I'd go home. If I can help it, I'm never going back to an office.
How do we know that remote telecommuting work isn't working? If you could telecommute to work and could live virtually anywhere, Kansas would not likely be at the top of the list due to a somewhat harsh winter climate. I'd imagine people would locate somewhere remote but with a temperate climate (i.e. Central California coast, Florida, Colorado, Western Washington, or even Costa Rica, etc.).
Your argument doesn't make sense. The OP says he himself wants to live in a small Kansas town, but can't because it's so difficult to find remote work. I'm sure the majority of people agree with your statement, but not everybody.
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.
It is interesting to consider why there is a preference to work physically together. The hive metaphor could shine some light here. Is telework effective/possible when there are workers and managers? In my experience managers resist telework.
What if we had a pervasive culture of self organization and direction?
I realize it's kind of a popular opinion on HN to shit on managers as only valuing "face time" and poo-pooing telework, but as an individual programmer, I find working at home without face-to-face interaction with product managers and designers a major pain in the ass. I can have a design discussion much more effectively with an in-person session than remotely. Of course, when I just want "get shit done" time I love working at home, but if I actually need to have a lot of interaction with other people I find it much more efficient to do it in person.
When in the early stages of a product I'd argue a design discussion is much more than once a week, though I totally agree with you about not wanting it "random throughout the day."
As a counterpoint, the D programming community could not exist without the internet and telecommuting. It's spread out all over the world, and we only meet once a year at Dconf.
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).
That's not really a specific counter point is it? The backing foundation is a non-profit that is backed by individuals, presumably they need a day job (not remote?) in order to be able to keep the organization running.
It is on point, as people are able to telecommute to cooperate and produce a large, complex product.
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.
Geeks have been doing this for decades, though, via IRC and email communication mainly. The problem is non technical people don't get that and insist on silly face to face meetings all the time.
Telecommuting "succeeded" in the form of offshoring. A seemingly dissimilar form of work, offshore workers nonetheless provide talent at a lower cost, in a locale that's far removed from the home office, but managed closely by supervisors at the remote site. Widespread telecommuting -- in the sense of independent workers with no on-site supervision -- would lead to the same labor cost arbitrage. You wouldn't be working in Kansas. You'd be out of work, with a very smart guy in Romania or Belarus doing your job.
IME that's already happened and in some cases come back to on shore. Programming is fundamentally communication: translating business and consumer needs into technical solutions. If a remote team shares the language and enough culture to do that work well then the money will follow.
I'd guess that culture, needs, and language are diverse enough that it won't be a race to the bottom any time soon.
Remote software dev jobs definitely exist. Especially in SF/NYC/Austin/Seattle.
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"
It is cruel, but as long as they continue to vote Republican, they'll see themselves stomped to bits. The reason Donn Teske can't get much out of the Republicans in the legislature is that he's no money to offer them. There's little left for the large businesses to steal from except their land and they'll get that through automation and debt. There's few public services to privatize into the hands of Republicans' sponsors except the roads. And those meatpacking plants? They will automate as soon as they can and scrap the workers.
Meanwhile the national Republicans want to replicate The Kansas Experiment across the country. Expect more pain as the Republican Party's ideal is implemented elsewhere. Survival of the fittest and the Republican voters have showcased they weren't the fittest in themselves or their vote.
To be specific it's Brownback and people who think like he does when it comes to economics. Such people are overwhelmingly Republican. I don't know the percentage of people who are Republican who think similarly though so I can't say that a majority of Republicans hold similar views.
Texas is more diversified from Kansas' farm economy, in addition to having a huge agriculture base, Texas is probably #1 or #2 in energy production/consumption in the USA. As long as oil is not in a slump, Texas can coast while other places without the natural energy resources would suffer. A large number of decent middle class lifestyles can be supported with or without a college degree with work around the oil fields. Even with this natural advantage, there was a staggering amount of underfunding for public schools statewide in Texas over the decade that the GOP has been in power in Texas that will mimic what happened in Kansas. The legislature continuously moves more and more of the onus of public funding to local property taxes and decrease the amount of funding from the state.
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/28/texas-am-lori-taylor...
Once upon a time, it took 90% of the US population to produce enough food to feed 100% of the US population.
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?
With those options then Net influencer or Instagram model surely? When the task of picking berries can be automated the manual labor should be shifted to other activities.
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.
If only we could automate the attribute of "being a human". Alas, as I often say, "as long as humans exist, there will be a demand for other humans to explain things to them". Thus a machine picks the berries while a human explains their feelings about the berries.
Could not the human do both, and take the job back from the robots?
Have you ever had to put 45 cases of cans on a shelf in an hour? Sorry for the "what about ism". There are some jobs that I wish automation would take, since they are so thankless.
This piece seems to me to be about automation more than anything else. Less people are needed to produce increasing amounts of crops, which due to surplus, are less valuable. Similar things are happening in many places and across many industries.
I'm writing this post from my home in Manhattan, Kansas, a mid-sized town in the Flint Hills. We had a gorgeous sunset tonight and I watched it from my back porch, staring across my lawn in the rolling ranch land behind me. I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US. Life is amazing out here. I have gigabit fiber internet, great third-wave coffee shops, a great local library, decent restaurants, and a couple of solid cocktail bars. Kansas State University is here, so that brings us a nice performing arts center that gets nationally touring acts and Big 12 football and basketball teams that you can't help but love. My only "commute" is driving my kids to school and driving myself to the coffee shop. We have a great little airport with free parking and I can leave my home and be stepping onto the jet bridge in twenty minutes and SFO is an easy hop through DFW.
It's beautiful out here and I wish more tech workers would consider the Midwest when they decide to leave the Bay Area.
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.
Who's supplying the gigabit fiber connectivity, out there?
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.
AT&T dropped fiber in my front yard too. I ignored it for a few months because previously they only offered bundles with tv and telephone and crappy speeds to boot.
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
Funny, AT&T is more expensive than Spectrum where I am for even worse (if that's possible... Spectrum is pretty bad) service. We're also a Google Fiber location (albeit one of the ones that is currently frozen) and when it was announced somehow Spectrum magically "discovered" a bunch of extra bandwidth and upgraded their plans from 50/5 to 300/50 for $90/mo. Symmetric gigabit for $70 is so far off for us it might as well be science fiction. And this is Raleigh, a well populated area known for high-tech industry.
It's frustrating, and there are many places that are far worse off than us.
AT&T was offering symmetric 100mb for $40 and gigabit for $80 in my Indianapolis suburb.<br>I understand it still has a cap of 1TB if I'm not mistaken. I guess they waive it if you use Uverse TV or directTV.
Yes, even if the prices aren't extortionary, I worry about the cap.
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.
Yep, I keep reading about how Google Fiber (or its like) entering an area causes competitors to launch competitive offers -- just in that same area, of course.
I live in NW Kansas and we have gigabit fiber everywhere in this corner. Ruraltel/Nextech is the company that scored the $300 million grant that was a rider on the Hurricane Katrina bill for the purpose of running fiber throughout northwest Kansas.
With hurricanes you get warning days in advance (I live in Florida). With tornadoes, you might get a few minutes warning, and with earthquakes, not so much (as far as I understand it).
For me, weather is a big issue - I’ve spent 4 years in Champaign-Urbana in Illinois, and I got sick of winter the first year I was there (two weeks where the high was -15 F, and the low was even lower than -30 F).
If the weather were better, I would seriously consider it, but I tired of suffering through that cold real fast.
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.
Also live outside Manhattan, KS. While there are plenty of areas of rural Kansas with poor options for Internet, some here might be surprised to know that there are a fair amount of local / rural telecoms in Kansas that have extensive fiber buildouts covering their entire service area including very small towns and rural areas.
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
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.
Though I understand that it likely seems rural, by US definitions you live in an urban area. Any area with over 50,000 people is urban, which Manhattan manages even before adding the 25,000 non-residents there most of the year.
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.
Manhattan proper is an urban area but Frankfort and Wheaton both discussed in the article are within 45 miles of Manhattan. You dont have to go more than a few miles outside of Manhattan to be back in "Rural" areas.
Agreed on the further away from a true city comment, that is whats happening in Western KS.
> I'm working for a San Francisco YC alum tech company but living in one of the most affordable places in the US.
> 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).
It depends on the team and the role. From Austin, I joined Twilio (employee #25ish) as the first developer evangelist not on a coast. Now I'm with Okta on the Product Team (almost 2 years) running the technical side of our API offerings. There hasn't been a local office for either during that entire time.
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.
Do you realize Austin isn't a small town? And that the experience you are expressing is in no way relevant to what I said or the person I responded too?
Your career in Austin is the exact opposite of what I want. It is the very definition of a "big city" career.
Yes, even though they are working remotely now, they still have a lot of bargaining power given to them by virtue of the many local opportunities available to them. Also, being near a lot of developers can't have hurt their chances of getting a job as a developer evangelist.
Yup and the fallback position of taking a local job if they can't find remote work w/o relocating which (honestly) was the original issue I was bringing up.
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've been working remote for over ten years now and I've never had a hard time finding work. I've never had to work for a subpar salary because of my reduced cost-of-living. Being experienced helps but ultimately it's about delivering results.
Ah yes the "well you must not be good enough" response when someone points out the average person is average. Usually followed by crabs in a bucket or pessimists or whatever.
"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.
You're making a generalization that just isn't true. My kids go to a gret public school system. I'm quite happy with the education they're receiving. (This is coming from a guy who attended one of the best public school systems in the US and went to college at Vanderbilt University, so I know what a good school is.)
Here is my test of how good a school really is. The conversation among the NON-valedictorians is:
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.
Much of Kansas is comprised of the most uninteresting topography in the United States. But for wheat and corn, nobody would live there.
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.
Living somewhere rural isn't hell. It means you might get bored some of the time - and that's not the end of the world! It also means you get to do what you want, instead of depending on other people to entertain you every minute until you die. Having some empty time between events happening is fine. Living more independently can even be great sometimes. You don't want to live in Kansas, that's fine, I'm just worried that a lot of people in the comments here are acting like there's no reason anyone could want to live there.
I don't understand the logic behind commodity food economics. Why is there so much excess wheat sitting around waiting for prices to jump? Surely that will go bad eventually. How much food will get wasted because of volatile markets?
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.
The interactions are complicated. Government subsidies on many agricultural commodities guarantee a price floor, but that's little comfort to farmers whose livelihoods depend on being able to sell at prices considerably higher. As with many things among actual people, the comparative differences are significant: if you can sell more for more money and have spent less money, you win much more so than your neighbors who've overspent and ended up with less profit.
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.
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.
Every time I visit my mother's home town (800 people in KS) and see main street basically boarded up I think about how interesting it would be to move there and try and build some type of ag or rural tourism business to get some partial revitalization. AirBnB for disconnecting techies in KC or maybe a small coffee house and Inn on main street. It's honest to god beautiful place.
This reminds me of a story about Slovakian Protestant Farmer's and how they died out because it became social acceptable for each family only had one child. If the child died the family died. If the child lived they would marry another farming family's only child and the farms would combine, growing larger.
I always find it odd when stories describing anywhere that has a population drop to be some kind of massive tragedy in the making. Meanwhile, world population is surging towards 8 billion!
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadPS: 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.
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.
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
[2] https://i.ytimg.com/vi/cL9JKhb1HCU/maxresdefault.jpg
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.
However those approaches seem to be taken very rarely, and you can imagine the attitudes of those residents who hold out.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treece,_Kansas
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=469705...
http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.com/2016/10/miles-from-n...
It's pretty insightful regarding the rise and fall of those places.
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.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/08/vanishin...
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.
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...
Meanwhile the national Republicans want to replicate The Kansas Experiment across the country. Expect more pain as the Republican Party's ideal is implemented elsewhere. Survival of the fittest and the Republican voters have showcased they weren't the fittest in themselves or their vote.
They are not the entirety of the problem and it's weird that you think they are.
A counter example is Texas: majority Republican and a very strong and growing economy.
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?
No... If anything, we're the ones spending our hard earn money on organic food, and daydreaming about the bucolic landscape.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Suicide by Culture (http://250bpm.com/blog:113)