
Ways to Bring Tech Jobs to Rural Areas - boulos
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/30/opinion/tech-rural-america.html
======
rayiner
There was a big push to wire up rural areas in the early 2000s. It didn’t
happen everywhere, but it happened in quite a few places that can serve as
data points. Here in Maryland there is quite a bit of municipal fiber covering
the areas Verizon FiOS doesn’t. Some of it has been in place since the early
2000s. Are those communities with fiber doing better than those without it,
economically? They’re not doing any better than their neighbors without fiber.
The limiting factor isn’t the availability of bandwidth, it’s the lack of
desire to hire anyone from these places for remote work. This is not a “build
it and they will come” situation. Many places built it. Nobody came.

People have these unfounded romantic notions about fiber and economic
development. Here in Maryland, more than 60% of households have access to
fiber. Has it revolutionized the economy? Not at all. Annapolis is a small
city (pop. 40,000) that has had fiber more than a decade and almost all the
tech jobs here are connected to the Navy (and we’re already here). What do
people do with fiber here? Netflix. Fiber is not a catalyst for job creation
and economic growth. It’s a means for content consumption. That makes it an
awful investment of public dollars.

~~~
bcherny
Could it be that you need to first invest in fiber, then you need to invest in
other things like small business incentives and attracting VC?

~~~
downrightmike
The crux of the problem is that people only talk about jobs, and other
people/corporations creating those jobs. Everyone can agree we need more jobs
and better jobs. The real issue is that people aren't finding ways to start
their own business, make themselves a job. Politicians use the word "jobs"
like saying it makes them appear. And too many people think that is how is
should work. Those people miss out. Make a good business for yourself and
people will throw money at you.

~~~
scarface74
You act like it’s just that simple

1\. Have an idea for a profitabld business

2\. Raise enough money until the business becomes profitable and self
sustaining

People in the tech industry are so use to being able to get money from VCs
once they get to step 1 and aren’t concerned with step 2 because they are just
trying to survive long enough to have an “exit strategy”.

------
scarface74
_... They are proud of their small-town values ...._

And this part of the issue. I come from a small town. The “values” of small
towns are racist, homophopic, and nationalistic. I’ve known many people who
moved away, started dating someone of another race and then come back home
with their significant other and feel completely out of place - not because of
family, but because of the city. I’ve also had gay relatives who refuse to
visit family back home but welcome them to come to where they live in a larger
city.

I’m Black and in conversations, when I tell people where I live - an infamous
“sundown town” as recently as the 80s - the first thing I hear is “why do you
want to live around all of those White folks”. People don’t understand how
much of an anachronism small town America is. The brain drain is real, young
people who are capable can’t wait to move as soon as possible to experience
more of the world.

I can’t imagine anyone who is not a native born American ever wanting to live
there.

~~~
sieabahlpark
Not "all" small towns are racist. Saying so is just ignorant.

I also think of all the values small towns have these aren't the forefront.

~~~
scarface74
So which small rural town do you know of that is welcoming to non native
Americans, minorities, or non straight people?

~~~
nkurz
I think it's more a question of the number of newcomers, and their desire to
integrate into the community versus their desire to change it to be like their
place of origin. Some small towns seem very happy to accept hard working
immigrants who they perceive to have compatible moral values.

For non-straight, I'm occasionally surprised by how well integrated (and even
beloved) some non-straight inhabitants have been in the small towns I've lived
in (Wisconsin and now Vermont). The problem might be that a town which is 90%
welcoming may have the effect of being extremely non-welcoming depending on
how much the 10% objects and behaves.

Earlier today I posted what I thought was an interesting small town Iowa
immigration story: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-27/two-
towns...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-12-27/two-towns-forged-
an-unlikely-bond-now-ice-is-severing-the-connection). I was surprised by how
welcoming at least some parts of the town were.

~~~
scarface74
_I think it 's more a question of the number of new comers, and their desire
to integrate into the community versus their desire to change it to be like
their place of origin._

How will a non Christian “integrate” into rural America and “share their
values”, by converting to Christianity? How will either a gay couple or an
interracial couple “integrate” where some Christians think their “lifestyle”
is a sin?

[https://www.newsweek.com/20-percent-america-thinks-
interraci...](https://www.newsweek.com/20-percent-america-thinks-interracial-
marriage-morally-wrong-poll-finds-845608)

But if you are a _really_ lucky minority like I was and went to a
predominately White Christian conservative school and knew the music, the
hobbies, and “integrated” well enough you might get the reward of “not being
like most Black people” or “being really articulate”. But still, don’t try to
date our daughter.

As far as your article that says just the opposite of what you intended.

 _When you walk out here in the central park, if it’s a warm day, they’re
sitting around on benches out here. I mean, it’s like Europe. They don’t stay
in their apartments. They come out in the street, and they sit around and
talk, and it’s all in Spanish._

They aren’t doing anything illegal. They are speaking to each other in their
native language but it makes other people uncomfortable.

I don’t speak a foreign language, but I’m pretty good at “code switching”. I
speak a lot differently when I’m at work where a lot of my coworkers are non
native English speakers - I don’t use a lot of colloquialism, I speak slower,
and I don’t reference a lot of pop references from 10 years ago. I also speak
differently when I am back home - I am not as attentive about not letting my
southern accent out.

When I am around my Black friends who are all professional software developers
who live in the burbs, the last thing I am concerned about is “integrating”
into my surroundings.

~~~
nkurz
_As far as your article that says just the opposite of what you intended._

I read the article, and realize it's not entirely pro-immigrant. I meant what
I said --- that I was surprised by how welcoming some of the town was. I was
less surprised that there was also resistance. It's also worth noting that in
the continuation of that quote, the speaker claims that he's not against
immigrants in general, just against those who don't intend to integrate. I
found that part to be positive: _“Don’t get me wrong,” says Heaton, who’ll
retire from the legislature in 2019. “The only thing that upsets me is if
they’re coming, they need to blend. I don’t need ‘barrios.’ I don’t need these
certain sectors where everything is still the way it was where they came from.
If you’re going to meld, then meld.”_

 _How will a non Christian “integrate” into rural America and “share their
values”, by converting to Christianity?_

It's tough. I think (I'm white but not Christian) that it can often be done by
practicing shared values, independent of belief. If you are working on the
same food drive or Habitat-for-Humanity house, a majority of Christians are
willing to (at least temporarily) overlook the error of your religious beliefs
(or lack thereof). If you simply don't share their values, well, that's where
I think the real problems are.

I do wonder if being black in America might actually be worse for integration
than being Hispanic or Asian. Even in small towns, I'm frequently surprised by
how fully integrated and accepted by the community the second and subsequent
generations are. In some ways, this seems more complete than in larger cities
where there is a sizeable enough immigrant community to avoid integration. I
haven't seen that as frequently for black Americans. Thoughts?

~~~
scarface74
_The only thing that upsets me is if they’re coming, they need to blend. I
don’t need ‘barrios.’ I don’t need these certain sectors where everything is
still the way it was where they came from. If you’re going to meld, then
meld.”_

How are they “creating barrios”? By speaking their native toungue and maybe
listening to Hispanic music? Would the city be happier if they all spoke
English to each other and they listened to Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw?

 _I 'm frequently surprised by how fully integrated and accepted by the
community the second and subsequent generations are. _

There are different levels of acceptance.

\- serving people in a place of business.

\- employment

\- socially

\- living in the same neighborhood

\- going to the same church

\- dating.

Statistically, most Black people live in a majority Black neighborhoods.
Because of redlining, steering, economics, and just comfort.

Because we live in an overwhelmingly White area, if my (step)son is going to
date anyone from school, more than likely they are going to be white. Parents
haven’t had any problems with it but is that because he has an acceptable
pedigree and he grew up in the burbs, doesn’t “talk Black”, and we live in
“good neighborhood”? How would they feel if he were the same person, doing
well in school but lived on the other side of the tracks? Also, both my wife
and I know how to “code switch”.

 _If you are working on the same food drive or Habitat-for-Humanity house, a
majority of Christians are willing to (at least temporarily) overlook the
error of your religious beliefs (or lack thereof)._

It takes an effort to just bring Christian churches of multiple races to come
together. When you are constantly being brainwashed into believing that
Muslims are trying to spread Sharia law and that there are already some cities
in the US under Sharia law, it’s hard to shake those beliefs.

------
thaumaturgy
I was one part of a group of people who worked hard for several years to try
to nurture a growing a tech scene in a rural area not far from Sacramento. I
stepped away from that almost two years ago and my current thinking is it
can't be done, not just because we largely failed at it but because there are
a number of other towns trying to do the same and they aren't getting traction
either.

I wonder if a healthy tech economy isn't more of an emergent behavior, and it
tends to emerge in cities because there are more people, more resources, and
more opportunities all mixing together.

You need good communications infrastructure, not just fiber but cellular too.
If all you have available is satellite or (gulp) DSL, it's really painful to
get work done. But that requires an enormous financial investment, especially
in rural areas where RoI-per-mile is mostly negative.

Often the rural areas already have a culture there, and that culture doesn't
necessarily want to get along with tech. Here, cellular providers can't deploy
new towers because too many people are convinced that they'll get cancer,
including some members of city council. Rural areas will tend to be mostly
populated by people who either moved to get away from the city, or have never
experienced life in a city. For those people, there's very little about a
strong tech scene that sounds marketably attractive.

That also means that the talent just isn't there. And talent isn't there in
part because opportunity isn't there. And opportunity isn't there because
talent and infrastructure aren't there.

Nobody wants to just pump half a billion dollars or more into a small town
just to see what shakes out, and if you did, you'd probably only end up
ruining everything that made it an attractive enough small town to experiment
with in the first place.

This is all really a shame, because it's contributing to a lot of the
political and economic divide in this country, as rural areas are neglected,
and shrink, and die slow deaths, while people all jostle for tiny amounts of
space at high cost in dense population centers.

~~~
lsc
I grew up in a rural area near Sacramento. Culture is your big problem; when I
was there, reading in public was "gay" and grounds for a (light)
beating/physical humiliation.

Of course, I was in high school at the time, and high school is terrible
everywhere; I'm sure it's different for adults. But, point being, at least in
the '90s, it was not a place that encourages you to study or engage in
intellectual pursuits.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Culture can be one of the challenges, and it is different once you get out of
high school. This area (Nevada County) is far less hostile overall.

~~~
lsc
One of the reasons why I love the bay area so much is that not only is it not
hostile, it's actively supportive. Like people talk about their favorite tech
companies the way people talk about football teams in other parts of the
country.

Moving from Yolo County to Santa Clara county, for me, was going from a place
where being what I am made me an outcast, to a place where being what I am
made me... valued to an irrational degree. Like I am not saying the bay area
is better for everyone, I've talked to some people who find it really
unfriendly here, but... for someone like me? it was really amazing to go from
being treated irrationally badly to being treated.. irrationally well.

I think that and the fact that this is home for so many people who grew up
with parents in the tech industry is really _the_ advantage the bay area has
for tech industry work. I think everything else would follow, if you could
move those things elsewhere. Getting good internet connectivity, even to a
farm, really isn't that difficult or expensive, compared to the cost of a
decent Engineer.

~~~
thaumaturgy
I grew up in the east bay, and my experience at school wasn't great, despite
being lucky enough to go to one of the most technologically advanced school
districts in the state at the time.

Anyway, everything else _doesn 't_ follow, because culture isn't a thing that
can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable
recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of
the environment.

Bend, Oregon has a great craft beer and outdoor culture that is the result of
having Mount Hood and other features nearby, and being close enough to some
metropolitan areas to get supplies but far enough away from them to retain its
own identity.

Moab, Utah has a strong outdoors identity but little economy outside of that,
because while they're one of the top destinations for mountain bikers,
offroaders, hikers, and canyoneers, they're hours away from anything that
anyone on HN would consider "a city".

Seattle's culture is largely the result of its location and history as a sea
port and lumber area, and then a home to Boeing before Microsoft and the rest
arrived. (And coffee for suffering through the winter.)

San Jose was a vast agricultural area when one side of my family settled in it
a hundred years ago. Vast acres of easy-to-transform land, loose environmental
regulations, nearby Stanford University, then Hewlett-Packard all transformed
the culture there from agricultural to tech-driven.

So this is what I'm getting at: you don't set out to change the culture in an
area. I don't think it works that way. I think the culture is an emergent
effect of the conditions, and maybe you can change a few of the conditions a
little bit, but mostly they work like natural processes. It's not economically
feasible to just create a tech culture in a rural area, nor can you simply
"change the culture" to make a rural area more tech-friendly.

There are a handful of people here who've had enough money to pay the $50k or
more to get fiber lit up on their property. Doing that didn't make them more
successful; they were already successful enough to be able to do it, and that
success came from elsewhere.

~~~
lsc
>Anyway, everything else doesn't follow, because culture isn't a thing that
can be just transported from one place to another. Nobody's got a reliable
recipe for growing a specific culture. I think culture is instead a result of
the environment.

my argument is that history and values _are_ culture. "everything else" is
just physical infrastructure, which is comparatively easy to build, compared
to getting people who value the things that need to be valued if you want a
tech hub.

------
LeanderK
well, germany is quite spread out and has lots of tech in smaller towns. It's
not always perfect and we are also struggeling with some things, but I think a
few approaches can be emulated. First, I think it's important that the small
town is not on it's own, but in a close neighborhood of other smaller towns
with which it's cooperating a lot. For a serious tech economy, even small
towns need a working ecosystem (and I think can't be too small). They have to
specialize, cooperate and develop the needed ecosystem, so that they can reach
"critical mass" in some area. Ideally, this includes a small university
nearby, so that there's a cooperation between the task of education and
employement and the specialized, needed workforce can be trained. Also,
research-institutes, which help small businesses which can't fund a research
division on their own, are important. In germany, they are often coupled with
thematic industrial clusters, a smaller patch of land where the city tries to
get all the industry together. The research-institutes in germany are the
Frauenhofer-institutes, public-private partnerships of applied reasearch with
a focus and goal of supporting the local economy.

For example, the small town of Hof in bavaria with a population of 45.000. It
has a university of applied science
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Scie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hof_University_of_Applied_Sciences)),
which is focused on educating the workforce suitable to the local economy
(often in close cooperation). There's some research going on in the
university, but it's not a research intensive one. Since the textile-industry
in Hof is quite strong, there's a Frauenhofer cooperating with the university
of applied science nearby ([https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-
processes/tex...](https://www.htl.fraunhofer.de/en/manufacturing-
processes/textile-engineering.html)).

TLDR: I think tech in smaller towns is possible, but it needs a specialized
economy, not too-small towns and a close cooperation between the public and
private. Tech won't come by itself, it needs to be lured.

~~~
jonstewart
Germany has a good railway system that connects many (most? all?) small
villages with nearby towns with nearby cities. More importantly, its rural
population density is an order of magnitude greater than the US, at 237/km^2
vs 35/km^2 (source: [https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rural-population-
percen...](https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/rural-population-percent-of-
total-population-wb-data.html), [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-
states/rural-population-...](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/rural-
population-percent-of-total-population-wb-data.html)). The biggest
misconception that I’ve found my friends from other developed countries have
about the US is that we are comparable to other developed countries; we
aren’t; we’re more comparable to a continent, and more of a second-world
country than a first-world one.

Moreover, the US system of government was designed to tilt the scales a bit in
favor of rural areas than cities (that was maybe a fair trade-off a couple
centuries ago). Combine that structural power dynamic with decades of rural
depopulation as smart kids from small towns pursue opportunity in cities (I’m
one) and it goes a long way towards explaining why we seem so crazy with our
elected officials.

~~~
adrianN
IMHO average population density is an almost meaningless number, because
population density is not even close to a distribution where the mean is
informative. I'm not sure whether it's the case in the US, but it's perfectly
possible to have a tiny average population density and yet areas where small
and medium towns are not too far apart from each other. You don't have to have
rail service connection a tiny town in Arkansas to New York, it's sufficient
if there is a train to the next city with its own cinema.

~~~
80386
National population density in the US is misleading. Population density drops
off sharply between the Rockies and somewhere around Iowa. East Coast states
that we think of as mostly rural, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, have
population densities that are squarely within the European range: 110
people/sq km in Pennyslvania vs. 106 in Hungary; 81 in Virginia vs. 82 in
Romania. On the other hand, Utah (14) is less dense than Saudi Arabia (16) -
both places are mostly desert.

Arkansas has a population density of 22 people/sq km, close to Sweden - but
Arkansas is probably much less urbanized.

------
seanmcdirmid
If cities are rich because of high concentrations of capital and talent, then
it really is a choice between living in a poor area and living in a rich one.
You can’t make the poor areas rich without giving them qualities of the rich
areas, at which point they simply switch over and become “big cities”.

~~~
randomdata
Trouble is that while cities may be rich, the people living there are not.

It is true that cities are the likely home to those with incredible fortunes,
but they are also home to many in abject poverty. In fact, while average
incomes tend to be higher in big cities, median incomes in big cities tend to
be _lower_. This suggests that you have some people doing _really_ well, and a
whole lot of people doing not so great.

Which is all well and good if you are, say, a software developer and can move
to the Bay Area to make $150,000+ per year, but that only describes a _very
small_ segment of the population who are able to do that. The typical person
is going to find themselves in the "not so great" category. McDonalds pays
more or less the same whether you are in the big city or in a small town. The
average rural (or urban, for that matter) resident is not going to become a
software developer on a whim.

Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although not
always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does not
mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that only
results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.

~~~
lsc
>Moving from a poor area, where cost of living is generally lower (although
not always), to a rich area, where cost of living is generally higher, does
not mean that you, yourself, will become rich. For the average person, that
only results in skyrocketing costs, leading to a reduction in quality of life.

Maybe? but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much
we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near.

The location-based pay differential is much larger for people who don't have a
college degree than for those who do.

That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree,
and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the
country are terrible.

~~~
randomdata
_> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we
make depends largely on how many educated people we are near._

There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the
whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education
will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant
for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does
one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...?

What they are probably referring to is the fact that the education system
filters out people who are less capable. Someone with, say, down syndrome is
unfortunately unlikely to withstand the academic rigour required to graduate
from college, and is unlikely to possess the traits that employers want to see
in order to pay the big bucks, leaving the data to show that this person who
did not graduate from college is also paid poorly. But it is faulty logic to
think that if you don't graduate from college that you will contract down
syndrome.

 _> That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a
degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of
the country are terrible._

Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in
tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of
the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do
you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or
any other major metropolis)?

~~~
lsc
>Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in
tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of
the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do
you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or
any other major metropolis)?

If I inherited a bunch of debt-free land and equipment from my dad rather than
a bunch of tech skills and contacts? sure, things would be very different. But
I didn't, and agriculture is less than 2% of the labor force, and most of
those people are hired workers, not the owner-operators, which is usually what
we mean by "farmer" rather than "farm hand"

For that matter, the farmers of my famiy's ancestral lands? Both inherited
family lands _and_ are highly educated. Yeah, there's still physical work
involved, but figuring out how to operate these million dollar machines they
use? at least as compex as operating the computers I use; and figuring how to
fertalize and otherwise maintain the soil quality? I'd argue is probably a lot
more complex, and higher risk.

~~~
randomdata
Perhaps I wasn't clear, but my comment wasn't really about agriculture
specifically. What I meant was that you are able to make more in the Bay Area
doing tech than doing tech in points outside of the Bay Area because of it
being the centre of tech. Farmers are able to make more in rural areas than
they would doing farming in the city because rural areas are the centre of
agriculture. Farmers would not make more money farming in the Bay Area simply
due to it being a densely populated area. Quite the opposite. They would take
a _massive_ pay cut if they tried.

~~~
lsc
ah, yes, that is completely true; some products are better produced in some
areas than in other areas.

My argument is generalizing this to "if you fix things or otherwise provide
services, you are better off fixing things or otherwise providing services to
wealthy people than doing the same for people who are less wealthy" (edit: you
can substitute "productive" for "wealthy" here, if you want to change 'are
better off' to 'add more productivity to the system' in the previous sentence.
Or you can leave it as-is, either way works, really.)

Which seems to me to follow, because my tech job involves a whole lot of
"service" type fixing things for people. I'm a SysAdmin, and let me tell you,
getting woken up in the middle of the night for a billion dollar product is
way more renumerative (and better in other ways, too) than getting woken up in
the middle of the night for a million dollar product.

My argument is that what I experience as a sysadmin would probably be pretty
similar if I fixed cars instead; Fixing cars for wealthy people is likely to
be a lot more renumerative than doing the same for people who aren't wealthy,
and regardless of the direction of causality, the correlation between degrees
and money is very strong; that's where I was going with my original point that
as a dude without a degree who fixes things and helps people, I'm better off
around educated people than otherwise.

Of course, you would be totally right to come back with other location based
jobs; like if I were a mechanic, the path to income maximization would
probably be to upgrade my skills to large diesel, and then move near some oil
fields or something; jobs that are dependent on location are totally a thing.
But most jobs depend on the people you are around more than any other
location.

------
jonstewart
There are several comments here noting that small towns are pretty well wired.
I’m fortunate to have just purchased a vacation home in rural Wisconsin (close
to family). In DC, I have 100Mbps fiber, a free upgrade from FiOS from the
25Mbps I ordered, with the option to get a gigabit. At my other house, I have
a 6Mbps DSL that only delivers 1.5Mbps at best, with a couple hundred Kbps
upload. There’s a cell tower only a mile away, but hills and trees obscure the
signal; still with two bars I can get 20Mbps on my iPhone. Can I get a
reasonable data plan? No. All the data plans cost a lot for a little, and
throttle you to 2G after a hundred GB or so of download per month.

My hope is to spend a good portion of every summer working remotely in
Wisconsin. I’ll be hard-pressed to make video conferences and pairing sessions
work, and I sure won’t be streaming many shows for entertainment in the
evenings.

~~~
rayiner
Why didn’t you buy a vacation home in a place that’s better wired? We stayed
at an AirBnB is Putnam County, NY recently that had very solid 100 Mbps cable.
You can get 100 Mbps cable throughout Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Easton, a
town of 15,000, is upgrading its municipal cable system to gigabit.

What does it say about the importance of high-speed broadband access as a
differentiating factor that even someone in the tech industry will move
somewhere without it? Is that a compelling fact for towns like Easton who
believe that investing in municipal broadband will attract more residents?

~~~
jonstewart
Your question comes across as a bit rude. To answer it, because after half a
year of looking, it was far closer to the ideal across a range of factors than
anything else we’d found. I didn’t really notice how terrible the DSL was
until after we purchased.

The Eastern Shore in Maryland can be pretty rural, but it’s still Maryland.
Euston is 15,000; my place is between two villages, one of 900 and the other
of 1600. In town, Internet access _is_ pretty decent. But the countryside is
another matter.

Cities are economic powerhouses because they have network effects. My career
has benefited from those network effects, and I think it would be a personal
mistake for me to convert to a 100% remote position. But I can leverage a bit
of that career capital to be remote sometime and take advantage of the vast
cost differences between a coastal city and the rural Midwest, and get some
lifestyle advantages from it (most importantly having my children see their
extended family members far more frequently). I am going to have to invest a
decent amount in equipment and services (e.g., MiFi, antenna, a router that’ll
support line sharing with the cell, VPS, etc.) to make it work. That’s not to
say “poor me,” far from it, but simply to point out that rural broadband can
really suck in some places. And I’m lucky in that the cell signal exists; lots
of places it doesn’t.

~~~
rayiner
I'm trying to tease out what you value, in an economic sense. Khanna is
proposing to spend a bunch of taxpayer money building fiber in rural areas, in
hopes that it helps economically revitalize these places. But you're someone
who _already works in tech_ , and judges a house to be "closer to the ideal
across a range of factors" _even though it has nothing faster than DSL._ If
someone who already has a need for fast connectivity won't use connectivity as
a dispositive factor in deciding where to buy a house, how valuable can fiber
access really be? If people won't pick Town A over Town B because Town A has
much better connectivity, what does that say about the value of Town A
spending a bunch of tax dollars to build a fiber network?

I think this is an important point, because we shouldn't make policy based on
platitudes. If fiber really has the value the platitudes ascribe to it, we
would see places with fiber being measurably more desirable than places
without it.

~~~
jonstewart
Well, for me, it isn’t about living there full-time, so the best possible
connectivity wasn’t the biggest consideration; advertised DSL goes up to
18Mbps or more, and discounting that ideal to, say, 8-10 Mbps would still
leave me in okay shape. The other factors were things like: size of property
(35+ acres), quality of property (trails, garden space, places for kids to
play outside, natural beauty, conservation), the house, and a balanced
location between different families as well as airports. I will admit that I
was surprised my DSL was _so bad_, considering we weren’t that far from town
and not far away from a state highway.

I agree with you that spending tax money on fiber won’t be a silver bullet for
a rural community in terms of encouraging economic growth from the tech
sector. It does help counteract the monopolistic rent-seeking behaviors of
local telecom companies, however.

I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless in the coming years. We’ll see about
the Sprint/T-Mobile deal.

~~~
ghaff
>I’m semi-optimistic about fixed wireless

I might be a bit pessimistic because WiMAX ended up being such a bust. OTOH,
it seems as if consumer bandwidth needs are probably plateauing to a certain
degree so another generation of wireless can possibly get things to a good
enough point for many purposes.

------
paulsutter
More remote-first companies are the best way to bring jobs everywhere. Remote-
first working is a separate and new skill that needs to be developed.

~~~
ascar
I'm not sure that there is enough demand for remote work. Many people enjoy
and even require the social interactions provided at a workplace and don't
want solitary remote work.

~~~
dbattaglia
I’m currently at my third remote job. The first time, I was 29, newly single
and I found it got old real fast. Moving back to an office environment was a
major improvement for me. Fast forward 10 years, I’m married again, different
living situation (in the city now) and I absolutely love the freedom and
lifestyle of working remote again. There are a ton of factors involved but I
suspect I’m not alone in finding remote work more appealing as I get older and
more settled.

~~~
ghaff
Much younger me worked in a very different environment with respect to
communications, information availability, etc. of course. But I still can't
really envision newly graduated me hanging out in my apartment and just
communicating using my (then-nonexistent) laptop.

Today, I attend a lot of events, go into an office sometimes, have some off-
sites, etc. But I'm much less interested in day-to-day coffees, lunches, work
sports leagues, etc. than I once was.

------
chillacy
Digital nomads will go to places like Thailand where CoL is cheap and internet
is fast, I wonder if a small town could emulate that experience. Doesn’t have
to be quite as cheap, but won’t give you food poisoning and could be safer
too.

~~~
ForHackernews
I think a big part of the reason (western) digital nomads go to Southeast Asia
is for the tropical weather and exoticism. It would be hard for small town
America to replicate those experiences.

~~~
Retric
Exotic locations stop being so after you live in them for a few years. Time
zone issues can end up as a real pain, which makes the US rather appealing.

Weather wise most of Florida is really cheap and Hawaii can be surprisingly
affordable a few miles from the beach. So, I suspect the digital nomads living
in Asia stereotype is more about them being interesting than that many people
actually doing so.

~~~
ForHackernews
Hawai'i is "surprisingly affordable" only relative to the Bay Area. All labor
is at first-world American rates and so many things have to be shipped in.

Maybe it's an option for wealthy Silicon Valley escapees, but it's surely not
a solution for the economic woes of middle America.

~~~
Retric
I am mostly talking digital nomads lifestyles.

You can buy a nice 2br condo for 50k. That’s cheap compared to most major US
cities. High speed internet for 50$/ month is generally available and you pay
~75c / lb to get computer equipment shipped out which is a minimal increase.

Mostly it’s just food and energy prices that are a little high, but that’s not
nessisarily a huge budget item. 40k is easily comfortable if you don’t need to
travel or have kids.

That said, the median income is also significantly higher than the rest of the
US. And things get crazy if you want to live near the ocean, and travel
regularly.

------
eeeeeeeeeeeee
I come from a small town (a few thousand people). I was able to “get out”
because I found a remote position.

I think that is the cheapest way — for the employer and employee —- to lift
these these places up.

------
LyndsySimon
Education is not the issue, in my experience - career opportunities are.

I work remotely and live in a rural area. To get my career to the point where
I could reliably find remote work, I moved to Charlottesville, VA for five
years.

Meanwhile, of the 20 or so people I’ve tracked down with two-year degrees
intended to train them for tech jobs, exactly zero have done so. The primary
problem that I see is that no one wants to hire a remote junior developer.
Senior, sure, but never junior.

~~~
ghaff
Speaking as someone who mostly works remotely (after multiple decades of
working in an office most of the time), I have a lot of trouble envisioning
coming out of school and sitting in an apartment at my computer all day. Sure,
there are consulting jobs where you spend most of your days at a client site
or otherwise don't work from an office much. Perhaps had I had a job like that
I'd feel differently. But going straight from school to a fully remote
engineering position would, I think, have been very difficult for me.

~~~
LyndsySimon
It would have been for me, too - without the school, though, as I didn’t
graduate.

That’s my point. Where does someone in a rural area get the experience to make
that transition effectively?

------
general8bitso
So, I believe the WVU Beckley campus was the formerly defunct Mountain State
University. Closed in 2013.

------
RickJWagner
What a nice article. I'm a programmer living in a rural area (and am usually
politically conservative.) I really didn't expect to see such an article in
the NYT, especially authored by a politician from the left side of the aisle.

Brings a good start to 2019. Thanks, Rep. Khanna!

------
growtofill
> Shame on us for shipping over 211,000 of these jobs offshore to countries
> like Malaysia and Brazil. Americans have an advantage in doing them because
> of a cultural understanding of what businesses need and a more convenient
> time zone.

> When some of the Beckley students asked me what more they should do to bring
> tech, I joked that they would be wise to open up a few more Pakistani or
> Indian restaurants.

So the idea is one should not be a valuable tech employee working for a US
company from abroad, they should come to the country and wash the dishes for a
few years first? No, thank you.

~~~
rndgermandude
No

>I saw that spark in the Beckley [W.Va] students, many from coal mining
families

It's quite the opposite: The joke was that the local US population should open
those restaurants to attract tech talent to their towns.

------
jelliclesfarm
Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the politician
representing us.

Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems? Bay Area is
choking. In more ways than one.

Talking points is not the same as actually getting them done. It’s just a way
to get elected. Again.

Also..am I the only one who found the Indian-Pakistani restaurant quip
offensive? This is why some of the rest of the country smirks at Californians.
I am from the same region as he is..and I would NEVER make that comment in
Beckley, W.Va. It’s just..well...rude.

~~~
kevinconaway
>Ro Khanna is my hometown progressive. So..obviously..I distrust the
politician representing us.

As someone not from the Bay Area, will you please explain why this is obvious?

> Why can’t he do a better job with our multitude of problems?

Perhaps because he has only been in Congress since 2016 and in that time, the
Democrats have been in the minority and mostly powerless to do much of
anything

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Because local constituents have a front row seat wherein we hear what
politicians say and what they do and how they do it.

In any average Silicon Valley town(or college town for that matter) where
there are more non voting residents than those who can vote, the policies are
geared towards everyone and usually not in the interest of those who are long
term residents and have voted and have paid taxes.

So politicians have to deliver for both the voting and non voting
constituents, but they have to convince the voters to choose what’s sometimes
not in their best interest.

This is the reason most politicians lie or back track. It is a most superior
skill to be able to convince people to choose what isn’t in their best
interest. In California..and especially the Silicon Valley mega region,
politicians of all stripe have honed this skill to a fine art form.

~~~
nindalf
> So politicians have to deliver

Why do they have to deliver for people who don't vote for them? If they're
some altruist who wants to do the Right Thing (TM), wouldn't they get replaced
real quick by someone who knows who their constituents really are?

But even assuming that they do, why is that so wrong? You make it sound like
it's terrible to think about our neighbours, whether they can vote or not.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
They deliver promises to people who can’t vote because they spend money and
earn money and pay taxes anyways.

An elected politician is not a monarch or a benevolent dictator or an
altruistic philanthropist. He is a representative of those who voted for him.

And re: why is this wrong? Because the politicians necessarily have to lie and
or fudge facts or back track on promises because there is a fundamental
conflict of interest.

A great example of this is California Proposition 1A aka Governer Brown’s
bullet train to nowhere. Voters approved $9 billion bond money in 2008. The
estimate is 77 billion now. And nothing is done.

That’s money we could have spent locally and to improve our roads and
infrastructure. There is no more local governance and only the tyranny of
regional governance. We are not homogenized constituents and our needs vary
greatly.

Another example is school funding and LCFF..local control funding formula.
Which is anything but as it’s a melting pot of school funding and then
redistribution. Schools in highly taxed..high density cities are deteriorating
with their infrastructure crumbling. With education tied to property taxes,
there is so much pressure to create more and more housing stock in Silicon
Valley towns that are already beyond carrying capacity. Afterall, a 2 million
$ matchbox condo home sold in Cupertino delivers more tax $$$ to the state
coffers than a home in Manteca..so why build roads and maintain freeways and
create networked public transport to allow the work force to move freely?

~~~
CalRobert
I see that you're not a fan, but there are many among us who support HSR and
more housing in places like Cupertino. The fact that it's $2 million indicates
it's desperately needed.

Though I agree that HSR has been suboptimal. I'd have preferred to have a
massive improvement in medium speed rail than a focus on HSR specifically -
just make the Coast Starlight take 8 hours from downtown SF to DTLA, not 13,
and you'd have a reasonably viable service.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
Do you have any example of higher density real estate development leading to
affordable housing? High density only seems to stress existing resources and
infrastructure while making cost of living more unaffordable.

It’s baffling. And yet, we keep buying the myth of high density
sustainability. This year is going to be the year I give up all delusions and
stop being naive.

~~~
zozbot123
It's a complex question. Higher-density areas _are_ more affordable, other
things being equal. They're also a lot more _desirable_ and appealing than the
lower-density alternative, and _this_ is what can make them "less affordable"
to some, while still being quite easily affordable to others. They have
inbuilt gentrification potential. But gentrification is a great thing - it
directly translates into a better quality of life! And if it spreads
sufficiently, to the point that "higher density" is not a rarity anymore, it
doesn't even _have_ to mean high rents.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
[https://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/where-is-
gent...](https://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/where-is-
gentrification-happening-in-your-city-1055) : it seems like gentrification
means displacement of existing population that is lower income. It doesn’t
address affordability. Cupertino doesn’t need to be more gentrified by
becoming high density. Average condo price was 1 million ten years ago. How is
high density in already affordable places more sustainable? Example:Oakland.
Oakland was a poorer part of Bay Area and because of its proximity to San
Francisco is becoming more gentrified and has even more high density buildings
now. It displaces older long time poorer Oakland residents who were already
living in a high density town.

Let’s take public school spending: OUSD spends average of $14534 per student.
[http://educate78.org/much-money-ousd-spend/](http://educate78.org/much-money-
ousd-spend/) ..it’s spending has been increasing steadily as it gentrifies and
its population gets displaced. They are always in debt.

[http://www.ed-data.org/district/Alameda/Fremont-Unified](http://www.ed-
data.org/district/Alameda/Fremont-Unified) : I searched for Fremont. The one
that is currently being converted to super high density.

This random search re Cupertino public school system and it turned out to be
in Quora: [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-approximate-per-year-
expe...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-approximate-per-year-expenses-of-
Cupertino-public-schools-vs-Challenger-Stratford) ..

Here is an even more brutal question of someone with $400k and can’t make it
by buying a good school district home: [https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-
survive-in-the-Bay-Area-with...](https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-survive-in-
the-Bay-Area-with-400k-family-income-Even-with-this-kind-of-salary-we-are-
unable-to-buy-a-single-family-home-in-Cupertino-We-want-Cupertino’s-good-
schools-and-shorter-commute-Any-suggestions-for-investments-or-business) : I
had mentioned this elsewhere on HN(diff thread) about how children’s education
is now based on speculation because property taxes are tied to public schools
and their excellence. Rich parents donate or obtain private coaching classes.
(The first answer is what makes it brutal)

I have a few more examples of other cities. But a quick search spits out
shocking contradictions which only tells me why high density is a myth and
that it was never meant to be a true solution.

This is the corroding of middle class. And this is how pitchfork factories get
started.

I don’t know a single example in the Bay Area where high density has
translated to sustainability. Or affordability. It only increase taxes and
outgoing funds to the tax coffers in Sacramento.

An expected side effect(and probably planned one) is an increase in govt
employees ..so basically all the revenue generated goes to the care and
feeding of public sector employees that has left ginormous unfunded tax
liabilities of these union backed employees. The city manager of san Jose
makes 700k and fremont city manager makes 500k. The new one is this guy
[http://tbrnews.com/news/manhattan-beach-dismisses-city-
manag...](http://tbrnews.com/news/manhattan-beach-dismisses-city-manager-mark-
danaj-without-cause/article_4bedfef0-f174-11e7-b704-cfae1efec280.html) ... no
one in fremont knew that this was the story behind their city manager. Why?
Because they were all stuck in grid lock traffic trying to get back home while
not being able to participate in the running of their city their tax dollars
built. This is the reality of Bay Area.

There are no slum lords. Even the slum lords have to pay the piper. The real
winner is the govt. this is the reality of gentrified Bay Area.

~~~
scarejunba
One of your Quora links is notorious Internet anger man Michael O'Church. He
hates everything about the Bay Area tech industry and so his views are
ridiculously flamebaity. His statements have low signal.

~~~
jelliclesfarm
I don’t know what to say about that. I figured there were a multitude of
opinions in Quora forums.

------
erikb
Improvement to YOUR life always comes from YOU. If someone else does something
it is to improve THEIR life. They will certainly tell you that it will be good
for you, but in the end your advantage would only be a nice-to-have side
effect. If you feel the money is passing you by without you getting a share
then YOU need to find out how to change. For instance by learning how to do
"tech stuff".

And then, when there are a bunch of people who really want to improve actual
problems arise. E.g. universities being too expensive for them. Even free
online courses require some level of basic skill to start use them. How to get
the funds for the equipment. And of course the technicl infrastructure to
provide electricity, infrastructure and basic living needs one can't provide
for when one spends 10 hours crunching technical problems.

These are problems I hoped to find answers for in the article, or at least
suggestions. People being too proud to accept the new status quo and hoping
for more icing on their apparently already tasty enough cake before they start
moving their asses, that is nothing. Even if they get it they won't start
moving. Cake makes fat and lazy.

I personally feel a lot of the mid-level towns in Western countries (not just
in the US of A) actually have a good starting point. Roads and trains are
already government supported and therefore good enough quality or better.
Super markets and a few restaurants are there already as well. Internet is
there, although it's maybe not the highest speed. Schools and libraries have
some computers and wifi access if they want to. Office rent and land prices
are cheap. Also with the internet location itself is less and less important,
which is why so many administrative and create jobs can be outsourced. They
could be outsourced to your town as well, if you could find a way to compete.
No need to be close to natural resources, in a trade hub like a coastal town,
etc. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, with road and internet access is
totally fine to start competing.

The only thing that is really missing badly is people moving their asses. They
have a tv and enough money to buy beer. The car repair every once in a while
is quite painful, but otherwise they don't feel motivated to do anything with
their life. Some won't even travel to a nearby coastal town for a weekend on
the beach or something.

In the meantime I'm friends with a Chinese cook who works for $100/month a
14h/7day cooking job and then after that at home spends time learning how to
code to make more money and work fewer hours. I mean, if our rural folks could
get up to do half of that, then they would be able to work a $50k remote work
web/app developer position in no time, and _boom_ they are part of the "tech
elite".

