Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
34,726 posts, read 58,067,115 times
Reputation: 46195
Quote:
Originally Posted by payutenyodagimas
if rural areas want broadband, they have to pay for it themselves. they should not be asking the federal govt or states to subsidize them just like they dont want to be taxed for services that mostly benefit city dwellers
sorry... as Sub mentioned... that does not work with 'for-profit' ... due to the 'numbers' (not enough subscribers).
REA worked fairly well (1930's) and created a LOT of national productivity gains / jobs / wealth / community services / commerce.
Similar to roads, rails, bridges, sewer, water systems, airports... Infrastructure (including rural internet access) powers the economic machine
The UK did a similar rural 'fiber' via REA type co-ops. Nice! really added to the commerce / valuations of small towns and rural dwellers)
We have the technology... Google / Amazon / Apple / MS / Facebook ... are using it to wire much of the world (except USA).
Last edited by StealthRabbit; 12-19-2018 at 08:03 PM..
For some reason city paper pushers who produce nothing benificial make more money the rural people who do stuff that actually benefits other people like producing food mining ect
Maine is the oldest state. We took over from Florida. If people like me did not work, the state could not function. I was born before WWII. It's 5 AM. I'll be at the general store by 5:30 for coffee with my contemporaries. The young folks will straggle in around 7 AM. The school bus driver has white hair.
We have a huge number of teachers retiring in the next few years. Want to teach where there are small classes, great fishing, hunting, snowmobiling and you can ride an ATV to the ocean? Come to Maine. We don't pay like Connecticut does, but you can buy a 25 acre farm with a decent house for $125,000.
Bring your significant other. The dating scene is kinda limited.
I think that rural areas more than 50 miles or so from a big town will stay rural (I hope!) and old due to lack of jobs that younger people want -- and I personally, very selfishly, hope that it stays that way. My husband and I are retiring from a big city suburb to a town with less than 1,500 residents, and the average age is 65 years old! (My husband is 62, and I'm 65.) And, no, it is NOT a retirement community, but a tourist one.
I would just as soon keep such small town rural communities mainly for oldsters like me that will gear themselves to us and keep the Disney/Capra idealistic portrayal of early U.S. culture intact (minus the racial bigotry and segregation) -- meaning good manners, friendly people, and well-kept businesses and homes. I hate what the U.S. has become in many ways, and I would prefer to live some place where the 21st century has not made much of a dent; and where the needs of us older U.S. citizens take precedence over the wants of people who are not citizens or who aren't law-abiding, responsible, and hard-working.
And, yes, I do very much recognize and appreciate the contribution that immigrants make, but I just prefer to live with people who are middle-class and U.S.-born, although I couldn't care less what their skin color, race, religion and ancestry are.
Last edited by katharsis; 12-20-2018 at 06:43 AM..
I think that rural areas more than 50 miles or so from a big town will stay rural (I hope!) and old due to lack of jobs that younger people want -- and I personally, very selfishly, hope that it stays that way. My husband and I are retiring from a big city suburb to a town with less than 1,500 residents, and the average age is 65 years old! (My husband is 62, and I'm 65.) And, no, it is NOT a retirement community, but a tourist one.
I would just as soon keep such small town rural communities mainly for oldsters like me that will gear themselves to us and keep the Disney/Capra idealistic portrayal of early U.S. culture intact (minus the racial bigotry and segregation) -- meaning good manners, friendly people, and well-kept businesses and homes. I hate what the U.S. has become in many ways, and I would prefer to live some place where the 21st century has not made much of a dent; and where the needs of us older U.S. citizens take precedence over the wants of people who are not citizens or who aren't law-abiding, responsible, and hard-working.
And the small town rural natives also would like rural areas to stay rural. I cant for the life of me figure out why those who aren't from rural communities think there is a dilemma and want so desperately to turn rural areas into urban ones to "save us".
Just live where you are happy be it rural, urban or metro and stop finding fault with where you don't live.
Exactly. I don't understand why this is so difficult for some people to understand.
Other infrastructure generally sucks. Many areas do not have reliable cellular service, broadband internet, or even municipal water. You're not going to get much in the way of business interest without these things. People with job skills and options don't want to move to areas like that. You're in an area that's an hour away from any real hospital. It's a vicious feedback loop.
.
Yeah, that's not just in TN, either. In rural SE Utah where we lived: no cell service, internet bandwidth was used up so no new subscribers, satellite could not even stream Netflix and any services including medical care was 45 min. away.
No water, (wells), no sewer (septic), 2-lane roads winding along the river that someone drove off into, periodically. No wonder it took over 3 years to sell.
The residents now are all wealthy/retired building expensive homes. Next to yurts and mobile homes of the previous demographic. But I have to say, we enjoyed right up to the end, when "things changed".
"Rural America is getting old. The median age is 43, seven years older than city dwellers. Its productivity, defined as output per worker, is lower than urban America’s. Its families have lower incomes. And its share of the population is shrinking: the United States has grown by 75 million people since 1990, but this has mostly occurred in cities and suburbs. Rural areas have lost some 3 million people. Since the 1990s, problems such as crime and opioid abuse, once associated with urban areas, are increasingly rural phenomena.
Rural communities once captured a greater share of the nation’s prosperity. Jobs and wages in small town America played catch-up with big cities until the mid 1980s. During the economic recovery of 1992 to 1996, 135,000 new businesses were started in small counties, a third of the nation’s total. Employment in small counties shot up by 2.5 million, or 16 percent, twice the pace experienced in counties with million-plus populations.
These days, economic growth bypasses rural economies. In the first four years of the recovery after the 2008 recession, counties with fewer than 100,000 people lost 17,500 businesses, according to the Economic Innovation Group. By contrast, counties with more than 1 million residents added, altogether, 99,000 firms. By 2017, the largest metropolitan areas had almost 10 percent more jobs than they did at the start of the financial crisis. Rural areas still had fewer."
There is no easy answer to the rural dilemma of a declining local economy.
One good idea is to develop alternative energy in those places. I know of a family living in rural Kansas who has a 23 year old son trained as a windmill technician and he thoroughly enjoys his $60K per year job that includes a new F-150 that he uses to go throughout the county maintaining wind machinery.
The money and opportunities have become very centralized, despite urban sprawl. Sprawl most times consists suburban housing and service franchises to make it feel like you "have everything within 5 minutes". Yeah, everything except, ya know, your job...
Same reason rural broadband projects are highly publicized but rarely executed in their entirety. It's just too darn expensive to invest in a place where housing density doesn't support the cost of infrastructure.
The contractors buy new equipment and charge big city prices to meet tight deadlines for big projects and be competitive with other firms. With the capital investments made, they cannot / do not adjust their prices when working outside city limits. Your $50/month high speed internet link requires fiber optic to reach within a few miles of the customer's address - it can no longer be copper from the central office with repeaters and load coils.
So you need a remote station, with racks of equipment and HVAC to maintain temp and humidity, it's own power meter, 48V battery backup, a PFP or cross box... you're into the tens and hundreds of thousands to add one of these.
While this may have a foreseeable ROI in urban areas (where they are first deployed for obvious reasons) they do not in rural areas.
Same rule applies whether talking about internet access or jobs. Companies are centrally located to take advantage of the talent pool available, who would drive X miles to a job that met their salary requirements.
This backfires when companies start having to increase offer amounts to support increasing cost of basic housing, instead of selectively applying premium pay for top performers.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
And the small town rural natives also would like rural areas to stay rural. I cant for the life of me figure out why those who aren't from rural communities think there is a dilemma and want so desperately to turn rural areas into urban ones to "save us". 
