Research has shown that, while people in their 20s often leave rural communities, a higher percentage of young adults in their 30s choose rural communities, Schmitt-Wilson said. Still, most of the research on migration of young adults to rural communities focuses on "returners," or those choosing to move home to the community they were raised in, she added.
[...] The researchers found that while study participants were candid about challenges associated with life in rural areas of Montana—such as a lack of amenities and geographic and social isolation—they also highlighted a number of benefits.
"Those benefits included the quality of life they experience in their rural communities, including family-centered environments, low cost of living, unconditional support provided by community members, intergenerational friendships, increased sociability and unique opportunities for personal and professional growth available for young adults in rural communities," Schmitt-Wilson said.
If urban centers are in lockdown and their amenities are gone, would young people still choose city life or would places like rural Montana do?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 28 2020, @06:55PM (15 children)
People go where the job are...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:02PM (14 children)
Other common motivations:
- They can't afford a city apartment anymore because rents continue to skyrocket while wages stay flat, so they're moving back in with their parents.
- One or both parents are sick and unable to take care of themselves and can't afford professional care, so one of the kids is moving back to where they can take care of them.
Before considering cultural motivations, you have to look at what's going on with people's wallets.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:32PM (13 children)
I didn't think america had a culture outside wallets.
(Score: 1) by ze on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:39PM
As an american, let me tell you, we culture plenty of antibiotic resistance too
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:46PM (3 children)
It does, and it's exemplified by the president: Fast food, laughably false professions of Christian faith, racism, spousal abuse, "reality" TV, lawlessness, and con-artistry.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:42PM
There are still a lot of good things here in the US, pretty much all small business. Perhaps we need to do some massive regulation on big box stores so small businesses can compete again.
End-game capitalism sucks balls, but I do like my cheap TV.....
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:20PM (1 child)
In Urban areas, I would agree. That's why I left them (Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, Austin).
Go live in the country, figure out a way to make it work, you and your family will be happier.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday May 29 2020, @01:45AM
I live in the country: Township with a population of about 2000. And make no mistake: Those cultural infestations are quite common around here too.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:47PM (7 children)
I can't put a finger on when it started to decay, US had a culture beyond the wallet.
Or maybe the US culture started to migrate into, say, rural Montana and became less visible?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Touché) by krishnoid on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:04PM (3 children)
It was around when America stopped being "Great", I'm guessing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @06:56AM (2 children)
Vietnam. It was 'Nam.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:08AM (1 child)
Hanoi Jane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:41AM
She went to Hanoi, Trump didn't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:57PM
My guess is around when the courts ruled that corporations were people.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @12:12AM
NAFTA the start of globalization
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ7kn2-GEmM [youtube.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 29 2020, @09:32AM
Always or never are the two obvious answers. Either it started to decay when European immigrants started to migrate to the Americas (more than 150 years before the formation of the US). Or it still hasn't.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Thursday May 28 2020, @06:58PM (3 children)
Yes to all the benefits. Jobs are the problem. I expected a commute requiring a room in the city. COVID means home-office, which has been great.
If companies stick with home-office, even partially, the primary advantage of cities will be gone.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:26PM (2 children)
Seeing how desperate people are to mingle, I don't think the effect will last too long. Maybe heightened telecommuting until mid-2021, depending on when a vaccine appears. But the amount of telecommuting, online grocery shopping, etc. will be years advanced beyond what they would have been without a pandemic.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:58PM (1 child)
they have apps for online people shopping now too
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:04PM
There are rural towns where all the Tinder in the world will just turn up various cousins you have, at least in the immediate few miles. Example: Varnamtown, NC, so named because, well, it's full of the Varnam family. And that's not even the REAL middle of nowhere, located only about an hour from Myrtle Beach.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:12PM (3 children)
I think there's probably a lot of weight to the arguments that it is financially motivated, but there's also a strain of anti-urban sentiment, romanticizing of the countryside, and disgust at the corruption, rudeness, and rejection of traditional values in cities. For a lot of young people, moving to Alaska or Wyoming is a way to escape modern culture and problems and live an idyllic life away from everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @09:59AM (2 children)
Please define "traditional values." It's practically a dog whistle at this point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @12:54PM
Only if you're the dog.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 29 2020, @03:11PM
How's about saying please and thank you, stepping aside rather than barging past someone, stopping to help someone in need rather than blanking them, waiting patiently in a queue, caring about the future of anything and anyone beyond your own back yard (OK there were lots traditionally that wouldn't have done that last one but they probably would have claimed it as one of their values all the same)...?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:14PM (19 children)
So "young adults" means people in their thirties now? WTF?! You can still be "young" and too old to be trusted?
I wonder who's sliding the definition along - people in their thirties unwilling to admit that they're "grown up" or older people who still think of them as immature?
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:18PM (3 children)
I prefer the same definition for "young adult" as the literature target range: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YA_literature [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:46PM (2 children)
That's not "young adult", that's adolescent. Or if you prefer "youth" or "teen."
I suspect the category is marketed as "young adult" to give the teen novel category more GRAVITAS for the authors and the books.
"Big children's literature" doesn't have the same ring.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Booga1 on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:08PM
True, but I wouldn't call anyone past 21 "young adult" no matter what. If that's the point access to legalized drugs are made accessible, they should just be plain ol' adults by that point.
In the US, I'm not really sure why we still allow for people to be sent off to war before they're being granted full adult rights. I think it's wrong to ask people to die before we permit them to live.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:16PM
Sorry, but teens aren't children. Their thoughts and goals are different. They aren't adults, either, though.
According to species "design" children are designed to be dependent on parental support, teens are designed to search out the appropriate mate, and adults are designed to raise a family. ("Designed" should be read as an evolutionary metaphor here. Saying this properly takes more than twice as long.) The point, however, is that the thirties should be a period when the family raising is finishing its parental role and switching over to grandparenting. It really *isn't* young adult....not in terms of our evolution. That's what the whole "Saturn return" thing is really about. (Saturn is just a good way to measure time.)
Now modern society has messed up that timing something fierce, but that doesn't change the evolved emotional timing and sequence. And people in their 30s are not emotionally "young adults". That's the late teens and early 20s (say 18 to 24). And note that all these changes are gradients, not binary reactions.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:18PM (2 children)
It's more than people in their early twenties now behave more like children than adults and so that's pushing everybody else forward, whether they want it or not.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 29 2020, @12:03AM (1 child)
Isn't that usually because they're in massive debt with tiny or non-existent wages, unable to afford their own place, so they can't really live as adults?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday May 29 2020, @12:05AM
Argh, Thexalon already had it covered. Shoulda read the other comments.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:09PM (6 children)
The older people are definitely the ones that are sliding the definitions. There are 2 main reasons for that:
1. Older people control most of the institutions that set cultural definitions.
2. Younger people have to a large degree been unable to achieve the things older people see as signs of middle adulthood, like marriage, children, and home ownership.
The second part of this, even among people pushing past 40, is why a lot of older people view younger people as "irresponsible". Never mind that most older people didn't experience 6 major problems that have affected younger people quite a bit:
1. It requires extreme levels of skill and luck to find a decent job without post-high-school education. That means that what older people did at age 18, younger people have to wait until 20 or 22 to do.
2. It's requires extreme levels of skill and luck to get a post-high-school education without taking on debt. That means that lots of younger people have to do the equivalent of paying off a home loan before they're even at $0.
3. Real wages are at best flat in most professions, while fixed unavoidable expenses like rent and health insurance have gone way up. So younger people doing the same things older people did when they were young are in a much worse position, even if you don't factor in points 1 and 2.
4. The dot-com crash. That screwed over workers from approximately 2001-2003.
5. The 2008 crash. That screwed over workers from approximately 2008-2018.
6. The current Covid-19 crash, which will screw over workers from a few months ago until probably 2030 or so.
And yes, some older people experienced economic problems like the 1970's stagflation or the 1987 crash, but the last 2 crashes I mentioned in particular are both on the same kind of scale as the Great Depression, and not even the people who lived through the 1930's got the same kind of 1-2 economic punch nor experienced the complete indifference of government to their situation.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:01PM (5 children)
RIP America's Golden Age 1948-1973.
One problem is that older people's expectations are out of step with reality. It's not Happy Days any more. Hasn't been since the early 1970s, maybe late 1960s. Old farts who assume employment prospects haven't changed, and therefore that it's entirely their own fault that kids don't have jobs, that they're lazy, entitled, selfish, etc., well, that's been going on for generations. Nothing new in that. But they don't account for current circumstances. America is still coming off the high of the Golden Age they enjoyed after WWII.
If that was the only problem, it wouldn't be a big deal. But America took a few wrong turns. The greedy have been allowed to loot the public treasury, divert most of the nations' wealth to them, rig the game to keep it that way, and persuade lots of people that it's fair.
Next, fearmongering has been far too successful. It's just incredible that the largest, most powerful military ever, by an order of magnitude even-- when they say superpower, that's what they mean-- is still seen as not enough. The US military budget could be cut in half, more than half, without increasing the dangers from other nations. But America has become afraid, very afraid. It is stunningly hypocritical for budget hawks to cry that we must cut Social Security and education and science, while ignoring the war elephant in the room. Big Bird still has to go. you know, so we can afford one more fighter plane. One F-35 costs about the same as 6 seasons of Sesame Street.
While we overspend on the military to ward off totally overblown if not wholly imaginary threats, we underspend on real threats that the military is ill suited to handle, problems such as Global Warming.
And now, the wrong turn has become a death spiral. The Republicans have gone mad. In their pivot to the Southern Strategy, they embraced the worst among the voters, and now they're stuck, those voters have pulled the whole party down to their level. They thought to use those voters, and it backfired. Now they can't stop the propaganda dance they started. They gathered these wacko voters into a coherent unit, making them far more influential than they would ever have become otherwise. Their biggest supporters spit on science and fact, insisting that none of it matters, it's all just made up stuff intended to get topsides on them in the eternal internecine competition for resources and room, it's all Wag the Dog. It's like we were playing a football game on a leaking cruise ship, and upon hearing the warning to bail water or bail out, Team Republican refuses to leave the field, insisting the warning is a lie intended to trick them into forfeiting the game, and further, they actually block the exits so no one else can leave either, interfere with all efforts to organize a bucket brigade or take any other measure to save the ship, and mock everyone else for being scaredy cats, snowflakes, quitters, and Chicken Littles.
With all that, is it still great good fortune to be born in the USA?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @04:21AM (4 children)
Thing is, the invented "problems such as Global Warming" are just the "persuade lots of people that it's fair" step of the "loot the public treasury, divert most of the nations' wealth to them, rig the game to keep it that way, and persuade lots of people that it's fair". If your brain is too stuck to the party line to notice it still, you are part of the problem. It is you, not R, who are gone mad.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EEMac on Friday May 29 2020, @12:46PM
I think both parties have gone mad. One is further along than the other, but which it is depends 100% on who you ask.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday May 29 2020, @12:55PM (2 children)
Congratulations on proving his point and demonstrating the obstructionist tendency.
Now tell us the one about how tragic it would be if we make sure people working full time can afford food, clothing, shelter and health care the job givers might have to hold off buying a new winter yacht.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @07:24PM (1 child)
Is it still not strong enough to openly call your opponent a fascist for the high crime of badmouthing your Infallible Leaders, or had you simply forgotten the word in your outrage?
If only we had a way to burn the straw the Dems use making their strawmen. The world would never need any other energy source.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Saturday May 30 2020, @01:08AM
You are the only person in this thread to drop the other F bomb.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday May 29 2020, @12:30AM
Unless you are a Republican. In that case you are young till 40.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Republicans [wikipedia.org]
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @01:12PM
I know many people in their thirties who are definitely not "grown up", and the unaffordability of having your own life has a lot to do with it: growing up implies moving away from the cradle, establishing a family for your own, and so on. If you can't afford your own place, you are stifled in your way to becoming a grown-up.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Friday May 29 2020, @02:34PM (2 children)
If you are a boomer, 30-50 is "young adults", anyone less than that are children.
I suppose there is some logic, even if it is stupid; 40-year olds have boomer parents.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 29 2020, @02:52PM (1 child)
Boomer is now slang for anyone who is tech illiterate or out of touch. So even a 15-year-old can "act like a boomer".
Pegging "young adult" at mid-twenties could be because of studies showing that brain development continues until around then. Or it could be an excuse for bad behavior.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24173194 [bbc.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDKWTehsomk [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Friday May 29 2020, @03:58PM
Yeah, thats a good point. I've seen 30-year-old-boomers [knowyourmeme.com] whining about my 40 year old ass being a "millennial".
Generations are a state of mind, anyhow. Being from that born in '76-'83 age range makes me not feel particularly connected to either X or Y generations.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 5, Insightful) by looorg on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:16PM (1 child)
This can't be that hard to figure out. You move the big cool city when you are young because you are stupid, wanting to get away from all the boring old and uncool people in your little town. Then you come to the big cool city and it's all exciting. Then as time passes you slowly realize that life in the big city sucks hard -- yes there are a lot of things to chose from and do but it's all super expensive and it's filled with other people and as Sartre said -- hell is other people. But then you are stuck in your social city circle and your job that has probably for most people become a dead end soulless job. So one sad day you just had enough and you just want to get out and break free and go back home. Certainly so if you want to have tiny little offspring cause having them in your awesome super expensive but tiny loft apartment will suck. So you get some "uncool" job out on the country and move away and become happy again. Cause now you are old and uncool and you rather live in a house that costs less then your tiny apartment and life in the big cool city ever did, and your offspring will repeat the cycle.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:48PM
I left the midsize town to the big city for college, got the degrees, got a jerb in the city after school - that ran for 12 years, had one rugrat and another on the way when the jerb imploded. Before the implosion our plan was to either: A) become unlikely wealthy and put the rugrats through private schools, or B) get out of the big bad city before kindergarten started. Of course, life threw us the C) jerb in the big city quits YOU option.
Ironically, we moved to a bigger badder city next, and found a happy spot in the suburbs with good schools, etc. Took a detour from there to a smaller town and found that the bigger city suburbs actually serve our (disabled) children much better than the small towns. Also upside down from expectations: the smaller town had a whole lot of different tech employment opportunities - they all sucked, but there was quite the smorgasbord of listeria ridden choices. The "big" (1M pop) city we're in now has better jobs, but not nearly as many tech employers to choose from.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:16PM (16 children)
I enjoy a number of things about cities like good book stores, chess clubs where I can find other strong players, theaters, stadiums, and so on. However, I *hate* many other things about them - traffic, crime, the complete depersonalization, and the general feel of it all. There's the paradox that in a rural area, even one where your neighbors may not even be in eyeshot, you feel like a part of a community and most likely know the folks around you pretty well. Yet in a city you'll have many magnitudes greater people all tucked in closely together, yet everybody feels alone. There's something really interesting when you look back at the famous post war housing boom.
1950 list of US cities by population [biggestuscities.com]
1960 list of US cities by population [biggestuscities.com]
Just about every major city in the US *decreased* in population between 1950 and 1960, mountains of babies being boomed out notwithstanding. When people had the means to do so, they all got out of the city. As we reach the era where working in a physical office is increasingly no longer necessary for many jobs, I'm curious if there's going to be a gradual decline in city life. Or at least at the minimum a decline in the acceleration of growth in cities (above and beyond that caused by plummeting fertility).
At this point in my life my goal is mostly to get some land, and setup a nice semi-self sustaining place for myself and my family. Setup some solar, get some crops growing, get some chickens and goats, ideally next to a decent sized river or lake. Hopefully try to get it all down to an hour/day of maintenance so there's plenty of time left for shit posting and even some work. Seems like a pretty good life to me!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:59PM (6 children)
You want to farm chickens, goats, and crops and expect it to take an hour/day? Perhaps as an average, where you may spend 4-6 hours a day during some months, and 15 minutes during others. In any case, I'd say you may be relying on a bit of robot farming too.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:43PM (2 children)
> relying on a bit of robot farming too.
Robots aren't grown, they're manufactured!
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday May 29 2020, @07:03AM (1 child)
Back in the beginning of the Great Depression, the "Dust Bowl Days", we called them, I planted eighty acres of robots. Just when the sprouted, a late spring deep frost killed them all. Has more seed, so planted a late robot crop. They came up looking mighty fine, till the bugs, locusts mostly, but some early Unix worms, killed all those. We only managed to grow one robot, in a sand-boxed greenhouse, to keep it from the harsh realities of nature, and blue screens of death. We named it "Bender". The rest is, as the say, history.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Friday May 29 2020, @09:41AM
(Score: 3, Informative) by quietus on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:50PM (1 child)
I tend to an acre of vegetable garden, 2 glasshouses and, about half that size, a fruit garden. (Also, an additional 4 acres for keeping livestock, but that's in the past for now.) You might limit yourself to an hour a day during winter season, but these months (March to May, June) you do indeed need about 2 - 3 hours a day -- on average. Four to six hours would be ideal, and would be good enough to raise a pig for slaughter; keeping cows could just be doable too.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:11PM
You're doing it wrong. That's what children are for: chores.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:55PM
Some people using permaculture methods claim to be able to reduce the daily work to an hour or two... after 10-20 years of labor getting it working.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dltaylor on Thursday May 28 2020, @08:51PM
My family background is largely rural, and I'm currently helping a friend who moved to Montana try to set up a less on-grid life.
An hour/day!? I need the contact info for your dealer, because that is great stuff you're smoking.
Goats and chickens can be rather free range, but neither is maintenance-free. Vet bills? Chicken runs and goat pens are exposed to weather, so there is maintenance on those, and you can NOT let the manure just sit in the enclosures. That stuff should be part of a compost pile, and those require maintenance, too.
Family-sized food gardens alone, regardless of your "trade crop", require more than an hour/day checking for infestations, disease, animal invaders, proper nutrients. I'm trying to talk my friend into a concrete-floored greenhouse with a combination of raised dirt beds and hydroponics to minimize that for her garden, but it is not a trivial expense to create.
Plants and animals will survive some inattention, but the folks I know spend a fair amount of what you might think is their "down time" performing maintenance on their tools. Many need to be kept sharp; all need to be cleaned.
Find a copy of the old BBC series "Good Neighbors" (also known as "The Good Life") and be enlightened as well as entertained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:22PM (3 children)
An hour a day of your time is realistic, provided you have a source of low-cost Mexican labor for the other five hours of chores that will need doing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @12:06AM (2 children)
There's a reason people kept slaves throughout most of human history. The slaves do the work and the masters think deep thoughts about how natural and right slavery is.
Sure, today the slaves get paid a pittance, but I'm sure this recent interregnum will end soon and outright slavery will return as the survivors scrabble amongst the ruins.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:13PM
Ugh. See upthread. They're not called "slaves," they're called "children."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @07:57PM
Modern day foreign workers are not slaves.
Slaves were brought here against their will to work and tried to escape.
Modern foreigners come into the US by personal initiative at some risk and say you can't throw me out!
You either are simple or you seriously are devaluing the meaning of "slave."
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Friday May 29 2020, @12:43AM (1 child)
"...get some crops growing, get some chickens and goats, ..." Hate to bust your fantasy bubble, but all that is going to take a lot more than "...an hour/day of maintenance...".
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday May 29 2020, @01:58PM
OTOH, for many people, that 5-6 hours a day is less than they would have to work to buy the results at a supermarket.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Friday May 29 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
There was another big push for people to leave US cities in the 1950s: the fear and terror of Soviet nukes.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:14PM
Haha joke's on them: large parts of rural America are smack dab in the middle of missile fields.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fustakrakich on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:26PM
Gonna be a dental floss tycoon
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:30PM (1 child)
n/t
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:01PM
Can't stay if you can't eat.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by cykros on Thursday May 28 2020, @07:54PM (25 children)
Historically speaking, people needed to go where the jobs are, which meant leaving the rural areas and moving to the cities. We've seen housing prices skyrocketing for years attesting to this trend. Meanwhile, more and more work is possible to do remotely, especially now that the majority of companies have lost the delusion that remote work necessarily means lower productivity. The only reason NOT to be moving out to rural Montana seems to be the lack of widely available broadband and other digital infrastructure, but this isn't uniformly the case.
The real interesting information would be if this migration is including places without connectivity. If all it is is people working remotely and buying 50 acres for the cost of a year's rent, it's a no brainer.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:03PM (14 children)
And SpaceX Starlink may be a game changer there, potentially. I personally have wanted to get away from heavy traffic, ugly cityscapes, and pollution (light and noise in particular) for some time and keep trying to find a good pace to do so - but the cost benefit of denser areas on cost of broadband have made it difficult to find a place better than the major metro I live in now. Interesting times ahead.
Be nice to upgrade my lot size too.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:08PM (13 children)
For us, it was the rugrats' schools that proved to be the killer location deciderator.
I thought: how bad could it be? Hell, I can just teach math & physics in the local High School and that will make up for what the boonies are lacking. In reality, the boonies' schools lack a whole lot more than High School math & physics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by DECbot on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:16PM (1 child)
One thing to consider, a school with a class size of 3000 does not offer the same experiences as a school of 250. Want to be student council officer, computer club member, varsity swimming, track, and cross country? That's easier to do at the smaller campus, but on the larger campus there's more competition for the same number of spots.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @12:32AM
In Florida, even the schools in the Boonies still have graduating classes of 200+ (4 year high school populations of 1200+, yes... that many do drop out.) They just tend to have one high school for the whole county instead of several.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 29 2020, @09:43AM (4 children)
If they'll let you. Odds are good that you'd be rejected for being overqualified or some similar excuse.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @11:22AM (2 children)
Around here, if you volunteer to teach at the bottom of the pay scale, they'll usually let anybody with minimal qualifications or better do it. In the mid-boonies my mom actually got premium pay for teaching Physics because they couldn't get anybody else to do it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 29 2020, @03:31PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @05:58PM
Oh, it's worse than that... Alachua county Florida: got disabilities? Yessiree... we'll serve you right here through the back gate, on the dirt traffic circle with no rain shelter. Folks will take your kids right from your car straight into the portable farm where your kids will spend their whole day. Please do show up late, and come to pick up early. Doin' their best to live like it's 1955, can't kick the coloreds around so much anymore so they get their yucks kicking the cripples, and especially the retards. Oh, but I forgot, in the cripple room of the colored school (yeah, the schools are still divided 94.9 / 5.1 because 95/5 is the test point where the feds would come in and demand more integration) yeah, that room: the in-room bathroom had a problem that vented sewer gas into the classroom - now most folks who look in there would think it's the kids 'cause so many of 'em are in diapers anyway, but, nope... that's the plumbing that hasn't been right for the last 10 years.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @02:37PM
Not Christian enough to teach science in a rural town.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:22PM (5 children)
When you have [football | basketball | wrestling], what else do you need?
In all seriousness, education has changed because of this thing, too. My kids haven't been to a physical school in months. They've been learning with Khan Academy. It's extremely effective. So you don't have to live where there's a good school to get a good education, if you homeschool.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 29 2020, @02:15PM (4 children)
Education is a great deal more than Readin, Ritin and Rithmetic. If the majority of schoolchildren shift to 100% home schooling, we're looking at a cultural revolution in 5-10 years, and I don't think it will be - on balance - for the good. School is where you learn how to deal with all the other assholes that live in the world, learn how much of an asshole you are yourself, and decide how much of an asshole you will continue to be in your adult life. Without that melting pot experience: cliques, bullies, bathroom muggings, drug deals, defiance of authority, punishment, evasion of punishment, etc. the children will grow up sheltered, ignorant and clash with each other as adults instead.
The two-horse town I was considering living in had a real problem getting staff for food services. Waitresses at the best restaurant on main street didn't know how to pronounce croissant, but with some OJT they could tell you it was "a sort of funny biscuit looking thing." Chillis had to delay opening for nearly 4 months before they could adequately train staff to cook and serve at minimum franchise acceptable levels. They were, on the other hand, host to one of the biggest rodeos in the state.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @08:10PM (1 child)
Learning to interact with a broad section of society is a useful skill, but one of the things you learn from that is that certain classes of people are best COMPLETELY AVOIDED.
How many years of mixing with thugs or low-goal people do you think is appropriate to learn the lesson? Most people would say that, on balance, your child is better off spending more time around people who have their s*** together and have morals. That's the example you want for them. Not bad examples. You don't want to normalize failure behavior.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:31AM
More than one, after about three I managed to shed my private school ignorance.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @10:10PM (1 child)
I don't know what your experience of public school was, but mine was not interested in bringing out the best in the students but rather bludgeoning them into a very small box. that was out west. having served on the schoolboard in brooklyn for years, I can say with authority that they are even worse than that.
If we have a chance to teach our kids the wonder of creativity and STEM and becoming self-directed, we should jump at it. we can't let public school teachers stunt our children anymore.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday May 30 2020, @03:35AM
Home schooling has been an option for decades... we've taken that option off and on when public was worse than nothing, but... home is no substitute for peer learning. I can see how the midwest would be pretty hopeless in the public school department, but schoolboards are one of those nearly accessible political forums where, if you've got a stay at home mom (or dad) with a bit of excess time/energy, you really can start to make a difference. If you've got three or four good people with the time and energy to get elected to the schoolboard - well positioned around a county, you can actually take over and start to make major improvements.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 28 2020, @09:05PM
I tried to get ahead of this trend, bought 20 acres on a river in the middle of sort-of-nowhere in 1999 - it didn't really materialize the way I envisioned back then, much more of a slow transition. Maybe COVID-19 will catalyze the change.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Informative) by mr_bad_influence on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:34PM (7 children)
Be careful what you wish for. I've lived in MT for 43 years for all the reasons already mentioned. When I came here, the population was approximately 800K. Now, it's over a million - 25% increase. With all those extra folks, many of them with more money than I'll ever see, my favorite spots are getting not only known but a bit crowded. The internet hasn't helped, there are no 'secret spots' anymore (on public land anyway) and it allows more remote working folks to move in. It's been great for real estate values but I couldn't afford a home here now, even on a software engineer's salary. I hesitate to say it, but it's still a great place even though the big city problems (traffic, crime, etc) have followed with the increasing population. It's also become a bit of a status symbol drawing exponentially more people.
Now, get off my lawn!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @12:45AM
Sounds like you and other Montanan’s need to head to Alaska, the final frontier
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @02:32AM (1 child)
Rich people are bad news.
They move into neighborhoods and expect everyone else to adhere to their standards. Like having an extra car, boat, or RV.
These busybodies will get involved in the city government, pass ordinances, rat on their neighbors, and foment an air of distrust among everyone.
Then the old neighborly ways are gone. One is constantly afraid some neighbor will rat you out for something as little as drying your clothes in the back yard instead of using a dryer.
Or complain you have an older car.
Most rich people seem to have a leadership mentality where they believe everyone else is subordinate to them.
And those are exactly the kind of folks I am trying to get away from.
It's very demeaning to have to work under one of these. All they seem to think about is money, and how to be successful by working with public servants to compel everyone else to their schemes.
They will buy up real estate to rent it back out, but won't create jobs.
I want to move out of Los Angeles area to Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, or Arizona, but first, I want to have my small scale manufacturing business ready to start up. I will do my research here, but when I need to hire, California is not very friendly to those trying to hire people.
I want to make stuff. California needs welfare recipients. And make Trump pay for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @08:14PM
Yeah! I'm sick of those cash-chuckers too!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:34PM (3 children)
It sounds like you live in Kalispell, Missoula, or Bozeman. Most of the rest of the state is the same as it always was. Go to Paradise, Libby, Eureka, Choteau, Malta, Wibaux, Jordan, Townsend, White Sulphur Springs, or Broadus and not much has changed. It's a big state in a big country. Plenty of room for people who want a rural life.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by mr_bad_influence on Friday May 29 2020, @02:30PM (2 children)
I have been to all of those places and then some. Thing is, when I came to MT, all it took was a knock on a door and ask for permission to hunt or fish and be granted access. Now land that has been in families for generations is being sold to the wealthy who lock out the average guy. They want to sell the fish and game to outfitters for a profit. The elk congregate on these properties due to pressure on public lands. Then they complain because all the elk over graze the ranch. Fish and wildlife are supposed to belong to all the people, but only if you have enough money. Montana is rapidly losing their welcoming and friendly folks to the wealthy.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @10:03PM
I hear you. the fastest way to fix it is to levy a property tax that increases logrithmically with acreage, with family ranches and farms grandfathered.
If all else fails, canada due north is vast and empty.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @10:05PM
Look, you had plenty of time to get your Montana bribe into Zinke while he was still leading Interior. Don't cry to us that you lost your chance now that he's resigned in disgrace.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:28PM
Of course, what that means over time is that you're competing for jobs with people from Indonesia, Afghanistan, and India. You don't get to pick and chose your "effects of a change".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:06PM (3 children)
Democrats turn cities into literal shitholes. [newsmax.com] Needles everywhere, mentally ill junkies left to roam free and entire industries of useless leftist assholes where continued employment requires they not solve any problems. Theft decriminalized, cash bail scrapped and aliens [filmyone.com] welcomed at taxpayer expense. Apparently it remains a mystery to some why people escape the tax burdens of these liberal utopias in favor of areas that have no plans to introduce gender neutral bathrooms.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 28 2020, @10:52PM (2 children)
Or it may be that the city liberals realized they can't win if they let the flyover country unoccupied and started to turn them liberal too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday May 28 2020, @11:37PM
Yeah, perhaps can't even survive.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:37PM
The lack of good lattes or a decent knish in "flyover country" repels city liberals. The weather usually polishes off those who grit their teeth through drip coffee.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Touché) by c0lo on Friday May 29 2020, @12:29AM (4 children)
Says TFA (with my emphasis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by looorg on Friday May 29 2020, @12:53AM
To be fair they don't actually say, or claim, that it's a cohort study. If it had been then nine people would have been a pitiful amount no doubt. They have set a fair amount of limits on their subject population with regards to subjects age, education and geographical location etc. Still one would assume that if they really had to they could have managed to dig up a few more subjects -- Montana might be a low pop state but the cohorts should be larger then that even when you add in education levels and such. So one can't really just look at the number of subjects, nine might of could be ok if it's a very long, reoccurring and in-depth interview study -- I gather it's at least a fairly comprehensive interview study so the interviews should be somewhat more extensive then a few questions. With that in mind the pop might actually be okay.
Cohort studies tend to have hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of people in them so compared to that then nine would be quite bad indeed. 500 peps or so for a roman cohort if I'm not remembering wrong but that is somewhat besides the point I guess.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @07:11AM (1 child)
Hi-line is not exactly Montana, the way the richies think of it. More Western North Dakota.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday May 29 2020, @01:40PM
The Hi-line is where you go if you want proof that Hell does freeze over. But Ft. Peck is lovely in the summer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2020, @10:07PM
Dollars to donuts the writer is a Millennial! "If it is new to me, it must be new to everybody!"