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How can a small town become more entrepeneurial, competitively against a city, or without becoming a city? The past 300 years shows that rural is simply not ec
by kolpa 9y ago
How can a small town become more entrepeneurial, competitively against a city, or without becoming a city?
The past 300 years shows that rural is simply not economically highly-productive.
- legostormtroopr 9y agoTell that to the food you eat. Rural is where every ounce of food comes from. There have been huge efficiencies in farming over the past 100 years that have fed the growth of cities. But we should never forget that without rural areas, cities would quickly crumble. The reverse is not true.
- neo4sure 9y agoIn the future food will be grown closer to the city in verticle farms. When that happens what will these folks do?
- secstate 9y agoThis a bit like AI. It's 2018. Where are your vertical farms? You want to talk efficiency, soil on the ground will be more efficient than soil in the air for at least the next 50 to 100 years. Eventually we'll even live in starships and colonize distant planets if we don't kill ourselves first, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that will not be our defacto mode of living in my life time, and the same goes for vertical farms.
- neo4sure 9y agoPlease note soil will not be used in verticle farms. The limiting factor is the cost of electricity. Please note the curve of the cost of electricity over time its downward trending and will eventually be closer to zero.
- warmcat 9y agoAre you sure it will be sustainable for feeding ~8 billion people (Yes, I am talking about the world in general)? Agriculture also creates ecosystem needed to sustain the planet. Not just feed people.
- neo4sure 9y agoYes, I am pretty sure of this based on the startups in this area. Like AI this thing will sneak up on you.
- poulsbohemian 9y agoI'm not sure I completely agree. There are economic advantages to being in a city. Lots of friction is reduced when you have easy access to resources, like talented personnel and capital. That said - on a place like Hacker News we talk openly about being able to work from Chiang May (for example) but we don't point out that it would be just as easy to work from somewhere in rural America. If you can build a software company in Portland or Seattle, what's actually stopping you from doing the same in Kansas or Iowa?
- RickJWag 9y agoNothing, really. Except business guests really like to have a nearby airport to fly into. I know this as I used to work for Acxiom, headquartered in Conway, Arkansas. (Population: about 30k then, an hour from the Little Rock airport). It really was a restriction.