5 ms·

I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11

I just spent 3 weeks in the US Midwest. There is plenty of land to use, thousands of square miles of empty rolling grassy plains. (Ex.: South Dakota averages 11 people per square mile.) Apply a little modern technology (solar/wind, water storage/purification, insulation, Starlink satellite internet) and nobody need complain of population density. There's a startup waiting to happen: self-sufficient high-tech prefab homes plus easy land purchase, organized for instant technocommunities; there are many of us "work from anywhere" types who would jump at the chance made easy.

floren 7y ago
Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.
  - floren 7y ago
    > LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere. Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
    - ctdonath 7y ago
      I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.
  - LargeWu 7y ago
    I grew up out there. Lots of those 100k+ jobs are oil jobs. It's hard work, even if you aren't working directly on the drilling rigs. It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.
Karrot_Kream 7y ago
Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago
  I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs. Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution. And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face. Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy". This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges. We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder. I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...
  - floren 7y ago
    I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)
jacobolus 7y ago
If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota. People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, .... A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.
- ctdonath 7y ago
  Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities. I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing. Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    > encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres There will soon be 11 billion people in the world. This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.

floren 7y ago

Roll it out in say Rugby, ND and you'll even have an Empire Builder stop right there, with service to Seattle, Portland, Spokane, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Milwaukee, and Chicago!

ctdonath 7y ago
Looked. Prolific lakefront opportunities, lots of suitable roads in place. Base town already there. LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). Just need someone to (profitably!) take on making it easy to move there.
- floren 7y ago
  > LinkedIn shows >25000 tech jobs in the state, many well into the $100k range (remember, extremely low cost of living). They don't even have to be in the state, right? Because the core concept was that a remote-working code-slinger could live anywhere. Another neat point about Rugby: it's apparently got gigabit ethernet service through North Dakota Telephone Co, although you'll pay $220/mo for that service.
  - ctdonath 7y ago
    I gave in-state jobs to show there is a tech environment. Indeed, the goal is to promote remote work, make living there point-and-click easy, and attract a critical mass of introverts who want open spaces and who, by simply being there en masse, attract a growing population.
- LargeWu 7y ago
  I grew up out there. Lots of those 100k+ jobs are oil jobs. It's hard work, even if you aren't working directly on the drilling rigs. It's incredibly easy to move there. My hometown of ~1,400 has something like a couple dozen vacant properties right now which you could probably buy for $150k or less because all the townies are moving out to the lake. But once you're there, there aren't a lot of good paying local jobs, there is very little to no culture, very few amenities. Not much to do unless you're into hunting and motorcycles. There's a reason it's sparsely populated.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago

Absolutely. Part of the solution is to figure out how to disaggregate knowledge economies. Why so many mostly digital companies insist on in-office work is absolutely beyond me.

shrimp_emoji 7y ago
I think it's because our telecomm tech still sucks. It's not as good as real life and it has bugs. Until we can smoothly emulate meatspace with VR, I don't think you can replace face-to-face interaction. If you can't do that, then people will still want to be close to jobs and similar businesses, so they'll continue to urbanize in a natural distribution. And even if you had your new VR tech with enough bandwidth to run it nicely, you'd still need to be able to provide it to your offworld coloni--I mean rural exclaves.
- Kalium 7y ago
  I think that until you're able to emulate meatspace in every aspect with VR, you cannot replace face-to-face. Economic clusters aren't just valuable for people being in the same office. They produce value because people and ideas meet in bars and restaurants and coffee shops and backyards. All of this is stuff you'd need to replace to "disaggregate the knowledge economy". This is not something you can accomplish with GitHub and teleconferencing.
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
I'd kind of like to go to rural nowheresville, live cheap, and still make tech money. But my parents are here, my wife has health issues, and my kids need decent colleges. We're getting to the point where maybe the work part works. College may be able to be fully remote fairly soon (Western Governors University is there already, but only has select majors). Specialized doctors, though... that might be a bit harder. I mean, yes, you can do "face to face" via Skype. You can't do blood tests that way, though...
- floren 7y ago
  I grew up in rural nowheresville and went to a good college across the country, but that's not necessary. Every single state has acceptable state colleges, if your children cannot bear doing their own laundry :)

jacobolus 7y ago

If people are going to live anything resembling a modern American lifestyle, then gathering people together in cities has much lower environmental impact and lower infrastructure costs than spreading them around South Dakota. People don’t expect just electricity and plumbing, they also expect modern construction techniques, roads, police, fire suppression, emergency response, schools, full-service hospitals, telecommunications, airports, parcel delivery, .... A big reason that rural / exurban living is cheap in the USA is that we massively subsidize services for people living very spread out.

ctdonath 7y ago
Consider the environmental transparency: instead of utterly devastating an environmental region as does cities, encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres, the high-efficiency home sporting solar roof & rainwater collection, wireless/satellite high-bandwidth internet, home & prolific electric car chargers, optimized Amazon/etc delivery, home/neighborhood schooling, work-from-home norm, etc. Environmental impact? between normalizing practically everything environmentalists call for (I'm not one), and there being not much of an environment to impact (have you seen the Dakotas?), the neo-futuristic American lifestyle can be achieved while minimizing environmental footprint/impact without the hideous expense & annoyance of overpopulated cities. I think you massively overestimate the rural "subsidies". Make it easy to move rural and "go green" with minimal regulations, and you may find the problems nearly solve themselves.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  You still need to give those people roads, maybe even sewer rather than having them use a horrible septic tank. They will probably want internet as well...and not the crappy satellite variety. And schools...ya, that’s a lot of bussing. Western Washington state subsidizes Eastern Washington state greatly, and that isn’t even as sparse as South Dakota (or as I like to call it, Tropical Dakota).
- jacobolus 7y ago
  > encourage each family to own a mostly-untouched >5 acres There will soon be 11 billion people in the world. This is a pipe dream, but if it came to fruition it would wreck the planet very quickly.