6 ms·

I hope that telecommuting will prevent this. The same amount of money can net you a much higher standard of living in a rural area with less crime and pollution

I hope that telecommuting will prevent this. The same amount of money can net you a much higher standard of living in a rural area with less crime and pollution and an all around better place to raise children. Having half the world converge on urban centers scrambling to pay exorbitant rent and taxes for the privilege of 100sq feet of personal space while sharing an apartment with five strangers is misguided at best and dystopian at worst.

ben_w 7y ago
> living in a rural area with less crime I doubt “rural” will continue to be “low crime”. In our fully automated future I expect criminals will also be telecommuting — stealing, vandalising, or trading illegal substances with drones, drones which are quite possibly either bio-mimicking or even bio-printed so as to make it less appealing to shoot them.
- rocgf 7y ago
  That is a very far fetched idea.
  - ben_w 7y ago
    Why? Drones are already used for drug delivery, bioprinting is a thing albeit not an amazingly good thing yet, and biomimicry is demonstrated in occasional TED talks and military spy drone demonstration videos on YouTube.
    - rocgf 7y ago
      There are so many weird angles to it that I just don't know where to start. In a sentence, it's just a big leap to go from a couple of disjointed currently-niche technologies to the conclusion that life in rural areas is unlikely to be as safe in the future.
      - ben_w 7y ago
        I didn’t say “safe”, I said “low crime”. Overall safety might increase, but I expect crime rates to go up everywhere as tech enables it. At least in the next 10-20 years, beyond that is unpredictable change to too many aspects of our world.
- stretchwithme 7y ago
  There will be countermeasures as well. Whether a bird is fake or real, breaking into a house can still be detected. I imagine we'll also see small robots that scurry into your garage when you open the door and whose one job will be to open the door later for thieves. That is probably already possible. So we'll need intelligent security cameras in garages too. Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. But anticipating and solving such problems would make an interesting startup.
  - PhantomGremlin 7y ago
    Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. There are various window films that can do an excellent job of making it quite hard to break a window. But they're currently quite expensive. E.g,: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/ (sorry for previous bad link, 3M website bozos make it hard to get a sane URL) I live in a "stick house" and it would be quite easy to set it on fire from the outside. Cedar siding, shrubs near the walls, etc. No need to crash through a window. Edit: I forgot to mention a roof made of "kindling". It wore out and I replaced it with a composition roof, but in Oregon it's trendy to have a "shake" roof. If you've ever examined a shake you will know it's just a very dry piece of wood (at least in summer, in winter it's very wet). Fortunately we don't live in such a dystopian world ... yet, at least not in most parts of the USA.
    - Scoundreller 7y ago
      > If you've ever examined a shake you will know it's just a very dry piece of wood (at least in summer, in winter it's very wet). Then there’s the varnishes and oils that you apply to repel water, which just makes it more flammable.
scarejunba 7y ago
I hope not. The climate externalities are huge. While city dwellers minimize water use, carbon use, and electricity use, rural dwellers maximize these. Perhaps we can ensure that people pay for their carbon.
- dwiel 7y ago
  Do you have any sources? I've found one article, but it was actually arguing that the difference isn't actually that large. Would be open to more recent and other studies thoug. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/8/1234/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/8/1234/pdf
  - mjn 7y ago
    There's a map here of per-capita carbon footprint per zip code: https://coolclimate.org/maps https://coolclimate.org/maps It seems to suggest that suburbs are generally the biggest emitters per-capita. Inner cities tend to be fairly low and some rural areas are low too, though that varies (rural areas in the midwest seem to be high). If more people moved to rural areas, my guess is they'd start looking more like the suburban areas in energy usage, though.
    - dwiel 7y ago
      Cool thanks. One interesting thing I noticed as a midwest town dweller, is that while my zip code rates quite low in population density (up there with houston) it's actually in the green as far as carbon goes. It seems that this is true of many of the smallish towns in the midwest (population < 500k). In general suburbs of large cities use vastly more carbon than towns with the same population density, not really that surprising. I guess the question then is it easier to have more small towns or to have high density cities without surrounding sprawl.
      - pas 7y ago
        It'd be interesting to compare US settlements with many of their non-US counterparts.
ageofwant 7y ago
This thinking is misguided. You can house people way more economically in high density high-rises: You take the lift to the doctor and the store and the school. Internet, water, waste and food transport costs are minimised. You do not need kilometres of asphalt to connect people, power and water distribution is way more cost effective. I see these small families in the new developments I sometimes drive through, there is maybe a meter of sand or grey gras between each house, each house has its own roof, water heater, windows looking into the fence 1m away. All of this has to be maintained. These people would have been better of living in a apartment in a high rise.

ben_w 7y ago

> living in a rural area with less crime I doubt “rural” will continue to be “low crime”. In our fully automated future I expect criminals will also be telecommuting — stealing, vandalising, or trading illegal substances with drones, drones which are quite possibly either bio-mimicking or even bio-printed so as to make it less appealing to shoot them.

rocgf 7y ago
That is a very far fetched idea.
- ben_w 7y ago
  Why? Drones are already used for drug delivery, bioprinting is a thing albeit not an amazingly good thing yet, and biomimicry is demonstrated in occasional TED talks and military spy drone demonstration videos on YouTube.
  - rocgf 7y ago
    There are so many weird angles to it that I just don't know where to start. In a sentence, it's just a big leap to go from a couple of disjointed currently-niche technologies to the conclusion that life in rural areas is unlikely to be as safe in the future.
    - ben_w 7y ago
      I didn’t say “safe”, I said “low crime”. Overall safety might increase, but I expect crime rates to go up everywhere as tech enables it. At least in the next 10-20 years, beyond that is unpredictable change to too many aspects of our world.
stretchwithme 7y ago
There will be countermeasures as well. Whether a bird is fake or real, breaking into a house can still be detected. I imagine we'll also see small robots that scurry into your garage when you open the door and whose one job will be to open the door later for thieves. That is probably already possible. So we'll need intelligent security cameras in garages too. Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. But anticipating and solving such problems would make an interesting startup.
- PhantomGremlin 7y ago
  Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. There are various window films that can do an excellent job of making it quite hard to break a window. But they're currently quite expensive. E.g,: https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/ https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/home-window-solutions-us/ (sorry for previous bad link, 3M website bozos make it hard to get a sane URL) I live in a "stick house" and it would be quite easy to set it on fire from the outside. Cedar siding, shrubs near the walls, etc. No need to crash through a window. Edit: I forgot to mention a roof made of "kindling". It wore out and I replaced it with a composition roof, but in Oregon it's trendy to have a "shake" roof. If you've ever examined a shake you will know it's just a very dry piece of wood (at least in summer, in winter it's very wet). Fortunately we don't live in such a dystopian world ... yet, at least not in most parts of the USA.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    > If you've ever examined a shake you will know it's just a very dry piece of wood (at least in summer, in winter it's very wet). Then there’s the varnishes and oils that you apply to repel water, which just makes it more flammable.

scarejunba 7y ago

I hope not. The climate externalities are huge. While city dwellers minimize water use, carbon use, and electricity use, rural dwellers maximize these. Perhaps we can ensure that people pay for their carbon.

dwiel 7y ago
Do you have any sources? I've found one article, but it was actually arguing that the difference isn't actually that large. Would be open to more recent and other studies thoug. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/8/1234/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/3/8/1234/pdf
- mjn 7y ago
  There's a map here of per-capita carbon footprint per zip code: https://coolclimate.org/maps https://coolclimate.org/maps It seems to suggest that suburbs are generally the biggest emitters per-capita. Inner cities tend to be fairly low and some rural areas are low too, though that varies (rural areas in the midwest seem to be high). If more people moved to rural areas, my guess is they'd start looking more like the suburban areas in energy usage, though.
  - dwiel 7y ago
    Cool thanks. One interesting thing I noticed as a midwest town dweller, is that while my zip code rates quite low in population density (up there with houston) it's actually in the green as far as carbon goes. It seems that this is true of many of the smallish towns in the midwest (population < 500k). In general suburbs of large cities use vastly more carbon than towns with the same population density, not really that surprising. I guess the question then is it easier to have more small towns or to have high density cities without surrounding sprawl.
    - pas 7y ago
      It'd be interesting to compare US settlements with many of their non-US counterparts.

ageofwant 7y ago

This thinking is misguided. You can house people way more economically in high density high-rises: You take the lift to the doctor and the store and the school. Internet, water, waste and food transport costs are minimised. You do not need kilometres of asphalt to connect people, power and water distribution is way more cost effective. I see these small families in the new developments I sometimes drive through, there is maybe a meter of sand or grey gras between each house, each house has its own roof, water heater, windows looking into the fence 1m away. All of this has to be maintained. These people would have been better of living in a apartment in a high rise.