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Yes, if I moved back to my home town and spent time around my family and friends I also would be welcomed since I’m not an outsider. I’m not talking about peop

by phil21 2y ago

Yes, if I moved back to my home town and spent time around my family and friends I also would be welcomed since I’m not an outsider. I’m not talking about people who previously had roots that came back home as a wayward son. Those people, including me, will get a pass as we are one of the good ones. Especially (and maybe only) so because we’ve kept up relations and close ties over the interceding years and we are currently few and far between. However, I’m fairly confident in my sampling bias on this one. I am close enough to people where they are willing to talk freely and the tenor is not great. Perhaps I simply have a bubble of especially negative folks, and maybe your area of the country is different. There was already a large current of resentment towards the white collar professionals prior to covid and I can only say that it’s accelerated quite a bit since. I only recently was able to spend considerable time around places like where I grew up. We are not generally a single generation away from “moving away from the farm” at this point in the country. Many are generations removed. And it doesn’t need to be absolutely middle of nowhere either on this one. If you’re a curiosity for the area you typically won’t have an issue. It’s when you hit a critical mass of “haves” vs the “have nots” that the problems spring up. And many folks resent the people who don’t have to “work for a living” sitting at home all day. It’s about a shared experience and “in this together” feeling that most knowledge workers will simply not endenger.

odyssey7 2y ago
If tech elites are making this call on behalf of generations-old communities, what jobs they’re allowed to have locally——sounds a little like a communist, planned economy, where some districts are assigned to have certain gainful opportunities and others are assigned to not have them——based on their own value judgements and informal conversations, it’s the height of arrogance for them to reason that only they can keep the social structure from fracturing in a tight-knit community of which they were never a part. Why not put it to a vote at the community level, out of respect for community autonomy, economic freedom, and democratic values? I can tell you that the people who are close enough to their children for them to want to stay around would never say no to a job opportunity that lets them do just that without sacrificing their career to do so. To boot, these communities generally have been home to at least some remote workers for decades already, but much of tech has fallen ill to narcissism in believing that it is somehow too special / important to also provide such an opportunity. The majority of people who choose to live in their hometown, over a flashier place that they could also afford, are doing it out of love for their community, not out of some anti-social tendency to take advantage of it as you suggest. Perhaps some decision makers, somewhere, got where they are through a self-selection bias, and are projecting their own psychological quirks onto others. There are a great many people whose families have roughly stayed put for generations. Your reasoning / dismissiveness / lack of care for these people shows a lack of insight or a tendency to marginalize the concerns of people from rural America.

by phil21 2y ago

odyssey7 2y ago

If tech elites are making this call on behalf of generations-old communities, what jobs they’re allowed to have locally——sounds a little like a communist, planned economy, where some districts are assigned to have certain gainful opportunities and others are assigned to not have them——based on their own value judgements and informal conversations, it’s the height of arrogance for them to reason that only they can keep the social structure from fracturing in a tight-knit community of which they were never a part. Why not put it to a vote at the community level, out of respect for community autonomy, economic freedom, and democratic values? I can tell you that the people who are close enough to their children for them to want to stay around would never say no to a job opportunity that lets them do just that without sacrificing their career to do so. To boot, these communities generally have been home to at least some remote workers for decades already, but much of tech has fallen ill to narcissism in believing that it is somehow too special / important to also provide such an opportunity. The majority of people who choose to live in their hometown, over a flashier place that they could also afford, are doing it out of love for their community, not out of some anti-social tendency to take advantage of it as you suggest. Perhaps some decision makers, somewhere, got where they are through a self-selection bias, and are projecting their own psychological quirks onto others. There are a great many people whose families have roughly stayed put for generations. Your reasoning / dismissiveness / lack of care for these people shows a lack of insight or a tendency to marginalize the concerns of people from rural America.