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Yeah, wow. I had forgotten most of that since reading it but you're exactly right, Walmart may have staunched some of the bleeding, but long after it was too late. Thanks for looking at the pop over time, shrinking to 1/5 the size in 50 years is brutal... i am harry: please come to louisville so I can get a tattoo from you.
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Jul 20, 2017 19:04
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NYT is racist!!
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Jul 20, 2017 20:20
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This is Hell did an interview about "The Hillbilly Problem" with Elizabeth Catte. It's a little tangential to this thread, but still interesting. Appalachia's Problem are Capitalism's Problem. e: it's like 25 minutes jsyk. Chakan fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 14:37
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Maybe a fivethirtyeight article with data and maps will explain the point I try to make better than I do: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-worst-internet-in-america/ This article is about a single county in Colorado that has the poorest internet access of any county in the United States. Just 6% of the population has access to internet that is faster than dial-up. It talks about the challenge in terms of population density and terrain of getting internet access to remote regions. Its also interesting to compare where rurality impacts Internet access and where it does not. East of the Mississippi, most areas have good internet access, probably because they have high population densities and no major terrain barriers. So if you look at Ohio on that map, it has strong internet. From a logistics point of view, living in downtown Columbus and a farm 100 miles away are pretty much the same, as far as utilities go. The same isn't true from Denver to the towns between the ranges of the Rocky Mountains.
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Jul 29, 2017 18:27
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boner confessor posted:maps like these always make me lol at the ludicrous size of san bernandino county in california. it's the size of a small nation!!! Reminder that California is the sixth largest economy in the world
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Jul 29, 2017 23:05
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Ziv Zulander posted:Reminder that California is the sixth largest economy in the world Whenever I ask Americans "Why is California (pop 40 million) one state and Dakota (pop 1.5 million) two states?" they give me this faintly puzzled look.
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Jul 29, 2017 23:51
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Historical accident that's now too entrenched to change.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:19
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Cicero posted:Historical accident that's now too entrenched to change.
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Jul 30, 2017 00:43
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Hambilderberglar posted:Oh cool, America has its very own Liechtenstein. That would be Rhode Island.
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Jul 30, 2017 02:42
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Cicero posted:Historical accident that's now too entrenched to change. This, incidentally, is the answer for why anything exists in the American political system. Anything at all.
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Jul 30, 2017 05:04
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Delaware rules because it wasn't even a colony and it declared itself officially independent of both Pennsylvania and the British Empire several weeks before all the representatives of the weak scared baby colonies signed their names to a piece of paper in Philadelphia. Also it was the first to ratify the Constitution so it was first in independence and first in the United States, which is why it's the First State. Also why it gets to stay a state forever even though it's tiny and pointless.
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Jul 30, 2017 05:33
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Ziv Zulander posted:Reminder that California is the sixth largest economy in the world this doesn't really have anything to do with a substate jurisdictional division being extraordinarily large
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Jul 30, 2017 07:22
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Delaware rules because it wasn't even a colony and it declared itself officially independent of both Pennsylvania and the British Empire several weeks before all the representatives of the weak scared baby colonies signed their names to a piece of paper in Philadelphia. Also it was the first to ratify the Constitution so it was first in independence and first in the United States, which is why it's the First State. Also why it gets to stay a state forever even though it's tiny and pointless. It's not pointless, it's America's premier corporate shelter (which is how it has the money to survive as a state).
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Jul 30, 2017 13:15
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Ratoslov posted:This, incidentally, is the answer for why anything exists in the American political system. Anything at all. West Virginia is a great example too. Virginia secedes from the Union at the beginning of the Civil War, then half the state re-secedes from the Confederacy and rejoins the Union, and we've just sort of rolled with it ever since.
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Jul 30, 2017 13:22
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PT6A posted:No offence but: what the gently caress? My parents explicitly told me that, while they would prefer I not do any drugs at all, for obvious reasons, some are okay and won't kill you, but don't ever loving touch heroin or opiates and avoid cocaine if you can. Lots of doctors believed this story (and Purdue Pharma wasn't the only company that peddled it.) Lots of people were given opioids for chronic pain, because it turned out that it was perfectly sensible to do that. It wasn't. So you get a lot of people addicted to perfectly legal and perfectly respectable medications. Then the Fed does a crackdown, a decade after the fact, on overprescription and overselling of prescription opioids. It doesn't provide any funding for any of the hundreds of thousands of addicts to get off opioids, because spending money on addicts only encourages them. So you wind up with not only an opioid crisis but a heroin crisis. Result! Main Paineframe posted:(really great factual post, thank you) Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jul 31, 2017 |
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Jul 31, 2017 00:53
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Cicero posted:Historical accident that's now too entrenched to change. Ha, unfortunately it's not an accident there's two Dakotas. In fact the territory was split into two states by the Republican congress in the late 19th century to gerrymander the Senate before southern Democratic led states were allowed to re enter Congress following reconstruction. It was a completely cynical and intentional move.
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Jul 31, 2017 02:25
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Squalid posted:Ha, unfortunately it's not an accident there's two Dakotas. In fact the territory was split into two states by the Republican congress in the late 19th century to gerrymander the Senate before southern Democratic led states were allowed to re enter Congress following reconstruction. It was a completely cynical and intentional move. Although at the time, it also made a lot more sense. In the 1890s, South Dakota had as many electoral votes as Florida, and Kansas had as many as California.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:42
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Squalid posted:Ha, unfortunately it's not an accident there's two Dakotas. In fact the territory was split into two states by the Republican congress in the late 19th century to gerrymander the Senate before southern Democratic led states were allowed to re enter Congress following reconstruction. It was a completely cynical and intentional move. Nevada and West Virginia and Maine were pretty cynical political moves also.
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Jul 31, 2017 03:49
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On the subject of opiates, and of rural areas, I found this article: http://www.kgw.com/news/investigations/opioid-prescriptions-drop-in-oregon-but-rural-counties-still-struggling-to-fight-addiction/456530917 (I have some questions about the map and associated data, especially if Grant County dropped quite that much, but, what I take from it is that opiate prescriptions are higher outside of the Portland area, but once you leave that area, there is little correlation between the degree of rurality and the amount of opiate prescriptions. Like Linn County (Albany, Oregon, if you are familiar), is freeway and big box rural: it has a population of 100,000 people and I-5 runs through it. .And according to this chart, it has a higher rate of opiate use than Harney County (home of Burns, Oregon and the Malheur occupation, about the size of Massachusetts with a population of 8000 people). Rather than rurality, I would guess that education and income levels have a lot more to do with it then anything else.
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Jul 31, 2017 06:54
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glowing-fish posted:Maybe a fivethirtyeight article with data and maps will explain the point I try to make better than I do: It should be noted that this article explicitly excludes mobile internet access (a growing part of internet access in disadvantaged areas), and that the scale on the second map chooses a rather odd place to draw the line for "broadband" - though, judging from how much of the map is the lightest shade of red, I'm guessing they chose their dividing line specifically so that the map would be mostly red rather than mostly green.
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Jul 31, 2017 15:15
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Main Paineframe posted:It should be noted that this article explicitly excludes mobile internet access (a growing part of internet access in disadvantaged areas), and that the scale on the second map chooses a rather odd place to draw the line for "broadband" - though, judging from how much of the map is the lightest shade of red, I'm guessing they chose their dividing line specifically so that the map would be mostly red rather than mostly green. Anyone that has actually lived on the countryside knows how poo poo of deal it is to have your internet connection to be tied to cellphone towers by necessity rather than choice. Every tried to triangulate your connection in a rural area? You can't, because there's likely only one tower in range and just barely at that if you're really unlucky.
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Jul 31, 2017 15:20
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glowing-fish posted:On the subject of opiates, and of rural areas, I found this article: Except "rurality" as it is conventionally defined isn't measured in degrees. It is a categorical variable. And trying to reduce the term to some kind of quantifiable jargon is going to lead to confusion and misunderstanding as it inevitably contradicts common usage. This is why the the USDA uses levels of "frontier and remote" to talk about these issues. Thereby avoiding unintentionally confusing or insulting people.
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Jul 31, 2017 16:36
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So where exactly are these remaining towns that don't have internet? Are they just gas station communities on the fringes of the state or what?
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Aug 12, 2017 21:37
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Mobile internet is not a suitable replacement for traditional broadband. A stopgap perhaps, but the heavy caps make it effectively not real broadband. Barely better than satellite because of lower latency, (and with most satellite plans, you get time after midnight to download without it going against your cap ). Our broadband options are comparable to Saugache County at the moment. (rural, central kentucky). The 12mb option would probably be around 80 after fees and modem rental. My parents still keep our old satellite plan as backup because the phone lines get hosed up during / after every storm. moron izzard fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 02:16
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FAUXTON posted:Cool thing is that the northern parts of the plains are pretty good about water use and it's the sacks of worthless poo poo in Kansas, Oklahoma, and (especially) Texas that are just sucking the aquifer dry like a $3 whore. What is it about glorifying the absolute absence of self control that makes it such a thing in Texas? These loving self-assessment trash insist on planting their lawns with subtropical grass instead of actual prairie stuff or buffgrass at least. Nope, Texas, gotta be as impractical as possible From pages and ages ago (page 63 I think), but I'm reading this thread slowly and just saw this post tonight, but northern plains states like Iowa are absolutely sucking their (well, I live there, so our) aquifers dry with CAFO hog, turkey, and chicken production as animal heads grows, not shrinks, even as the human population peels off. People in my county are outnumbered by pigs in orders of magnitude. There is no local control to how many CAFO facilities can be erected as counties must abide by a "master matrix" assigning points on these facilities set by the state. If the points are OK, they're obliged to approve the application for construction and operation. Larger facilities have tougher restrictions, but they're not "tough." Producers basically fill out a form themselves to award or reduce points. If you live too close to a park - which is a point suck - just award yourself more points in another area, like acres onto which you can spread the manure. The onus is on County Supervisors to find fault in your application, not you to be truthful in it. To be fair to my and my area's Supervisors, they're trying like hell to change that. Mostly Republicans too. When your backyard literally makes you want to puke, unfettered capitalism starts to affect you, too. Most hog places have fewer than 2,500 head of hogs at any one time, but they turnover pigs roughly three times a year. And "fewer" is literally 2,499. So singular barns will have as may pigs in it in a calendar year roughly equivalent to the county's human population. Can the Department of Natural Resources inspect these places to ensure that number? No. The place reeks of poo poo, literally, a good portion of the time because it is quite literally spread across the farmland, which is something like 95% of the acres here, as a fertilizer. There are more pigs making GBS threads than there are acres of land on which to spread it, so there are puddles of poo poo seeping slowly into the ground after harvest time. And that's just the pigs. The recent avian flu epidemic saw around 50 million chickens and turkeys destroyed in the US, almost all in the upper midwest. We're not learning lessons from Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. We're just a little late in the race to the bottom. I returned to the town I basically grew up in at the crest of the recession. I had returned to my native New England after I graduated from a rural Iowa school. The environment was great there. Iowa had a fantastic educational system at the time; if not the best in the nation, then top 5. I met a gal in New Hampshire and after a period of being both laid off, me from a decent state job because of budget cuts, and her from a vet practice due to needing to make cuts, I got offered a job for me and her by a high school buddy who bought a few weekly newspapers. I said "If we move there, I promise you we can buy a house." Six months after arriving to our new - my old - town, we bought a house. It cost me a princely sum of $20,000. Three bedroom, 1.5 baths, with a fireplace. In a town with all the affiliated benefits of municipal power, water, garbage pick up, etc. Certainly not a castle, but it's a place that would have cost us around $150,000 where we were living in (also rural) NH. It was purchased in 2012. We'll have it paid off in less than a year from now. We're DINKs, and she just finished getting her RN degree. I wouldn't be amazed if me, a journalist for small town newspapers, and her, a nurse, were among the top 5% of wage earners in our county now that grain prices are down and farmers can write off a shitload of expenses. Want to hang out with that GBS guy who talks about Des Moines all the time? You can buy a 3br house there for $43,000. Needs a bit of improvement, but I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. In one school district I cover, every student -100% of the kids- get free breakfast and lunch because their poverty rate is so high they qualified for a "gently caress it" waiver from the feds/state and just provide it for every kid in the district. To show how high that percentage is, the other two districts we cover are at around 70% of the kids qualifying for free and reduced meals and they have to submit documentation instead of getting the "gently caress it" waiver. Because of the universal poverty, schools are super egalitarian. I was a free breakfast/lunch kid going through school, but I was simultaneously in the talented and gifted program. Poor kids were never at a disadvantage because the majority of the room was poor. Did some kids who were poor do more poorly in school than I did despite an inherently similar intellect? No doubt. My brother may have been one of them because he was the last of 4 kids and was 5 years younger than me so his entire high school career was him in an abusive household without much help. He wound up in jail for stealing cars. All 4 kids attempted to go the military route to get out of Dodge, as it were, and his extra curriculars cost him his contract with the Navy. Military sign-ups were very common at my school. In fact, I got a pre-basic training promotion because a classmate said he'd be my referral for signing up. I graduated with 69 classmates (lol) and, including myself, a dozen opted for military instead of college. I got drummed out when I went to ship out for basic training because of nerve damage I suffered in my shoulder was picked up my the MEPS doctor. I was going to basic as an E3/PFC. I was pissed at the time. I got the boot in August, 2001. A few weeks later, I was relieved. I wound up taking a job at a private college after double-loving my shoulder and being unable to wrestle back east in NH and as a benefit, my schooling was free. I got my degree and wound up back in Iowa as a 28 year old. The poverty is worse, the smell is way loving worse, and the options are even more limited. Despite automation, we've got a fantastic industrial base. My step dad is still working in machining even after two plants he worked for before closed their doors. I place help wanted ads every week in my newspapers looking for workers in the industry. You can get a job with or without a high school diploma that will pay you roughly $12/hr to start so long as you're mechanically inclined. It's also below market value for the skills you'll learn or had previously to start there, though. Engineers could name their price, though. The "brain drain" is quite real. The draw of "city" life and the paychecks provided to you there are the reason I can think up 10 or so people I graduated with still living here or having had returned. Ironically, most of them were the military folks. I've been back here for roughly 6 years now. I'm in and of the community because I'm at every function and government meeting. 70% of the people voted for Trump. I get it. They're hurting. I'm "out and proud" via my editorials being a hater of Rep. Steve King and to the left of President Obama on a lot of stuff. $12/hr won't get you far, despite $20,000 houses being available. This place has shrunk 50% since the 1950 census. Of course houses are cheap, half the fuckin' people left. The void has been filled by pigs, turkeys, and chickens sucking up our aquifers. At some point, my wife and I are heading back east because she wants to be closer to her family since her dad had a severe brain injury and is now stuck at home. I'd be amazed if someone bought our house quickly, and at what we paid for it. I'm a booster for living here, but there's no fixing it, I've concluded. People who have the means or the brains will leave. At some point, I will too. Forget national politics, state politics are forcing it. We've cut commercial and industrial taxes in Iowa and now, surprise, surprise, have a massive budget deficit. What gets cut? Education, both at the PK-12 level and through college. Schools have fewer dollars today, adjusted for inflation, than they did when I moved back here. Every district gets the same figure per student, so smaller districts - which cover a massive geographic area - have to maintain accreditation while paying teachers out of the same pot of money they have to pay for transportation. So, small districts are bare bones. Consolidation means kids are on the bus 45 minutes to get to school if they're the last one on it in some cases. Teachers who get experience bounce for districts who can pay them better. So, turnover is high and achievement level is low. Really low. All three districts get dinged somewhere as a "School In Need of Improvement" because of low scores in some subject. The "all kids eat free" district, not surprisingly, is most in peril of getting an assblasting from the state in that regard. Honestly, the world would quite literally be a better place if we just shut 'er down, returned my corner of the world back into swamp land, and went somewhere else. At least the Gulf of Mexico might bounce back because we'd keep our dirt in our fields instead of sending it down the river loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus, which causes a massive dead zone. Some day, that's the way it's going to be. Industry and ag are the only reason the lights are still on. I live in a place that will most likely begin desertifcation around 2080 because of climate change. Unless some miracle I cannot fathom happens, grain production will be impossible long term and it will go back to fallow ground. The towns will be gone either through attrition or mother nature and it'll be in beef production, maybe, through ranching. Long story short, the story looks like it's going to end in one way only - dry as poo poo. Drank dry from CAFO operations, black dirt turned into sand because of climate change. It was a good two centuries of people living here. I don't see it going on much longer than that. TL;DR - Some of the northern prairies are a lot more like Kansas or Oklahoma than you may have first thought. And it's going to get worse and I don't ever see it getting better. Want to buy my house in rural Iowa? $20,000 for a 3 br, 1.5 bath with a fireplace. No garage though, but I might remedy that by buying out my neighbor's property. If that happens, I'll sell you a home and an investment property to rent (tenants included!) for $35,000. Living's cheap out here if you're willing to work for less than an average wage, but if you're an engineer, you'll make out OK. I make way more than I should because every time I told my boss we were planning to leave, he gave me raises. And we've got fiber internet! Just don't mind the smell of poo poo 25% of the time.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:19
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ColoradoCleric posted:So where exactly are these remaining towns that don't have internet? Are they just gas station communities on the fringes of the state or what? I love how Pennsylvania is considered part of the old rotting industrial Northeast but there are places where the county seat only got cell phone service in the last five years. That's the principal town of the county, not the areas outside. Rural Kenya and Uganda have better cell networks than rural Pennsylvania.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:26
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As if that post weren't massive enough, I neglected to mention that local school districts in Iowa, cannot, even with voter approval, tax more money for per-pupil allotment. I get it, kinda. It should be a level playing field, but if you've got 20 kids per class in a district that's 200 square miles you cannot offer any sort of advanced classes because you've got to pick every kid up in the morning and drop them off in the afternoon. Every teacher who can cover both middle school math and high school calculus will bounce to a) earn 30% more and b) have a much less rigorous schedule. I've heard in school board meetings that the only way to retain teachers is to have them marry a local so they are willing to be overworked and underpaid. It's loving gross and I hate it. Every new teacher is either a brand new graduate looking for experience, or a transplant from a district that is somehow smaller who got their position cut as the system looks to shed salary in an almost always futile effort to maintain their legal spending limit on one hand and accreditation requirements on the other. I have no kids, plan to have no kids, but as an American and human being, it makes me want to punch a wall. We can afford to educate our children but shirk that responsibility to cut commercial and industrial property taxes. gently caress you. You're killing the ability of rural districts to exist, and any draw for people to live there. If I somehow had a kid tomorrow, he or she might get a decent education in the town I live in by the time school age rolls around, but I'd be amazed if that were the case in 10 years.
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Aug 13, 2017 05:38
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Eat This Glob posted:Honestly, the world would quite literally be a better place if we just shut 'er down, returned my corner of the world back into swamp land, and went somewhere else. At least the Gulf of Mexico might bounce back because we'd keep our dirt in our fields instead of sending it down the river loaded with nitrogen and phosphorus, which causes a massive dead zone. As someone who works in the Mississippi watershed, I can't argue with this.
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Aug 13, 2017 06:17
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Squalid posted:As someone who works in the Mississippi watershed, I can't argue with this. Hey, we've made it voluntary. A handful of acres, and time I have to take to show up to take pictures of governors at prairie pothole swamplands retaining nutrients a few times a year might fix your crisis. gently caress middle america. We have it covered.
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Aug 13, 2017 07:03
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moron izzard posted:Mobile internet is not a suitable replacement for traditional broadband. A stopgap perhaps, but the heavy caps make it effectively not real broadband. Barely better than satellite because of lower latency, (and with most satellite plans, you get time after midnight to download without it going against your cap ). Where do you live? Are we just subsidizing your "farm lifestyle" so you can live in the middle of nowhere? Why do all these rural folks think that jobs are going to come back to them to support their decadent lifestyle? It's pretty entitled of them if you ask me. You want middle class jobs in the middle of nowhere for people who don't even have a highschool education? ColoradoCleric fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Aug 13, 2017 |
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Aug 13, 2017 17:40
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