Medical care isn't usually that far. You would have to be very much in the middle of nowhere to be very far from a decent hospital with a medivac helipad. Rural water coops are very common and you can always just dig a well.
If it wasn't for the urban dwellers flyover usa's subsidizing water, electricity, mail delivery, telephone, etc they would have a very different about the free market.
The obvious counter to that is: without flyover country, the cities would all starve to death (rapidly) and would not have had the energy necessary to have been built in the first place. To say nothing of that the population foundations of most US cities were seeded thanks to people moving from more rural, agricultural-heavy regions. Labor imported from the more rural areas directly helped to build the cities over time (and that process of rural to urban continues today, albeit slower).
I think the argument is something like: It is not profitable to provide the current level of service to rural areas. Because of the high productivity of urban areas, we can redistribute resources and improve rural public infrastructure.
I mean, they're not wrong. I'm a millennial in my early thirties who actually owns several acres of rural land. I would love to make it my full-time residence, but can't because I can't get decent internet out there. I'm a software engineer whose company lets me work remotely, but only if I can actually do my job. Until I can get good enough internet/phone service to call in to meetings and reliably access various remote servers, I'm stuck in civilization.
I completely agree. It's funny that I didn't care at all about SpaceX and Oneweb before I bought this property, but they can't launch soon enough for me now.
I was just talking about this in a different thread; I'm a similar age to you and my house is in a rural area that has mediocre DSL as the only internet option.
So, I rent an office in the nearest town. I have a quiet space to work and 5x better internet there. It's close enough to bike in when the weather is nice, and a pleasantly short commute the rest of the time.
Does that generation make enough money to be considered a market? Also conflating some to all, most millennials just turned 30 its the older ones mid 30s.
But not so much for the Greats, the Silents, and Generation X. My theory is that the Greats, the Silents, and Gen X were all wartime generations. The Silents and Gen X were also relatively small generations, there really aren't that many of them. Add to that the fact that all of those generations had some level of dispossession coupled with an even more impressive level of productive wealth creation, and you can kind of see why no one really picked on them as much as what we see today. The Greats were, well, the Greatest Generation. 'Nuff said there. The Silents were a wartime generation, born in the depths of the depression, who never really whined about their lot and because there really weren't many of them, they were, person for person, likely the most productive generation in our history. Generation X was given the name because they were the black spot. They were the first generation that would grow up to have less than their parents. They kind of just ran with it, and despite having war after war to deal with, ushered in one of the most transformative eras of wealth creation in mankind's history.
All that said, actual leadership of the country seems to skip over those kinds of generations. (With the exception of the Greats.) Not many leaders from the Silents or Gen X, but a large number of well known leaders from the Baby Boomers and even the Millennials. From Mayor Pete to AOC, the Millennials seem to outshine Gen X as far as leaders are concerned, for better or worse. In the same way, the Baby Boomers outshone the Silents to the point where the Silents are almost forgotten to history. Generation X might have been forgotten were it not for their technological innovations and achievements.
Anyway, that's my theory. So Millennials shouldn't take all the ribbing too hard, because if history is any indication, in the end, you'll likely be the ones in charge. Again, for better or worse.
Depending on who's definitions of birth date ranges you use, Obama might be considered a Gen X president.
Also, not entirely sure why there's a generation called "the Greatest Generation". We can say they were all war heroes and suffered etc., but there were also jerks in that generation who started those wars. We are all products of our time. It kind of sucks to just lump everyone based on their birth date and stereotype them.
It started with Baby Boomers. Generations prior to that didn't pay nearly as much attention to generational cohorts. The whole idea of generational cohorts feels like a marketing construct, and its adoption into the normal lexicon coincides with increases in middle-class wealth and expansion in the advertising industry.
I own several acres of rural land. Internet is by far my biggest hurdle to making it my full-time residence. Satellite internet is high latency, low data caps, and very sensitive to any kind of weather, all for more money than I spend on cable for my apartment in civilization. It's completely and utterly unsuitable for remote work.
Not to mention culture, night life and other non-home-bound entertainment, a variety of good restaurants, and perhaps real-life friends who share your outlook, experience, and interests.
I mean, that's a pretty big "if" qualifier there. Getting water might be easier than getting the power once you have the power, but that also means its harder than getting power because it requires an extra step. Also, it's straightforward, but that doesn't make it easy or cheap.
If you want to go to the ISS, become an astronaut is straightforward, but it's not exactly helpful.
Can you rely on that as your only internet coverage though? Most of the "unlimited" plans start to degrade the service once you go over 20 GB/month. Of course, depending on what you are using it for it could work (such as ssh over vpn tunnel, which is low bandwidth usage, however OS updates can blow away your monthly data allowance in a short period).
I'm currently using Ubifi[0] and the experience has been pretty great so far. I'm a few miles away from the nearest cell tower and I consistently get real world download speeds of up to 10Mb/s, with usage in the 100s of GB per month. To be fair, I did need to buy a Yagi antenna to get those speeds to be consistent, but that is a distance issue, not an ISP issue.
Costs $89.99 and I can use my router anywhere in the US if I want to. I've even taken it on a roadtrip and plugged it into my car's AC adapter, continued to work like a charm.
That’s good to hear. I went to a small college in Massachusetts that only had dial-up in 2008 and no cell service. The entire school shared a custom symmetric 10 mbit/s split over 500 people.
Couldn't you just get internet over satellite link? Of course there'll be lag, and perhaps lower bandwidth, so you might not be able to play multiplayer action games or download 4k videos, but you should be able to get the news, send email, and surf the web without too much of a problem.
Edit: I suspect the grid squares being used are of different sizes, but even so - the crowded bits of the UK are even more crowded than the overall population density would suggest.
They're about the same size: the UK map blocks are 1 km x 1 km
US: "the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks." The USA area is 9.834 million km², according to a well-known search engine.
So about .9 km² in average, roughly in line with "Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them".
