That's been a general movement away from rural America for decades (and people have been leaving the countryside to make their fortune in the big city for centuries). However, this line stood out to me because of the timeframe cited:
A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023.
Maybe I'm just still bitter, but maybe they should have tried social distancing, wearing masks, and getting vaccinated.
Yeah, it is an interesting statistic, isn’t it? It definitely doesn’t seem like the kids moving away for better economic prospects is the only factor here.
This stood out to me as well, the conservative stance on C-19 and the resulting general negligence seems a very obvious major factor to the rural population decline in this timeframe.
We’ll probably live to see robot towns, where a small contingent of maintenence workers keep a huge fleet of automated farming/processing/shipping equipment operational. If they’re lucky Monsanto will buy a restaurant chain so there’s somewhere for them to eat nearby.
Honestly for as much “woe is me” that they crammed into this piece, my takeaway was mostly just, “Hmmm…good.”
Like…I love rural PA, I’m just not wild about a lot of the people who live there. They vote against my own interests (and theirs), disproportionately influence state government, and welcome corporations that proudly destroy the environment while taking a hostile stance toward anyone not like them.
This isn’t down to every last person, of course, but broadly speaking, the ones who aren’t fitting that template are also not the ones doing most of the dying.
So the piece is reading, to me, more as, “the people most responsible for keeping the shitty aspects of Pennsylvania shitty are dying faster than they’re breeding”…which is good news for the more reasonable residents of the state.
Agriculture is getting significantly more efficient. You don’t need 300 people do backbreaking labor for 12 hours a day in the beating sun anymore. We have automated threshers.
Industries are shifting. We generally moved away from manufacturing and an extraction-based economy. (Though the former is recovering, thanks to Biden’s awesome investment plan)
jobs are moving to cities, where there are more schools, hospitals, high paying jobs, and may be more resilient to climate change.
Personally, I’d never ever consider moving anywhere rural for the aforementioned reasons, but also because rural americans are against my type family, and I don’t care to be the queer pioneer family for them to realize we aren’t so bad. I also never want to drive a car for a half hour+ for basic supplies or to see friends. It’s too lonely. We have rail and ebikes here. I can get to the store or a friend’s in less than 10 minutes.
Having come back to the farm later in life, the issue with rural communities (at least in Canada) isn’t prejudice, it’s that everyone is up in everyone else’s business. But we have gay couples with kids around that seem to negotiate it fine. People are fine face to face usually.
Fine face-to-face but still vote to make your existence illegal. I’m not alright with that kind of “civility” and it’s the reason I don’t connect with an arm of my extended family. Fuck em.
There are still a lot of workers needed in agriculture, but increasingly they are either undocumented migrants or on restrictive visas (like temporary foreign workers in Canada) that limit their bargaining power and let their employers exploit them with poor working conditions and rock bottom wages. This means that these workers often don’t have the means or income to participate much in the local economy beyond the bare essentials. This is actually a case of “trickle down economics” where paying workers fair, living wages would lead to healthier local economies where these workers could spend those wages and support having or starting a family.
“My country is facing a war, and we are facing that hate here. My daughter is traumatized; whenever I open the apartment door, she runs away and hides, telling me she is afraid the lady will come and immerse her head in the water again.”
That’s the worst thing I’ve read all day. No one deserves that kind of trauma, let alone a 3-year-old little girl. I hope the attacker, Elizabeth Wolf, rots in prison.
It’s a travesty that she was allowed bail at all. She has already established that she is extremely violent and poses a clear threat to the community and a continued threat to the victim and her family. While police were arresting her, she said, “Tell her I will kill her and I will kill her whole family.” What the fuck does it take to get bail denied in Texas?
What even is bail anyway? I’ve never understood this concept. Either you deserve to be in custody, or you don’t. And the one singular thing that could never change this is whether you can put money down. Good behavior, maybe. Or a time limit on how long you can be in custody before facing trial. But not a fucking down payment, are you kidding me?
Like many things it’s a solution to a problem that’s now solved in other ways, originally it was really easy to skip town and make a new identity so they had to have enough collateral to know you’ll come back - if you’re facing two years in jail if you lose the trial or losing 5 years worth of money if you flee it’s more likely you’d turn up to court.
I guess it became a money thing at some point, the rich like it because they can avoid the same harsh laws the poor suffer, then lending money became an industry and of course they use some of the money they screw out of poor people to lobby the government to make the system even less fair… plus j imagine all sorts of clever accounting makes use of the money while in the courts hands, probably earns some kickbacks somewhere.
Abolishing it and creating a more sane modern system would be a good thing but it’d be unpopular for many reasons - but we’ve always done it like this, but we would have a budget hole, but why are they making things easier for criminals when my life is hard / climate change / war / etc… politicians don’t deal with issues like this because the voting public would punish them if they did even though the voting public largely agrees and would likely totally agree if they understood it - which they never will because their opposition will find clever ways to make it seem complicated or turn it Into a culture war issue / moral crusade.
It’s to make sure you show up for your actual trial.
Obviously she committed a crime, so she was jailed, but they have to do all the work to put the case together to prove it at trial. During that time, they don’t want you to skip town and avoid justice, so they put you in jail. But keeping people in jail is expensive, so you can give them a pinky-promise based on your reputation (“personal recognizance”), or something of value that you get back when the trial happens (bail money).
You can still skip bail, you’ll just lose that money, and I’m sure there are additional charges for when they find you.
It was a firework from that rich guy’s yacht. What do you mean there’s no sea in New Mexico? There’s sea in Old Mexico, what kind of fucking upgrade is this?
Really good John Oliver about libraries recently. Informative but has some good recommendations on what kinds of actions to take: youtu.be/42xZB80sZaI?feature=shared
A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.
I don’t understand how these students would even still be around to graduate when Project 2025 has them all being rounded up. This is clearly a case of Trump saying shit for someone trying to get their vote with 0% intent to follow through on it, because he only cares about himself.
Okay okay, but no body will bring up the pose on the photo? WTF people! What are those fools doing? It’s like a hybrid between tobacco harvesting and processing and maybe some sort of naughty yoga thing for TikTok or the P hub? … Free use tabaco leave processing?..hey Pedro! I see you’re hard at work!.. Well you don’t mind if…
Anyway, I don’t know what the guys are supposed to be doing just by looking at the photo. It’s missing some sort of explanatory legend.
I wonder how the electrical grid in the Olympic Village will fare when it will be overloaded with probably thousands of unexpected ACs.
And I also wonder what the organizers had in mind when they designed this “low carbon” thing. I assume the houses will be used for other means after this summer - did they expect those people to live without AC, too?
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