‘Smaller cities’ in the US are what most of the world calls ‘rural’.

Rural in the US is truly remote, not just ‘has farmland’.

> ‘Smaller cities’ in the US are what most of the world calls ‘rural’.

What? No it's not. In the study I linked and also for most people's purposes, "smaller city" is something like Milwaukee or Pittsburgh, a place with an urban center, a real downtown, some skyscrapers, and probably a few corporate headquarters.

To somebody that lives rurally in the US, a town of 10,000 is where you go to get groceries. 100,000 gets you a movie theater and shopping. Pittsburgh? That's basically a megacity.

For the more rural states you need to take a zero off each of these numbers. A town of 1,000 in North Dakota would have shops, a town of 10,000, which would be the tenth most populous in the state, would have a cinema, and Fargo, with 250k people living in its vicinity? That's your megacity.

Yes, that town of 10,000 is probably rural, and in the study I linked, people were not moving to those towns. They were moving to actual cities.

What are we even talking about here?

We were discussing your belief that everyone in the world has a city slicker inside struggling to get out.

The views of rural people can be disregarded in favor of the superior City Person viewpoints, since that's what we're all secretly striving to become. Before long there will be nobody living in the country at all, because why would anyone want that?

No more fresh air or clean water for me. Nope, I'm moving to some city somewhere so I can enjoy living in a 300 sq. ft. luxury apartment with a pet cockroach. The only people still living out in the countryside will be my backwards hillbilly cousins, like in Hunger Games.

Is this where you believe things are headed? Because we all want to be you so much?

I can find data that points out two trends right now.

1. Decentralized growth into exurbs and rural markets. This is further driven by USDA home loans into those markets, where people can not only afford to live but buy homes 90min or less away from a metropolitan area (but living outside the metro). This move into exurbs and rural markets is reversing a 40 year trend!

2. Movement from major top-5 us cities into smaller cities with a university or two (Knoxville, TN; Boise, ID; and Tulsa, OK are seeing the highest inbound-to-outbound ratios). Major cities like New York and Los Angeles are still seeing net domestic outflows in 2026.

In fact the Yankees, Californians, and city slickers of all sorts are FLOODING into the southeast USA, and have been since they suddenly decided all at once in 2020 this is where they need to be for some reason. I've never seen so many foreigner plates in my life here in Alabama. (New York, California, etc.) Between them and the half of Mexico/Guatemala who already lives here, it's getting pretty crowded out here in rural nowheresville these days.

At least I can be thankful it's not as crowded here as East Tennessee, North Carolina, etc are getting to be. Yet. The very bad reputation of Alabama among a certain crowd seems to keep more of those types away.

The big reason people were in the cities was because of jobs. When remote work happened, all those people were still making big city pay, but could now move and live in lower cost areas (with fresh air, less crowding, etc.).

Affordable housing on big lots

Generally smaller cities are the surroundings and suburbs to cities like that.

You said it yourself - they make more money and have more control doing it the other way.

Put differently - why wouldn’t you do it?

Because contractor satisfaction is important to them, as they're the ones that make them money at the end of the day? Of course this doesn't work for sweatshops, but when we're talking about big contracts and managing experienced devs, we're not so easily replaceable.

I have given them notice that I will end my engagement with them this summer, for example, and now they'll have to spend a couple months finding a replacement; if we had had a more sane arrangement, I might've stayed.

Of course being greedy and extracting maximum profit out of workers is a valid strategy, but I do not think that it is the only way to run a business.

In the current market, they may be able to find folks easier than they previously were.

What they do may be a local optimum.

That doesn’t answer my question?

I you have the vision and don't have the "tyranny" of say, impatient shareholders, you can you chase a longer term goal than maximum profit right now.

They have the most to win/lose.

The rest are just going ‘WTF is this shit?!?’

Why would the party support them?

Those are the people who do the nost work for the party. People who 'toe the line' are also those who tend not to do the work that gets people elected. People who care enough to think also knock of doors and the other work that gets someone elected. You won't find a thinking person you 100% agree with, but a mostly agree is better than a mostly disagree - and by doing that work you also get to talk to people and perhaps change minds.

For the team? For the influence? There used to be a time when people could work across the aisle.

You can have beliefs, but you also must have heart and a brain to open your world view to other perspectives. This is what being an adult is all about. Not this crap that we see today.

I would suggest that at those times it's when the structure of achieving the same common goal was at stake.

Disagreements on the best day to provide services to the public are still attempting the same common objective.

Disagreements on which people will have their rights removed are not a "let's agree to disagree" sort of thing.

Eh, dying was only going to make the whole mess higher profile.

If they wanted it to stay quiet, throw him in solitary and don’t allow any visitors until he dies of old age.

I don't think they're implying it's likely. Just that it's more likely than the other scenario.

Eh, I take it as more ‘duh, what did you think was going to happen’?

Which at the national politics level, seems fair.

That is why the current admin keeps talking about (and trying to push) printing more money. Because the obvious plan is to inflate out of the mess. Which they have been a little.

The big question is, will they succeed at accelerating it or not?

Either way, cash won’t be worth as much.

This won't work if you are on the shorter end of the yield curve. Obviously when investors say "cash" they mean money market fund at least.

Now people holding actual cash will have problems.

Considering most folks feel like actual inflation is > anything they can get from a money market account (and hard to argue with them!), that is why we have the problem we have.

If actual inflation > IR you can get for safe investments, it means inflation is working as designed. Mainstream economists make the argument that anyone who saves money is selfishly hoarding resources that could be spent or invested. The Fed is supposed to print money to purposely cause inflation, precisely to "tax" this unsocial behavior and incentivize consumption, riskier investments, and debt.

I don't personally agree with this argument. But everyone should be aware that the argument exists, many economists endorse it, and it is used to guide policy in many countries.

The person I'm responding to thinks everything is going to blow up. That means he expects equities to worth a lot less than now. The obvious thing to do is to hold cash.

For now….

I suspect the administrations are as much a sign of the shifting tides than a cause.

Conservative approaches tend to be…. Conservative. Which is the opposite of growth.

Tammany hall got people murdered [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall].