Posted on 06/17/2014 7:00:15 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Only 4 percent of consistently conservative Americans want to live in cities, but urban environments are where the tech action is.
It's one of those stats that just smacks you across the face: In a recent Pew poll, only four percent—4%!—of consistent conservatives want to live in America's cities.
Meanwhile, about a quarter of people with mixed political views want to live in cities more than they want to live in small towns, suburbs, or rural areas. And nearly 46 percent of consistently liberal people want to live in cities.
For someone who writes about technology, this is particularly significant. It's not just that the latest round of hot companies are deciding to headquarter in cities like New York and San Francisco; it's also that many of these companies make sense, for the most part, only in urban environments.
All the startups clumped under the heading Uber for X—of which there are dozens—require high concentrations of people (i.e., cities). Take companies like Airbnb, which works best with a lot of listings in a given area, or Yelp, which declines in utility as fewer people contribute reviews. But take, as well, the range of other technologies that make the most sense within dense agglomerations of people. The most prominent example is autonomous vehicles, which require detailed, expensive, and regularly updated maps to operate. For that reason, those vehicles will almost certainly deploy in cities first, and maybe only in places where enough people drive to make the investment in mapping the area worth it....
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
It amazes me that the liberals came up with a GOTV model that got every drunk, senile pensioner and welfare queen to the polls, but then they couldn’t do the Obamacare site.
Not here that I can tell.
Maybe because when the SHTF we cons know all the “tech” in the world won’t matter???
Ho hum.
Yet more shallow, self-glorifying drivel.
It was reported that, this week, Obama is playing golf on courses located on the private estates of internet billionaires, which are located -— where?
In the back yards of town-houses in urban areas?
Noooooo....
In “the country”. Think “Rancho Mirage”.
I wonder, who pays the idiots who write this dreck?
Out here in the sticks at least we know how to back up our files...
I think that conservatives know that e-mails can never be lost just due to a hard drive crash. :)
When the financial markets inevitably start to puke up the 40% fake money created every day to pay the entitlement army, cities are gonna become quite sh!tty.
plenty of people commute. there’s no reason, whatsoever, requiring anyone to live in the city
meanwhile, the truth is... if there are leftists in the company and they identify you as right leaning, they will do what they can to either get you out or trip you up.
you’re at war, whether or not you know it
I’m so upset! Not.
“but urban environments are where the tech action is.”
Yeah, just look at how modern, tech savvy, and innovative Chicago and Detroit are!
Only to a liberal is the city the limit of civilization. Millions of conservatives live outside the cities and work in tech that is not in a city. Most of the tech in the Denver area is not in Denver. It is north, west and south of Denver. Even Loveland and Longmont, many miles north of Denver, have more tech than Denver has.
What a load. In my 35 years in the IT business the overwhelming majority are not libs. They live in the burbs or the sticks and commute or telecommute.
Wah!
“All the startups clumped under the heading Uber for X—of which there are dozens—require high concentrations of people (i.e., cities).”
This current batch of startups is hardly worth getting excited over, in terms of what they are adding to the economy. A little bit of savings to the consumer by streamlining the market is not a huge deal, but when you have nothing else to get excited about, and you are a tech writer, you hype it anyway.
Live by technology, die by technology!
Point the Second: without us Morlocks the whole system turns into useless oblong plastic and silicon paperweights. And we really don't have to work in the city anymore.
Point the Third: technologies that depend on population density will gravitate to where the people are. Those that don't will be ignored by urbanites convinced that they're the only smart people around. That doesn't mean they won't exist.
Point the Fourth: They do. GPS, for one. Who needs it more, a city dweller with an electronic sign that points her to the nearest Starbuck's three blocks away, or some guy trying to find a friend's house in the dark countryside? Who needs a portable water purification filter or a portable generator more? (We won't go into what happens when that really does become a city dweller because this is an Internet posting, not postapocalyptic fiction).
The urban/suburban/rural political continuum has been known for decades. It maps well to a preference for collective over individual activity in the city, hence the liberal tilt. It does not map well to technology adaption except for that which is already self-selected by virtue of a dependence on population density. The author's argument in that respect is circular.
There's more of a market where there are more potential buyers, that's about all this really says. But not necessarily more profit depending on the nature of that technology. And it's all about ROI.
It's all in how you look at it. The city limits are a definite line--for a liberal the civilization is within and ends at the city limits going out.
For many more rural Conservatives, civilization ends at the city limits, if you are going in...
Wishful thinking. Actually autonomous vehicles enable people to tolerate longer commutes and spread out. That is good for Republicans. An autonomous car needs only a minimal map because it must sense the present environment. Invest in real estate where autonomous technology will soon increase demand.
City slickers mainly produce intangible intellectual property. Most manufacturers are a located in the suburbs and beyond. Cities are too expensive and restrictive to operate in.
Cities are were most bad news comes from. They are where most terrorism takes place and most disease is spread. Russia and China have nukes ready to go that are programmed with the coordinates of every major Democrat hive.
Competent engineers tend to be conservatives, not promiscuous city slickers that can't do math. City slickers can handle the creative arts, like writing lame articles, but technology generally requires conservative engineers.
What a load. In my 35 years in the IT business the overwhelming majority are not libs. They live in the burbs or the sticks and commute or telecommute.
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