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9rxlast Tuesday at 7:32 PM1 replyview on HN

> More available total jobs or more available comparable jobs?

More actual opportunity, perhaps? Cities have lots of available jobs (assuming they aren't fake; that is a thing, apparently), and lots of people without jobs, but they never seem to align such that the people without jobs ever fill the open jobs. It's quite curious. As a result, people are much more likely to be without work in cities, as seen in the data. Yes, I'm sure you can find exceptions if you pick particular locations. We were never talking about a specific location.

> Please do share this data.

I'm sure you can look it up just as easily as I.

I was about to suggest that you can hire an assistant if you can't find the time to do it yourself, but whatever causes the above disconnect is apt to bite you too, assuming you are in a city. Oh well.

> You're eventually having to spend more and more time driving through all those seas of neighborhoods to those decent paying jobs

What kind of jobs are trapped in these seas of neighbourhoods? Most businesses need to get supplies into the city and their product out of the city, so usually the jobs are located on the fast track in and out of the city. This means that, if anything, it is easier to access the jobs when you don't live in the city.

Tech might be an exception to that. Maybe that's where your mind went, given the nature of this site. But tech doesn't require an in-person presence at all, so that one doesn't really fit our discussion.


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vel0citylast Tuesday at 8:05 PM

> Im sure you can look it up just as easily as I.

Not any datasets that actually agree with your assertions. Most datasets showcase the hollowing out of rural job opportunities as globalization and automation has massively cut back on manufacturing job opportunities, automation has reduced farm jobs, rural depopulation leads to education closures, etc. So if you have a lot of data otherwise please do share.

And once again it completely goes against everything I've personally seen in nearly a dozen metro areas. I've got family who live in absolutely rural areas and operate farms in the Midwest. I've lived in a few metro areas. I've got close coworkers in other metro areas from me. I've got close friends who came from other rural areas, and know many people who live on these fringe of metro/rural kind of spaces. They all see the rural areas getting hollowed out economic-wise and the only real job opportunities are moving closer into cities.

I've driven through probably a dozen dead rural towns in Texas. Places that had what were probably lively town squares even in the 70s, probably had their last gasps in the 80s, and have been largely boarded up since then.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/chan...

> We were never talking about a specific location.

I've absolutely been talking specific areas. Have you not been reading my comments and actually looking at the map in question? And then, this is still pretty similar for almost all the other, I dunno, top 30 or so cities by population?

> What kind of jobs are trapped in these seas of neighbourhoods?

Not in those neighborhoods, through those neighborhoods. Decades of continuously pushing the fringe suburb line further and further out has done this. The towns that were once the edge of the city are now 30+mi into the urban area, and they've never been allowed to densify. Once again, it feels like you haven't actually looked at that map I linked once. It would be pretty obvious spending not even five minutes looking at that map to see what I'm talking about.

> Tech might be an exception to that. Maybe that's where your mind went, given the nature of this site.

No. My wife doesn't work in tech and those people in Forney I'm taking about are security guards and building engineers. That's not tech. Once again, are you reading my comments? Where are you going to get a commercial property building engineer paying nearly $100k in a rural area? Going to get a finance job with JPMorgan Chase in a rural area? Far easier finding a civil engineering job in a place where civil engineers are actually building things like skyscrapers and giant highway interchanges and what not than a place that barely has a stoplight. You're not going to have as well paid healthcare job working at a rural hospital struggling to stay open especially after this next round of Medicaid cuts compared to the giant hospital networks like Baylor, UTSouthwestern, Memorial-Hermann, etc, especially if focused on some speciality.

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