alt Hacker NewsThese teenagers aren't thousands of years old. Neither are their parents.
The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area seem to simultaneously believe that these people:
- have a right to the benefits of what you call '"modern" settled life', AND
- cannot be inconvenienced by the things that make that life possible (like density)
> The folks suggesting that other people should pay to improve things for people choosing to live in that area
If the United States federal government wants to maintain a legitimate claim to sovereignty over much of rural Alaska, which is very sparsely populated, it needs to maintain an actual population there and provide basic services to it. It's a fairly well established geopolitical principle.
Similarly there's something like 41,000 people in Nunavut, and the Canadian government spends a shitload every year subsidizing all their communities' existence. But the alternative is worse, if you remove the population there's a danger that other interested parties might try to lay claim to it for themselves. It seems we're already seeing that with the US trying to claim Greenland for itself based on the concept that nobody is doing anything useful with it.