Krugman is, of course, right about this. BUT, note that universities can do a lot to revitalize declining and rural regions.

See this thing that @lymanstoneky wrote: https://t.co/2xqpKdMZUs
And see this thing that I wrote: https://t.co/2GduLv9SL5
And see this book that @JamesFallows wrote: https://t.co/sXGIQHirxn
And see this other thing that I wrote: https://t.co/uxUcLHzmON
And see this book that Enrico Moretti wrote: https://t.co/GO3WXIPv25
And see yet another thing that I wrote: https://t.co/zud8wNQDTh
And see this thing that @John_C_Austin wrote: https://t.co/9NOOIiewx9
Universities are the closest thing we have to a "magic bullet" for reviving America's declining, forgotten, rural, and left-behind regions.

Everyone needs to know this. Help me get the word out.

(end)

More from Noah Smith

When Republicans started to believe in racial bloc voting - when they stopped believing that nonwhite people could ever be persuaded to vote Republican - they started to see immigration as an invasion.

This explains why immigration is now at the center of partisan conflict.


Of course, the belief in ethnic bloc voting becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

When a slight Dem tilt among Hispanics and Asians caused the GOP to turn against them, Hispanics and Asians shifted more toward the Dems. Etc. etc. A self-reinforcing cycle.

Bush's 2006 amnesty attempt, and the 2013 intra-GOP fight over immigration reform, were two moments when the GOP could have turned back to the approach of Reagan, and courted Hispanics and Asians.

But they decided against this, and...here we are.

What will disrupt this bad equilibrium, and save American politics from being an eternal race war?

Either:
A) More white voters will grow disgusted with the GOP approach and defect, or
B) The GOP will find some non-immigration-related issues to attract more Hispanics and Asians.

As long as both parties see elections in terms of racial bloc voting - where the only way to win is to increase turnout among your own racial blocs or suppress turnout by the other party's racial blocs - American politics will not improve, and the country will decline.

(end)
1/Lots of tech companies and workers are making noises about leaving San Francisco, LA, NYC, and other "superstar" cities.

Some are predicting a shift to remote work and distributed companies.

Let's take a hard look at what that would actually

2/We're all familiar with the trend of tech companies and other knowledge industries (finance, biotech, etc.) piling into a few tech hubs, raising rents and house prices.

Now some think the advent of Zoom, Slack, etc. might reverse this trend.

https://t.co/nQVCJrKvrB


3/But escaping the superstar cities is going to be tough.

The forces keeping tech companies in places like SF are so strong that these regions have essentially become prisons for these companies.


4/In order to escape the prison of the superstar cities, tech companies and other knowledge industries will have to overcome the Four Jailers of Industrial Clustering:

1. In-person office productivity

2. Thick market effects

3. Knowledge spillovers

4. City life amenities

5/I'm actually pretty optimistic that companies can find ways to make remote work productive.

Studies show that working from home *some* of the time actually tends to raise
To be honest, I think this is just the effect of Twitter.

If you're on Twitter all the time - as every political commentator now is - it's easy to think that whiny, big-talking Twitter slacktivists are "the Dems".

But what's happening out there on the ground?


This is another reason I think Twitter is so bad for society.

It convinces intellectuals and commentators that practically everyone who's on their side is an extremist.

Which makes them tolerate extremism out of a (false) feeling of necessity.

If you stay on Twitter too much (which we all do now), you start to think that the typical left-of-center person is some British wanker who quote-tweets "Imagine thinking this" to anyone who doesn't like the idea of "ending capitalism".

But he is not typical.

A majority of Americans are not on Twitter.

But *every* journalist, commentator, and intellectual *has* to be on Twitter.

So every journalist, commentator, and intellectual comes face to face with big-talking slacktivist faux-extremists day in and day out.

It's a problem!!

Online bubbles full of shouty faux-extremists are, in general, fine.

The difference is that every journalist, commentator, and intellectual is essentially forced to exist in THIS bubble, because their jobs require it.

Twitter is a dystopian technology.

(end)

More from Society

The Nashville Operation - A Battle in the War

A thread exploring the Nashville bombing in the context of the 2020 Digital War (via SolarWinds) against the United States perpetrated by our enemies, likely China, Iran and/or Russia.


SolarWinds Hack

A digital "Pearl Harbor" moment for the United States, whoever was responsible had access to the keys to the kingdom for months during 2020, including sensitive military infrastructure. This is war!

SunGard + SolarWinds

SolarWinds software company is owned by same company that owns SunGard, which essentially provides data center services. A secure place to host internet servers with redundant power and "big pipe" data connections.

https://t.co/U3P3SrrkM1


SunGard Data Center

In Nashville, around the corner from their "big pipe" connection, AT&T. Like any data center, highly secure. Only authorized personnel can enter, and even fewer can access the actual server rooms. Backup generators are available in case of power failure.


If the SunGard hardware was being used to "host" critical command and control software related to SolarWinds, the US powers would be very interested in gaining special access keys that are stored on the hard-drives of specific servers.

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