How can we get rural Americans to become excited for a space opera future?

[MilitaryCadetAlpha]

I heard the development of prisons helps the economies of rural America.

This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?

How small-town jails drive America's high incarceration rate

What can be done to get rural Americans to welcome industries that advance humanity?

Schools and spaceships should be built! Not prisons!

 

[Revoltingest]

I heard the development of prisons helps the economies of rural America.

This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?

How small-town jails drive America's high incarceration rate

What can be done to get rural Americans to welcome industries that advance humanity?

The get-tough-on-crime attitude pervades both major political parties in Americastan.
Urban areas have the bulk of the voting population, so they're the ones driving this
spendy assault on civil liberties. Can't blame a single county in corn country.
So the question should be....
How can we get meaningful country-wide justice system reform so that it's actually about justice?
Some ideas.....
- More emphasis on rehabilitation.
- End the War On Drugs.
- Repeal laws against victimless crimes.
- Try non-incarceration punishment where appropriate.

 

[Nakosis]

I heard the development of prisons helps the economies of rural America.

This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why?

How small-town jails drive America's high incarceration rate

What can be done to get rural Americans to welcome industries that advance humanity?

Provide jobs.
Folks want to work and be able to provide for themselves and their families. That's it. No Secret.

 

[sun rise]

To add one observation - people should look at why we have many more people in prison than any other developed and free nation. The problem starts when kids are young and by the time they're adults it's too late.

 

[columbus]

But Mr. Gaddis lived in Dearborn County, Ind., which sends more people to prison per capita than nearly any other county in the United States.

Eff Mr Gaddis and his drug dealing though.
I live a few miles up the road. And people like him are a plague.

I would like to see a more evidenced based approach to the drug problem. But I have no sympathy whatsoever for the dealers who get caught exploiting the system as it is.
None.
Tom

 

[Sapiens]

Provide jobs.
Folks want to work and be able to provide for themselves and their families. That's it. No Secret.

People do not need jobs, the need access to viable career paths. This requires skills that they often do not possess. These skills come from education. Education if funded by the electorate. The uneducated electorate does not support education. It is a vicious cycle of anti-intellectualism. I grew up in an agricultural area that is now known as Silicon Valley that is often cited as the "provide jobs" success story. Why did it happen? Two-fold reason, a concentration of the best institutions of higher learning in the world and no economic barrier to taking advantage of them (e.g., I went to U.C. Berkeley for $50 a quarter).

 

[Nakosis]

People do not need jobs, the need access to viable career paths. This requires skills that they often do not possess. These skills come from education. Education if funded by the electorate. The uneducated electorate does not support education. It is a vicious cycle of anti-intellectualism. I grew up in an agricultural area that is now known as Silicon Valley that is often cited as the "provide jobs" success story. Why did it happen? Two-fold reason, a concentration of the best institutions of higher learning in the world and no economic barrier to taking advantage of them (e.g., I went to U.C. Berkeley for $50 a quarter).

Education is not going to help if there are no jobs available.

While I'm all for improving our education system and doing whatever possible to make it affordable, some folks are not in a position to afford the time to get an education. First folks need to be able to provide for themselves and their family. That's going to take priority with people. There's a lot of older folks for who it will be difficult to stop being a provider to get an education.

 

[Jumi]

Access to quality basic education is a good start. It makes kids hungry for knowledge when they realize this is actually useful. After that higher education needs to open up.

 

[Kemosloby]

Too many laws. Why shouldn't someone be able to buy reasonably effective pain medication without needing to pay a doctor and a pharmacy? The true meaning of "flower power" is regulating the poppy.

 

[Kapalika]

It started with the war on drugs to disrupt political opponents and has since grown into an industry. More prisoners means certain companies make more money, often at tax payer expense.

When the state prisons overflow they hand them off to the private ones which get paid to do so. So they turn around and lobby for policies that will put more people in prison, often piggy backing off of the drug war or other things.

It's a vicious cycle, and our culture has been taught to justify this "tough on crime" attitude as a way to blind people to what's really going on.

 

[Sapiens]

Education is not going to help if there are no jobs available.

While I'm all for improving our education system and doing whatever possible to make it affordable, some folks are not in a position to afford the time to get an education. First folks need to be able to provide for themselves and their family. That's going to take priority with people. There's a lot of older folks for who it will be difficult to stop being a provider to get an education.

I do not disagree with you, I'm just saying that there aren't jobs and that there are not going to be jobs no matter how fast the economy expands. Factory jobs are a thing of the past (save for highly trained jobs maintaining automated factories). Basic industries like steel and coal are things of the past. Agriculture is there, but that is seasonal and few people are willing to do it. Construction can help, but where will the buyers come from? In the end much of the nation is reduced to flipping burgers for each other that won't work for long. Sure, gainful long term employment is the goal, but I don't see how we can make that happen without significant retraining of the retrainable and welfare style marginalization of the non-retrainable. A twenty-year infrastructure rebuild might help, but in the end if we are not left with a reskilled population we are left with improved infrastructure and a bill we can not afford.

 

[Brickjectivity]

What can be done to get rural Americans to welcome industries that advance humanity?

Industry has a continuous history of breaking promises. You want to change its terrible reputation, but can you change its nature. Why are you proposing that rural communities embrace industry, for example? Why not propose instead that energy based industries embrace communities? If you look at history, communities readily embrace industry and are then back-stabbed for it. It is a continual process of back-stabbing.

 

[Brickjectivity]

How can we get meaningful country-wide justice system reform so that it's actually about justice?

That is a tall order. It depends on what you are willing to give up to accomplish it. Are you willing to give up the current hot political topics to press for this? A president or a governor could threaten to release 90% of prisoners if a county does not make reforms. They have their power for a reason, perhaps this very reason to force municipalities to be reasonable about justice, but are they willing to wield it and fight for justice. Apparently its not at the top of the list.

 

[Revoltingest]

That is a tall order. It depends on what you are willing to give up to accomplish it. Are you willing to give up the current hot political topics to press for this? A president or a governor could threaten to release 90% of prisoners if a county does not make reforms. They have their power for a reason, perhaps this very reason to force municipalities to be reasonable about justice, but are they willing to wield it and fight for justice. Apparently its not at the top of the list.

I think it will require a popular recognition of the need for change.
Politicians must believe that getting elected depends upon
improving things. It could happen. But I'm not holding me breath.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

People do not need jobs, the need access to viable career paths.

This is exactly the problem. There are plenty of jobs around here, but in retail/food service and working-class blue-collar jobs. Professional careers are not many outside of places like Fort Wayne and Indianapolis (either one is about 60 miles from where I live).

This requires skills that they often do not possess.

Indiana has several excellent universities of world renown. The problem is not at all education, but rather there are so very few jobs for the educated. Indiana only keeps about 25% of its college graduates.

Education is not going to help if there are no jobs available.

When I started the job search a few months before I got my bachelors, it only took me a few minutes to realize my options aren't much better than what they were before. I can make tons more than I ever have before, but the problem is actually getting them.

 

[Father Heathen]

This is why I'm not on board for privatizing everything. If a prison's goal is making a profit rather than actual correction and rehabilitation, then you're going to have this problem of unfair convictions, excessive punishments, and swelling prison populations.

As for getting rural America interested in scientific and technological development, you have to appeal to their patriotic pride, such as recalling the glory days of the Apollo program and the moon landing, for example.

 

[Sapiens]

This is exactly the problem. There are plenty of jobs around here, but in retail/food service and working-class blue-collar jobs. Professional careers are not many outside of places like Fort Wayne and Indianapolis (either one is about 60 miles from where I live).

Indiana has several excellent universities of world renown. The problem is not at all education, but rather there are so very few jobs for the educated. Indiana only keeps about 25% of its college graduates.

Having one or two first tier institutions is, unfortunately, not what it takes. The critical mass (if you read New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, L.A, etc.) seems to be having a bunch of them. Indiana (for example) has two top tier schools, Purdue and Notre Dame, but that is not MIT and Harvard (and 300 odd other schools in the Boston Area) nor is it Stanford and Berkeley (and 300 odd other schools). Add to that the issue of getting the "talent" to want to move there when it is not attractive enough to keep even the current graduates.

When I started the job search a few months before I got my bachelors, it only took me a few minutes to realize my options aren't much better than what they were before. I can make tons more than I ever have before, but the problem is actually getting them.

My experience was very different. When I was forced to leave with my degree (I was doing fine, I did not want to graduate. but I took a class that the Dean decided fulfilled a requisite that I was holding open so I could stay) I was faced with selecting one from a number of interesting jobs. It was a different time and different place, but bottom line, I suspect, was more the result of the old school tie network I had gained than my being anything more than a reasonably competent zoologist and an adventurous soul.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Having one or two first tier institutions is, unfortunately, not what it takes.

It demonstrates there is good education going on. But out of everyone who gets an college education, 25% stay while the other 75% take their degree and get work elsewhere.
They obviously aren't having to "tier up" their degrees.

 

[Revoltingest]

It demonstrates there is good education going on. But out of everyone who gets an college education, 25% stay while the other 75% take their degree and get work elsewhere.
They obviously aren't having to "tier up" their degrees.

More science education.
It's just so interesting!
And it makes so many other things more interesting.

 

[Sapiens]

It demonstrates there is good education going on. But out of everyone who gets an college education, 25% stay while the other 75% take their degree and get work elsewhere.
They obviously aren't having to "tier up" their degrees.

I think we are saying the same thing. There needs to be more in the way of an intellectual critical mass and infrastructure than a few good institutions to provide for the growth of college graduate jobs in an area.