Craig, the problem is closer then you think: your lifestyle choice for the city forces others to live out in the country. You want your fruit, veg and possibly meat. It has to be grown somewhere, and there's not enough space near where you live. So it's further away.
Now, you want to pay a reasonable price for things things, so these farmers need to work efficiently. For instance, need to upload a video of their cattle to sell it, rather than ship them all to a central location and then onward to the buyer (expensive in time, manpower and other resources, loss of cattle in-transit, etc)
Distributing people more allows food production to happen near or closer to population centres. That would need infrastructure too, broadband is a key aspect of it anyway, and I'll still contend with you that NBN is bloody cheap compared to pretty much any other capital infrastructure project. Of course $40bln is a lot of money, but that really is not the point.
There's issues in rural Australia with health and education. Well, big growing cities have major problems with the same. Cities are not the solution, they are as much part of the same problem. We might as well build smart infrastructure so that location is no longer the problem. Then we have a more space to solve the real issues.
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Re: NBN (nature of), cost & benefit
Date: 2010-08-08 06:52 am (UTC)Now, you want to pay a reasonable price for things things, so these farmers need to work efficiently. For instance, need to upload a video of their cattle to sell it, rather than ship them all to a central location and then onward to the buyer (expensive in time, manpower and other resources, loss of cattle in-transit, etc)
Distributing people more allows food production to happen near or closer to population centres. That would need infrastructure too, broadband is a key aspect of it anyway, and I'll still contend with you that NBN is bloody cheap compared to pretty much any other capital infrastructure project.
Of course $40bln is a lot of money, but that really is not the point.
There's issues in rural Australia with health and education. Well, big growing cities have major problems with the same. Cities are not the solution, they are as much part of the same problem. We might as well build smart infrastructure so that location is no longer the problem. Then we have a more space to solve the real issues.