> (3) The Agency shall award grants under the Program on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to available funding, as follows: (A) not more than $125,000.00 in calendar year 2019...
With such a small budget, it seems like the actual intent may have been to allocate up to $125K to generate advertising about their state.
> Vermont has budgeted grants for about 100 new remote workers in the first three years of the program and about 20 additional workers per year for every year after.
Vermont lost 10,000 working-age residents over the past five years.[1] This plan will (in theory) recover just ~1% of that.
Maybe they're monitoring reactions to this announcement before they put more money into the program? Otherwise I don't see how this is supposed to make any difference to their problem.
With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore, and agriculture in a slow death spiral, Vermont is trying to embrace it's potential as a bedroom community for NYC and Boston.
Burlington is a cool little city and the countryside is beautiful as well. If they can use a small program like this to stimulate some cadre of "pioneers", they'll get alot of value, and perhaps some improved outlooks for underutilized former IBM people.
> With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore
I'm not sure where you are coming up with that. In fact many places in the NE have have multiple top 10 all time snowfalls in the last 10 years.
Climate change is expected to increase the precipitation in New England, particularly in the winter and the temperature increase can result in more snow due to the increased ability of the air to hold moisture. In general we'll probably have better skiing for the next few decades at which point snow _may_ start to be replaced with rain, depending on how high the temp goes where you happen to be.
That is a really weird paper, basically they are assuming that the 98-99 season is representative of some abstract season in the 2040-2069 time period which is at best a questionable assumption. But even with the questionability they are showing a 8-10day decrease sometime in 2040-2069?
I think they also leave out major changes in snowmaking. The mountains I visit have lost a lot of access to snowmaking due to regulations limiting their water use and changes to what bacterium are used for nucleation.
The temperature swings are in some cases actually a benefit for season longevity. What you often want is a good dumping early in the season and then some rain / wet snow followed by a freeze to build a good hard base for later in the season.
I live in Upstate NY. We get snowfall, but after the storm blows out, it gets warm. This January/February, I cleared my roof of snow wearing shorts, and the temp was around 65-70.
I don't totally understand the figure. What is determining the number of data points taken? It looks like the density of readings in the NW is much higher than in the NE.
Snowfall data at ski resorts isn't reliable because they make snow, and the incentive is to lie toward favorable amounts for marketing purposes. In Colorado a few years ago a number of resorts were caught blatantly fabricating snowfall amounts and then they combated this with variations on snow stake cams published on their web site.
Anyway, there are quite a few NOAA SNOTEL sites all over that have reliable data and for sure snow pack is on a decline, and there's also USDA NRCS who use that data and publish agricultural specific interpretations of it. Further, due to budget constraints, some of these data may stop being tracked and produced altogether.
By that data Vermont has slightly increased rates of snowfall over the last 70 years. This paper also references studies that predict Vermont will see an increase of snow over the next few decades as well: https://www.northeastern.edu/climatereview/?p=282
The big resorts make their own snow so it's not like things are completely dead. But there is the subconscious thing for visitors nearby where if there's no snow in NYC or Boston they forget that there is always snow on the major mountains here.
>"With skiing in the east an industry in rough shape since it doesn't snow anymore, and agriculture in a slow death spiral,..."
Can you elaborate on the slow death spiral of agriculture part? Are you talking about the effects of globalization factory farms or something else specific to Vermont/Northesat?
I know Hoboken has one or two at least, but I'm North Bergen so closer to Edgewater than Hoboken!
I can actually (and have) walked to Edgewater.
I was definitely not being completely honest, but there is an insane number of people in Hudson county, it's surprising there aren't offices for corworking spaces. But I guess because of the demographics and most people absolutely not being in tech is the answer.
As we are talking about living and working in Vermont on a technology focused news aggregation site, I would call that a success.
Part of the reasoning given in the article is to shore up the "rapidly sinking tax base" of the state and it reminds me that we don't have a good example of governments that both grow and shrink based on the economic activity of the state. That is something that could really help areas remain stable for longer periods of time I expect.
Yes, the Strong Towns organization has a unique perspective on this. They make a convincing argument that local governments in the U.S. are trapped in a "growth Ponzi scheme." [1] Without continuous growth, most of them will never cover their liabilities. Strong Towns also provides interesting insights on how to avoid and correct this pattern.
I like the Strong Towns ideas, I wish they could present them in a less activist sort of way sometimes. It is perhaps the author's of the various article's history that leaks through but often times when reading their stuff I feel like I'm being talked down to and I think that blunts their otherwise useful information.
To be honest, most "anti-tax" people are fine with the theory, but don't trust that it will be well managed and, more importantly, preserved for lean times. Too often surpluses are immediately funneled to special projects that we could have been better off without.
The "pro-tax" people in my area are also generally against this sort of thing, because they want nothing more than to take more money and spend it on special constituencies.
For example, my state passed a sales tax that was sold to us as a way to better preserve our parks, wild lands and cultural heritage. About 19% has gone to the DNR, which means less actually went to the stated cause. The rest is being funneled to art projects that are poorly received and utilized.
Mind you, this is in a state that's very pro-taxation, and otherwise very liberal.
So are most pro-tax people, they're just pro-tax-everyone-else. Our governor is filthy rich, campaigned on raising the taxes on the one percent, and yet none of the taxes he wanted would have affected his trust fund income. What a surprise.
It seems the more pertinent correlation is to resource-rich states, which makes sense as most are non-renewable, and if on state land, should benefit all the citizens.
The reason for this historically is that throughout human history the main problem for societies has been to devise systems and governments that allow you to grow as fast as possible. Famine, War, Diseases or any Natural Disasters had the potential to wipe out your community or Kingdom, so throughout history you see this mad dash at settling lands, growing communities etc.
That has changed in the past 100 years, especially in the New World. You no longer have to worry about your towns being burned down by an invading army (not in the developed world at least). The systems and thinking that we have in place for governing have just never dealt with this problem before.
I do hope that it changes in the near future as we see the inevitable decline in many, many rural communities in the US and the hyper-growth of urban conglomerates. It would be nice if Governments could plan for a gradual decline in the population and ensure that basic city services would survive the decline by investing judiciously, rather than try to reverse the trend with expensive gimmicks to attract people that lose money, make the communities financially insolvent and basically increase their misery.
Likely a pilot program, the cost of administering the program provably exceeds the 125k itself.
I've just received my Danish startup visa. It may seem that every European country is trying to hand these out like candy, but my batch was capped at 50 visas.
It makes sense to start these types programmes out small and observe the ramifications. Cash-for-clunkers is a good example of a large scale program going wrong, where massive funds were allocated to buy back unused cars.
Northern Ireland had a no-cap for renewable heating, no one bother to ask for money for years until ppl close to the DUP figured how to exploit it and extract a billion pound or something.
Starting with a small sum makes sense, and for every remote worker they attract there might be a spouse, very likely children and suddenly you have two jobs generated on top for free.
> (3) The Agency shall award grants under the Program on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to available funding, as follows: (A) not more than $125,000.00 in calendar year 2019...
With such a small budget, it seems like the actual intent may have been to allocate up to $125K to generate advertising about their state.
https://legislature.vermont.gov/assets/Documents/2018/Docs/B...