Things are going well.
I live outside of Boston, and when we did some home renovations about 10 years ago we had an electrician who had a good sized company with about a dozen electricians who worked for him. He said that he was regularly sending a truck with half a dozen electricians to Cape Cod to work there. The cost of living combined with NIMBYism on the Cape has gotten so bad that fewer and fewer trades people etc. can afford to live there. More recently I’ve heard that a high end restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard is chartering flights from the mainland to bring in employees.
I can only imagine Florida is going to end up in a similar situation but for very different reasons. They’re proving more and more successful at pushing hard working qualified people out of that state. Sooner or later they’ll be forced to start cutting corners on all manner of infrastructure since they won’t have quality carpenters, electricians, plumbers, etc. It’s already happening with farmers in that state losing their laborers as well as long haul truck drivers, etc.
At this point I’m just watching the clock wondering when Florida will be literally uninhabitable. I mean it’s already figuratively uninhabitable, but I mean going from “No sane person wants to live here” to “It’s literally impossible for anyone to live here”
I mean DeSantis is a shithead, but Florida is also expensive, hot, has poor infrastructure, and is sinking.
This article is putting a political spin on something that might not be that political.
Academics do not get paid much, so the increase in Florida’s cost of living (combined with it being a shit place to live) probably contributes to them leaving.
It’d be more compelling if they showed the stats of academics leaving Florida compared to non academics in the same economic bracket.
All those things you just mentioned are heavily influenced by who is in political power.
Ok, but did you read the article? It’s about a specific issues at Florida Universities where top leadership is being replaced by politically influenced Republican appointees who are punishing academic for doing their jobs as well as the impacts of anti academic legislation that’s making it harder for professors to do their jobs properly. You’re just complaining that they aren’t also covering random other social issues as well? It’s a news article about a specific subject, that doesn’t mean other subjects don’t exist outside of the scope of the article, otherwise you’d need every article to be an encyclopedia. It’s just how writing and articles work. I don’t understand your complaint.
I don’t think the point is “academics more so than other professions”, but that “any marginalized people with a choice” are ditching FL. Having that sort of choice is more common among knowledge workers, thus the brain drain.
Florida being a shit place to live for many reasons, most of which (including your examples) are political. But it’s hard to deny a governor criminalizing your identity is a major deterrent.
republiQans are pleased with this. Then, there is a sub-set of republicans who are confused as to why good academics would be leaving. They will continue to vote republiQan, of course.
Fascism drives away intellectuals and is always hostile towards reason.
