Industry of the Future
The Cycling Infrastructure post began on a different site. I was running a discussion space for the small town I was living in and someone said they wished there was a bike rack at the grocery store in downtown.
It's a small town on a peninsula with historic scenic highways and zero interstates, which means cyclists can be on the old roads that go directly through downtown and I had seen groups of cyclists parked at the downtown grocery store on more than one occasion.
Aberdeen, Washington was at one time The Lumber Capitol of the World and logging still happens in that area, but it's never again going to be as big as it was at one time. They are trying to transition to tourism.
The problem with tourism is it promotes traffic and pollution which can be extremely damaging to the area. Tourists neither know nor care how much damage they are doing. It's up to locals to design things to foster income without allowing the tourist industry to become an extractive business, doing more harm than good in the long run.
I was hoping to foster the installation of cycling infrastructure not just in downtown Aberdeen but all over the peninsula to try to attract more cyclists and encourage tourism that's both healthy for the visitors and less damaging to the local environment than car-based tourism while encouraging locals to get more exercise and spend less on gasoline and car maintenance and generally try to trend pollution downwards.
If you are doing development in any small town or rural area, you need to contemplate the ways that development may negatively impact what you currently have and intentionally design things to bring more money without you ultimately regretting it.
After seeing this article:
I thought that's something Natives could potentially monetize. They would need to insist that only Natives can hunt these species and make these parkas and price them accordingly, but that's potentially a means to keep their culture alive and sustainably further business development goals.
SimCity 4 has clean industry. If I recall correctly, it isn't something you zone. It's something that happens if you meet certain benchmarks, including adequate education.
I read some article once where a member of a small town city council was critical of the decision to entirely exclude industrial development from the downtown core. She believed it would be possible to allow some kinds of clean industry to foster jobs without harming the downtown.
I have a long-standing interest in running my own business. The real world is nothing like the convenient zones of games like SimCity, where there's a clear bright line between industrial development and commercial development or a convenient definition of where light industry ends and medium or heavy industry begins.
My mother worked from home for a lot of years while nominally a full-time homemaker. She took in sewing and made several hundred dollars a month at a time when that would have more than paid their mortgage.
Her sewing machine was in the combined kitchen-dining room. There was no clear bright line between her work space and family living space and she sewed a lot of our clothes too, so her sewing machine was not strictly used for business alone.
I would like to make clothes and have wondered if I can start by making my own at home and try my hand at selling it and I've tried to look up definitions of "light industry" online and tried to figure out how much I could do in a residential setting without getting in trouble with government before needing a factory in an industrial zone.
I don't know the answers to those questions but generally speaking rural areas frequently have little to no zoning or laws about what you are allowed to do. So you may be allowed legally to do whatever you want but in practical terms doing too much of x may harm some other essential activity, like growing your own food.
Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity.
If you are someplace rural, make sure you aren't pricing it too low. If it's selling like hot cakes, it may be because you are giving people two dollars worth and only charging them a dollar, which is a great way to get steadily poorer.
If you can develop a product you can make locally, sell online and ship elsewhere, you may be able to increase your income without regretting it. But that may be more challenging than it sounds like it will be.