Walmart and the like killed local competition. There’s a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It’s insanely busy.
I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn’t get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow.
The county has something like 12,000 residents. It’s about the same population as a 2-3 mile radius is the suburb I live in.
To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op.
Edit: Removing the last 2 sentences of the last paragraph as it’s against the guidelines for flamebait topics. Reading between the lines of the original article I can only assume “speak the the language” is referring to politics.
> “It’s ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They’re O.K. with ‘community store.’ They’re the same thing, but you’ve got to speak the language.”
The political flamebait in your last paragraph breaks the site guidelines. That's not ok because it leads to flamewars, as it did—wretchedly—in this case.
Whoa Dang, you've got a hot one here! Glad to see the site guidelines being applied equally, as other times I've felt you were a bit too lenient with the left leaning comments (perhaps that's just my own bias).
Generally we try to persuade people before banning them, especially if there's evidence that they're otherwise using HN in good faith.
Speaking of which, why not follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? It's in your interests for at least three reasons. First, those rules are what keep HN interesting and prevent it from burning to a crisp. Scorched earth is no good for anyone. Second, I realize that you have reasons to be angry about things some other commenters say, but if you just blast everybody with a flamethrower, it only discredits your positions. Keeping your cool, staying neutral, and explaining your point of view in a positive way would be more effective and have more dignity. Third, following HN's rules takes discipline and self-control, two classical virtues which we all profit from cultivating.
> A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow.
A 1/2 cow would probably require buying a new freezer, but splitting a 1/2 cow is quite common. (splitting a half gets you a better mix than buying a quarter)
Not to mention that if you can come up with the cash, a quarter is far less expensive than buying beef at the supermarket. Last time I did it (2 years ago?), it came to under $3.00/lb total (farmer's price + butcher shop) for about 200 lbs of beef.
There's a natural incentive for a couple families to band together and buy a whole or half beef.
It's a poorly worded and incisive line. However the sentiment that they were trying to express does have merit in discussing under more specific and civil terms.
I too have observed an apparent abundance of individuals that decry various forms of social support programs only to change their story when it's suddenly a program that more-obviously hands them support. (There is also a strong argument for social support programs as a method of minimizing the loss to society of productive labor as well as prevention for forcing individuals towards lives of crime so they can put food on the table.)
So... Many people are hypocrites and/or inconsistent in their politics?
Not exactly insightful.
Go ahead and point out whatever bad policies you think lead to this outcome, and why you think they should be changed. But calling people hypocrites on a tangential topic (social services) doesn't add anything.
There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.
Yeah, this isn't really a relevant critique in farm country. You can live in a town and walk to the grocery store, but then you need to drive to work. Or else you can live on a farm and drive to a town to buy groceries. But in no scenario does farming and density work together. Industrial-scale farming doesn't happen without car travel. Subsistence farming does, but if all the farmers are subsistence farmers then the cities don't get fed.
If you want to be a proponent of dense urban living, that's great. Dense urban living is good. But dense urban living is only feasible because farm country exists.
I'm not critiquing dense urban or rural living. However, when 70% of the people who live rural pass a couple grocery stores on their way home, the ones who don't commute are going to suffer.
Roads should be designed to travel between communities, not bypass communities.
I'm an engineer. I live on a small farm. If not for this "car culture" I wouldn't have a job. The closest business to my house is a bar about 3 miles away. The next closest is a gas station 7 miles away. There is no "community:" that's a fiction perpetuated by people who live in cities. Maybe there was 100 years ago, but there sure isn't now.
You can hate on cars all you want, but there's no denying that they opened up people's options. The fact that the small towns are emptying out is pretty much all the proof you need.
How many engineers in Europe live on small farms 20+ miles from their employer?
Look, engineers can get jobs in the United States without owning a car, too -- but they'd better live in an urban area with public transit, or work remotely (and live in an area where they can still get where they need by transit, bike, or walking). I suppose it's possible that engineers in the French or German equivalents of rural farm country do just peachy where they are, but I'm betting most of them are actually living in and around Paris, Berlin and Munich.
There is a lot between "urban" and "rural". You could be car-free in my non-urban area. I don't do that, but you certainly could. It's the Florida cities/towns of Melbourne, Indialantic, and Palm Bay.
From my house in Indialantic it's not more than a mile to my workplace, to Ace Hardware, to Dollar General, to an organic food store, to a seafood store (raw or cook-to-order), and to the beach. There are closer houses even, often below $400,000 for a 3-bedroom on a quarter acre.
Melbourne and Palm Bay are similar, but cheaper and with many more jobs for engineers.
What should I have said differently to substantiate my point that that circumstance wasn't an inherent necessity?
Citing "they're already doing X" is the best way to refute "things have to be not-X", right?
I wasn't trying to start a national flamewar, and I don't see how what I said was unnecessarily inflammatory. If no one has a better way, I think I was within the guidelines.
In case it matters, I don't live in the place I was saying does things better.
"Not many, because their urban planning is better" reads like a swipe. It's clear from your reply that you didn't intend it that way, but unfortunately intent doesn't communicate itself on the internet. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate. There are two main ways to do that. The first is to include more information in your comment—in this case you could have spelled out your argument more clearly and relied less on one-liners. The second is to use neutral and factual language. For example, you could have macroexpanded the nearly-informationless "better" into an explanation of just what the relevant difference is.
There's another point about how your comment was flamebaity: it steered the thread in a more generic direction. When discussions go from more-specific to more-generic, they typically get more divisive. This is what your comment did. All it said was "their urban planning is better" and "car culture is not some fundamental invariant". Those claims were larger and more generic than where the discussion was just prior to your post. This is basically always a step down in discussion quality, and nearly always makes a thread more divisive.
If you're going to do that, you should include enough specific information to put meat on the bones. Large claims with little information amount to provocation on the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21456176 was a predictable response to the provocation, and you reacted by taking a swipe at the poster ("I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger"). That's what I mean about taking threads further into flamewar.
This whole dynamic usually starts with the swerve towards more generic discussion. This is a subtle point, but a surprisingly reliable one.
I appreciate your elaboration and reference to the guidelines, but I think your application of them here is dubious.
>There are two main ways to do that. The first is to include more information in your comment—in this case you could have spelled out your argument more clearly and relied less on one-liners. The second is to use neutral and factual language. For example, you could have macroexpanded the nearly-informationless "better" into an explanation of just what the relevant difference is.
Sometimes greater detail is warranted, yes, but elaborating that way wouldn't have added relevant or decisive information. "Better" was already implicit from the previous post (enabling residents to get to destinations without a car); and the greater ease of such living in Europe, in more locations, is already undisputed. No one contested that point except to note that there still exist car-necessary rural areas in both places, which is exactly how they would have replied if I had done as you suggested. No loss of conversational efficiency.
>There's another point about how your comment was flamebaity: it steered the thread in a more generic direction.
I could maybe understand that in the absence of my next sentence, which was:
>>Bottom line, car culture is not some fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job, as the original comment was suggesting.
That was specifically aimed at preventing the discussion from broadening to the generalities of "Europe vs the US", by reminding readers of the original issue in dispute (necessity of car culture and accessibility of typical destinations) and asking that any discussion of European planning be mentioned with an eye for whether it speaks to that.
>id=21456176 was a predictable response to the provocation, and you reacted by taking a swipe at the poster ("I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger").
Only in the sense that you "took a swipe at me" by calling my comments flamebait. The comment you linked was unprovoked and itself flamebait in how it elevated an accident of wording to an opportunity to humorously ridicule someone with a pithy remark (rightly called a zinger). And you don't seem to have a problem with that, or the commenter's refusal to make a good-faith effort to read context.
Just as you felt the need to call out aspects of my comment that hindered quality discussion, I felt a need to call out aspects of that comment that did the same.
> Not many, because their urban planning is better.
I don't disagree, but I think it's easy to overstate how "planned" the differences between the population distribution in Europe and the United States are -- and I honestly think it can be easy for Europeans to underestimate how dramatic the population density difference is. The EU has over 50% more people in under half the square kilometers, giving Europe a density of ~118 people/km^2 and the US a density of 33.6/km^2 -- and there's almost certainly a wider variance in density over here.
Doing the numbers just now, over three-quarters of the US population lives in states that are less dense than Europe, and over a third lives in states half as dense or less. Car culture is not a "fundamental invariant of reality for getting a job," but for a lot of America, not having a car is simply not a realistic option.
Probably a lot more in Europe. Density there is so much higher that you really can't compare their rural areas to those of the U.S. In Germany you can live on a farm and commute by train to work in a city.
Yes, I should have used a more general term, like "land use planning"; I'm glad that gave you the opportunity for the zinger.
In any case, (literal) urban planning is definitely relevant to determining how many places someone can affordably live without owning a car, and lead to less people being in the kind of boxed-in situation where their best option is to live far out and car-dependent while having to drive far for necessities.
It wasn't a "zinger," I just had no idea what you meant.
That said, one important aspect that even US journalists sometimes don't get is that most of the people who live in rural areas are doing it by preference. It's not because of urban sprawl or limited housing options. Most of us just like having lots of space and keeping our neighbors at arms length.
>It wasn't a "zinger," I just had no idea what you meant.
That's why you read the rest of the comment -- for context that can disambiguate it.
>That said, one important aspect that even US journalists sometimes don't get is that most of the people who live in rural areas are doing it by preference. It's not because of urban sprawl or limited housing options. Most of us just like having lots of space and keeping our neighbors at arms length.
Of course, but I doubt it can account for the fully difference. In the later 20th century, there was a vast movement out to the suburbs, and I doubt it was from a spontaneous desire for more space.
People in rural areas used horses, then horse and carriages, and now cars. If we didn’t use a faster mode of transportation we’d be stuck where we were born.
It’s not feasible to connect every single small town.
This is missing from this. There aren't many small towns anymore. Those have been decimated. It's now random strip malls in random places. There is no reason that people should need a car to do everything in life, and that's not how things used to be, but that's how things are now.
In fairness to individuals, the federal government drove this with subsidizes for highway expansion and making it hard to get loans on denser building types (even something like an apartment over a store was hard to build).
The federal government basically forced this shitty sprawl on all of us and played a major role in destroying small-town America.
You seem to be confusing small towns for suburban sprawl.
Small towns don't have the problems you list: build a massive McMansion on the edge of town you are still walking distance to the other edge of the town. The whole value of your house will be more than a tiny house in San Francisco despite having 10x the floor area and 100x the land.
Hiways have been good for rural areas overall, because the few people who live there can get the things they need quicker. (when the trains existed before they didn't come often enough to be useful). In the suburbs the hiways killed the possibility of useful trains, but in rural areas that possibility didn't exist anyway. (if the hiways were worth the cost is a different question)
Actually OP is more right than even he knows, because the small towns themselves should never have been built but for massive federal government land subsidies for railroads in the 19th century - huge sections of which were never sustainable even when built, let alone a century later.
Interesting argument, but I'm not sure if it is correct. In the 19th century farms didn't have tractors so they had to be much smaller. Thus there were more farmers, and so more towns were needed to support the farms. The railroad helped things along, but many of them were built without federal land subsidies. The farther east you go the more likely the railroads were built without federal subsidies.
Someone in a different forum just pointed out to me that the federal subsidies for railroads were not massive in the 1860s. Today that land is worth a lot and so the subsidies seem massive, but back then the federal government had a lot of land that was essentially worthless - except for a few recluses nobody wanted it because you had to live a solitary life. By giving it to the railroad they were able to build a railroad that meant someone who moved to railroad land could get somewhere (IE back east to visit family for Christmas), and goods. The railroad made out great on this, but land that didn't have a railroad nearby wasn't nearly as valuable because you were stuck living there alone, with no opportunity to buy nice things to make your life better.
>vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability.
Much like people rally against sprawl, but move the burbs for their kids; or rally against global warming, but don't live minimalist lifestyles.
It is reasonable to optimize your life around the world as it is. And if you use the extra resources this world provides to move things in a direction you consider better, then it isn't even necessarily hypocritical.
One can look at it from another perspective -- when Walmart comes to town, typically they'll receive a tax break, which is an unfair advantage over a local grocery store. They'll also typically get a massive investment in terms of newly built infrastructure -- roads all around the lot, pipes, electricity, etc, compared to a local grocery store.
When you compare the revenue the WalMart (or any big box store) brings in compared to the amount of space it takes up (with a massive parking lot), it's typically WAY less than a small neighborhood grocery store built in the older traditional style. It's only because towns and cities have effectively subsidized these big-box stores that they've taken over. They're really a terrible deal for municipal governments in terms of economic benefits.
In many places (such as Texas), people don't consider space to be valuable because it's so plentiful -- which is true in one sense. But it's not just space we care about, it's infrastructure-supported space. Space that has roads to access it, water pipes, electricity, police and fire services, etc. will ALWAYS be scarce. These resources are expensive, and the more spread-out things are, the more money we're forced to spend on infrastructure.
This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
> This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
If people were ideologically consistent in their views, yes.
However, look at the reaction here on HN and elsewhere to where AOC opposed such a tax-break for Amazon's NY HQ, and blamed her for Amazon deciding to not build the 2nd HQ there.
We've asked you repeatedly not to use this site for political and ideological battle. Since that's all you're doing, I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Please don't create new accounts to break the site guidelines with, though.
It's not ok to use HN for regional flamewar here, or political flamewar. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and not post like this again, we'd be grateful.
Blue states filled with people who claim to be liberal generally support restrictive zoning and housing policies that make housing impossible for the poor and lower middle class to afford. Looking around the country it's generally "blue" areas that have the least affordable housing with very few exceptions.
Hypocrisy is pretty universal. Most people vote based on superficial affinity signaling, not any understanding of actual policies or their implications. The present political situation is what you get when people vote based on who they'd like to have a beer with, not whose ideas they support (or even understand).
Whataboutism is sometimes a good way to point out rank hypocrisy.
I didn't vote for Trump and won't, but I totally understand why he won. He won largely by taking traditionally Democratic counties in the Midwest who are fed up with having their jobs sent to totalitarian countries in one-sided trade deals for the benefit of huge corporations. He also won because people look at the coastal "blue" cities and see unaffordable enclaves of the super-rich, not some kind of egalitarian paradise.
They also hear it in the rhetoric. The worst example was Hillary's "deplorables" comment. Yes I know that she meant Nazis, but a ton of people heard "poor and working class." I also must point out that while the Nazi types are noisy there are not really that many of them. Trump could not have won on their support, but he did win with the support of a ton of disenfranchised poor and working class voters.
Note that many of these people hate conventional Republicans as much as they hate Democrats. Trump was viewed as the outsider "fuck you" candidate, basically as a walking Molotov cocktail to toss into DC. "I hope he does as much damage as possible" is one quote I heard from a friend who lives in Ohio. I also read a lot of comments framing the election as Trump vs. Bush/Clinton, seeing Bush and Clinton as interchangeable "establishment" names.
BTW I take whatever opportunity I can to call out NIMBYism. My favorite quip: Texas is more liberal than California because in Texas a poor person can afford a home.
In Lafayette (LA), there was a gas station right off I-10 that put up a huge sign after she said that that said “The Deplorables”. That’s when I knew she was in deep shit. That and her “I believe in Science!” line at the DNC and Trump’s “I’ll make every dream you ever dreamed come true” ads. Although even I laughed at the online ones about Hillary and the emails with Pac-Man
A poor person can't afford a home in either Texas or California. Not unless you cherry pick living in the middle of nowhere, in which case both states are perfectly affordable.
And if you get sick or injured in Texas, well, I hope you have good health insurance from your job.
Maybe not outright poor, but compare home prices vs. median income in most of Dallas (excluding the most expensive neighborhoods) vs almost anywhere in LA or SF.
Ninja edit since I can't reply: no, they are not even comparable:
Just wow. Try finding that anywhere in SF, LA, OC, or SD. I see a lot of decent homes under $200k. I don't mean trailers.
My point is about optics as much as reality. A lot of people look at San Francisco to see what liberalism is going to do since that city has a reputation (right or wrong) as being a kind of capital city for the Democratic left. When they look they see a city with massive wealth divides where nobody but the rich can afford a reasonable home and there are drug addicts on every street corner. They think "wow, so this is the future that liberalism is going to give us."
I'm not sure this is totally wrong either. I wouldn't want the country run by the head-up-the-arse crowd that runs San Francisco any more than I want it run by the current bunch of clowns occupying the executive branch.
If you think Austin or Dallas isn't going to go through that same reality then you would be ignorant of how things are playing out.
I live in Texas. Dallas and Austin are no different and home prices are already soaring off the backs of tech companies moving down here and the local government being unable to build infrastructure or support a growing population. This has nothing to do with 'liberalism' and everything to do with cities in America built on top of bad city design, terrible infrastructure, gentrification and unsustainable growth.
American city designers love the von Neumann bottleneck! They see two problems. Jobs and homes. They solve them independently and then connect them with a central bus. The end result is that everyone has to cross the central bus to get from one to the other.
> Sure, and yet somehow they are consistently voting in people who want to dismantle both.
I think they vote Republican mostly because of social wedge issues (and to a lesser extent, the appeal of tax cuts and associated propaganda).
I come from a farm state. They used to elect a lot of Democrats to federal office, until relatively recently. Remember Tom Daschle? I'm personally convinced that a party that's credibly socially conservative but fiscally liberal would clean up in those states.
> I doubt you can name a single Republican politician who has run and been elected on this platform.
A whole lot of Republican politicians since around 2000 (including George W. Bush) have run for and been elected to federal office on an overt platform of dismantling both the revenue and benefit payment sides of Social Security.
Sure, the soundbite has been “saving social security”, but the concrete policy of dismantling that lies behind the soundbite hasn't been secret, it's been explicit and public, widely covered, and defended by candidates on debates, etc. The people voting for them either support it, don't think it's an important issue, or aren't paying any attention. They might be duped on what they'll get out of it, but the substance of the policy hasn't been concealed.
RE: Medicare Part D, that's a pretty controversial topic. In the political air of the time, passing something like that was an absolute necessity. Bush/Republicans got it passed in a way that (a) involved big benefits for big pharma (e.g., no ability of government to negotiate drug prices) and (b) failing to pay for it in budget, thus hugely increasing deficits and national debt.
George W Bush pushed through Medicare Part D, which was essentially an entirely new social program, fist proposed by Bill Clinton.
You're right that they do want to undermine these programs (they certainly talk about it), but they've proven consistently happy to toss aside their beliefs and values to win elections.
These are both mainstream politicians. Perry was a governor of Texas, a plausible Presidential candidate, and is now DoE Secretary. Gingrich was and is quite active politically.
You're arguing in bad faith, and I will not engage any more.
This is a classic example of actions vs words. I don't care what Republicans campaign on, I care what they do once they are elected, and they have gone after these programs more than once.
You are assuming my political leanings. I'm more conservative than you think.
I'm only stating what I observe in regards to states like Kentucky and Mississippi. The people continue voting in representatives that say one thing, then work on doing the opposite.
> Not OP. It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery!
They're not "willfully choosing to suffer." They're actually starting co-ops but choosing not to call them by that word. The OP just decided to be needlessly judgemental over that, and lead us down into this stupid, prejudiced subthread.
> It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery!
So, you're going to speculatively stereotype an entire group of people and condemn them based on your own hunch as to their politics and station in life.
While you're certainly entitled to an opinion, nothing about your entitlement precludes that opinion being a bigoted one.
What a bigoted existence.
> Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets.
Ah yes, the classically conservative Illinois which shares so much in common with the Deep South.
Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets.
There’s nothing bigoted about it. Every one has an opinion, call it what you want. I don’t feel superior compared to them.
> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them.
You might want to talk to some farmers in these small towns, because co-ops aren't what they used to be and farmers often don't have a kind word anymore for the local co-op.
As the food economy consolidates around large producers and the small farms that built the co-ops are going broke, co-ops are complicit in switching their support to the corporate producers and not sticking up for the little guys who built them, sometimes actively kicking them out to make room for larger contracts with the bigger producers.
Historically, co-ops were ran by and populated by workers who were ex-farmers or who had other close ties to farming. Nowadays they're managed by suits, and the workers have no ties to agriculture and could care less about inefficient practices burning through struggling farmers' capital. Ask a farmer who is working 18-hour days and can barely pay his bills how he feels about his local co-op showing up with 3 trucks to spread fertilizer and 2 of the trucks sit with engines idling for hours while the guys inside play slither.io.
Anyway the ignorant sweeping dismissals towards white* rural America I see so often from urban bugmen really disturb me. You think you have your finger on the pulse of "the country" because you have a vacation home there you visit once a year or you have some distant family members that live there (which you apparently secretly disdain?). Your brain is so infected with ideology rooted in urban leisure-time that you project that onto people who don't even have a grocery store and think it's perfectly logical they'd continue driving hours out of the way for supplies rather than patronize something with a "cursed word" in the name. You're living in la-la land if you think the majority of these people have the time to mentally masturbate to politics to your extent, much less burn time and money for some kind of political statement.
* Because you never ever see this kind of callousness directed towards poor minority communities, only whites deserve to suffer.
I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn’t get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow.
The county has something like 12,000 residents. It’s about the same population as a 2-3 mile radius is the suburb I live in.
To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op.
Edit: Removing the last 2 sentences of the last paragraph as it’s against the guidelines for flamebait topics. Reading between the lines of the original article I can only assume “speak the the language” is referring to politics.
> “It’s ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They’re O.K. with ‘community store.’ They’re the same thing, but you’ve got to speak the language.”