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Comment by infosample | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to tell if you are making a counterargument to the parent or if you believe inner city residents[0] expect government to solve their problems, lack motivation, and don't work hard.

[0] Do the people you are referring to actually live in the inner city?

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A little of both, but I'm mostly commenting on the "The thing I've noticed is that it actually is harder to sympathize with the white, rural poor" sentiment. Namely to say that the reasons listed for not sympathizing with the rural poor can and often are applied the same to the urban poor. Going further, urban poor have a stigma of being assisted by the government. It's an odd situation because at the same time that there is resentment for the urban poor receiving more government programs, there's more popular will to help the urban poor. I imagine it's largely a visibility problem.

Sweeping generalizations are sweeping. And general. I don't believe all poor people, regardless of residence, lack motivation or are just looking for handouts. If pressed, I'd probably guess no more than 10% of the poor population would fairly deserve those insults. But, you could probably say only 10% of the global population might deserve those insults.

Have you ever lived in the "inner city"?

Yes. I've also lived in rural America. While there are significant populations of lazy dolists in both, the population of do-nothings is much higher in rural America. Rural America really does believe that everyone has forgotten about them, and blame all their problems on other people while they happily do meth or get drunk all day in their trailers.

The thing is...they're right. Because they live so far from any place that matters, no one who matters thinks about their situation, so it's much more difficult to leave rural America than it is to leave the inner city.

Well, Donald Trump matters. And he thought about them. And this is where we are.

Indeed. Looking at America from across the Atlantic, it seems that the American inner cities are making themselves heard by drug trade and a fairly large number of homicides, and rural America now made themselves heard through elections.

I kind of find the latter approach more constructive, in fact, even if it resulted in Trump.

It's a bit more complicated. Inner-city populations heavily vote Democrat, along with most densely populated areas. In fact, something like ~80% of Americans live in urban areas (which also includes dense suburbs), and therefore we should expect Democrats to win elections most of the time (even in spite of the fact that some dense sub-urban areas heavily lean Republican). However, this doesn't happen in practice because the electoral college system heavily reduces the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas, and also excludes votes coming from urban areas that lie within a larger, Republican-leaning state. For example, in the last election, probably most people in Philadelphia voted for Clinton, but their votes were nullified because the state over-all went to Trump.

So inner-city populations can't reliably make themselves heard on the national level via Presidential elections.

It doesn't help when voter suppression efforts make access to voting rights prohibitive to people in cities, especially the poor. 4 hour lines to vote (because there are fewer polling places) are painful even when your livelihood isn't on the line.

That's is something I don't understand: how come these cities cannot arrange enough polling stations? After all, if they're Democrat majority, it would be in interests of Democrat-elected local officials to arrange enough polling places.

(Another thing I have a hard time understanding is that Americans allow people to vote even if they have no ID. Over here, it's a basic requirement for democracy that only those vote who have the right to vote, and they each vote only once.)

I'd like to see some data for that 80% urban population statement. Unless the definition of "dense suburbs" is outlandish, I can't see the percentage getting that high. Most studies I've seen put the US at a fair rural to urban split that up until very recently has always favored the rural population. It is only in the past 10 years that we've approached 50% urban to rural.

I know this to be true in North Carolina, and various readings about elsewhere make me believe it to be the case for the greater US.

You're right - the 80% is exaggerated. I got it from https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm.... Their definition of "urban" is actually outlandish, in that it includes "urban clusters", which means towns that have > 2,500 and < 50,000 inhabitants. I assumed the 80% just included all the sprawling, dense suburbs, but I see the definition the census is using here is much looser.

> However, this doesn't happen in practice because the electoral college system heavily reduces the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas, and also excludes votes coming from urban areas that lie within a larger, Republican-leaning state.

The Electoral College doesn't 'reduce the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas'; it allocates votes to states in roughly proportion to population.

Voting by states doesn't just 'exclude votes coming from urban areas that lie within a larger, Republican-leaning state,' but also excludes votes from conservatives living in Democratic states, e.g. California.

> probably most people in Philadelphia voted for Clinton, but their votes were nullified because the state over-all went to Trump.

Their votes weren't nullified any more than the votes of those against Brexit were nullified by those who voted for: it's in the nature of a vote that someone will lose (not be nullified).

I didn't vote for President Trump, but I am glad that we are a federal republic with an Electoral College, not a direct democracy or anything like it. I wish we had more federalism, not less, to include state legislatures appointing senators and electors, and the elimination of the popular vote for president altogether.

> The Electoral College doesn't 'reduce the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas'; it allocates votes to states in roughly proportion to population.

Um, that depends on what you mean by "roughly proportional":

+ Each state, no matter how low the population, gets a minimum of three votes in the Electoral College (one per House member and senator).

+ House representation increases by population, but Senate representation is capped at two, no matter how large the population.

+ As a result: "Each vote cast in Wyoming is worth 3.6 as much as the same vote cast in California. How can that be, you might ask? It’s easy to see, when you do the math. Although Wyoming had a population in the last census of only 563,767, it gets 3 votes in the Electoral College based on its two Senators and one Congressman. California has 55 electoral votes. That sounds like a lot more, but it isn’t when you consider the size of the state. The population of California in the last census was 37,254,503, and that means that the electoral votes per capita in California are a lot less. To put it another way, the three electors in Wyoming represent an average of 187,923 residents each. The 55 electors in California represent an average of 677,355 each, and that’s a disparity of 3.6 to 1." [0].

[0] E.g., http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-petrocelli/its-time-to...

> The Electoral College doesn't 'reduce the weight of votes coming from inner-cities and urban areas'; it allocates votes to states in roughly proportion to population.

It does reduce the weight of votes coming from inner cities, because it does not allocate votes proportionally all the time. The disparity occurs most obviously between the high populated states like New York, California, and Texas, compared with very low-population states like Montana or Wyoming. I live in New York, so my individual vote is worth less than someone living in Wyoming or Montana.

Of course I know it's complicated; I was making a simplification to express a point. The violence in cities wouldn't make me want to give the violent more voice in making decisions, rather to the contrary.

And the votes of those who are second-past-the-post are not "nullified"; they just didn't win. We have a different system (d'Hondt) and it has its drawbacks as well.

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