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Comment by nugi | Hacker News Reader

The world continues to focus on cities, while the rest of the people are left behind. I notice a clear metropolitan bias on HN, often incredulous that 1st world citizens are still living in a unimproved state. Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing. Please keep in your minds and hearts that there are millions people outside the expected social systems generally assumed available to city and suburb dwellers.

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For those not in poverty what you describe is -- indirectly -- a feature not a bug

Schools are disappearing because there is no tax base to support them, and the remaining residents tend to favor an austere government. There's also a degree of distrust of governmental organizations. There are a lot of small towns where, if the state government came in and said "We're going to build you a school for free and you won't have to pay for anything" there would be a lot of belly-aching about how the bus traffic would increase wear-and-tear on roads, causing more roadwork, raising taxes.

My father lives in rural Wisconsin. Every political season, there's a wave of people running for office trying to reduce the county's tax burden from the 2nd smallest to the 1st smallest in the state, by basically completely gutting what already meager community amenities are provided. Each year they get closer to sweeping the county elections.

The little town in Texas that voted to put libertarians in charge is a decent cautionary tale. https://www.texasobserver.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-frees...

After reading the article I'd say that the problems were caused primarily by personal conflicts. Any problems with libertarian philosophy did not have a chance to surface because they were completely swamped by the dysfunction of town leaders.

They tried to have their cake and eat it too. I think that played no small part.

They incorporated as a town to save their way of life as an unincorporated community then got greedy and tried to to town things without a town budget.

A weird tangent - this may be the mother of all libertarian - libertarian conflicts - Nick Denton versus Peter Thiel. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-t...

I'm just going to point out regarding schools: if you let the state come build it for you, you're probably going to get a big, deadly dumpster fire of a school. It'll be a regional consolidated school so they can put a huge educational campus all in one place. It'll be far from any town because that's where the land is cheap. Everyone will have to choose between driving their kids to school or putting them on hour-long bus rides. And it'll abut a road where the 85th percentile speed is in excess of 50mph, which is not the smartest place for a hive of people who are immature and inadequately familiar with their own mortality. And some of them will probably be driving to it, too.

Then 25 years from now, those kids will find the asterisk from the state where they find themselves liable for all the maintenance on the huge complex they couldn't afford in the first place when the ceiling is leaking and there are cracks growing in the gymnasium's walls.

Hard to imagine why they don't have much affection for the programs provided by taxation. Admittedly, it's petty to take those grievances out on the local government, which probably provides the only public services they like. But when all you hear about is federal and state foolishness, and all you can affect is your own town, the misplaced anger isn't that surprising.

Thanks for the perspective. And because of things like this, rural folk don't want "our" help. They fall further behind, become more insular and hateful. Self-reinforcing cycle. Solving these problems is extremely important and will likely involve harsh tradeoffs. Unfortunately, in the US it feels like we need some dramatic examples before people will finally accept that tradeoffs are necessary.

Let me preface by: I don't mean to offend, but I think your perception is fundamentally wrong.

Rural folk don't want help from your "our" because their situation is different than yours. What works for major metropolitan areas doesn't work for small or rural schools. In an area where likely career paths involve working on or inheriting the family farm or ranch, more urban-centric curricula don't make sense.

It's not that rural people in the US are more insular, it's that they need to be more independent. For instance, when the nearest ambulance may be an hour away, you learn to deal with emergency medical issues yourself, or you or your loved one die. When that ambulance cannot get to your house when the husband is having a heart attack, the wife somehow manages to get her husband into a vehicle to meet the ambulance somewhere the ambulance can reach. When the nearest sheriff is likewise an hour away when you call for help, if you even have 911, the sheriff is likely going to assume you have a shotgun, tell you to get it out, load it, and use it, if necessary.

It's not that rural people in the US are insular or unaware of the rest of the US, it's that their situations are entirely different from what city dwellers encounter. Ambulances, police and fire response aren't just a few minutes away. It can be hours before emergency services arrive.

And likewise, getting to even your local school that graduates at a HS level can take an hour or more. Getting to a college or university likely will take even longer.

edit: grammar, spelling, minor bit of clarity.

Thank you, this is more in keeping with what I meant (though I might have done a clearer job saying it.) The place I have in mind is admittedly denser than what you describe, and is in many ways the worst of both worlds, but I think the lessons are similar. My home town is one of two 20,000 person towns in a 1000mi^2 county of 120k. Any time you have the combination of major repairs needed at schools and budget shortfalls at either the town schools or the county schools, the idea of consolidation gets floated around. My hometown is a town of 20k with about 950 in high school: enough for some variety, but not enough for all the really fancy stuff that the huge new schools have. On the other hand, the fastest speed limit along the school is 25mph, and it borders the walkable part of town (the rest of the town having been built after WW2.)

It seems like someone is always talking about bonds and matching funds from the state to build some monstrosity at the edge of town so it's only reachable by bus.

The problems of the school are many, but facility is not very high up on the list. The lack of smartboards, likewise. All the best teachers/professors I ever had used whiteboards or blackboards, and plenty of them held classes in buildings 3 times as old as my high school, with trashcans in the hallway to catch the rainwater. That's not to say there's not a place for new things in education, but thoughtful use of it doesn't require brand new everything.

I honestly believe that smartboards reduce the quality of education. The majority of my teachers who have used them didn't teach with rigor. I believe that the use of a board one has to write on forces them to know their material better.

Where are you talking about? Because as a rural Illinoisan, none of this rings true. Response times aren't anywhere like a major metropolitan city, but they are not nearly as abysmal as you're saying.

Also, assuming kids are going to be working on "the family farm or ranch" is ignoring the past 50 years agricultural consolidation in America. The economic landscape of the rural midwest has changed a lot in just my lifetime.

Since you mentioned having a gun, this is one of the huge differences between your average liberal elite and the average rural dweller.

People on the left simply don't understand the difference of living on your own. The independence is completely at a different level. You may very well need a gun to fend off some crazy banging at your door that won't go away. In the city, you have the assumption that the cops will swoop in when you call 911 (albeit a very mistaken assumption).

There is a lot of pundit handwaving going on right now saying that it's all just money that keeps gun laws from being passed, but people forget where the NRA gets its money. It's from individuals (and for the PAC, they don't even allow corporate donations).

There are lots of people that truly see any gun laws as government overreach from a bunch of politicians who are usually flanked on both sides with gun toting body guards.

Well, sorry for that tangent.

Does the possibility of needing to fend off some lunatic outweigh all the negatives of loose gun control? Rural residents will still be able to own a gun but maybe they should pass a psych test first and maybe that gun shouldn't be military grade.

The laws banning military grade weapons already exist -- the civilian AR-15 is not an military grade M-16, it is difficult to obtain an automatic weapon, destructive devices are banned-ish.

Fundamentally the problem is that gun ownership is a core American ideal (to enough electorally well placed people), so outright bans are infeasible and other restrictions cause a race by manufacturers to innovate around the restrictions.

The gun you want for reasonable home defense / deterrence in a rural setting is a shotgun, no? Very different to the assault rifle proxies typical used in mass shootings.

Assault rifles are automatic. We haven't been seeing automatic weapons in mass shootings.

You might mean "assault weapon," but that's a poorly-defined political term that can include cosmetic attachments and colors.

And plenty of people get AR-15s for home defense.

But people don't need AR-15s for home defense. Muskets would be fine for home defense, and coincidentally were what was standard at the time the 2nd amendment was passed. People don't need anything more than a musket/shotgun type weapon for home defense, and we need to have laws that make sure the process to get these prevents them from getting put in the hands of the wrong people.

The second amendment wasn't passed for home defense, nor should our basis of law be "what people unfamiliar with guns think others should use for home defense."

You are missing OP's point. A shotgun is a far better home defense weapon than an AR-15. So is a handgun. The AR-15 was very carefully designed for intermediate range combat.

It depends. The best gun is the one you're most familiar with shooting. If the one you'll spend the most time shooting is an AR-15, then it's that one.

It's also irrelevant. Home protection isn't the only reason you'd have a gun in a rural setting. They're also quite excellent for keeping groundhogs and coyotes off of one's property, and for recreational purposes.

This mindset of people who know nothing about guns (e.g. not knowing what an assault rifle is) claiming "You should only be allowed to have what I think you need" is the exact problem at the heart of this discussion.

> It depends. The best gun is the one you're most familiar with shooting. If the one you'll spend the most time shooting is an AR-15, then it's that one.

So what you are saying is that banning the AR-15 shouldn't be problematic for people, because they can simply become familiar with other options like shotguns, making them the best gun for them?

> It's also irrelevant. Home protection isn't the only reason you'd have a gun in a rural setting. They're also quite excellent for keeping groundhogs and coyotes off of one's property, and for recreational purposes.

> This mindset of people who know nothing about guns (e.g. not knowing what an assault rifle is) claiming "You should only be allowed to have what I think you need" is the exact problem at the heart of this discussion.

I think the exact problem is not "you should only be allowed to have what I think you need". Every regulation and law in existence is a variation of "you should only be allowed to do X to the extent I think you need". A speed limit is functionally equivalent to the statement "you should only be allowed to drive as fast as I think you need". They are all attempts at balancing utility (how fast you can drive) and costs for yourself and those around you (getting in a crash).

The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming the utility of weapons like the AR-15 for tasks like groundhog control and recreation outweighs the costs of AR-15s being used to take human lives.

> So what you are saying is that banning the AR-15 shouldn't be problematic for people, because they can simply become familiar with other options like shotguns, making them the best gun for them?

Why stop there? They can learn Jiu Jitsu and not need the shotgun! All things are possible when we are just speculating about how to take others' rights in theoretical scenarios we won't have to deal with ourselves.

The AR-15 is a fun gun to shoot, which is why it is popular.

> I think the exact problem is not "you should only be allowed to have what I think you need". Every regulation and law in existence is a variation of "you should only be allowed to do X to the extent I think you need". A speed limit is functionally equivalent to the statement "you should only be allowed to drive as fast as I think you need". They are all attempts at balancing utility (how fast you can drive) and costs for yourself and those around you (getting in a crash).

Speed limits are something we all understand culturally, and are not set at the federal level.

If huge swaths of the country had no cars or roads, they might clamor for federally lower speed limits every time there was a bus accident. "The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming that going 10 MPH faster outweighs the real loss of human lives." And that's basically what happens with guns any time there is a mass shooting.

> The actual problem is the mindset of people like yourself claiming the utility of weapons like the AR-15 for tasks like groundhog control and recreation outweighs the costs of AR-15s being used to take human lives.

The second amendment's purpose is for the gun's use for the purpose of taking lives. Nobody's arguing groundhog control is the only valid use case for having a weapon. Valid use cases include as a check against government tyranny (as protected by the second amendment), home defense, as well as the other reasons I mentioned.

And if you're going to complain about the AR-15, you have to state where you draw the line. Presumably a ban of AR-15s alone wouldn't accomplish your goals. What guns and gun features are you proposing banning?

As you say, the 2nd amendment is about taking lives (or more accurately anout maintaining a well regulated militia), so I could care less if a given gun is “fun” for people living out their tacticool fantasies. The 2nd doesn’t guarantee the right to have fun.

An AR-15 is a good all purpose weapon. Great for intruders but also excellent for shooting racoons or opossums that are killing your chickens. Or coyotes that are chasing your cows. They are also good for use in a well regulated militia, being necessary to maintain a free state and all.

You know what the difference is between an AR15 and your typical .30-06 hunting rifle? Beside the fact that the 30-06 will do more damage, it is usually brown wood instead of black. That is why people are scared of the AR15, it's black. You can throw a big clip on any semi-automatic hunting rifle and it will be just as deadly.

Plenty of semi-automatic hunting rifles have a small magazine with a plate that closes over it and won't accept a larger magazine without modifications.

You're right that "semi-automatic" deserves more focus than "black".

I do wonder how likely it is that the "typical" hunting rifle is actually bolt action though.

Bolt action are usually cheaper, but a semi-auto hunting rifle is exceedingly common as well.

Unlike a shotgun, the AR-15 is usable by frail people. You can be 90 pounds, be on blood thinners, have weak muscles and bones, and still practice with an AR-15. Essentially, a requirement to rely on a shotgun would be discriminatory, particularly toward women and the elderly.

Last April in Oklahoma, a home defense situation with an AR-15 made the news. There were 3 armed intruders that got killed with only 2 rifle shots. That is a great example of just how effective the AR-15 can be in home defense.

As a former rural resident, I want to add that laws designed for cities often don't make any damn sense for rural areas. I basically always carry a small pocket knife, and a while back I got hit with a hundred dollar fine (and they took the knife) for having it on the NY subway, and I was furious for days afterwords. In a small town that sort of thing just doesn't happen.

Yeah, that'd be quite a shock. The thing that strikes me first is how much less appealing it'd be to bring lunch to work if I couldn't cut anything for it at lunch time. And then there's the inconvenience of not having my knife at work, which would come up at least several times on even the slowest days.

> if you let the state come build it for you, you're probably going to get a big, deadly dumpster fire of a school

An interesting theory, but many of the top universities in the world are state universities: Berkeley, UCLA, U. of Michigan, U. of Washington, and (if Wikipedia is accurate and I understand it correctly) ETH-Zurich, University College London and University of Toronto are all top 25 global universities.[0] I'm omitting Imperial College London and LSE because I don't know their status.

[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

I believe he was talking about high school education or less. State Universities are a different beast.

Why shouldn't the world focus on cities? If you're choosing to live in an area where you're geographically separated from other people can you really complain that you're not receiving benefits from systems that are more optimal when people are clustered together?

>can you really complain that you're not receiving benefits from systems that are more optimal when people are clustered together

Yes. Society should always be doing more than what is cost optimal.

Cities are only being focused on right now naturally because that's where the rich people are. It wasn't that long ago that inner cities were quite poor and there were people making excuses like you for not investing in them.

It’s where a large majority of all people are.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...

While I agree that the more investment is probably required in rural areas, I think your assertion that the reason why rural areas are being under funded is incorrect.

Reality is that more people now live in urban areas[1]. Democracy being what it is, most funding goes to the majority - which are in the city. Add to that that setting up this infrastructure is often not cost effective for a private business (due to a lack of customers) and that most rural communities prefer less government intervention (ie less taxes), we have a situation where there is little impetus to invest in rural communities by private companies and governments (at least local) don't have funding to pay for service.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/acs-...

Note however that the census definition of "urban" is very broad. I live in a 7,000 population town and between myself and a few neighbors, we're on about 100 acres--not counting adjacent conservation land. We're urban according to the census.

>Democracy being what it is, most funding goes to the majority - which are in the city.

Democracy has to be more than two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.

It's true that the majority can just vote to line their own pockets and leave the minority in squalor, but that leaves a pretty shitty country leftover. Many of these rural areas look like third-world countries and that's not something us urbanites should be proud of.

Scholarship money disproportionately goes to lower income students, but that doesn't mean we should stop giving them scholarship money.

Well, we can all be proud that state governments are both handing out disproportionately large sums of money to rural areas and doing so in ways that crushes any notion of cost optimal. This is done, of course, through infrastructure building, in which rural mucipalities beggar themselves to get state matching for road construction they cant afford to spur on unproductive growth that will turn around to bite them with maintenance costs. Matching makes it sound much better than is the case, since in some cases the state's share of the bill exceeds 90%.

I think you need some citations before your claims can be taken seriously.

Examples that prove insightful to you are a personal matter. Unless you believe it important that spending be apportioned by lane-mile or road inventory (which I'd argue is rife with moral hazard), it is likely that your state effects net infrastructure transfers from urban to rural, as is the case in mine.

If it's the 90% figure you doubt, I encourage you to look into some road projects. In Virginia, we have a particularly problematic system where the local contribution is pegged at 2% (see page 52)(though it can vary by project.) You are welcome to read the VA urban (misnomer) maintenance code, though I encourage you to find the one applicable to you, so you can be familiar with the perverse incentives provided in your own area. [http://www.virginiadot.org/business/resources/local_assistan...]

Unfortunately, the children of people who choose to live outside of cities don't have a choice in where their parents live.

>choosing to live in an area where you're geographically separated from other people

people aren't created out of a vacuum and randomly choose a place to live. What if your 70 year old mother is simply too frail to move to a city? What if you desperately need the monthly paycheck and cannot just go months without pay looking for a job because you care for your child? What if you simply do not want your community to rot away because every abled bodied person runs off to the city?

People aren't just amoeba in a lab experiment.

Honest question: why should people pay for your lifestyle just because you choose it? I live in a small city, but if it stopped being capable of supporting itself and suburbs (somehow) were more sustainable, I would move to them. Sitting in a low per-capita situation is economically infeasible for many, so they should either live with what they have or adapt. I would love to sit around and read fiction for a living, but I can't survive in the lifestyle I enjoy, so I don't.

"too frail" to move doesn't make sense - not having enough money does make sense. Look for a job while you have your current one - it is far easier and more successful that way anyway. Country living with a decent lifestyle is for those that have figured out a way to afford it, not for anyone that feels like it.

There are options: just because it isn't what you dream of doing doesn't mean it isn't an option.

You seem to vastly overestimate the choices people have, especially those who live in rural areas where there are more people than jobs, and many people live paycheck to paycheck. You mention "not having enough money" -- yes, that's exactly it, and many (most?) of the people in that situation don't have a way out of it. You can't get a better paying job where you live if there isn't one, or at least isn't one you're qualified for. You can't keep your job at home and travel to a city to interview for a better job if you don't have the money for transportation, or can't get (or afford) the time off to interview.

Oh, I'm not saying there aren't traps. I strongly believe we should have some economic mechanism to help people relocate to where the jobs are - a major reason our country is in the current situation is due to people not moving like we thought they would. Part of that is being stuck, and we need to address that (more). But another part of that is the belief that the world should adapt to you. It's funny, because many people making fun of being entitled, are actually incredibly entitled in believing that jobs should come to them.

There was an interesting thread on reddit about coal towns in (I think) Virginia, and the mindset of people there and the situation they were in. It was stated that there was a large pool of money in the state available to people for retraining (coal to trucking or solar development, etc) and something like less than 25% of the money was even used.

A woman I know got a simple laser cutter and designed a site around doing craft projects with it. In under a year she has thousands of followers and is making thousands a month doing it. I mean, hell, just get you and your friends together and say, "ok, we need to get out of here, lets all live together as cheaply as possible, until we have enough money, then rent some place in a better location, and live there, pooling resources, until we all get better jobs."

There are options, now more than ever with the Internet existing and the mind numbing amount of resources it brings.

Why should the world focus on cities?

Those who are born and raised in rural areas can't just uproot their lives the moment they turn 18 and start to afford, or even enjoy city life.

Because the commute is closer? It's still at least as slow in many places, because of traffic problems generated by tighter clusters of people.

The idea that cities are the most optimal is an idea, not a proven fact. Your experience may support the idea, but mine certainly does not.

The point here is that there are more people living in cities than in rural areas, simply because that has been true for a few generations, and people don't tend to change lifestyles.

People who grow up with one lifestyle realize the advantages it provides, and grow up with a bias toward that lifestyle. That bias coupled with the population difference is the real reason the majority of people don't care about rural areas. Personally, I think we should fight that bias.

because it's more efficient? The services will help more people because of population density. I mean, the math is obvious. I'm not sure what the argument is. Nobody is saying city folk are more important. There are simply more of them.

>The services will help more people because of population density.

You're assuming a centralized distribution model and that the overhead of centralization is more than made up for with economics of scale.

edit: is that not the implied assumption?

Well I didn't downvote you if that's the implication :)

Sure, I suppose it is.. do you mean to suggest that the assumption is false?

Yet, tight population densities also have detrimental environmental effects, such as heat islands, higher levels of noxious gasses, modification or pollution of natural drainage, losses of open green spaces just to name a few.

Rural areas typically don't modify the local drainage (you're not likely connected to a sewer, you have a septic system). They don't become heat islands are there's relatively little pave or concreted. The noxious gasses aren't usually a problem due to lower traffic, usage and density, except in some mountain valleys where you get temperature inversions over winter that trap some of that.

The problems are technological/economical. Getting power is a pain in the ass, yet we've mostly solved that, likewise with traditional phone land-lines. Internet access is abysmal. I get better internet connectivity on my cell phone than my parents can get in their house because local providers won't run cable/fiber because it's too expensive for too few subscribers, but the federal government mandated access to both power & phone and we have those.

I've lived in cities - they typically failed to provide better services than lower density suburbs, despite having a bigger tax base and "efficiencies". There are many reasons for this, but cities do not become magically more efficient or well run with more people. Sadly, the opposite is usually true.

I think you've bought a bill of goods that a certain group of people are selling, without actually having lived it.

> I've lived in cities - they typically failed to provide better services than lower density suburbs

I think this is an almost uniquely American phenomenon. In most places in the world, the suburbs are where you grudgingly live when you can't afford housing in the city.

I live in a city as well. I thought we were comparing cities to rural areas, not suburbs? My belief would be that suburbs are not good for society - they're land inefficient and get more resources than they should because more affluent people live in them.

Anyway I was just offering a basic justification for why society would focus on improving lives in cities as opposed to rural areas.

I'd also say that wealthier people want to live in suburbs, because there they can have a whole house for themselves while also maintaining some closeness to the city center. Only poor people or not-yet-settled foreigners really live inside the city even though their costs might even be higher than paying off a house in the suburbs. And now if you're a service provider where would you focus your services? On the monoculture with money in the suburbs or on the poor and very differentiated city dwellers? The other way around the city centers are also better for startups because you haven't got the infrastructure to provide for a large, high-demand customer base yet, and prefer a niche. Multicultural hot pots are better sources of small niches with low requirements.

You are vastly overestimating the amount of control these people have over where they live.

So, what you're saying is that, apart from buying goods and services from rural areas, that the rest of the countryside should somehow assist, with tax money, the rural citizens?

Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates. Perhaps not you personally.

In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?

Not so. The state takes our taxes and runs the schools. The rural areas get little funding for their schools, even for the same size school (the same tax base approximately).

No, its city folks voting all the money to their schools. Its democracy, but its not pretty.

Schools are funded largely by local property taxes in most parts of the US, which is why rural areas have less funding for schools. Schools of equivalent sizes rural vs urban absolutely do not have the same property tax revenue.

Not sure where you live, but in the states I've lived, it's the county or municipality that uses property taxes and runs the K-12 schools. Public universities are are subsidized by the state, but those are available equally to all of the state's residents.

Iowa. They do it differently. The state took over decades ago.

In general across the country, less and less public school funding actually comes from local taxes. The state has gotten involved in most states in order to correct discrepancies in school funding between rich and poor districts (with California being one of the most involved states).

Some states still have notable funding issues between districts, though. This gives a pretty good description of the issue: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

I thought taxes for education stayed within the school district locally.

This is a myth. Rural areas get more tax money back than they pay out. Rural communities are already subsidized by cities, but their low tax base and inefficiency means they still can't provide the same level of services. That's not to mention that cities can provide services with less environmental impact.

> even for the same size school (the same tax base approximately) This is probably a bad assumption. Rural folks pay significantly lower per capita taxes, on average.

Here are a few relevant sources, but this information is all over the place: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/817088161906102273 http://www.startribune.com/metro-vs-outstate-which-counties-... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/opinion/sunday/why-blue-s...

>So, what you're saying is that, apart from buying goods and services from rural areas, that the rest of the countryside should somehow assist, with tax money, the rural citizens?

Yes.

>Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates.

They're stuck in a two-party system where one side looks down their nose at rural voters and their values and the other sides looks just down their nose at rural voters.

>In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?

The wording here makes it seem like what's happening in rural areas is just a consequence of nature but it's not, it's tied in with all sorts of policy decisions we've made over decades, making new policy decisions to fix that seems reasonable to me. Here's a really great article on the issue: https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and...

Comment banned in my imagination for violation of imaginary ban on the phrase "So you're saying..." and its variants, which are almost always the opening tag of a sentence that misrepresents something.

"Strange that you'd say that..."

They didn't.

EDIT: Deleted sarcasm. Also adding: I say all this even though I actually lean the same way in my suspicion that rural dwellers probably absorb proportionally more public spending in some categories, while voting against "big government" etc.

> Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing.

Literally all of those services are more efficient in cities. A km of fiber serves more household when population is dense. Ambulance (and any other vehicle) commute times are shorter when everyone's in the same place. A single school building can be within walking distance of more kids.

Its not a matter of city folk being entitled or holding their provincial counterparts in contempt. It is impossible for rural areas to enjoy the same standard of living as urbanities because literally every interaction and service has to pay extra to solve the last mile problem.

Do you know how much fiber, how many ambulances, how many school buildings it would take to make every rural area as desirable as the city?

I'm not sure how to sympathize with people in rural areas lacking services when they relentlessly vote for anti-government leadership by very large margins.

If they want the market to provide, they should move closer to the markets.

> ... ambulance times are in hours

Where? I live in an very remote part of Northern Minnesota. Even so, worst case ambulance time to most people in my area would be 15-20 mins.

I would argue that an incredibly small portion of the US population lives >1hr from an ambulance or first responder.

Here's a map of critical access hospitals, which are a pretty good proxy for rural emergency hospitals:

http://www.flexmonitoring.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/CAH...

It doesn't show larger hospitals, so it is hard to directly answer the question about access to emergency care, but it shows that there is quite wide geographic coverage. The map in this article shows that the gaps are just where you would expect, in the extraordinarily rural west:

https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/03/health/hospital-deserts/index...

The closest hospital from me is an hour away. 45 if you drive semi-fast. That time + whatever response time is. We had to call an ambulance for my father once and it was 20-30 minutes for them to arrive. It's not really that uncommon.

There’s a meaningful difference between “it was 20-30m for them to arrive” and the previous post’s “hours.” Almost an order of magnitude’s difference.

And that’s a medically meaningful difference. 20m response time, 45m to the hospital, you’re still in the time window for critical therapies for heart attacks and strokes. Several hours response time, you’re not. I mean to say, I’m not nitpicking: the difference between your scenario and what the previous poster asserts is large and medically meaningful.

When I was growing up in the rural Midwest, about 30 minutes from the nearest small-town hospital, we waited nearly an hour and a half for an ambulance to arrive to help my sister with an asthma attack because my mom couldn't drive and keep her breathing at the same time.

Thirty minutes from a major city but ambulances take hours doesn't seem to make a ton of sense.

I can imagine scenarios where it might. Maybe that area is in a different service region (so they don't dispatch from the city) with a much lower ambulance density. If all the ambulances are busy and have long travel times, it's possible it could take more than an hour for one to free up for a new call.

If the ambulance is ran by the county and there is only one or two and you are 4th in line for pickup it could happen.

City ambulances don't service counties. If the county outside the city has less available ambulances but high demand then wait times go up.

Depends on what time of day you have your emergency and what is happening.

The town I grew up in is 45-60m to an ER during the day, 30m at night. It’s a volunteer squad, so typical response time is ~20m, longer during the weekday. If someone else has an emergency, they will likely need a mutual aid call, which adds 15-30m. If you need ALS, the ambulance may need to pull over en route when a county paramedic responds. If you are further out, the times increase rapidly. Many common emergencies like stroke are guaranteed fatal.

In the small city that I live in, first responder for a medical emergency will arrive in <7m. Transport to hospital is ~5-10m.

California on its own has a huge amount of disparity. I'm only familiar with the SF/Bay/LA/OC/SD bubbles, since that's where I've spent (and continue to spend) my entire life. I can't even name more than a few counties, and I can barely name any cities outside of those counties. The rest of California that isn't bordering any of these regions may as well be another country to me.

Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford's Hoover Institute has been the leading writer on this topic for years; this is his latest: https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-21st-centur...

If you want to see “Appalachia West”, drive north on I-5 until you get to Bakersfield, then take CA-99 from Bakersfield to Sacramento. Well, from the LA area, anyway. Or from SF go east on I-80 to Sac, then south on CA-99.

It’s a different world than the coastal cities. (Much like you said, but that’s the route, anyway)

Sacramento itself is a kind of borderland, despite being the capitol.

>Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing.

I can't speak for school funding, but are you actually suggesting ambulance response times were better in those areas in the past? Or broadband?

Even an 30min from one of the 10 biggest cities on the USA, broadband is still unavailable to a majority, ambulance times are in hours, and school funding is increasingly disappearing.

The first claim seems unlikely, unless that’s 30 minutes at the speed of sound. I’d need solid citations to bite. The second seems unlikely as well, and given how bad response times can be in disadvantaged parts of cities, I’d wonder if it’s an urban/rural divide, or the usual rich/poor divide.

The third point is absolutely true, and that’s what happens when people leave, and therefore aren’t paying property taxes in that area. A supermajority of Americans live in and around cities, so that’s no shock.

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/05/27/us/nearly-half-in-the-us-a...

More recent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_S...

80% of Americans live in cities, so is it really a shock that a majority of resources are focused on the majority of people?

I don't have a solid citation, apologies. But remember 4 of the top 10 cities are in the, landwise, mostly uninhabited Texas and Arizona. It's not a stretch to drive out of the city and lose access to broadband. I'm in a top 30 city and absolutely driving 30 minutes away takes broadband off the plate...depending on direction(south and west do, north and east dont).

That’s fair enough on the citation. I would point out that as you say, Texas and Arizona are heavily urbanized, and outside of that, very sparsely inhabited. TX having ~84% urban population, and AZ nearly 90%, that’s going to be hard to cover the other small percentage with broadband. Texas, despite being one of the “Big 8” ranks 32nd for average population density.

In other words rural TX and AZ are atypical.

>The first claim seems unlikely, unless that’s 30 minutes at the speed of sound.

It doesn't have to be a physical or technical limitation at all. It's a limitation of the cable monopolies not seeing profit in putting fiber or cable lines out there and there's no competition so if they don't, no one will.

As for everything else you've said... I would like to introduce you to the concept of the tyranny of the majority. If the richest country in the world says to its citizens "sorry your school isn't big enough to afford books, have fun in the job market" something is seriously fucked up.

Yes, yes it is a shock that rural populations are treated like shit. I grew up in it, and the fact that it's getting worse not better is still shocking every single day.

I live in Central Kansas. We have 6Mbps top speed available. ~15 minutes away, they have 40Mbps, with gigabit coming in. ~15 minutes the other direction, you have satellite, or...... satellite. Cell service is too poor to use it for general purpose internet, DSL doesn't go that far from town, and the Pixius tower (10Mbps) is just out of range. And there are people who live there too.

Derp. I should've actually read what I was replying to. We definitely aren't thirty minutes from a top 10 city... Just a small town to most of you city dwellers. :)

I'm in Canada, but I live rural/exurban in the greater Toronto/Hamilton area, less than 8km from town and less than 20km from two major cities and there's no broadband because it's not profitable to run DSL or cable to my road. Telcos/Cable companies just won't do it. The next road over has it, through some fluke.

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