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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

The US should stop subsidizing rural communities. It is bad for the environment and people that want to live out there should have to pay the real costs of serving them.

One possibility is to reduce the days mail is delivered to rural communities to cut costs.

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And city folk could pay the real cost of having their food grown and delivered to their doors and local stores. The whole issue works both directions but most people only tend to see their perspective. ;)

Another perspective is that everyone is paying for the real cost of having their food grown by massive agribusinesses through massive government handouts in the form of subsidies.

> city folk could pay the real cost of having their food grown and delivered to their doors and local stores.

But they do. That's the market price. That and the subsidies.

Most people living in the countryside rely on the same food distribution networks that serve city dwellers, so that equation doesn't check out.

Mail subsidy built this nation.

I invoke Chesterton's Fence. You haven't demonstrated an understanding of why package and parcel delivery works the way it does; so I reject your call to dismantle it, until you do demonstrate that.

Cities house half the worlds population but create 70% of the worlds carbon emissions. I'm not sure they are as green as you think.

I'm not sure you're comparing like-for-like. A large number of the people living outside cities are subsistence farmers in developing countries and have unsurprisingly low carbon footprints. There is significant lifestyle inflation as the rural populace move to cities.

There is significant lifestyle inflation as the rural populace move to cities.

Exactly.

While we’re on the topic of carbon emissions what’s the footprint of the post office? Driving around junk, the printing of which burns carbon, with combustion engines, most of which is thrown away immediately.

Don't put that on the Post Office, put that on (many) lazy Congress which allowed the post office to be taken advantage of this way, and the abusers.

How much of these cities' carbon emissions are caused by the manufacturing of products for people living in the countryside? Big factories tend to be in or near big cities where there is a workforce to support them.

As an example here in Germany, the city of Wolfsburg has the original Volkswagen plant. It's so big, it's literally called "car city" ("Autostadt"). They certainly don't make cars just for Wolfsburg, or just for city dwellers.

Rural communities used to have industry and manufacturing and were able to contribute to our nation as a whole.

And they shall rise again.

I hope so :)

When have factories ever sprung up without cities?

Historically never, since you need convenient access to a population of workers. Rural areas are too spread out.

In modern times car companies, in particular, have built factories in the middle of nowhere because land is cheap. Small cities then spring up around them to support a population of new workers.

As a side note, the car companies are pretty savvy doing it this way. They get to pay minimal amounts for empty, "worthless" land and force everyone else to pay increasing prices on the surrounding land which may be purchased, directly or indirectly, by the company.

I mean anywhere between the two coasts, yeah. Can you still call places like Detroit “cities” when they’ve been left to decay to destroy the generational wealth of the people who lived there?

http://cornersideyard.blogspot.com/2018/07/a-personal-segreg...

This is already the case in some very small communities, and there are sometimes mail delivery volunteers. The USPS was already profitable but has been undermined significantly: opening the private option for servicing USPS mail and requiring pensions to be paid up front for every employee.

Additionally rural communities are about 20% of the population, and many of these communities are around farmland, which of course is necessary to keep some of. It's much harder to live alone with just a small amount of farmers vs. even the smallest of communities. Should farmers commute to the farm just so the USPS has a slightly easier time?

Yeah because who needs rural America with all of their useless farms...

Ah yes, we should just force them into the dense city centers. That'll improve housing affordability for all those urban families.

It's not as simple as thinking in terms of those first order effects. Mailing subsidies reduce the cost of non-local alternatives for goods. It can often make it impossible for small businesses to exist in less urban environments and can lead to downward spirals where rural communities are self-exterminating because processes like this consistently siphon money out of the local economy.

Imagine if shipping of all consumer goods were made free. Amazon would be INCREDIBLY more dominant. And in fact, this is a large reason they started with books. The USPS has a special program built for a world 100 years ago called Media Mail which allows you to ship books for next to nothing. It made it impossible to run a bookstore profitably. Removing shipping subsidies to rural communities may very well create more of them and will definitely make them more resilient.

This isn't "the US" subsidizing rural communities, though. This is private enterprises effectively doing the same, for the sake of providing a flat rate shipping service. Although I too think that rural living is bad for the environment, this is not a particular case of the government subsidizing it.

if UPS/FedEx want to offer flat rate shipping to both densely and sparsely populated areas, it's on them to make it economic. if amazon wants to take advantage of their business model, I don't see anything unfair about it.

USPS is a government agency though. if they ship stuff to rural areas below cost, that is the US government subsidizing rural communities. with mail still being the lowest-common-denominator means of communication, there is a public good argument for burning money to deliver mail/packages affordably to people in these areas. I do agree they should feel at least some of the cost though, and I also feel there is something distasteful about amazon exploiting this cost structure.

I wonder what the cost difference would be if we reduced mail to 1x per week and got everyone broadband.

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