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Comment by CyanLite2 | Hacker News Reader

So much apparent bias in this article (from telecom vendors).

>Bowles says a fiber-to-the-home alternative would’ve cost $5.5 million, taken at least four months longer to construct, and covered just over 600 homes.

This is the problem. If it was a wealthy neighborhood, no one would blink an eye at spending $5.5 million of government funding to string fiber to 600+ homes. But if it's rural people, especially the black or brown ones, then it's a questionable decision, and they should just get shoddy CBRS-based Internet instead at a $2m cost instead.

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This is a horse crap take. People in rural areas get an insane amount of subsidization for infrastructure. And for what reason? Why does their incredibly energy intensive, land intensive lifestyle deserve to get subsidized?

This is yet another take that money deserves to get sucked out of cities and pushed to car dependent, unsustainable areas.

The city where I live had a good, commercially successful fiber roll out going. The ISP literally stopped the progress of the roll out in the city for a couple of years, where it was actually affordable and paying for itself, because they got a massive government "grant" to put up fiber in a rural area just to the south.

If people want to live in rural areas and then shit on people living in dense areas, where quality infrastructure is actually possible for a reasonable price, let them pay for it!

There might be a few things you need from rural areas like food, energy, water, a place to put your trash, raw materials and warehouse space. The people that live out there, work in those places. One might argue that urban areas are far more dependent on rural areas than the other way around.

The vast majority of agricultural workers are seasonal migrants.

Energy workers are typically seasonal too, at least for fossil fuel extraction. Refineries are typically close to the cities.

How much human labor is required to "produce" water? Seems like gravity does most of the work there.

No number of seasonal workers obviates the needs of the non-season workers.

And seasonal workers still live near the job for a whole season.

I figure the folks who pick my vegetables ought have internet, same as they ought get paid fair for the work.

Yeah, no, not around here. Most people in rural areas aren't working on farms, the landfills aren't that far out, almost all of the warehouses are closer in to where the majority of people live, the water comes from the city (there are multiple water treatment plants that draw from the river maybe a mile from downtown and send water out to suburbs/exurbs), etc etc etc.

You're talking about jobs and uses <10% of people in rural areas are actually doing. The majority of people are instead commuting 40+ minutes in to denser areas where there jobs are.

On the other hand, all I hear is propaganda about why cities are awful places and why exurbs/rural areas are so amazing. I'm tired of huge chunks of my money getting pulled away from where I live to subsidize people living these unhealthy, expensive lifestyles.

The larger point it true, but the really rural areas actually, to my surprise, had pretty good per-capita carbon tax emissions on the maps I saw. It's the suburbs that measured as by far the worst.

I guess there is just nowhere worth driving to all the time.

So don't get me wrong it's still massively subsidized, and we should stop doing that and make more parks instead (especially on the east), but it's not so polluting.

Some differences:

Suburbs use more than half their water on lawns; water that is treated and often pumped

Availability of renewable power is limited by neighborhood rules and acreage

Lawns are not so bad east, with it's plentiful water. The real scourge is the driving.

Suburbs are fundamentally more like cities than agricultural rural ares in terms of the interdependence / non-self-reliance of housing units. (No, your aspirational basement workbench that isn't used to satisfy basic needs count for much.) They offer a simulacrum of rural life to, originally, white flighters, that doesn't count for anything.

Giving the need for transport, and the great distance everything is from everything else, driving is unavoidable. What gets sacrificed then is the spontaneous interactions with other human beings and tiniest casual trips, as the big essential stuff saturates the road's and peoples time for traveling.

It's a terrible way of life.

> because they got a massive government "grant"

It means they had money to fiber the rural area AND the city. They just chose not to.

No, because they weren't going to hire and train an excessively large infrastructure crew when they'd have to fire most of them as soon as the subsidy ran out. They just shifted all of their people from the urban area to these exurbs to do the build out.

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