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Comment by jskrablin | Hacker News Reader

I don't want to live in a city. It's noisy, polluted, crowded and I really like my small countryside house with plenty of land around it. Lived in a city for 20 years, got fed up with it, despite all of the alleged 'advantages' it offers. I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

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No, you don’t. plain and simple. Tons of people living together share the costs. the few in the suburbs need to pay for their own infra. They’re not now. The cities are subsidizing the suburbs. that’s not fair.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI

Your sentiment can be summarized as "Fuck you, I got mine." Hardly convincing.

As an aside, the countryside can survive without cities but cities cannot survive without the countryside. Perhaps consider your dependences before brazenly brushing them off.

There's absolutely no way farmers can be more than subsistence farmers without selling to the masses in the city. Country farmers like to pretend they enjoy living off the land but outside of what they actually sell to make money, they would be losing same amenities as the city that they are not willing to give up.

no, my sentiment is you’re stealing from me and not even aware of it. you’re taking more than your portion.

Cities need farms (a few people and a few roads) they don’t need suburbs (people wasting resources, living large, and stealing tax resources from the cities to subsidize their lifestyle)

I've watched that video and seen it quoted a fair number of times, but I don't see how it jives with the reality of tax collection and spending - at least in my area of residence (ATL). I'd love some hard data on how the city is subsidizing the suburbs.

Instead, the recent trend has been that wealthy areas near downtown (e.g. Buckhead) have been trying to incorporate so that they're no longer subsidizing the rest of the city.

I think it's great to live in the country but you should not expect the government to bail you out. That's part of the deal. I myself have thought about buying country property, but as a responsible property owner, I bear the cost for adding infrastructure, and, in return, I get the sole enjoyment. That's the deal. If you want the infrastructure built for you then you need to accept public use of it. That means the government gets to decide how large that public is too.

You can have whatever local infrastructure yourself and your community can afford.

You can have whatever connection to the rest of your state your community and the state can afford and decide upon.

FWiW I've very much been there, I grew up in the most remote corner of a state 3x larger than Texas with a population (then) of under 1 million.

We graded our own airstrip, 150 km of road, maintained our own vehicles and aircraft, fed and managed our horses and camels, loaded and unloaded ships off the mud flats at low tide.

If you’re willing to split the cost with ten people rather than ten thousand, have at.

Most of the noise and pollution in cities comes from cars.

    > I guess I don't deserve decent infrastructure in your world view?

Do you pay enough taxes to demand it? Probably not.

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