Hacker News Reader

Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

I think this article is city-centric. I am in a rural area in the US and I have only had a smart phone for 2 years and have never installed any apps beyond Mumla that I use for my own self hosted uMurmur server. I have never browsed the web from the phone. My life today is just as it was in the 1970's in that regard. All the businesses here have printed coupons. There are local printed newspapers. I have zero dependency on any "smart" features of phones unless one considers texting to be a smart feature given that was not a thing in the 70's. I do not expect any of that to change. The people here like keeping things simple. With exception of Amazon to get things small shops here do not carry I could even kill my internet connection and life would go on just fine. I would probably even get healthier. All the local businesses know me by name so I guess that makes up for a lack of cookie tracking.

View on HN

> I think this article is city-centric.

It's an article about the situation in the UK. If your "rural area" is in the US, it is not surprising that it's a bit different than anything in the article.

That makes sense. I think the US tries to mimic big city behavior in the EU so it's probably just a matter of time for big cities in the US to have the same problems. Maybe that means I have a few more decades for any of that to find it's way to me. Curious how prevalent this behavior is in the rural parts of the UK.

I realize this might not be a kosher comment for HN, and i aphid for that. But you seem to have imagined some inherent divide between the mechanics of urban and rural (and apparently foreign and domestic) lives or at least governance. With this imagined division, you are free to ascribe whatever outcome that affects cities to whatever cause, since you live in a different state of existence.

I'm not saying that as an insult, but rather because I don't think there's an inherent difference, I just think rural communities are harder for companies to monetize, for multiple reasons - think density and average income.

But like Amazon, they will get there, and unlike cities, rural communities have less ability to resist and less ability to support a diversity of options. Think about the takeover of Walmart and Dollar General/Tree.

I don't think there's anything special inherent to your rural community that protects you from all this "progress". You're just living through the time before it catches up to your community. And i bet if you think about the effects of the arrival of changes like Walmart's rural expansion, you might find that they upset rural life as well, reducing wages, extracting money from the local economy instead of allowing it to continue to circulate locally, and then investing driving distances, and the associated costs in fuel and time among others.

My guess is that you will go from blaming cities for their problems to blaming cities for your communities problems once they reach you.

But maybe if you reevaluate your perspective, you could help your community prepare to resist those changes while you still have time.

All of this could come to pass. Should that be the case I can always move to a smaller community or to a very remote location. I've always wanted to build an underground home or build a cave home to reduce my carbon emissions for really real. That might be the time.

In the US large companies in rural areas also often use apps in the same way as they do in the city (at least they did the last time I visited) and at least all the people I know in rural areas have had smartphones for a long time and use apps a lot (though maybe the fact that the area I know well is near a major university has made it a bit techier). The smaller local stores don't use apps so even in Chicago most places I actually went to didn't. I just went through my phone and the only app like that I have is for Taco Bell

People here do have smart phones and I'm sure some have apps installed. What I am saying is none of that is required today. Nobody here is penalized for not installing some app.

Unless it's McDonalds. Then you pay more for not having the app.

I would have to pay more regardless. The closest McDonalds is a 2 hour drive each way and going up steep mountains on the way back. The burgers at the local restaurant are much better and healthier ... well ... as healthy as a burger gets.

Practically every store now significantly subsidizes their products through their apps. Especially all the fast food chains. But even my local rural gas station does. Need that juicy, juicy data and those notifications.

I had never heard of Mumla and just looked it up -- looks like it needs some help. [1]

Curious, why do you use it?

[1] https://github.com/quite/mumla

Amazing audio quality. Text chat. No censorious behavior. The server is ultra light weight in terms of memory and CPU.

Don't worry... The 21st century should reach you too, eventually.

No worries. This troglodyte will bury his head in the sand. There will be a documentary about us and even the Amish will be shaking their heads. People in the 25th century will look back in envy after the machines take over and they had to reset civilization with EMP's back to agrarian or hunter gatherers. All of that pales in comparison to what happens from the years 201 BG to 108 BG during the Butlerian Jihad.

I live in very rural America. The only thing within 25 miles is a gas station. If I didn't have the gas station's app I would pay a lot more for a lot of the items I buy as they are discounted/on offer/free only on the app.

Well, not so much city-centric as it is population-centric. Cities are population centers, so there is correlation.

The scale you are thinking in is comparable to a small web forum being sustainably moderated by the owner of the site, while the majority of the world exists in a place like reddit that has more moderator users than even large web forums have in total. Reddit would not be sustainable if they had to pay a moderation staff, and similarly rural living cannot be scaled up to support cities without becoming city-like.

So assuming you accept all that, why even read this article or post a reply in the discussion?

I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see why you find this topic interesting? It's like replying to a thread about how life in Afghanistan is really difficult, and you're saying "I think this article is not about America because of all the American things I experience."

I'm not trying to gatekeep here, I'm just saying I don't see why you find this topic interesting?

My ulterior motive and secret agenda is to let people know they can escape that nonsense. Many rural areas are getting faster internet but are much more chill. There are pros and cons people can research themselves. For me most of the cons are pros.

If I can save even one person per year from the social, government and store apps that have massive teams of marketing psychological warfare experts manipulating them then I have done my hero's doodie.

I for one very much appreciated your response. I am pleasantly surprised to hear life like that still exists in the US

I have never had any of the apps people are talking about on my cellphone since I moved to Louisiana. I just rarely eat fast food anymore, once I realized that I was paying nearly double for my app-free lifestyle. I didn't notice because of inflation at first.

The nearest fast food place to my house is 25 minutes away. Same with Walmart, Kroger, my bank, and nearly everything except dollar general and gas stations.

No ubet, Lyft. There is the food delivery, but only "in town". So far I have never been able to convince anyone to deliver food to my house.

I could use digital ID/license but I don't.

"Reward cards" are just phone numbers, at least the two I use (Kroger and horror fright). Oh and 1 gas station rewards.

I grew up in Los Angeles and spent 33 years there.

I don't think it's a natural urban/rural division. I suspect that that division is more an artifice of capitalism. These new services want to grow, so they target places with the most potential customers. If the pitch to the municipality is that they can take the cost of coin collection and meter maintenance out of the budget entirely, and switch the enforcement from a human walking around, checking meters and wiring tickets to a car that drives past with license plate readers and a sass subscription, then it will come for anywhere with meters, and may eventually come for everywhere, because the original pitch for meters required justifying the expense with projected revenue. And now, if the expense of a few signs and a subscription are low enough, and the license readers are already on police cars, then that evaluation changes.

Of course, as with all of it, local jobs disappear from the local budget, and that money gets shipped off to Wall Street.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com