This post is getting a lot of reaction on Bluesky:
The context is that Semafor is asking pundits/press to post about their biggest miss of the year. (Side note: as Jay Rosen pointed out, it’s all about predictions, which is part of the problem, since these people think of their roles as savvy predictors, like bettors at a dog track, rather than knowledgable explainers.)
I’m not shocked but still disgusted to see that this person is the head of NBC News, which means she’s in charge of trying to inform her audience, and she certainly failed with this facile, stupid gloss that hides a real issue worth talking about.
I happen to be spending the holidays in a town where people drive two hours to go to the store, but the reasons for doing that are not that they’re idiots who can’t do the math on spending $50 for gas to save $2 on bread. The reasons are: the grocery stores here have a poor selection of overpriced goods, stores here don’t have what residents need (home improvement is a big example), and specialty medical care is only available in the “big town”.
Since about the early-to-mid 1970s, the death spiral of rural towns has been fed by more reliable cars and big box retail in bigger towns. People get in the habit of driving to the larger town to buy some goods they can’t get in the small towns, but while they’re there, they stock up on other things. This means stores in town lose business, then go out of business, leading to more travel to the “big city”. This cycle continues until only the basics are available in the small town, if residents are lucky.
Often, the grocery stores are kept in business by the poor, who can’t afford to drive two hours to buy groceries, using WIC and SNAP — some stores in really poor areas will post rules about days when the eagle shits because those are their busiest days of the month. (I’ve posted before about the importance of the eagle shitting for rural areas.)
This ties into the politics of rural towns being highly red and fed by resentment at real loss. The Republican right-wing noise machine is very good at pushing out propaganda that gives this population a target for their anger over the loss they feel, especially the loss of the young, smart, motivated kids who move to the big city. But it’s a rare (perhaps nonexistent) piece of reporting that mentions the role of propaganda in the opinions of the old, retired white guys in the diners they visit. I’d love to see a story that correlates the constant noise about big cities being hellholes with the statistics of rural kids who seek out an education and settle in those cities. Instead, we get nonsense like people traveling 100 miles for $2 cheaper bread.
Penn
I saw an article recently positing that the death of local groceries is due to the government no longer enforcing that distributors offer the same prices to everyone, in the 80s. This means big chain stores get better deals and small stores go under. It correlated this to food deserts.
Baud
@Penn: Chicago School of Economics eviscerated antitrust laws.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Penn: This is the piece:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/food-deserts-robinson-patman/680765/
Steve LaBonne
Republicans are going to take away their health care (via destroying Medicaid) thus killing off the remaining rural hospitals, and cut their disability payments and food stamps to ribbons. I hope they enjoy what they voted for. The rest of us should ignore them and do whatever we can to help people in our own communities. Ignore globally (it’s all fucked), act locally.
Baud
I don’t think the media has any interest in reporting on how rural residents are victims of their (un)dying loyalty to the conservative mindset.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
We continue to pay as a country for the crap that’s come out of the Chicago School of Economics.
zhena gogolia
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Understatement of the year!
TBone
We have a large, discount grocery store in a nearby town run by cretins. From 2020, when I stopped even looking at the outside of the store while driving past the slim hordes of country brethren protesting and counter-protesting.
suzanne
The way the healthcare industry is moving….. many towns will lose most of their medical care, including primary care. Rural areas are older, on average, and those people are likely to have to relocate if they want medical care at all. There’s a growing shortage of healthcare workers, including home health aides.
Baud
@TBone:
Good man.
Peke Daddy
I will take a hit, too. I am working to not become a mirror of the “Don’t care if I take a hit if the Other takes a bigger one” attitude MAGA’s take. Less gratuitous suffering is better than more, on the whole.
TBone
@Baud: also, there were, what for us yokels is, big crowds of white BLM protesters lining the main drag and especially in front of the town police station/district court. It made me so proud to see that I’m not as alone here as I sometimes feel. Being on probation for punching a cop from that very station, I couldn’t participate. I really was simply trying to get out of an ambulance I didn’t need, and had to resort to throwing hands to no avail.
Ksmiami
Bloomberg had a recent piece about the true cost of Walmart et Al in rural America
Steve LaBonne
@Peke Daddy: I, along with my church and other like-minded churches, can help people in Northeast Ohio who need food, transportation to medical appointments, and the like. I cannot do a goddamn thing to help the good people of Mifflinburg escape the consequences of the Federal policies they voted for.
khead
Welcome to southern WV! The Heart of the Nation’s Coal Bin!
karensky
@Baud: 100%
Sloegin
Earlier in ’24 I came across Semafor, and thought ‘oh this is an interesting site that doesn’t seem to be loaded with a bunch of idiot hot takes’. It took a month or so to rid me of that mistaken notion. The last couple of months in particular the site has been posting more clangers than bangers.
Glory b
I will note for the next time the media travels to diners there, Youngstown OH has a large black population (almost 50% I believe).
Why can’t they ever find a black person to talk to?
Scout211
This is where I live now. We retired and made our move to a rural area of NorCal. The difference for us is that we both had full-time jobs and now retirement funds as well as social security. Most of the people living here in this county don’t have that advantage. The grocery prices and availability are a problem. But from where I sit, healthcare is the biggest problem for residents out here in the boonies. Most residents have to drive to cities in other counties to find healthcare providers, let alone specialty providers. We kept all of our providers from the next county “big cities” and have to drive an hour both ways. It’s getting harder since my husband can’t drive anymore but so far, we still like rural living.
That’s the other factor. The rural life is revered by the residents who live out here. It’s an identity that makes them feel superior to the city dwellers. I’ve heard many a disparaging comment about “ those people” who live in the cities. But we personally have been treated quite well by our neighbors, who all voted for Trump. Even Trump voters can be good neighbors.
But the point about the media having a narrative and then going on a rural safari to find that residents who seem to represent that narrative is valid. And at this point, kind of ridiculous. Apparently, they have no mirrors to help them figure out who pushed that narrative.
jonas
@suzanne: We live in a rural area and our oldest child has a number of medical and mobility issues that require a bevy of specialists to manage and just this month we’ve seen the departure of her PCP, neurologist, and orthopedist. Earlier her audiologist moved and no-one picked up the practice. The providers just leave and the medical group has no continuity of care plans or anything. And it seems like no-one in a fifty-mile radius is taking new patients. Grrr
ETA: an of course the insurance company’s directory of providers is worse than useless — I don’t think a single MD on it is up to date.
Baud
@Glory b:
Black people need to learn how to tell reporters that Dems abandoned the working class. Then they’ll be quoted up and down the NYT.
West of the Rockies
I don’t mean this in a snarky way, but maybe you could write that proposed article, Mistermix? I’d read it.
Kay
@jonas:
They try to keep them. Our medical group offered payment of student loans to get a psychiatrist. No takers. My next door neighbor is a family practice doc and she arrived in town and 3 months later stopped taking new patients – she was full, and that’s working 730 A to 730 P five days.
ArchTeryx
@Steve LaBonne: There’s a reason why the book Dying of Whiteness is so on point. These people will literally go to their deathbeds spouting the same propaganda. See: COVID wards and redneck idiots begging for the vaccine after they are near death from COVID. And then they die.
Sometimes human society has to advance one funeral at a time. That’s where I am with the country sparrows at this point. Let them all die for their whiteness.
TONYG
Yes, these people are idiots. But, putting politics aside (for a moment), you make a good point about “more reliable cars” hastening the demise of rural towns. I haven’t seen any reporting on this phenomenon (not that I’ve looked hard for it), but as an old geezer of 69 I can attest that automobiles are much more reliable than they were when I was a kid and a teenager. “Back in the day” (sixties and seventies) it was a common sight to see cars just stall out unexpectedly and it was kind of expected that men would help push each other’s cars to get them started again. Something improved in terms of engineering around the late seventies/early eighties and now it can be safely assumed that a two-hour car trip can be negotiated successfully. And that fact has accelerated the decline and demise of “Main Street” businesses in rural and even suburban towns.
rikyrah
Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) posted at 0:28 PM on Mon, Dec 30, 2024:
The cult trashes Vivek & Elon for days on H-1Bs. Then Trump sides with E&V and the cult goes silent.
The cult trashes Mike Johnson for weeks over the CR. Then Trump sides with Johnson and the cult goes silent.
I guess they just believe what Trump tells them to believe.
(https://x.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1873798275490591212?t=pVpkrC1mkCVMX7Ah9h5ANw&s=03)
Sure Lurkalot
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Did a number on Chile and the rest of Latin America too.
rikyrah
SCAM
SCAM
SCAM
ProPublica (@propublica) posted at 5:07 AM on Tue, Dec 31, 2024:
New: Arizona’s acclaimed voucher program provides zero transparency into private schools’ history, academic performance or financial sustainability to help parents make informed school choices. https://t.co/urDkq6UabN
(https://x.com/propublica/status/1874049810761666897?t=arFlY7gHit7R2qYcyTJ6oA&s=03)
Glory b
@Scout211: “‘Those people’ who live in cities.”
I bet I can guess who they really mean.
They may be good neighbors to you, but probably not for everyone.
Many exurban & rural hospitals closed because the people there voted for elected officials who promised to vote against Medicare expansion.
AGIAN, I refer to the book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland” by Jonathan Metzl.
Kind of discouraging how many people refuse to see this for what it is.
rikyrah
Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) posted at 6:37 PM on Mon, Dec 30, 2024:
Last year, Jimmy Carter asked President Biden to deliver his eulogy—a testament to Biden’s rare ability to capture the depth of grief and humanity.
Dubbed the “Eulogizer in Chief,” Biden’s unmatched empathy has marked farewells to many, including:
John McCain (2018) – Senator and close friend
Ted Kennedy (2009) – Longtime Senator and ally
Daniel Inouye (2012) – Senator and WWII hero
Fritz Hollings (2019) – Former South Carolina Senator
John Warner (2021) – Virginia Senator and Navy veteran
Bob Dole (2021) – Senator and WWII hero
Harry Reid (2022) – Senate Majority Leader
Elijah Cummings (2019) – Congressman and civil rights leader
Madeleine Albright (2022) – Former Secretary of State
Ethel Kennedy (2024) – Widow of Robert F. Kennedy
The president’s words and empathy transcend politics, touching hearts in moments of loss. Something his successor will never be able to do.
… https://t.co/V7jEsOcs16
(https://x.com/ChrisDJackson/status/1873891315953385640?s=02)
TBone
@TBone: the whole point of the sign hung by Wengers was to keep us filthy libruls out of the store, to cut off access to lower grocery prices for those of us who engage in wrongthink. Lower prices are only for Bible thumpers!
Glory b
@ArchTeryx: I don’t see that we can do anything else.
Kay
I go to a nurse practitioner for primary care and she says NPs and PAs in rural areas are working outside the scope of their training because there aren’t enough physicians. The licensure wasn’t designed to handle complex medical histories and issues, but they feel pushed by ACTUAL NEED because they’re committed to providing care for people.
So we maxed that solution out pretty quick.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@TONYG:
I’ve written about this before, but one of my uncles had a ca. 1940 (maybe 1950?) road map of North Dakota hanging on the wall. So many more roads and so many more towns than a modern map. Reliable cars are part of the equation. Once it was possible to economically and reliably travel longer distances, the little towns in between the bigger ones all dried up. Almost every nearly abandoned small town around here has the remnants of a gas station with a garage. For repairs, oil changes, fixing tires, etc. All of those things happened much more frequently back then.
ArchTeryx
@Glory b: Help the country sparrows that don’t believe in that shit – they exist – and don’t continuously bite the hand that feeds them. My bloody bunny is smarter than that. If they want to be a bunch of sheep and vote the wolfpack in over and over again, then get picked off one by one, who am I to stand in the way? The ones that DIDN’T vote for the wolves, and tried to warn everyone… those are the ones worth saving. (Including a whole lot of black country sparrows – not just while folks out in the boonies).
One of these days I need to tell the stories I heard after the Tuscaloosa tornado of 2011, one that killed over 70 people and was one of the deadliest tornadoes to ever strike Dixie Alley. It will both enrage and make you feel some hope for humanity.
Melancholy Jaques
@rikyrah:
Further proof that they do not care about any policies.
Peke Daddy
@Steve LaBonne: Bless you. We must do what we can, where we can.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Kay: It’s different in my old home town — there are more primary level providers here than when I was a kid, and it’s relatively easy to get an appointment. I think the reason is long-term, strong town involvement in the hospital here, as well as it being a critical access hospital, with those sweet USDA (not a typo) loans/funding.
Hardly any babies delivered, but they have an OB unit and OB-qualified providers.
Still, very little specialty care. So 100 mile trip it is.
coin operated
Reliable cars that also get significantly better gas mileage. The desert that is the state of Nevada is littered with small towns surrounding an abandoned service station.
billtheXVIII
where I live it doesn’t seem to be the big box stores doing in the mom and pop retailers, its Amazon.
citizen dave
One of my best media choice decisions was to stop watching registered republican’s Lester Holt NBC news. I must have heard him say “deeply divided” a thousand times. The fact that NBC did that bread story is incredibly embarassing for them. To put a number to mistermix’s rightly calling it a nonsense story–at 20 mpg (I’m assuming 50 mph, or 100 miles to Omaha), that’s 5 gallons of gas each way. 10 gallons, at ~$3 (generously low), is $30. Not to mention the time wasted. To save $2. Fuck NBC News.
rikyrah
Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) posted at 4:00 PM on Mon, Dec 30, 2024:
There are now 200,000 publicly available EV charging ports in the U.S.—more than doubled since the start of the Biden-Harris Administration and well on track toward the President’s goal of 500k by the end of the decade.
(https://x.com/SecretaryPete/status/1873851735040459072?t=0OMTbtIxWXUFTdJxDQ6CjQ&s=03)
ronno2018
@jonas: Are you a farmer or a small business person? What keeps you in a rural area?
Steve LaBonne
@billtheXVIII: Killing USPS will put a stop to that- last-mile delivery to rural addresses isn’t economically attractive to Amazon. USPS is another service that I can live perfectly well without but that is a vital lifeline to for the folks dying of whiteness.
zhena gogolia
@rikyrah: Impressive for someone who sank into dementia in July 2024.
Matt McIrvin
@coin operated: Yes, though lately it’s mostly driven a preference for larger vehicles to wipe out a lot of that gain. Nothing actually is a car, everything is conceptually an SUV or a truck, even in the city.
That said, better technology has made it possible to get an SUV that gets mileage you previously would have gotten from a little econobox, even if it’s not a hybrid.
lowtechcyclist
@Glory b:
Agreed. And more specifically, assuming the Dems get back into power at some point, we should give up on trying to rescue them. If policies that benefit everyone across the board happen to benefit them too because of that, fine and dandy: we shouldn’t actively exclude them. But policies aimed specifically to benefit rural areas? Forget it. Whatever the 2030s’ equivalent of rural broadband is, we just shouldn’t do it. And we should pass programs specifically aimed at addressing problems of cities and metro areas. More funding for mass transit, dense urban housing and the like.
David_C
@Glory b: Metzl’s book is foundational for any of these conversations. Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us belongs in the same pantheon, along with Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste.
ETA: Any discussion about disaffected voters needs to start with race or whiteness as a primary or contributing factor.
TBone
@Kay: my hubby never sees an actual M.D. anymore, it’s nurses and P.A.s all the time now, a stark contrast to just six or seven years ago.
They even have the front desk receptionist phone us to discuss his medical questions. She has no schooling at all.
Another Scott
@coin operated: +1
When gas is $0.30/gallon, people don’t care too much that their giant tank gets 14 MPG. And gas stations did so much business that they gave away glasses and books and cookware and paid people to wear uniforms and pump the gas and check the oil and clean the windshield…
Yup, things are very different when you have to stop to fill up every 200 miles than when you can go 300-400-500 miles per tank. And it has lots and lots of knock-on effects.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
RevRick
@khead: Rural areas have been on a death spiral since the 1920s. Even family farms are essentially factory operations. I watch a Reels segment on Facebook, Laura Farms , which is a multigenerational farm, and they spend millions of dollars every year just to run their huge farm. Over the years, as they grew, other farm families had to go elsewhere, which has affected every other business and institution in the area. So, all those farm families are now small businesses.
A Ghost to Most
No sympathy for the selfish, self-righteous, or Nebraska. I did my time there.
p.a.
“Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland”
Since they won’t get their heads out of their bigoted asses, the proper response is “Not fast enough.”
TONYG
@Glory b: These dumb attitudes persist not only in rural states, but also in rural and exurban areas of “blue” states. For a couple of years about a decade ago I worked as an “I.T. contractor” at an IBM office in New York State that was only about 30 miles north of New York City. It was another world. My co-workers (who were otherwise intelligent enough to support software) had, for the most part, never been to New York City, but were nevertheless really pissed off at “those New York City freeloaders getting all that welfare and stealing their tax dollars”. (In reality, New York City taxpayers were helping to support their little towns in the Catskills and Adirondacks.). Needless to say, they were all white. I’m sure that they all voted for Trump a couple of years later.
different-church-lady
@Steve LaBonne:
At the federal level we can’t do anything for them anyway. Nor in states controlled by the red side, which tend rural. Really, the only thing we’re talking about being able to do for them is give sympathy or pity. And we shouldn’t.
JaneE
Amen.
And they wonder why Amazon got so big.
Every few years they have a study on how to get more local business and talk up buy local. What they can’t do is get a town of 3000 to have the buying power of a metro area with 3 million. They can’t get a store of 2000 SF to carry all the merchandise of one 20,000 SF.
p.a.
@Steve LaBonne: RFD was a legislative victory to the rurals delivered by one of the most virulently racist Americans of the 20th century, GA Sen Tom Watson (D). But he didn’t start out that way.
C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel
Tragic story & cautionary tale too.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: But people still buy 14 MPG vehicles, especially further out from the city. They’re colossal Ford F350s.
scav
There’s also the whole increasing mechanization of farms, the consolidation of farms and the general decline of population that contributes to the decline of small towns. Smaller families anyway, kids leaving, fewer people needed to run the bigger machinery on bigger farms, all of those contribute to the collapse of local markets alongside the easier, more reliable drive to the big box stores. Farming, along side mining and factory work, has just changed with mechanization.
Melancholy Jaques
@citizen dave:
Our problem is that they are not embarrassed. They are certain they are doing a great job and all the complaints (from Democrats) are bullshit.
suzanne
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
I used to work with rural health systems….. one office I worked for had that as a market niche. Almost all of them had USDA loans for their construction.
One thing that was interesting was that most of the construction in that sector was around vacation-destination towns. Not rural working towns.
Glory b
@ArchTeryx: Yes, they are gerrymandered into voicelessness sometimes.
Case in point, the state with the largest black population is STILL Mississippi.
Alce _e_ardillo
@Kay: Not only in the rural areas, I might add….
Motivated Seller
NBC is *not* in the business of informing the public. Like many other for-profit broadcasters, they’re in the business of click and eyeballs. The news “business” is a convenient hook where rich people dress themselves as first amendment champions. But in reality, they’re nothing but vapid socialites intent on keeping themselves at the top of the pecking order. See how energetically they report on the horse race, rather than the stakes.
p.a.
When you hear the “our taxes support cities” rural crowd, point out that no matter what they pay for electric or (in olden times) telephone, now wire/fiber/cable broadband, it is subsidized because their cost would be unaffordable if production, transmission, maintenance, and repair were priced to market to them. And propane as well as, well, everything not grown locally, delivery relies on the (socialist, dontcha know) road system.
satby
@zhena gogolia: yep, salty forever about that.
Jeffg166
I am glad I live in Philadelphia. My medical, food and supply needs are met close by.
My primary care doctor is leaving the group practice that is around the corner from where I live. Today is her last day. I will call to find out who I will now see.
There is a hardware store about a half a mile from me that has been in one family since 1948. All the contractors working in the area go there for supplies.
There are big box stores about 7 miles for where I live. The contractors might save a dollar or two if they bought at the big box stores but they would spend more to go get what they need. Buying it locally with a somewhat higher markup is a win win for them.
If these rural towns have cheap real estate that younger people could afford that they could work from remotely there could be a resurgence of the rural town.
The locals would have to accept that the new people may not be the same color, religion or sexual orientation they are.
suzanne
@scav:
Most of the growth in the economy, the best that I understand, is in service industries of varying skill level. Those have a strong agglomeration effect. So: cities.
I will once again cite that this is a worldwide phenomenon created by economic specialization. It was approximately 15 years ago that — for the first time in human history — more people lived in urban areas than rural areas.
This is really an unstoppable force of life, and if we are smart, we would plan for the sustainable future.
scav
@Jeffg166: Rural town I best know had a freaking meltdown when the Amish moved in. “Those buggies! They were going to ruin the roads!”
suzanne
@Jeffg166:
Agree that we really cut off our noses to spite our faces when we (royal we, not BJ jackals) surrendered remote work at societal scale.
Many of those rural towns don’t really want city people there, though. For the reasons you describe, but also because more people bring traffic, want different services and amenities. So it’s a challenge.
call_me_ishmael
“Sweat, Jizz, Piss and 2 hour drives for bread.”
Mistermix with the LGM/Zevon crossover title.
Kristine
@Penn: As an aside, the same big vs small principle apparently applies to special circumstances like recalls. A favorite gelato of mine was recalled due to contamination**. I had been buying it at a store that’s part of a smaller Midwest chain, and when months had passed since I last saw it in stock, I asked one of the managers what was up. He said that even if a company has started shipping again, their contract with larger outlets like Walmart probably requires them to fulfill those orders first. If they’re still gearing up and haven’t yet resumed full-scale production, that means smaller accounts don’t get their orders filled.
And if you’re like my smaller chain store, you give up on waiting, cancel your account with the gelato company, and fill their part of the freezer with something else.
**Their product had not been made on the affected equipment, but iirc it was the same contract manufacturing plant, so they pulled everything because it’s the cleanest way forward.
TBone
Elno went full 4chan today.
https://newrepublic.com/post/189752/elon-musk-far-right-troll-x-profile-change-pepe-frog
So fucking thirsty.
Matt McIrvin
@suzanne: There’s a part of me that thinks the antinatalist philosophers and the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement have the right idea, and we should be trying to wind down human civilization to extinction in the most kind and humane way possible, for the sake of the biosphere and the minimization of suffering. As a person who actually participated in the making of a child, however, I am a hypocrite on this score.
Even if we don’t go that far, there’s the fact that making human fertility more voluntary (especially for the people who have to carry and nurse the babies!) has caused it to drop everywhere, including places that Americans don’t think of as the First World; population growth is going to tail off over the coming century, and this is probably a good thing on balance–but we’re going to have to deal with the economic consequences of lower fertility, many of which are bad.
Cheryl from Maryland
@RevRick: Yes. My mother was born in 1924, and as soon as she graduated high school, her parents told her she had to leave the farm, join her sister in the big city (Richmond, Va), get a job, and send them a remittance. And this was a tobacco farm that couldn’t pay its bills. Now my mother said or was the best thing that happened to her – leaving the farm, learning to be a book-keeper, having a job, being independent. All of which made her a great mother.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m with you. Right wingers are freaking out, but human population can’t grow forever. Mars colony isn’t happening.
Matt McIrvin
@TBone: I feel sorry for the web cartoonist who invented Pepe the Frog, who never intended or condoned any of this.
Sure Lurkalot
@different-church-lady:
When government helps with programs, they pay no attention to which party cared enough; with subsides, they claim they don’t want handouts; ignore them and their grievance and resentment gets dialed up to infinity. Their only haven (as Obama noted) is guns, religion…and now Trump. I’ve likewise convinced myself they can’t be helped.
TBone
@Matt McIrvin: well, we’ll always have Gritty! Also unintentionally and much to the delight of antifascists.
TryCry harder, Nazi bitchez.Snowlan01
This piece focuses on the declining towns due to more reliable and fuel-efficient cars.
I would like to point out that there is also much better farm and ranch machinery, that allows fewer people to raise more crops per person, and fewer people needed to supervise the livestock. This newer equipment is also much more expensive. Therefore, more capital is needed if you want to make a living farming or ranching.
If there are just fewer people needed for the same amount of economic output from an area, and the startup costs for earning a living increase so much, there will simply be fewer people in a region. And whoever is remaining in the region will be divided between a few wealthy people funding the work, and a lot of poor desperate people either doing the manual labor or living in impoverished and government-subsidized despair.
My family is from the Panhandle of Western Nebraska, and I have watched this change over my lifetime. Ranch and farm sizes have increased. The capital needed to run an outfit has exploded. The number of farm or ranch hands needed has plunged. So . . . all the infrastructure needed to support normal human life has also withered because there just aren’t the people needed to make the infrastructure workable.
I am not sure what to do about it. It’s not all maliciousness on the part of the wealthy. Some of it is technological change.
Jeffg166
@scav:
That’s funny. The Amish really are stewards of the land they own.
Harrison Wesley
@TBone: I know Pennsylvania has a lot of spelling and pronunciation variants across the state. This version of “Wanker”is a new one to me, though.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: The malcontents’ kids have figured it out- they get the hell out of Dodge as soon as they can.
TBone
@Snowlan01: the outfits that sell farm machinery here in central PA have grown exponentially over the last few years, with their stocks of equipment strewn outdoors over ever-expanding acreage. Uglying up the place. Just growing and growing shiny metal.
Miss Bianca
@Steve LaBonne: Uh…I LIVE in one of those red rural communities, bub. Fortunately, it’s in Colorado, so for the most part, we’ll be OK. Still, I would take it as a kindness if you’d cool it with “they all deserve to die emiserated and impoverished.”
Or I might start to take it personally.
TBone
@Harrison Wesley: HAHAHA!
Yes hubby and I have called it that in the past, but I haven’t been there in so long I’d forgotten!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Even if we could viably colonize other planets, it wouldn’t really help–the rate at which we could reasonably export people off-planet would be minuscule compared to even a steeply reduced rate of population growth.
And even the Solar System is finite. The most utopian visions that are at all physically plausible involve something like chewing the whole asteroid belt up into artificial space habitats, and even with magical nuclear fusion plants or beamed power stations harnessing the full power of the Sun, unrestrained exponential growth would exhaust even that in short order. (Interstellar colonization, I’m just gonna say that is not happening, at least not at any rate that can make a difference.) Fortunately, we’re not actually growing exponentially.
Steve LaBonne
Go ahead and take it personally. Nobody is forcing you to live there, and anyway I can’t do anything to help places like yours except what I always do- vote for Democrats who altruistically want to help everyone.
suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: But but but! I’ve been told by commenters here that not prioritizing the issues of people who don’t vote for us is “abandoning” them!
In all seriousness…. I agree with you. We have to be more intentional about where people live in the future. Cities are going to be where most people live– for economic and environmental reasons. Rural areas are for resource production and wildlife. It’s about more than serving the needs of our electoral coalition first….. it’s really about how we have to change to accommodate growth and our needs without destroying the only planet we have.
coin operated
@Matt McIrvin: Yup. A buddy of mine has Ford 6.7 PowerStroke F350 coupled to a 10sp transmission. He gets upwards of 22mpg if he leaves his lead foot at home.
TBone
I have been priced out of moving back to civilization. I could afford to do it, but then I wouldn’t have emergency medical care/long term care money in the future.
Steve LaBonne
@TBone: And THAT- the dire shortage of affordable housing in places where it makes sense for people to live- is the big problem that desperately needs to be tackled. Not holding my breath, alas.
catclub
This. I tried every hardware store and electrical supply store I could find in NE vermont (northeast Kingdom)
for a starter capacitor. None.
Amazon has it for $12.
However, even Amazon shipping to NE Kingdom is definitely NOT
one day. More like a week.
TBone
@Steve LaBonne: me too either!
The Audacity of Krope
So I understand where you’re coming from. My approach to this is not that we should “wish harm” on red communities, but we should absolutely stop looking to the federal government to be everyone’s savior everywhere. It’s not going to happen, wouldn’t even if the deck weren’t rigged.
I’m not of a mind to let Mississippi drag us all into the muck because some good people live there, like everywhere else. People are allowed to move. We really should focus on allowing states more autonomy.
Snowlan01
@Steve LaBonne: Yes – my own dad left in the mid 1950s – but not everyone is able to leave. You can’t really blame those who stayed, if they didn’t have the resources to go.
suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
I am of the opinion that it is both a good thing to have children, and a good thing not to….. and that we will find an equilibrium there. A smaller population can thrive.
But we have to plan ahead, because, as you note, there’s some bad consequences that could happen if we don’t. But I have no faith in Americans to have foresight.
Matt McIrvin
@coin operated: That’s actually better than I thought they got.
(Meanwhile, my hybrid Hyundai Sonata, which is more car than I could have bought, gets 50 MPG in the summer and closer to 40 in the winter. Because I am a skinflint at heart, I still fuel up at BJ’s and most the people who bother going to BJ’s for the discount are driving truly gigantic vehicles, towering pickup trucks and Chevy Suburbans and Escalades, so maybe it gives me an exaggerated idea of what’s out there. But let’s just say that fluctuations in the price of gasoline don’t actually bother me that much.)
different-church-lady
You’re saying this in the 21st century as though they’re different things.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: As I’ve ranted here in the past, the business tax code encourages that via the huge subsidy for vehicles over 6000 pounds GVR.
So, it’s not surprising that giant pickups and SUVs are popular even though they’re colossally inefficient.
I kinda wonder how many Bentley Bentayga Speeds are used for “business” by folks with a $100 LLC.
Grr…
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
The Audacity of Krope
@different-church-lady: I’m low key beginning to think Fox is the best 24 hour news network after all. At least they aren’t pretending to be good, civic-minded people.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: I’m not blaming them (for being there, but I sure blame MAGAs for being MAGAs), but also I can’t save them. Both political (with the help of a lot of their votes) and economic forces have doomed rural areas beyond hope of recovery.
Ruckus
@Steve LaBonne:
I see that rural OH is still the same as when I lived in OH for work. On the outskirts (and farther out) of Columbus the small towns ended up depending on driving to a wally world because the little country store couldn’t carry the stuff that people ended up wanting. Those little country stores were basically liquor stores with a better choice of snacks. And if you weren’t a farmer you had to drive into the big city for a job. It was nice and quiet – not having much in the way of modern amenities gave it that old timey nothing existed feel.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Snowlan01:
Important point – thanks. Sorry that the Chadron State College grad didn’t make it to be VP.
Also, to those who mentioned Amazon, that’s a huge factor in the loss of small town stores, too.
catclub
Yes, living in a city means modern conveniences.
It is also eco-friendlier than country living which has lots of driving.
I was in a very small city in 2005 for Katrina, but we got power back in a week. People out int he country went three weeks or sometimes months.
different-church-lady
@Miss Bianca: It’s past time I cleared something up.
I have been vocal advocate of “THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR, DUMBFUCK!” But that is not the same as “ALL RED STATE RESIDENTS CAN DIE IN A FIRE.”
We shouldn’t be preemptively calling anyone a dumbfuck. But when someone gets all vociferous about saying, “WHY IS THE LEOPARD CHEWING ON MY FACE HE WAS SUPPOSED TO CHEW ON THEIR FACES?!?” we absolutely should respond, “YOU GAVE THE LEOPARD PERMISSION… YOU DUMBFUCK.
Obviously blue voters in red areas aren’t going to be the ones doing that.
Seanly
@Jeffg166:
BS. Amish are jerks. They abuse their animals, they don’t forgo tech as they preach, they poach game. They’re a bunch of asshole hypocrits.
When I lived in Central PA, the hunters hated Amish. They hunt deer well out of season and are generally scofflaws about it.
Drive around in Lancaster County and you see electrical & phone lines going into a little building on nearly every Amish farm – that’s where they keep their computer and phone.
TBone
@different-church-lady:
I might.
Scout211
My experience is mine alone, but in my mid-size city neighborhood in NorCal, most of the residents in my suburban neighborhood were Democrats that don’t fit your description. They were never as friendly, kind or as generous to us as my rural neighbors are here. If I were to stereotype them as you seem to do to rural folks, I would say they were a bunch of Karens and Kens who were not in the business of helping anyone outside of their own clique.
Again, this is just my personal experience.
ETA for clarity
Steve LaBonne
@Ruckus: I don’t actually spend much time in small towns. I live in a small city (Medina) of 26,000 which is an integral part of both the Cleveland and Akron metros. My UU church is half an hour away in the affluent Cleveland suburb of North Royalton and its charitable work is oriented towards Cleveland, where there is no shortage of need.
Ruckus
@Scout211:
It isn’t that they don’t have mirrors it’s that they refuse to use them because then they’d have to admit what they actually see.
Baud
@Scout211:
Doesn’t really matter though. Given where the Republican Party is now, political decisions reveal more character than interpersonal relationships.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady: I certainly agree with your sentiment.
For me, yelling has never been an effective approach to convincing anyone of anything. It seems to work for some people though so YMMV.
Snowlan01
@@mistermix.bsky.social: Thanks – my family was rooting for him also. Well, on to the next fight.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Not yelling hasn’t accomplished much, has it?
TBone
@Seanly: there are some bad hombres in that crew but also, and as always, some good ‘uns. Some saved me a lot of trouble more than once and, in return, I once gave a contractor my books on Lyme Disease for his long-suffering daughter and wrote down the name “Doryx” for her inside the cover of the book titled “Healing Lyme.”
Steve LaBonne
@Scout211: Our best politicians- like Biden- unfortunately are better than a lot of our voters.
Kayla Rudbek
@Sloegin: my impression was that Semafore was clogged with Russian propaganda
The Audacity of Krope
What good is a mirror to a vampire?
suzanne
@catclub:
It is not merely the driving! It is running utilities for miles, encroaching on wildlife habitats, using up loads of space for personal yards and setbacks, not sharing shade and warmth/coolth……
It is unsustainable.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady: I don’t know what will work. I’m inclined to go with “point-and-laugh” and endless repetition as others have suggested.
scav
@Seanly: Well, horrors, they’re human. Mixed bag. The ones that rented and then bought the family farm went out of their way to keep an eye on (and feed pies to) my great uncle who wouldn’t leave the town. And we just got a Christmas card from them despite this being a decade to multiples of same past.
The Audacity of Krope
Even if nothing improves, at least you’ll be laughing.
Melancholy Jaques
Can’t help but wonder how many people in the Heartland® have ever heard of the book Dying of Whiteness, let alone read it.
Ohio Mom
@rikyrah: I am imagining Biden giving a fabulous eulogy for Carter and the rest of us being able to rub that in the face of everyone who has declared Biden senile.
Omnes Omnibus
Can’t push start an automatic.
Ruckus
@Steve LaBonne:
I was born and raised in Los Angeles county and so a big city guy. I moved to OH for a job I thought I wanted and lived on the north eastern outskirts of Columbus. In Columbus it was not all that far off of living in LA county as far as amities, restaurants etc. I used to head out into farm country to ride my bicycle. Miles and miles of quiet back country roads, surrounded by corn fields. One had to be careful of intersections because many locals didn’t stop, only slowed down a bit at the intersections because they didn’t expect to see anyone else. Sometimes I could ride for an hour and never see a vehicle. Sort of the exact opposite of living in Los Angeles. And yes Medina is a nice town.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: It isn’t even really a rural phenomenon–I see so many city parking garages where most of the spots are marked “compact car only” and are all occupied by Grand Cherokees and Suburbans, somehow crammed in there with a millimeter to spare.
Another Scott
@Matt McIrvin: On the last, Dean Baker isn’t buying it.
I think he makes a good case.
Similarly, but differently, Michael Crichton was a crank when it came to global warming, but this (as a general caution, but not when applied to physical models of the atmosphere) is very good:
Hang in there.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Kayla Rudbek
@Steve LaBonne: and USPS not going last mile may also hurt the small businesses on Etsy etc (example I am familiar with being the craft businesses who sell yarn, embroidery kits, crafting bags and who are located in smaller towns but relying on USPS to ship all over the country). Other jackals here are Etsy sellers who would probably know better than I would.
TBone
PSA 2025 begins with WTF
(Wed., Thurs., Fry)
Matt McIrvin
@Ohio Mom:
Nope. He’ll stumble over some phrase, as he does, and that’s what will be all over the evening news.
Heidi Mom
@TBone: Hi TBone, I know whereof you speak. I grew up in Snyder County, lived for a time in Milton and worked in Lewisburg. Every now and then I think of the quiet beauty of that landscape and, for a fraction of a second, think “What if . . .?” And then I think “No. Just . . . no.” It’s beautiful down here in Cumberland County, too. (And I didn’t even know about the store with the sign decrying LBGTQ rights.)
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Another Scott: he’s probably mistaken about lap dancing.😁
Steve LaBonne
@Another Scott: The problem is that on this timescale, the physical models of the atmosphere make everything else irrelevant.
TBone
@Another Scott: shazam
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: Agreed. And that outlook, while technically correct, ignores that all those changes were the results of human society making decisions.
Miss Bianca
@The Audacity of Krope: You do realize, when you airily pronounce, “people can move”, that a lot of people actually CAN’T move, right? As in, “literally cannot afford to”. And if your advice is still “so, just move”, do realize that the only places most people who can’t afford to move *could* afford to move to…are places even shittier, for one reason or another, than the places they already live. They’re not going to be moving to blue enclaves.
But, maybe you don’t actually care about all that. I’m just saying that, tempting as it may be for *me* to be saying, “so long, suckers” and savoring the schadenfreude-ily delicious taste of it all, there would be consequences to such an attitude, from my perspective. YMMV, of course.
TBone
@Heidi Mom: I love Lewisburg, the surrounding countryside, and the mountains and the surrounding wilderness covered in State Forest and State Parks. I was raised part country, part DelCo by virtue of our family farm in Tioga County and my grandparents tutoring at Camp Susquehannock every summer. So country is in my blood.
But damn, I’m homesick for my primary home of DelCo despite it being a hairy armpit sometimes hahaha.
I am a flatlander!
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: It suits the techbros and their hangers-on to pretend that technology is an unstoppable autonomous force.
The Audacity of Krope
@Miss Bianca: As opposed to airily pronouncing that we should all uniformly suffer under the yoke of Christian Nationalism when people in my neck of the woods emphatically did not choose that?
All that does is remove the option of moving somewhere better for everyone.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott:
Human beings will have made it all worse.
Next question.
TBone
@different-church-lady: 🎯😆
Matt McIrvin
@Another Scott: Japan is an interesting case. My experience of it is very superficial, that of a tourist. I’ve experienced being shoved into a Tokyo subway car at rush hour and it actually is terrifying, like you’re teetering on the edge of a mass-crush-death scenario in every car. (But aside from that, their transport situation is awe-inspiring, simply superior to what you can get here in every way.)
They’ve been in kind of a stagnant situation for a couple of decades now. It feels familiar to an American, the same kinds of things that are happening to us, though in different ways–like they were early adopters of a lot of things, seemed like they were living decades in the future back in the 1980s and 1990s, but they’re still in that same world while the rest of everyone caught up. Cash is oddly prevalent.
Immigrants are less visible than in the US, Europe or Singapore, but not absent. The kind of good foreign food you can get anywhere in Japanese cities is Indian–more obvious evidence of South Asian immigration than I’d have expected.
The Audacity of Krope
Requires a little nuance. Many things will be better. Fewer of us will be free to enjoy those things.
Steve LaBonne
@Miss Bianca: I have always voted for politicians who wanted to help and actually did help when they had the power. And many of the people who were helped hate those politicians and hate me for how I vote. I’m not going to indulge in Schadenfreude, but neither am I overflowing with sympathy.
Ruckus
@Glory b:
Find a black person to talk to and be unable to speak in a manner that reflects all their actual emotions towards anything or anyone that doesn’t met their unreasonable, unrealistic, inhuman notions?
What is this notion of racial equality that you suggest so strongly????
Sorry for the pompous arrogance sounding reply, as I’ve stated above I lived on the outskirts of the rural area of Columbus OH, after decades of being born, raised and living in Los Angeles. There is a night and day difference between even the concept of living in those 2 areas.
tobie
I feel like rural means very different things in different regions of the country in terms of access to goods and services. No matter where you live in my state, Maryland, you’re never more than an hour from suburbia. Can’t imagine that’s true in the west, southwest, upper midwest or even deep south.
TBone
@Ruckus: try a year in Texas.
The Audacity of Krope
@TBone: JFC, you might as well have suggested trying heroin.
Steve LaBonne
@different-church-lady: I can predict the world of 2100- massive climate-driven migration that will make the migrations of the late Roman Empire look puny by comparison and that will overwhelm the nation-state system. Accompanied by our old friends famine, pestilence, and war.
Baud
Baud! 2100!
zhena gogolia
@The Audacity of Krope: Hmmm. I live in a state that went 56.40% for Harris-Walz. But I see Trump signs all over the place, including on my own block.
TBone
@The Audacity of Krope: LOL !!!!!!!!
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Steve LaBonne: I’ve been on vacation with relatives outside of Seattle for Christmas – and reading Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath which I took with me on the plane. The replacement of people with machines was a big part of moving the Joads off their sharecropping land – if the tenants wouldn’t go, the new tractors would clip the corners of their houses, causing the house to collapse, and that would force them to move out.
Steinbeck’s problem with trying to dramatize the Joads’ plight, though, is that basically his homeless tenants are car-camping in a California where no-one thinks twice about starting a campfire anywhere. Since the writer also needs to emphasize what good people they are, he’s hard-put to make their lives actually unpleasant enough to justify the political changes he wants.
Meanwhile, in Bellevue, where everyone drives everywhere, even though they don’t actually need to, people routinely get really fat. I live in NYC and it’s shocking to see how many of my relative’s neighbors are morbidly obese. They’re also surprised that I think it’s ok to walk ten blocks or so to the supermarket or a local cafe or the new Transit Center and then take transit into Seattle. It’s obvious that people are trying to make Bellevue walkable, and more people are actually taking the bus, but it’s equally obvious that Bellevue was initially built with the expectation that everyone would always drive everywhere.
And then I read about the desperate people in Grapes of Wrath, who are spending most of their time with family and friends, outside, walking everywhere, cooking over open fires and sharing much fresher and healthier food than is sold in the rows of frozen foods available in the supermarket here……
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: That would have been a pretty good modem back in the day.
Snowlan01
Given some of the recent back-and-forth here, I propose the following as the current dilemma (admittedly a bit hyperbolic and oversimplified):
Either:
(a) you live in a rural red area with hollowed-out infrastructure and no ready access to life-saving medical care and other supports for the poor, vulnerable or elderly.
Or:
(b) you live in a blue advanced urban area but can’t afford anything but to rent a one-room apartment, since the cost of real estate is beyond your means and also need to negotiate clogged roads to get anywhere you can’t walk due to inadequate people-moving infrastructure.
Take your choice!
Glory b
@suzanne: Of course, actually prioritizing them is abandoning them too.
See, Biden moving heaven & earth for WV & getting rewarded with 30% of the vote.
cgerrib
@suzanne: Speaking as somebody who grew up in a small town and has a 100% remote job, the problem is that the same lack of, well, anything, that’s causing the town to dry up makes it unattractive for people like me to move there.
Were I to want to move back to Central Illinois, I would move to a place like Urbana (population ~35000) which, because it’s a college town, has the things I want.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: Get away from the coasts and there are actually many urban areas with lots to offer that are far less expensive and less congested than the coastal cities. I live in one.
Ruckus
@TONYG:
That is among one of the things.
What about diversity, what about being able to find a medical specialist if necessary, what about living in the current century, what about not having to go to 3 stores to purchase what you want – and know that exists because you used to be able to buy it in the BIG CIY? What about…… I’ve had the pleasure of small town and big city life. Big city can mean working to find something, small town likely means not finding it or possibly even knowing about it. At least that’s my experience.
Omnes Omnibus
@zhena gogolia: Wisconsin is effectively 50/50. But I do think that people sometimes forget, in a 60/40 GOP state, that the 40% is a lot of people. They won’t all fit in Massachusetts. Nor could a lot of them afford to live there.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Steve LaBonne: BAUD! 134.5! [nostalgia]
sab
@Steve LaBonne: OT If we tried to organize a springtime (after snow) meetup for NE Ohio would you be interested?
Glory b
@Snowlan01: There are smaller urban areas to select from.
I live in Pittsburgh. 25 years ago, I bought a house that’s part of a development in a black neighborhood built to encourage more middle class residents, complete with incentives & tax breaks.
Mortgage for a 3 bedroom on a quarter acre lot ( unfinished lower level)? $675 a month.
tobie
@Snowlan01: i never cease to be amazed at how few hands are needed for commercial farming. The equipment costs a fortune. About 10 years ago, a former dairy farmer told me it takes 2000 acres for a dairy farm to break even. I wouldn’t be surprised if that figure is now double.
Snowlan01
@Steve LaBonne: I live on the Front Range of Colorado (the urban corridor from Fort Collins to Pueblo). So not the Coasts. . . . Yet it is the same problem here – absurd real estate prices and clogged traffic; I am a professional, but I couldn’t afford to buy my own townhouse if I were moving here. I am glad you don’t have these issues yet, but it is by no means a Coastal-only problem. And the costs of living in an urban area are real and increasing.
Steve LaBonne
@Omnes Omnibus: Despite the damage done by Republican state governments, states are not homogeneous and living in a blue city in a red state beats the hell out of living in the sticks in a red state.
Steve LaBonne
@Snowlan01: Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Indy, KC, and others are still much cheaper than where you live. Young people are starting to figure that out and I think we will see jobs and people returning to cities like these.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
Most red state economies depend on their blue cities.
The Audacity of Krope
@zhena gogolia: Just saying, again, we should allow states more autonomy. Do states rights authentically.
Too many people are blind to the consequences of their votes. So let the little laboratories of democracy produce real results for people to judge.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@West of the Rockies:
This is the article you want MM to write, it’s a good long-form piece on the economy of the urban-rural divide:
https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-political-economy-of-the-urban-rural-divide/
Steve LaBonne
@sab: Yes. Please keep us posted. Thanks.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steve LaBonne: I am aware.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Naturally, and get the usual amount of thanks for it.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@different-church-lady:
We already have made things worse; poor people in the Grapes of Wrath had much better health & community than they do now.
@The Audacity of Krope:
Yes, but it requires people to make wise choices which they don’t always do. We now have obesity drugs – but the drugs aren’t making people give up the unhealthy lifestyles that led to the problem.
sab
@Steve LaBonne: So that is why Cuyahoga County is so much more expensive than Summit and Medina. North Coast. (Actually I think that is true. I would love to live nearer to a Great Lake.)
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@rikyrah:
“Acclaimed voucher program” is an oxymoron.
Steve LaBonne
@sab: I used to, in Lake County. My daughter was living there in my old condo with her husband, but just recently she left him and is now living in the upper unit (with as much floor space as my house) of a duplex in Lakewood. I’m envious. ;) Her rent is $1600 but she makes more than enough to easily afford it.
TBone
Ready, set, WTF 2025
Republicans Just Slashed IRS Funding In Shutdown Deal
The Biden administration said the cuts would end up adding $140 billion to the national debt.
suzanne
@Steve LaBonne:
I moved to Pittsburgh in 2020, in large part because of exactly this reason. I will note that we bought a fixer-upper, and we could now sell it for double what we paid for it….. even without factoring in the improvements that we’ve made. Our neighborhood has pros and cons to it. I wish there was less crime, I wish I didn’t find used needles behind my house.
Pittsburgh used to be twice as large as it is now, and it recently started growing again. There is a lot of the “missing middle” housing stock here …. duplexes and triplexes, apartments over stores, etc. So there’s some affordable options left.
The job growth isn’t in the old blue-collar jobs, though. It’s in….. services. Same as pretty much everywhere else.
The Audacity of Krope
Keep the IRS budget low enough that they can only afford to go after ma and pa. Oligarchs keep their money. Voters stay mad at the tax man. Win/Win
RevRick
@Cheryl from Maryland: Ssorry I took so long to respond, but I was out getting in my daily steps and litter collection. But you’re right. There’s always been a push off of farms as well as the pull of city opportunity.
Farm work used to be arduous, back-breaking labor, and that coupled with the vagaries of the weather and the ruthlessness of the market and the isolation that often occurred has driven millions off the land.
Your mother got good advice.
Kosh III
People get in the habit of driving to the larger town to buy some goods they can’t get in the small towns,
I’ve seen this phenomenon happen with churches. Rural areas had churches every few miles because you could only walk, ride a buggy or horse so far in one day.
With the advent of cars, esp. in the past 50 years, it was less time consuming to drive to a nearby town or city that had a big church with nice programs for the kids, the singles, the whomever. So now many of these churches are closed or as I’ve noticed often, have 4-10 vehicles in the parking lot for a building that can seat 150 or so folks.
Churches in general are dwindling now but that’s racism, sexism, anti-gay Holy Trumpism etc etc
sab
@Steve LaBonne: I returned from out west 25 years ago. Went west to get job skills I couldn’t get in Ohio ( where they only hired the well-connected or the already experienced) then moved back years later when I had the requisite job skills. A lot of my nieces and nephews did the same. About half of them came back. The mixed race and gender-nonconforming have not come back.
I like living in cities, but prefer smaller to sprawler ones.
Ruckus
@rikyrah:
shitforbrains has money. Likely, very likely not as much as he claims, sort of likely not even close. He’s like one of those dolls that you used to pull a cord out of their back and words would come out. It often made no sense whatsoever in the moment, but A TALKING DOLL! I call him shitforbrains because from foot to tippy top of his head he is full of it. What he has is the rage a lot of people feel because their lives do not add up to what they see others having or believe what they should have. IOW normal humanity in any large number of humans.
That’s likely what shitforbrains sees. He’s educated – or at least he went to school past 6th grade. Did he actually learn anything? I don’t think he did. Because I knew 6th graders that were smarter than he acts, when I WAS IN SIXTH GRADE. Which is over half a century ago. And they weren’t necessarily in the top of the class.
[ Just looked out the window and I can see 2 doors away! So foggy this morning that I couldn’t see anything that far away. ]
different-church-lady
@The Audacity of Krope: I’m in a post-nuance mood.
Matt McIrvin
@Snowlan01:
My dad is from there too! Everyone in his generation worked in some kind of farm-related job at some point. His boyhood small town’s population actually hasn’t dropped much from what it was in 1950, but it hasn’t risen either, and I get the impression that an ethanol plant is currently keeping it alive.
TBone
@The Audacity of Krope: 🎯
Hatchet man appointee
The Audacity of Krope
@different-church-lady: We’re in a post-nuance world.
Kosh III
@Baud:Most red state economies depend on their blue cities.
If the economy of blue Nashville, Knoxville and Chattanooga wasn’t booming the rest of the state would crumble. Yet the super-fascist/theocrat governor and legislature continues to bash these places.
(I left out blue Memphis because….Memphis)
RevRick
@suzanne: Meds and eds to be more specific.
Steve LaBonne
@Kosh III: The only difference between red and blue states is that the latter have enough urban dwellers to win statewide elections.
Chris
@scav:
There’s also the reliance on illegal immigration for those jobs that still have to be done by humans, which also contributes to the problem. People who are specifically hired because they work for peanuts and can’t invoke any of their legal rights without being deported are not the stuff that bustling middle-class small towns are made of.
sab
@Steve LaBonne: We live in Akron, which I love. We have a rental house in Wadsworth, rented to a high school buddy of my husband. I would love to give it to my daughter, but the locals would probably be burning crosses on the lawn if she moved in with her mixed race child. A major reason I prefer cities to
tinysmall towns.ETA Daughter doesn’t even like shopping in our suburban groceries. Other customers stare at them. Here in our neighborhood mixed race families are the norm.
Panwere
@khead: They will probably lose their black lung benefits too.
Steve LaBonne
@Chris: As a nation we have chosen Pottersville over Bedford Falls.
mvr
@Snowlan01: There had been a law banning non-family corporate ownership of farms in the state which is why consolidation has happened more slowly here than in South Dakota. About 20 years ago it was overturned in court.
So nowadays you often see perfectly good old houses falling apart on the corner of a section that might once have been part of the family farm. But no it is part of a larger farm. Perhaps owned by a neighbor who has combined a few of these. Or by our governor who is trying to lower his taxes on ag land (of which he owns a lot given that he has 100-ish employees) by raising taxes on the rest of us. He didn’t have a good session, though he got some of what he wanted. That larger, better, more expensive machinery only makes sense if you have enough land. And it doesn’t fit in the older barns so they are also low on maintenance.
Of course what I really wanted to say is that you’d go through several cities driving to Omaha 200 miles from most anywhere in Nebraska. So in addition to writing something that implies folks in the state can’t do math or basic economic reasoning, they also seem to be accusing us on not knowing our geography. Or perhaps they just didn’t look at a map and notice Omaha is on the Iowa border.
TBone
I’m so old I remember when the ethics & disclosure rules for real estate sales people were changed and how the Realtors’ Association settlement was gonna help home buyers…
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/15/economy/nar-realtor-commissions-settlement/index.html
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Steve LaBonne:
Nominated!
Chris
@Seanly:
Read something not too long ago about how the Amish are extremely selective about the “new” technologies they do and don’t allow, and the common denominator is “will this technology do anything to undermine our hierarchy/authority.”
Matt McIrvin
@Steve LaBonne: With a few exceptions: the mostly rural Black Belt across the South, and the oddball white rural hippie liberalism of the Berkshires and parts of Vermont.
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: I mean blue states can’t be that great; we host Wall St., Hollywood, and the NYPD.
Ruckus
@Glory b:
What it is.
It is what they want, if they can’t have what they want then no one else can have the life they have. Because that makes them equal to a group that they consider far beneath them. IOW a lot of humanity, the part that believes that they have to be “higher up” than someone, anyone else, even if that higher up is meaningless in any real way.
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: And every other blue city PD.
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: Yeah, but NY is something special. I refuse to set foot over MA’s Western border. That place is hell.
ETA: Yes, I know I would more likely arrive through Connecticut.
Geminid
@cgerrib: Urbanans also have the capable Nikki Budzinski as their new Congresswoman. In 2021, when Springfield Democrats redrew the 13th CD to be D+5,* Republicans complained that they did this with the former top Pritzger aide in mind. If you look up Budzinski’s biography you’ll see why Democratic redistricters would have done that.
* The new 13th CD extends from the Illinois suburbs of St. Louis west through Springfield to Champagne County. It’s only one county wide for the most part and is surrounded on three sides by the rural 15th CD. A nifty piece of gerrymandering.
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: Are you dissing my native state and city? Come sit by me. ;)
Ksmiami
@Steve LaBonne: I feel like we are living in a similar era to the interregnum between ww1 and 2. Has a very Herman Wouk feeling about it: as if we are about to fall off a global cliff.
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: 😂😂😂
Steve LaBonne
@Ksmiami: I don’t want to think about the world my 32 year old daughter will live in when she’s my age (69). Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: Christ, imagine how expensive eggs will be in 37 years…
Snowlan01
@mvr: I used to work for the Unicameral before I moved back to Colorado – so I know some of the history you are describing. I seem to remember the huge debate over corporate farming. But . . .
The consolidation was starting even before the law change – mostly intra-family in those days (particularly in my own family). I think the technological changes in farming and ranching were the primary cause – you just didn’t as need many people – but DID need more money.
I was relieved to see a bit more life and spine back in the Unicameral recently. They seemed like automatons for a while. :-)
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
IL Democratic pols *get* it vis a vis gerrymandering. They’re playing the exact same kind of hardball (R) do. States controlled by Dems that don’t have some kind of 3rd-party redistricting setup and don’t avail themselves of an age-old ‘Murkin tradition like gerrymandering are stooopid.
Now, should we have some kind of national reform on drawing Congressional districts? Absofuckingloootly. But everybody should understand (putting on my long closeted political geographer hat) that, not unlike ranked choice voting, that setups/commissions like that have their own peculiarities and are no panacea.
And until there is some national change in this, (D) should stop shooting themselves in the foot when they’re in charge at the state level when it comes to drawing districts because the other guys will do it in a nanosecond if in charge.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
@TONYG: The improvements in cars since the 60s and 70s seems to be largely the German and Japanese carmakers doing. While the Big Three in the US stumbled on cluelessly, (the Ford Pinto, AMC Pacer, etc). we got to see reliable cars from overseas, and learned to like them.
Off on a tangent, does anyone else think life in the US would be better if Sam Walton had never been born?
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: esp as our economy is designed on a growth model, not a “maintenance” economy
Ksmiami
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): actually, he wasn’t so bad, but ugh his heirs on the other hand…
mvr
@Snowlan01: We’ll see how it goes this term. I don’t think the opposition is any more fiesty this past year than it was the previous one. Just that this governor is not as savvy as Ricketts and they picked bad issues to push on. In the past couple of years there haven’t been enough Ds to filibuster bad stuff. I believe this will still be true after this last election.
Yes even before that law was overturned there was interfamily consolidation and some other consolidation. But I think it happened more quickly in states without such a law. Also, like most things economic, when the market is bigger than the state you can’t really fight certain bad developments with local laws. That’s why lots of state policies like corporate tax breaks are basically races to the bottom.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Ksmiami:
People in certain economic policy circles (classic example of both-sides-do-it) basically say that more growth will fix the ills of more growth.
Which is like saying the cure for cancer is more cancer.
And what they leave out is that most of the fruits of economic growth accrue to the rich. Thank you 40+ years of trickle-down economics! And Austerity (thank you Chicago School of Economics).
Gvg
@coin operated: the building of interstates also contributed I think, though that wasn’t the intent. I wonder if railroads did the same?
Matt McIrvin
@Ksmiami: How to move from a growth-at-all-costs economy to an ecologically sustainable economy is the great unanswered problem of our time.
I don’t know if it’s even answerable. I see a lot of people out there positing that the elimination of capitalism and a move to some kind of eco-socialist economy is the answer.
But nobody’s ever really done eco-socialism; we don’t know what it looks like. State socialist economies in practice seem to have been as fixated on maximizing productivity as capitalist ones–maybe more so.
Maybe, because money is pretend and not a physical resource, “growth” in an abstract economic sense doesn’t necessarily map to ever-increasing consumption of natural resources. But I’m not convinced of that either.
Technological innovation won’t save us but it does give us tools. But tools can be used foolishly or wisely.
If we assume our leadership will always be foolish, then to embrace extinction is the only real answer–humanity is a disease and humanity needs to be eliminated, one way or another, for the sake of life.
But maybe that is just giving up the game prematurely.
Steve LaBonne
@Matt McIrvin: I seriously wouldn’t worry about the biosphere. It will be greatly diminished, maybe even as greatly as in the Great Dying, but over time it will re-diversify. It’s humans who won’t be around.
Steve LaBonne
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” – Edward Abbey
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: In the last round of redistricting, New Mexico Democrats did what Ilinois Democrats did, by redrawing the New Mexico 2nd CD to make it D+2-3. Republican Rep. Yvette Herrell then lost to Democrat Gabe Vasquez, and Vasquez beat her again this November.
New Mexico has three Congressional districts, and the 2nd basically covers the State’s southern half. The redistricters simply removed some rural Republican counties in the northeastern corner of the 2nd and added them to the Democratic district to the north, and then tool some southern Albuquerque-area precincts away from the other Democrat-held district and add them to the 2nd CD. Easy peasy.
I’m not sure any other Democratic legislatures did differently last cycle.* New York Democrats tried to gerrymander their state much as Illinois Democrats had, but unlike Illinois’ supreme court, New York’s threw out the map and a special master redrew the map in a way favoring Republicans in the 2022 midterms.
Last year Albany Democrats tried to take another bite at the redistricting apple. That’s too a long a story to recount here but the result was some minor adjustments to the 2022 map. I think the Dems flipped two New York seats last month.
* Virginia Democrats passed on a gerrymandering opportunity in 2021 when some of our General Assembly members joined Republicans voting to put a proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot a second time. It passed two to one, and created an independent redistricting commision. There ensued another long story, the upshot being a D7-R4 Congressional delegation going into the midterms coming out 6D-5R, after Elaine Luria lost her seat anchored in Virginia Beach.
General Assembly Democrats definitely could have protected Rep. Elaine Luria’s 2nd CD seat that year had they rejected the amendment in 2021. The legislature had passed it with a solid Democratic majority the first time, in 2019.
Some Dems claimed we could have cinched an 8-3 majority with an aggressive gerrymander, but they never produced the map to demonstrate this. A safe 7D, R-4 resuklt would have been easy though.
Colorado Democrats also passed up a gerrymandering opportunity when they voted in an independent redistricting committee.
TONYG
@Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin): That sounds about right! I was 17 years old (a new driver but years away from becoming a car owner) when the 1973 “oil crisis” convinced many Americans to buy those weird Japanese cars with their good fuel economy. It was a few years after that, that the fuel economy and general engineering of American cars started to improve.
TONYG
@Chris: Ha. My Amish anecdote: About eight years ago, I worked for a couple of years in Reading, Pennsylvania, a real rust-belt city. A few miles out of the city was Amish country — women in bonnets, horses and buggies, the whole nine yards. I would often visit one the Amish farm stands to buy their great fruits and vegetables. The women in bonnets were using cell phones and credit-card-processing devices. Very selective technology rules!
thalarctosMaritimus
@ArchTeryx: whenever you’re ready to tell that story, this Alabaman would be eager to hear it.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
Living here in CO, I voted for the independent redistricting commission when it was on a state-wide ballot in 2018.
It’s probably as good as one will get but again, some of the criteria compete against each other, thus, the Commission clearly sacrifices some for others. For example, one criteria is Maximize Competitive Districts and they did no such thing. The created 4 solid (D) districts, 3 solid (R) districts and one competitive one.
If they wanted to maximize competitive districts, they’d need to violate another criteria, Compact As Reasonably Possible.
Basically, they wanted to come up with a way to basically split the state’s Congressional delegation as close to 50/50 as they could. Given the nature of the Commission, that’s not surprising.
TONYG
@Omnes Omnibus: That’s right. I’m remembering the ancient era when most cars had manual transmissions.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
I remember hearing someone say, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” and that is true for me.
Citizen Alan
@Matt McIrvin: i get on average 33 mpg to the gallon with a honda hybrid suv. I do very little driving and have to fill up my tank roughly once a month. And I still kind of regret getting the suv instead of a hybrid sedan like an accord or something that gets 50+ mpg.
Kayla Rudbek
@cgerrib: exactly. When I retire, I want to be able to access good medical care, vegan substitutions for dairy products and eggs, a decent to great library, and cycling friendly culture. I probably have another 20 years to go until then, but if current trends continue who knows what will happen.
Citizen Alan
@catclub: the thing I dislike the most about fresno is that it is a medium-sized city (pop. 500k, 39th largest city in the country) that aspires to be a “small town.” Friends i’ve made out here are continually astonished when I mentioned that my hometown had a population of 7000 and there were 120 people in my graduating hs class.
Citizen Alan
@TBone: i would rather die.
Ruckus
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Also, as the big cities grew part of that growth was people moving to where there was more than miles of farmland or miles of nothing. Remember that TV used to be much better around big cities, food choices were better, more opportunities existed. Small town life is fine, if you fit in and if your needs are met. Take those away and it’s just not fine for many people. As an old I see the change in life, in some ways dramatic and some ways small. But a small town would be the last place that change might happen. Do you wear glasses? Does your small town have an optometrist? Or do you have to travel 2 or 3 hrs to get a replacement if your’s break? Just one point of what a small town can cost. Now maybe some of that is less of an issue now because of population growth, and modern package delivery but it’s likely still some level of issue.
StringOnAStick
We moved to a smaller town From the Colorado Front Range region just over 4 years ago; the differential in home prices had a lot to do with it but because we moved to an area well on its way to being a tourist area and Mecca for sporty retirees, the cost of housing is now almost as high as where we moved from. I absolutely love Bend and it’s the blueberry in the tomato soup of central Oregon. I venture to say that’s a big part of why this town is growing so fast. The city has pushed for in-fill development so 1 acre lots are being converted to 6 homes at an amazing pace. Traffic is significantly higher than it was when we moved here, but so are the efforts to create more bikeways and walkable neighbourhoods.
One thing I’ve never experienced before is how incredibly friendly our neighbourhood has been from Day 1. We’re tight enough with the gay couple behind us that when we cooperated on replacing the fence between us, we added a gate. We have good friends next to them, and also next to us. Twice a year on each solstice there’s a block party (with Solo fire pits in the winter) and a huge July 4 potluck. It’s frickin’ Mayberry RFD, and it’s because the neighbours are over 80% D. The town is a positive, growing place because the people moving here are typically fairly well off D’s as well, and generally it’s a place accepting of and has a positive attitude about diversity, though the cost of living here is definitely a drag on that. I’m glad to be on the left coast even if it’s a few mountain passes away.
RevRick
@TONYG: Are you sure they were actually Amish or were they Mennonites? The actual name of the Amish is Old Order Mennonite. They are the most conservative of the Mennonites.
Non-Amish Mennonites drive cars and use electricity, and the women dress as you describe, though some Mennonites used to paint their chrome bumpers black as a way of expressing their devotion to “plain living.”
Ruckus
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
All of this but also.
We live a completely different life today than even only 75 yrs ago. Back then you almost had to live around where there was some sort of store to buy things you couldn’t make or grow. Take something like cars. Making anything out of metal (something I did most of my working life) changed so much since WWII that if you brought back a 50 yr old machinist born in 1900 he wouldn’t recognize anything more than the shape of some of the machines. Computers. More machines have one and are run by programing than even 25-30 yrs ago. The accuracy that can be maintained consistently would be dumbfounding to that 50 yr old. The things that can be done and done repeatedly part in part out is amazing, even to this person who’s last part I made 3 yrs ago had a tolerance of 25 millionths of an inch. And it was rather easy to hold that on every one. That’s progress. And many parts of life are affected in a similar manner. Even healthcare, medicine in general, has improved dramatically in my lifetime. What can be done for you today is so much more, so much better. How many homes 75 yrs ago didn’t have a phone? How many people today don’t carry a phone with them everywhere? And if you were an early adopter of cell phones, tell me how much better they are and how much better do they work? I was an early customer and I can tell you that there is an entire world of difference. That’s one device. Is your new car better than a 30 yr old one was new? The answer is HELL YES. A 50 yr old one? After they both have 4 wheels – freaking everything/in every way. Do they cost more? Not near as much as may be thought if you do a complete comparison. Ever buy a radio, 65-75 yrs ago? Did you buy a TV in that time frame? Pure, absolute crap compared to today. Electronics then had vacuum tubes with test machines and tubes sold in grocery stores. And all in B&W. Is there a drive in movie your town? None in mine. I get a better view in my front room today. How about a movie theater? I’ll stop here….. I could go on.
All of this is my point, life may be life but how we live it has changed dramatically in the lifetime of seniors alive today.
Ksmiami
@Matt McIrvin: I do think obviously that technology and UBI will have a huge role to play, but in my darker moments, I realize that the future world will necessarily be lower population. Humanity is simply at its peak- ish population mark
emjayay
@Another Scott: The last time gas prices were about 30 cents a gallon was in 1968. That’s equal to $2.78 today. I saw gas for $2.49 in the Midwest a couple weeks ago. Right now gas prices in Brooklyn NY where I live are as low as $2.77, and stations right near me are at $2.90 to $3.10.
Geminid
@RevRick: There are a lot of Mennonites living in the Shenandoah Valley. Back in the 1970s, my friend Ricky was attending a community college near Harrisonburg and made friends with a Mennonite student. One day Ricky’s friend said, “Come out to the parking lot, I want to show you something.”
It was his new “muscle car.” Ricky asked him, “You’re allowed to have this?”
The young Mennonite replied, “As long as it doesn’t have chrome.”
Ruckus
@emjayay:
I worked in a 76 gas station in SoCal in 1966 and 1967 and gas prices were $.35-.45/gal. It could be bought slightly cheaper in an off brand station. So $.30/gal was around. If I remember correctly other states/areas had cheaper gas.
Do remember that everything was cheaper – but. Minimum wage was a lot less, food was cheaper, EVERYTHING was cheaper. Now in ratio of income to costs, it really wasn’t a lot different than now. When I started working in that gas station minimum wage was $1.25 and it went up in 1967 to $1.40, in 1968 to $1.60 and in 1974 it went up to $2.00/hour. First new car I bought was in 1968 and it cost $2400.
Chris T.
@TONYG:
People started buying small Japanese cars because of the gasoline issues (starting around 1973, but it took a while for the car mix to change over) and in the process discovered how horrible the American cars were. This forced the US manufacturers to “up their game”, as it were.
The funny thing about this is that the impressive manufacturing practices coming out of Japan at this time were the result of the Japanese taking the US research on “how to run heavy industries reliably” to heart, while the poor ones from the US were from the US management ignoring the research. It turns out that if you follow good science, you get good results. Who would have ever imagined?
spirilis
@Melancholy Jaques:
Probably about the same as have read Cadillac Desert.😉👍See you in Phoenix