4 ms·

Could you be specific about how the urban population is subsidizing the rural? Also, where does most of your food come from? What do you mean in regards to CO2

Could you be specific about how the urban population is subsidizing the rural? Also, where does most of your food come from? What do you mean in regards to CO2? I'd suggest that many people living a rural lifestyle completely offset their CO2 footprint due to carbon sequestration. I know I have enough trees and vegetation on my acreage to completely offset my carbon emissions. But, of course, to counter your argument I really only need to offset the extra emissions that come with driving an extra n miles into the city.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
paulmd 4y ago
[flagged]
- dang 4y ago
  You posted this comment once, it was flagged by users, and you deleted it. If your intention was to post a new version that didn't break the site guidelines, I think that's probably ok (albeit borderline). But in that case you should have removed this too: > Love the "gosh if you want to eat we need to fund lifestyle ruralism with billions of dollars of infrastructure annually" whataboutism, like that's supposed to be some kind of a gotcha That's obviously against the site guidelines. Please make your substantive points without doing that in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- _ktx2 4y ago
  Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some. > There's a lot of miles of power lines and roads for what is, in the end, maybe 10k people in that county outside the cities/towns. Power plants are (mostly) created in rural areas, so your argument is a bit backwards: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in-the-united-states/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in... Your story that the last miles are costing us an arm and leg don't really hold up to comprehensive analysis: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-electric-grids-cost-in-2-charts/#:~:text=First%2C%20administrative%20costs%20are%20more%20than%20a%20third,per%20kWh%20have%20increased%20significantly%20in%20recent%20years https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec.... The tldr of this is that the higher number of connections to the energy grid, the higher the cost of the grid. It doesn't really matter how you distribute them. > But we don't need to be encouraging "lifestyle ruralism". That's extremely infrastructure-heavy and it's absolutely true that people living in, say, Mikado MI (pop 899) or along one of the state highways out there are using disproportionate amount of infrastructure funding relative to the number of actual people there. I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. My water was drawn from a well into a community water storage tank that was then pumped to the local community. This was repeated all through that area. Water, in this case, was a co-op as well as energy. Sewage was done on-site; I had an aerobic septic system. For all intents and purposes, with respect to the angle of your argument, the footprint of my town was miniscule compared to a city. More anecdotally, when I worked for a water startup we had a way easier time getting into rural areas because many of them had never had public water infrastructure.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    > classless Uncivil, violates site rules. You can express yourself without putdowns. > I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some. Eh, rather dismissive yourself. > I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. How many miles of roads and power lines in your rural area, divided across how many people? Again, I very clearly expressed what I meant by "infrastructure heavy", but with you self-admittedly not really being a full and fair participant in the discussion, I can see why you might have some confusion. > Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. The saying goes that people use the "downvote" like a "disagree" button and when it comes to political debates people use the "flag" button like an "I really really disagree" button. If I don't see a particular reason a post is flagged then yeah, I don't really have a problem with recreating it. I shouldn't be suppressed by average users for expressing a well-reasoned argument they disagree with, nor censured for a single disagreeable line. Even you yourself cannot avoid technical violations of the site rules, your comment itself is violating the same rules to the same extent as mine. Realistically, that rule is a "please", as I've been repeatedly told when I point out violations of it, and virtually every comment has something that someone can be offended about. I'm not going out and attacking people here, it's just a "jaywalking" violation that everyone does and people fall back on when they're losing an argument. The strictest interpretation of the rule essentially forbids any sort of "active-voice" argument that's strong enough to make a positive point (because someone can ALWAYS find be offended by any positive point) and that's incredibly harmful to discourse. If you have a problem, call it out specifically, or get dang, otherwise if people don't bother replying and are just using flags as a way to suppress opinions they disagree with then yeah, I don't really care and I'm not going to be suppressed just because of some meta-gaming from people who disagree with me so little that they can't even reply. Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community and doesn't belong here either. If you have nothing to say, don't post at all, but "cheerleading" is not constructive or beneficial to the discourse here at all. Spirit of the rules vs text of the rules, my fellow. Your comment violates the textual rules. Actually your post attacks me as an individual, so in that sense it's really kinda worse, isn't it? And on the flip side, I was dismissive of an argument in a single line of a 3000 character comment. Oh no.
Panzer04 4y ago
It's not an offset if it would have been that way anyway - In other words, you owning/living in a rural area does nothing extra to offset carbon emissions, because that rural area would have offset it regardless. The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered. Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense. I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

paulmd 4y ago

[flagged]

dang 4y ago
You posted this comment once, it was flagged by users, and you deleted it. If your intention was to post a new version that didn't break the site guidelines, I think that's probably ok (albeit borderline). But in that case you should have removed this too: > Love the "gosh if you want to eat we need to fund lifestyle ruralism with billions of dollars of infrastructure annually" whataboutism, like that's supposed to be some kind of a gotcha That's obviously against the site guidelines. Please make your substantive points without doing that in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- aaaddaaaaa1112 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
_ktx2 4y ago
Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some. > There's a lot of miles of power lines and roads for what is, in the end, maybe 10k people in that county outside the cities/towns. Power plants are (mostly) created in rural areas, so your argument is a bit backwards: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in-the-united-states/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-every-power-plant-in... Your story that the last miles are costing us an arm and leg don't really hold up to comprehensive analysis: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-electric-grids-cost-in-2-charts/#:~:text=First%2C%20administrative%20costs%20are%20more%20than%20a%20third,per%20kWh%20have%20increased%20significantly%20in%20recent%20years https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/the-u-s-elec.... The tldr of this is that the higher number of connections to the energy grid, the higher the cost of the grid. It doesn't really matter how you distribute them. > But we don't need to be encouraging "lifestyle ruralism". That's extremely infrastructure-heavy and it's absolutely true that people living in, say, Mikado MI (pop 899) or along one of the state highways out there are using disproportionate amount of infrastructure funding relative to the number of actual people there. I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. My water was drawn from a well into a community water storage tank that was then pumped to the local community. This was repeated all through that area. Water, in this case, was a co-op as well as energy. Sewage was done on-site; I had an aerobic septic system. For all intents and purposes, with respect to the angle of your argument, the footprint of my town was miniscule compared to a city. More anecdotally, when I worked for a water startup we had a way easier time getting into rural areas because many of them had never had public water infrastructure.
- paulmd 4y ago
  > classless Uncivil, violates site rules. You can express yourself without putdowns. > I'm not going to respond to all of the points that you raised that I think are false or misleading, but I'll respond to some. Eh, rather dismissive yourself. > I grew up near rural areas and lived in one for a bit. I don't know what "infrastructure heavy" you're talking about. How many miles of roads and power lines in your rural area, divided across how many people? Again, I very clearly expressed what I meant by "infrastructure heavy", but with you self-admittedly not really being a full and fair participant in the discussion, I can see why you might have some confusion. > Recreating your post after it was flagged and dead is classless. I'm surprised someone did this so brazenly. The saying goes that people use the "downvote" like a "disagree" button and when it comes to political debates people use the "flag" button like an "I really really disagree" button. If I don't see a particular reason a post is flagged then yeah, I don't really have a problem with recreating it. I shouldn't be suppressed by average users for expressing a well-reasoned argument they disagree with, nor censured for a single disagreeable line. Even you yourself cannot avoid technical violations of the site rules, your comment itself is violating the same rules to the same extent as mine. Realistically, that rule is a "please", as I've been repeatedly told when I point out violations of it, and virtually every comment has something that someone can be offended about. I'm not going out and attacking people here, it's just a "jaywalking" violation that everyone does and people fall back on when they're losing an argument. The strictest interpretation of the rule essentially forbids any sort of "active-voice" argument that's strong enough to make a positive point (because someone can ALWAYS find be offended by any positive point) and that's incredibly harmful to discourse. If you have a problem, call it out specifically, or get dang, otherwise if people don't bother replying and are just using flags as a way to suppress opinions they disagree with then yeah, I don't really care and I'm not going to be suppressed just because of some meta-gaming from people who disagree with me so little that they can't even reply. Similarly, I find your "won't respond to the comment because I disagree with it" against the spirit of this community and doesn't belong here either. If you have nothing to say, don't post at all, but "cheerleading" is not constructive or beneficial to the discourse here at all. Spirit of the rules vs text of the rules, my fellow. Your comment violates the textual rules. Actually your post attacks me as an individual, so in that sense it's really kinda worse, isn't it? And on the flip side, I was dismissive of an argument in a single line of a 3000 character comment. Oh no.

Panzer04 4y ago

It's not an offset if it would have been that way anyway - In other words, you owning/living in a rural area does nothing extra to offset carbon emissions, because that rural area would have offset it regardless. The infrastructure-to-population cost ratio of urban areas is way, way higher than rural areas. A meter of footpath, road or sewer in a city is reused by (just spitballing numbers) 10x as many people compared to a suburb, and probably 100x vs a rural area. Infrastructure is just much cheaper in cities relative to the served population, because so much less land area needs to be covered. Since people generally pay the same taxes no matter where they live, the net result is cities generally fund a lot of infrastructure for other areas, as they are so much more efficient. There's nothing necessarily wrong with this for genuinely rural areas - we do need farms etc, so infrastructure built to serve them is well spent. The issue arises when we sprawl with suburbs, as they don't serve any particular purpose that couldn't be fulfilled by a dense city, but cost much more in terms of infrastructure expense. I have no problem with people living in suburbs, so long as they bear most of the cost of living that lifestyle, rather than dense urban areas funding them.