From what I can see, the standard new vehicle for the American Man is a lifted 4-door pick up truck, and these can achieve maybe 17-18MPG on a good highway day. But a green light means go and many of these men push the throttle to the floor to see how many people they can wake up with their exhaust.
I'm half joking here, but having a massive lifted vehicle has become a part of masculine identity in the country at a really bad time, and these people could size down just a little to even a Jeep and do better on fuel bills. I'm not even suggesting to ditch the truck! Just save it for the weekends and the mudding trips.
Not sure why this was downvoted. My Jeep gets much worse mileage than my RAM. Even my GF’s stock two door consumes more than my truck.
(You’ve probably seen the memes re Wranglers being less aerodynamic than cows and lobsters. They are wheeled boxes, horrible for wind resistance. Add lift, armour, and a few other things, and mileage goes from bad to terrible.)
That’s a rather poor assumption that every large or lifted vehicle has a modified exhaust system. The article is about inflation and fuel prices, but I assure you nobody is moving from rural to urban and expecting _less_ noise.
Correct. The availability of cheap credit + higher than normal resale values for vehicles of late has led to a situation where people are overextending themselves and buying vehicles that cost 80% or more of their yearly income in order to "keep up with the Joneses". I know some people in this situation, and their ability to afford $600/mo payments (plus insurance, plus gas, plus maintenance) is leading them to actually do less: fewer outings, fewer trips, less expenditure elsewhere, perhaps no summer camp for the kids, etc.
America badly needs a return to the much lighter S-10 and Ranger of the past, with a 4-banger and a small back seat. These behemoths with V8s are not necessary for most people, and neither is the level of temporary luxury they convey. Let's face it: after a couple years your shiny new truck is just as noteworthy as every other truck on the road, which is to say, most people don't care about it / aren't impressed by it anyway.
Bigger vehicles pollute more (engine, brake/tire particulates, and both engine and tire noise), the design and poor handling ensures that crashes are more likely and more lethal when they happen, and the size means that the median driver has issues fitting their vehicle in standard lanes and parking spaces. I live in a city where many ostensibly two-lane streets are now one-lane because oversized vehicles are so common.
> Bigger vehicles pollute more (engine, brake/tire particulates, and both engine and tire noise)
That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
they also drive like fucking assholes, wear down the roads more, and make driving significantly less safe for everyone, especially the pedestrians who are unfortunate enough to be around them.
> That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
More work you say? Great! It's odd that all the big lifted trucks I see are never hauling anything. It's almost like most of the people who drive them just like having a big truck and don't have any actual need for it.
Blame your state DOT. Those trucks pay much more in taxes based upon their gross weight rating when they tow/haul. Costs of doing business.
> all the big lifted trucks I see
Nobody lifts a truck conspicuously to do more work, this somewhat compromises the suspension’s ability to handle load. A lot more people would know this if they knew anything, other than some anecdotes, about the topic they want to regulate.
> Nobody lifts a truck conspicuously to do more work, this somewhat compromises the suspension’s ability to handle load. A lot more people would know this if they knew anything, other than some anecdotes, about the topic they want to regulate.
This seems very confused: nobody in this thread is talking about people who are actually hauling heavy loads. It’s about the people who buy a huge truck and use it as their daily driver but never use the full bed capacity except going to Costco/Walmart.
You seem to be arguing under the assumption that every truck in existence is "working" 100% of the time, and that no one buys trucks unless they need them for work. This is not the case. If a job requires a truck, so be it. I'm not that naive. But what I, as well as the rest of the people you're responding to, are arguing is that there are a lot of people who buy trucks just because they're "masculine", and that it doesn't make economic sense.
Doesn't seem like the person you're responding to is talking about vehicles "hauling crops" - rather, the lifted "rolling coal" vehicles that have been an integral part of rural masculine culture for some time now.
Anecdotally, I haven’t seen a diesel that dumps soot in a long time. It would seem the kids with deleted emissions systems and smoke tunes have given up near me. Sorry this small group has affected your perception of the proper use case and larger group.
Can you provide any kind of source on the "proper use case" and "the larger group"? It would be nice to have something to reference other than your personal anecdotes :^)
That’s not a strange way to say something, it’s not the same idea. A bigger vehicle always costs more - you have more mass to move, stop, and many parts need to be stronger for those reasons.
That can be justified if you actually need to do something which a smaller vehicle cannot do - nobody expects a cattle rancher to pull a trailer behind a Prius! - but the vast majority of the larger vehicles Americans are buying will never be used for something which requires that extra capacity. The extra bling added to justify those price tags makes them worse for the ostensible reasons people buy them, too - who’s going off-roading with premium rims and delicate flair?
This is the classic externality problem: people are buying massive trucks and SUVs for emotional support reasons which would be an amusing personality trait except that they’ve reversed a half century of road safety improvements and the pollution they generate affects billions of people other than the buyers.
> It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
This similarly is arguing against a different point: my statement was simple fact - bigger vehicles pollute more, no matter whether that’s a large EV full of batteries or an oversized truck.
This is a famous drawback to EVs, along with the CO2 used to create them and the mining for battery components, and one reason why both environmentalists and urbanists are careful to say that the future should be more transit, bikes/scooters/etc., and walking because the model of everyone driving themselves everywhere in a private vehicle is inherently unsustainable. EVs solve the downsides of cars the same way that methadone solves opiate addiction.
> > more likely and more lethal when they happen
> Those also pay more for insurance.
Again, this isn’t the point. Insurance can’t resurrect a dead person and it pays nowhere near the cost of lifetime impacts for people who are seriously injured. If they’re lucky, victims will get enough to pay for their immediate medical bills - the rest, often majority, of the cost is fobbed off to society just like all of the other negative externalities of driving.
Maybe 5-10% of the big trucks I see in and around Dallas, Texas, are doing anything that requires a truck. The rest are smooth and shiny, with empty beds, sometimes lifted, sometimes not, sometimes with garish aftermarket lighting, sometimes not, but empty beds and with usually one person in them.
I've got no problem with the landscapers and plumbers and electricians and farmers and so on getting a truck to support their work. They're paying the price, and they're relying on what the trucks can do for them.
I've got a problem with the 90% use case in my area, which is unsafe drivers driving unsafe vehicles unsafely, apparently for the image.
As European, I always failed to see what is the use of a pickup truck. In Europe noone use them, we are using van like the Sprinter / Iveco daily. If your trade needs a flatbed you buy a sprinter with flatbed. They can also pull a trailer if you need.
But mostly they are used by all trades in their normal design (box).
Also, they don't consume a lot (7l/100km).
So what are pickup truck used that cannot be done by a sprinter?
About half of the pictures of Sprinters with flatbeds that I saw on [1] have added side walls. I guess their owners found some use for a pickup so they made their own.
Between the two designs, I'd rather have a pickup. With a flatbed, I'd worry about things rolling/blowing off.
The fuel consumption is a separate issue; there are pickups that get good mileage. But that was (until recently) less of a concern in America because we had lower gas prices (and for the most part, the people who buy pickups don't worry about climate change).
The sidewall are there to hold the load, you need also to secure the load by attaching it. Moreover they come with tilting mechanism to unload (sidewise or back wise). This I think is not possible with a pickup truck.
It is very useful when you destroy a wall, you can haul the brick to the junkyard, or if you bring sand in bulk for building a wall.
This comment seems to be full of callous hatred and prejudice. Sure there are exceptions, but for fucks sake, go to the country side once in a while. Do a trip this upcoming weekend.
I’m not sure what you consider country but this seems pretty accurate based on my recent experiences. There were a lot of $60+k vanity trucks in pristine condition - along with sensible vehicles and a handful of trucks which were actually being used as designed - and it was quite noticeable compared to the same areas a few years prior to the pandemic. I don’t know who needs an $86k (not a joke - I checked) pickup truck to make a fashion statement but I have a strong suspicion that they’re also the kind of people who complain loudly when gas goes up $0.50/gallon.
Maybe you stopped by a small town bar and concluded from what’s parked outside.
Either way, HN has a serious delusion about rural life and while it is ok to make observations, HN tends to infuse those opinions with condescension and prejudice.
It happens every time we have a discussion about trucks.
> Maybe you stopped by a small town bar and concluded from what’s parked outside.
Maybe you’re feeling defensive and are trying to ignore a well-documented change in buying habits. It’s not a secret that people are buying high-margin vanity trucks at unprecedented numbers - there’s even something of a spike in used sales for the kind of smaller pickup trucks which used to be ubiquitous because they’re cheaper to operate and fit in crowded spaces. I’m thinking of the Datsun my grandparents used for their camper which got close to 30mpg on the highway and carried at least as much cargo as I see on easily 75% of the 15mpg vanity trucks.
I grew up in a rural town that’s primary exports were dairy, corn, and tobacco. I think you might need to visit a rural town and look around if you never noticed the cosplay farmers who didn’t ranch or farm but kept up the appearances.
Did you not have people constantly getting ragged on in high school for “being a pussy” if you didn’t drive a pickup?
As someone who grew up in the country and now lives in NYC, this is about as out of touch as the takes I used to hear back home about how city people must live.
Growing up, my Dad couldn’t have been more proud of his F-150, not because of whatever testosterone fuelled fantasy you’re talking about, but because it meant we could pull city people out of the ditch when they came down our closed road in the wintertime. He never accepted any money from them either, but it made his day whenever someone knocked on our door and he got to bundle up and go out in the snow to help them out.
Just a reminder that there are millions of very real rural Americans out there who are nothing like the stereotype you described but would still gladly go out of their way to help you, despite your seemingly low opinion of them.
You've been to Austin? How dare you not say "hello" and yet notice all of the dnrgy (small D energy) burning ancient biomass, increasing global warming, adding unnecessary microfines to the air, contributing to noise pollution, and increasing Earth's entropy faster! :) They did, however, get to shout "first" at the next stop light to idle their diesel, glass-packs-enabled tank that also does Jake Braking to that next light as efficiently expensive as possible.
Can you cite any sources that confirm what you assert? Anecdotally, I have lived on a farm and my experience contradicts everything you mentioned, except possibly education (but I don't have children, so I wouldn't really know).
Dubar's number suggests that there's a limit to how many deep meaningful friendships/relationships one person can have so living in cities of millions isn't really something anyone needs. As for income it's all abstract. True, rural areas don't provide complex services like software that facilitates the integration of two other softwares to generate paper GDP points, but they make food. Rural areas can exist without cities but cities can't exist without rural areas.
Living in a bigger city doesn't mean more friends necessarily, it means more diverse friend groups which small towns seriously lack. They tend to have a monoculture.
Sure, if you're looking for anecdotal data I can provide some. I don't know about 'more', but I'd argue it was definitely not 'less' social.
I can't speak to the income stuff because I also worked remote during this time, but I will say there were less divisions along economic lines out there than there are in the city, for sure. People share meat and produce with each other regardless of whether they are pulling in a bay-area tech salary or they are working HVAC for the county. We're more similar than you think around a bonfire or with fishing poles in our hands.
I live in a city now so these thoughts are comparing some of my experiences in both places:
- I spent more time with my neighbors helping each other, sitting around a fire, cooking and sharing food than I do in the city.
- seasonal help was much more of a thing in the country - we'd help each other every spring with brush clearing and burning, fall harvests, culling and processing.
- I'd go to bars just as much as I would here in town, and there was a coffeeshop from which I'd work (though much more rarely compared to now).
- We'd drive in to town to go to sporting events or concerts together, like I drive across town now for the same thing with my friends.
- we'd go hunting/fishing together, I guess sort of like I'd go paddling boarding here in town.
- volunteering and charity work was very different - you'd mostly go directly help whoever needed help; there weren't as much donation drives or petitions signed.
In coming up with that little list it occurred to me that just like in a city there are people that stay to themselves, there's definitely folks in the rural areas that do that also. It might vary so much from person to person that it's not a good comparison to make between rural/urban environments.
The farm has less overall "social points", but if you subtract the antisocial behaviors your are subject to in many cities the rural areas can come out ahead.
Take all the interesting subway conversations you have had on one hand, then subtract all the times you have smelled human urine or stepped over a heroin needle.
> This attitude about rural life coming from city folk is almost infantilizing.
I grew up in rural PA. I'm not city folk, I chopped wood and raised livestock. I walked though the woods with my dog after school every day. I got third place in the county youth skeet shooting competition when I was 14. Half my friends were Pennsylvania Dutch. I live close enough to NY and Philly to have spent a lot of time there. I live in the suburbs now but I'm moving out as fast as I can now that my career is established and I can work remotely.
It's ok if you like living in a city, I'm not stopping you but it isn't for me.
It's just dishonest for you to pretend like cities are the source of problems, and not -people-. I'm assuming your village never had any issues with elders being bigoted or sexually exploitative? Cities are no less pious than the country to me.
What I find interesting is that you're in the suburbs: the worst of both worlds. Suburbs were truly designed by a demon, in my mind.
People are the problem that's why I don't want to be a city.
Let's say 1% of people are antisocial assholes, in a city that's tens of assholes within a 5 minute walk from your door. In a rural area that's less than 1 asshole per ten square miles.
In a rural area if your neighbor likes loud drum and bass music, you learn that if he invites you over. In NYC, you learn that your neighbor is a chain smoker as you are moving in.
Rural areas limit both total assholes in a area and the asshole blast radius.
As for the suburbs, I only moved here to work. Thanks to Covid I now have a choice where I live and I prefer the countryside.
Frankly you should be happy people want to live in the middle of nowhere, rents are high as it is.
Starlink and remote work is really opening up parts of the country that weren't possible to live in before. The middle of PA is gorgeous and dirt cheap. People moving to rural areas from the city seem to want to be relatively close to it so I say let them drive up your property values and you can live in a mansion on twice the acreage in a few years.
* The per-capita drug use rates are significantly higher in rural areas.
* Cities absolutely are greener, as their total energy consumption per capita is orders lower than rural areas. People drive less in cities, way more public transit is used etc. etc.
I like cities, but I never see the urbanists talk about the housing for a large family in the city, I guess Japan is different in this regard where each family still gets their own house. Only thing being built near me is 2-BR apartments with crummy balconies.
Per capita murder rates and robbery rates are much higher in cities. All of the most dangerous places in the US are mid to large cities. Detroit, Baltimore, St Louis etc and it's been that way for decades.
A couple of things off the cuff, but economies of scale affect infrastructure costs, so centralized areas take far less money per person to operate. For example, a dozen busses provide much better return on investment in an urban area than suburban or rural because they can each complete a single route quickly and service more people per mile and thus you have service every 10-15 minutes. When you spread those same busses out over a larger, less dense, area you have much longer between stops and far fewer people to use them for the same cost.
Water, sewer, electrical, communications all scale better with more dense living as well. Bigger pipes are far cheaper than much longer runs.
Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961508
I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.
> A couple of things off the cuff, but economies of scale affect infrastructure costs, so centralized areas take far less money per person to operate. For example, a dozen busses provide much better return on investment in an urban area than suburban or rural because they can each complete a single route quickly and service more people per mile and thus you have service every 10-15 minutes. When you spread those same busses out over a larger, less dense, area you have much longer between stops and far fewer people to use them for the same cost. Water, sewer, electrical, communications all scale better with more dense living as well. Bigger pipes are far cheaper than much longer runs. Suburbia is Subsidized: Here's the Math - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31961508
I can't and won't disagree with what you're saying. If we're talking about how much money it costs to bring services out to rural areas, you're 100% correct. However, I'm not sure what your point is, because rural folks also pay taxes for services, like urban residents. It makes total sense to me that a concentration of people paying taxes for the cost of services to serve the entire city/county/state would of course be paying more than necessary for those services if they excluded rural citizens from those services. The grandparent didn't mention anything like this though, except maying saying "cheaper" (but I took that to mean day-to-day life honestly):
> Cities are cheaper, safer, greener, more social, places to live with higher incomes, better educational and health outcomes. We need to stop subsidising rural under performance.
I agree this is super complicated! Anecdotally I felt much safer when I lived rurally. I have experienced unsafe situations more than a handful of times since being back in the city. That's not real data, just a single data point from my experience though.
> I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.
I don't disagree - rural communities tend to monocultures and some of the social activities are hard to do out there. Other activities are much easier though: bonfires, hunting, fishing, harvesting, etc. The same way some folks might go to a book club to discuss a sci-fi novel they are reading, my neighbors and I went to a fence-building workshop on the weekends to learn about building better fences that involved erecting livestock fence on a pasture. Definitely wouldn't have the interest or ability to do that in a city.
And you would like these people to work in complete isolation?
Or is it okay if there are people in rural areas living near them?
And you're completely ignoring that just because someone works in agriculture they still need services like car mechanics barbers etc etc The actual number of people who work in agriculture if you include all those is considerably higher.
> Cities live on the backs of rural people and it's time to stop subsidizing them and send some of that money to the rural communities.
Cities subsidize rural areas fiscally, look at the tax base in a city, and a rural area. Suburban US by the way is the most subsidized part of the country, BTW. StrongTowns has published an enormous amount of work in this arena.
And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning through money in services but they don't actually produce most of the things that they use.
So yeah if you look just at dollars, cities produce more. But they would fail utterly without the rural areas, I don't think cities give enough credit to that.
Strong towns is very myopic in what they focus on. They are not considering the second order of effects of things like reducing the scale of the interstate system.
Really not getting into anything that looks like a flame-war here, the obvious solution is a better balance between everyone not a who is better argument but rural areas often are more heavily subsidized per capita and do not have the same economic generators that cities do. None of that is to say urban is more important or rural is more important. Statements like where do you think all the people who actually make things live undervalues the absolutely essential interdependence between urban and rural areas.
From the massive and increasingly automated mega farms that don’t need the support of rust belt and country towns full of the impoverished or people choosing a rural lifestyle for cultural reasons
They fulfill the most basic need of the population : they produce food eaten in the city. Noone cares about your programming skills when there is no food.
> you are weak and antisocial so you are hiding. the rural people are the ones who are the parasites, in strict financial sense. they need more assistance then they contribute to the economy.
Luckily a "strict financial sense" doesn't really matter outside of theorizing on Internet forums. I am sincerely concerned about you if you honestly think what you said. I suspect you have never spent much time in a rural area and not ever talked with folks that live in rural areas.
That's probably how jehowah witnesses persuade newcomers to join the cause: "Our tight-knit communities are safer, greener, more social places to live. We need to stop subsidizing the sin thay corrupts men from within!"
>"They would love to work and get city wages, but they can't commute. It's too expensive with the gas prices. And really, the thing that's holding them back is the cost of homes."
>"Some people are contemplating moving closer to a city, moving to the suburbs, or moving to a small community 45 minutes from a city. So yeah, it will probably, if it continues, accelerate rural depopulation in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains."
Once again, the heart of the issue is the American commute.
This is kind of interesting: at the same time as white collar workers from the city are fleeing out towards the suburbs, you have blue collar workers feeling pressure to move towards the city.
I live in a rural area. I know NOBODY moving closer to the city. Exactly the opposite here. People are fleeing the Bay Area to my area and every single person I've met that has moved here, say it's because of crime and the high cost of living.
I read some of the other work put out by the author, Ben Abrams, as well as some of the work espoused by the expert referenced in the article, professor Dave Peters. Abrams appears to be a cookie cutter left leaning journalist that doesn't appear to have spent much time in rural America. Professor Peters is focused on "rural change".
I don't think either of these people really understand rural America and this feels like signaling rather than reporting.
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[ 0.68 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadTwo years ago no one was driving anywhere and the oil market was in a death spiral.
I'm half joking here, but having a massive lifted vehicle has become a part of masculine identity in the country at a really bad time, and these people could size down just a little to even a Jeep and do better on fuel bills. I'm not even suggesting to ditch the truck! Just save it for the weekends and the mudding trips.
It decides on its own, you can't do it manually.
It gets 22-23mpg on the (flat) highway.
(You’ve probably seen the memes re Wranglers being less aerodynamic than cows and lobsters. They are wheeled boxes, horrible for wind resistance. Add lift, armour, and a few other things, and mileage goes from bad to terrible.)
The noise OP mentioned is a real problem in some communities.
America badly needs a return to the much lighter S-10 and Ranger of the past, with a 4-banger and a small back seat. These behemoths with V8s are not necessary for most people, and neither is the level of temporary luxury they convey. Let's face it: after a couple years your shiny new truck is just as noteworthy as every other truck on the road, which is to say, most people don't care about it / aren't impressed by it anyway.
That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
> more likely and more lethal when they happen
Those also pay more for insurance.
> That’s a strange way of saying large vehicles are intended to do more work. I haven’t seen a Toyota Prius yet that can practically trailer a load of crops to market or carry construction equipment.
More work you say? Great! It's odd that all the big lifted trucks I see are never hauling anything. It's almost like most of the people who drive them just like having a big truck and don't have any actual need for it.
Blame your state DOT. Those trucks pay much more in taxes based upon their gross weight rating when they tow/haul. Costs of doing business.
> all the big lifted trucks I see
Nobody lifts a truck conspicuously to do more work, this somewhat compromises the suspension’s ability to handle load. A lot more people would know this if they knew anything, other than some anecdotes, about the topic they want to regulate.
This seems very confused: nobody in this thread is talking about people who are actually hauling heavy loads. It’s about the people who buy a huge truck and use it as their daily driver but never use the full bed capacity except going to Costco/Walmart.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rolling+coal&tbm=isch
That can be justified if you actually need to do something which a smaller vehicle cannot do - nobody expects a cattle rancher to pull a trailer behind a Prius! - but the vast majority of the larger vehicles Americans are buying will never be used for something which requires that extra capacity. The extra bling added to justify those price tags makes them worse for the ostensible reasons people buy them, too - who’s going off-roading with premium rims and delicate flair?
This is the classic externality problem: people are buying massive trucks and SUVs for emotional support reasons which would be an amusing personality trait except that they’ve reversed a half century of road safety improvements and the pollution they generate affects billions of people other than the buyers.
> It’s also strange to me someone would mention tire particulate pollution in a grand comparison. The EV poster children wear through tires quicker than their comparable gasoline counterparts—softer tire compounds (road noise reduction) and weight.
This similarly is arguing against a different point: my statement was simple fact - bigger vehicles pollute more, no matter whether that’s a large EV full of batteries or an oversized truck.
This is a famous drawback to EVs, along with the CO2 used to create them and the mining for battery components, and one reason why both environmentalists and urbanists are careful to say that the future should be more transit, bikes/scooters/etc., and walking because the model of everyone driving themselves everywhere in a private vehicle is inherently unsustainable. EVs solve the downsides of cars the same way that methadone solves opiate addiction.
> > more likely and more lethal when they happen > Those also pay more for insurance.
Again, this isn’t the point. Insurance can’t resurrect a dead person and it pays nowhere near the cost of lifetime impacts for people who are seriously injured. If they’re lucky, victims will get enough to pay for their immediate medical bills - the rest, often majority, of the cost is fobbed off to society just like all of the other negative externalities of driving.
I've got no problem with the landscapers and plumbers and electricians and farmers and so on getting a truck to support their work. They're paying the price, and they're relying on what the trucks can do for them.
I've got a problem with the 90% use case in my area, which is unsafe drivers driving unsafe vehicles unsafely, apparently for the image.
So what are pickup truck used that cannot be done by a sprinter?
Between the two designs, I'd rather have a pickup. With a flatbed, I'd worry about things rolling/blowing off.
The fuel consumption is a separate issue; there are pickups that get good mileage. But that was (until recently) less of a concern in America because we had lower gas prices (and for the most part, the people who buy pickups don't worry about climate change).
1: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=sprinter+with+flatbed&iax=i...
It is very useful when you destroy a wall, you can haul the brick to the junkyard, or if you bring sand in bulk for building a wall.
Either way, HN has a serious delusion about rural life and while it is ok to make observations, HN tends to infuse those opinions with condescension and prejudice.
It happens every time we have a discussion about trucks.
Maybe you’re feeling defensive and are trying to ignore a well-documented change in buying habits. It’s not a secret that people are buying high-margin vanity trucks at unprecedented numbers - there’s even something of a spike in used sales for the kind of smaller pickup trucks which used to be ubiquitous because they’re cheaper to operate and fit in crowded spaces. I’m thinking of the Datsun my grandparents used for their camper which got close to 30mpg on the highway and carried at least as much cargo as I see on easily 75% of the 15mpg vanity trucks.
Did you not have people constantly getting ragged on in high school for “being a pussy” if you didn’t drive a pickup?
Growing up, my Dad couldn’t have been more proud of his F-150, not because of whatever testosterone fuelled fantasy you’re talking about, but because it meant we could pull city people out of the ditch when they came down our closed road in the wintertime. He never accepted any money from them either, but it made his day whenever someone knocked on our door and he got to bundle up and go out in the snow to help them out.
Just a reminder that there are millions of very real rural Americans out there who are nothing like the stereotype you described but would still gladly go out of their way to help you, despite your seemingly low opinion of them.
I can't speak to the income stuff because I also worked remote during this time, but I will say there were less divisions along economic lines out there than there are in the city, for sure. People share meat and produce with each other regardless of whether they are pulling in a bay-area tech salary or they are working HVAC for the county. We're more similar than you think around a bonfire or with fishing poles in our hands.
I live in a city now so these thoughts are comparing some of my experiences in both places:
- I spent more time with my neighbors helping each other, sitting around a fire, cooking and sharing food than I do in the city. - seasonal help was much more of a thing in the country - we'd help each other every spring with brush clearing and burning, fall harvests, culling and processing. - I'd go to bars just as much as I would here in town, and there was a coffeeshop from which I'd work (though much more rarely compared to now). - We'd drive in to town to go to sporting events or concerts together, like I drive across town now for the same thing with my friends. - we'd go hunting/fishing together, I guess sort of like I'd go paddling boarding here in town. - volunteering and charity work was very different - you'd mostly go directly help whoever needed help; there weren't as much donation drives or petitions signed.
In coming up with that little list it occurred to me that just like in a city there are people that stay to themselves, there's definitely folks in the rural areas that do that also. It might vary so much from person to person that it's not a good comparison to make between rural/urban environments.
The farm has less overall "social points", but if you subtract the antisocial behaviors your are subject to in many cities the rural areas can come out ahead.
Take all the interesting subway conversations you have had on one hand, then subtract all the times you have smelled human urine or stepped over a heroin needle.
I can promise you that you'll find antisocial behaviors in rural America.
This attitude about rural life coming from city folk is almost infantilizing. Noble savages, the farmers are in your eyes.
I grew up in rural PA. I'm not city folk, I chopped wood and raised livestock. I walked though the woods with my dog after school every day. I got third place in the county youth skeet shooting competition when I was 14. Half my friends were Pennsylvania Dutch. I live close enough to NY and Philly to have spent a lot of time there. I live in the suburbs now but I'm moving out as fast as I can now that my career is established and I can work remotely.
It's ok if you like living in a city, I'm not stopping you but it isn't for me.
It's just dishonest for you to pretend like cities are the source of problems, and not -people-. I'm assuming your village never had any issues with elders being bigoted or sexually exploitative? Cities are no less pious than the country to me.
What I find interesting is that you're in the suburbs: the worst of both worlds. Suburbs were truly designed by a demon, in my mind.
Let's say 1% of people are antisocial assholes, in a city that's tens of assholes within a 5 minute walk from your door. In a rural area that's less than 1 asshole per ten square miles.
In a rural area if your neighbor likes loud drum and bass music, you learn that if he invites you over. In NYC, you learn that your neighbor is a chain smoker as you are moving in.
Rural areas limit both total assholes in a area and the asshole blast radius.
As for the suburbs, I only moved here to work. Thanks to Covid I now have a choice where I live and I prefer the countryside.
Frankly you should be happy people want to live in the middle of nowhere, rents are high as it is.
It's already started and I hate it.
* Cities absolutely are greener, as their total energy consumption per capita is orders lower than rural areas. People drive less in cities, way more public transit is used etc. etc.
I mean these are all obvious points now.
They are not obvious at all to me, someone who has lived extensively in both worlds.
Crime and violence rates similarly don't match up with what we might expect, though it's a complex topic. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.
I can't and won't disagree with what you're saying. If we're talking about how much money it costs to bring services out to rural areas, you're 100% correct. However, I'm not sure what your point is, because rural folks also pay taxes for services, like urban residents. It makes total sense to me that a concentration of people paying taxes for the cost of services to serve the entire city/county/state would of course be paying more than necessary for those services if they excluded rural citizens from those services. The grandparent didn't mention anything like this though, except maying saying "cheaper" (but I took that to mean day-to-day life honestly):
> Cities are cheaper, safer, greener, more social, places to live with higher incomes, better educational and health outcomes. We need to stop subsidising rural under performance.
> Crime and violence rates similarly don't match up with what we might expect, though it's a complex topic. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-07/is-new...
I agree this is super complicated! Anecdotally I felt much safer when I lived rurally. I have experienced unsafe situations more than a handful of times since being back in the city. That's not real data, just a single data point from my experience though.
> I don't have anything for socialization, but access to more diverse population gives you far more options to interact with people of shared interests. For example, if you're the only person in your small town who likes Sci-fi, you aren't going to get to discuss it with anyone. In a more dense/diverse area you'd likely have options of dozens of book groups and meetups. The same holds true for any number of interests.
I don't disagree - rural communities tend to monocultures and some of the social activities are hard to do out there. Other activities are much easier though: bonfires, hunting, fishing, harvesting, etc. The same way some folks might go to a book club to discuss a sci-fi novel they are reading, my neighbors and I went to a fence-building workshop on the weekends to learn about building better fences that involved erecting livestock fence on a pasture. Definitely wouldn't have the interest or ability to do that in a city.
I personally find cities to be disgusting overcrowded places that are harmful to my mental health and I try to stay as far away as I can from them.
If there was no rural America the cities would collapse. Where do you think your food comes from?r Where do you think all the manufacturing is?
Where do you think all the people who actually make things live?
Cities live on the backs of rural people and it's time to stop subsidizing them and send some of that money to the rural communities.
Southeast Asia? Mexico?
For that matter, where does the grain come from to feed the chickens? Where does the molasses come from to make the rum?
Pretty sure the answer to all of these is "from a lot further than five miles down the road"...
Or is it okay if there are people in rural areas living near them?
And you're completely ignoring that just because someone works in agriculture they still need services like car mechanics barbers etc etc The actual number of people who work in agriculture if you include all those is considerably higher.
That's why the suicide rate is 4 times higher in rural areas then.
Cities subsidize rural areas fiscally, look at the tax base in a city, and a rural area. Suburban US by the way is the most subsidized part of the country, BTW. StrongTowns has published an enormous amount of work in this arena.
You can't eat money.
And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning through money in services but they don't actually produce most of the things that they use.
So yeah if you look just at dollars, cities produce more. But they would fail utterly without the rural areas, I don't think cities give enough credit to that.
Strong towns is very myopic in what they focus on. They are not considering the second order of effects of things like reducing the scale of the interstate system.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-rural-america-needs-c...
From the massive and increasingly automated mega farms that don’t need the support of rust belt and country towns full of the impoverished or people choosing a rural lifestyle for cultural reasons
Don't forget not to use any fuel, no electricity or public transportation either.
And if you live in NYC you also can't drink the water.
Luckily a "strict financial sense" doesn't really matter outside of theorizing on Internet forums. I am sincerely concerned about you if you honestly think what you said. I suspect you have never spent much time in a rural area and not ever talked with folks that live in rural areas.
>"Some people are contemplating moving closer to a city, moving to the suburbs, or moving to a small community 45 minutes from a city. So yeah, it will probably, if it continues, accelerate rural depopulation in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains."
Once again, the heart of the issue is the American commute.
This is kind of interesting: at the same time as white collar workers from the city are fleeing out towards the suburbs, you have blue collar workers feeling pressure to move towards the city.
I read some of the other work put out by the author, Ben Abrams, as well as some of the work espoused by the expert referenced in the article, professor Dave Peters. Abrams appears to be a cookie cutter left leaning journalist that doesn't appear to have spent much time in rural America. Professor Peters is focused on "rural change".
I don't think either of these people really understand rural America and this feels like signaling rather than reporting.