10 ms·

Walmart and the like killed local competition. There’s a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It’s insanely busy. I

by wil421 7y ago

Walmart and the like killed local competition. There’s a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It’s insanely busy. I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn’t get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow. The county has something like 12,000 residents. It’s about the same population as a 2-3 mile radius is the suburb I live in. To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. Edit: Removing the last 2 sentences of the last paragraph as it’s against the guidelines for flamebait topics. Reading between the lines of the original article I can only assume “speak the the language” is referring to politics. > “It’s ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They’re O.K. with ‘community store.’ They’re the same thing, but you’ve got to speak the language.”

mieseratte 7y ago
> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them. It’s the same with my family in the country. Lots of people vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability. You don't feel bad for them because you've speculatively determined they're all hypocrites? Glad to see casual bigotry is acceptable on HN. People like you are the problem, you are so arrogant as to assume that your speculation is correct and above reproach, and that you can not only judge by condemn someone based on your errant speculation. And you sit and defend your own bigotry with pride!
- pstuart 7y ago
  Not OP. It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery!
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery! So, you're going to speculatively stereotype an entire group of people and condemn them based on your own hunch as to their politics and station in life. While you're certainly entitled to an opinion, nothing about your entitlement precludes that opinion being a bigoted one. What a bigoted existence. > Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets. Ah yes, the classically conservative Illinois which shares so much in common with the Deep South.
    - wil421 7y ago
      Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets. There’s nothing bigoted about it. Every one has an opinion, call it what you want. I don’t feel superior compared to them.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Read about Cairo sometime.
  - CharlesColeman 7y ago
    > Not OP. It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery! They're not "willfully choosing to suffer." They're actually starting co-ops but choosing not to call them by that word. The OP just decided to be needlessly judgemental over that, and lead us down into this stupid, prejudiced subthread.
    - pstuart 7y ago
      > They're actually starting co-ops but choosing not to call them by that word What are they calling them? I'm curious.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't break the site guidelines by taking the thread further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - pstuart 7y ago
      Sorry. Not trying to fan flames. Admonishment taken.
- magashna 7y ago
  Red states that vote the most against social programs are the biggest beneficiaries. It's the leech screaming "Leech!" in the mirror
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    > Red states that vote the most against social programs are the biggest beneficiaries. It's the leech screaming "Leech!" in the mirror You're assuming in a "Red State," all those using social programs are the same ones screaming "Socialism!" This entire premise is based on your stereotype of one's politics. Perhaps you need to step back and re-examine your assertion. > Or based on what the politicians elected by those states say and then vote for. "Vote the most against"... You're stereotyping entire states and condemning the value of the people therein based on your ghostly spector of a Red State politician. Yours is a stereotyped, bigoted position.
    - hirsin 7y ago
      Or based on what the politicians elected by those states say and then vote for. "Vote the most against"...
    - magashna 7y ago
      You are assuming my political leanings. I'm more conservative than you think. I'm only stating what I observe in regards to states like Kentucky and Mississippi. The people continue voting in representatives that say one thing, then work on doing the opposite.
  - refurb 7y ago
    Really? Because this poll suggests that Republicans are pretty supportive of things like Social Security and Medicare. https://socialsecurityworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nat-Social-Security-March-18-2-Results.pdf https://socialsecurityworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/N...
    - gambiting 7y ago
      Sure, and yet somehow they are consistently voting in people who want to dismantle both.
- wil421 7y ago
  They’ve made their bed and have to lie in it. You reap what you sow mieseratte. If you’re against having a local grocery because it’s called a co-op then I don’t feel bad at all. As the article said, farmers invented co-ops but somehow that’s been lost because of political lines.
- dang 7y ago
  We've asked you repeatedly not to use this site for political and ideological battle. Since that's all you're doing, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Please don't create new accounts to break the site guidelines with, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ptah 7y ago
people opposed to "socialism" always say they don't want to queue for bread. it looks like these folks don't even have a queue
bryanlarsen 7y ago
> A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow. A 1/2 cow would probably require buying a new freezer, but splitting a 1/2 cow is quite common. (splitting a half gets you a better mix than buying a quarter)
- HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
  Not to mention that if you can come up with the cash, a quarter is far less expensive than buying beef at the supermarket. Last time I did it (2 years ago?), it came to under $3.00/lb total (farmer's price + butcher shop) for about 200 lbs of beef. There's a natural incentive for a couple families to band together and buy a whole or half beef.
oxymoran 7y ago
To be honest, 3 years later and you still can’t figure out why Trump won. And no, I am not a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for him. I won’t vote for him. But it’s really easy to see how he won.
kevin_b_er 7y ago
> “There is no funding for rural grocery stores,” said Nancy McCloud, who scraped together $200,000 in personal loans and crowd-funded contributions to buy and reopen a closed supermarket in Mountainair, N.M. “There was nothing to help.” Funding that would be an anethma to Republican ideals. You must pull yourself into the air with your own bootstraps. They have professed their political belief in greed as the be all end all. They've professed against any communal acts as "socialism". They've professed for the economics to decide in a cruel fashion. They got the consequences of that they so love.
- asokoloski 7y ago
  One can look at it from another perspective -- when Walmart comes to town, typically they'll receive a tax break, which is an unfair advantage over a local grocery store. They'll also typically get a massive investment in terms of newly built infrastructure -- roads all around the lot, pipes, electricity, etc, compared to a local grocery store. When you compare the revenue the WalMart (or any big box store) brings in compared to the amount of space it takes up (with a massive parking lot), it's typically WAY less than a small neighborhood grocery store built in the older traditional style. It's only because towns and cities have effectively subsidized these big-box stores that they've taken over. They're really a terrible deal for municipal governments in terms of economic benefits. In many places (such as Texas), people don't consider space to be valuable because it's so plentiful -- which is true in one sense. But it's not just space we care about, it's infrastructure-supported space. Space that has roads to access it, water pipes, electricity, police and fire services, etc. will ALWAYS be scarce. These resources are expensive, and the more spread-out things are, the more money we're forced to spend on infrastructure. This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
  - kaibee 7y ago
    > This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly. If people were ideologically consistent in their views, yes. However, look at the reaction here on HN and elsewhere to where AOC opposed such a tax-break for Amazon's NY HQ, and blamed her for Amazon deciding to not build the 2nd HQ there.
jeffdavis 7y ago
"Lots of people vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability." That reasoning is shallow. They can't opt out of paying the taxes that support those programs; so what sense does it make opting out of the benefits?
- mjevans 7y ago
  It's a poorly worded and incisive line. However the sentiment that they were trying to express does have merit in discussing under more specific and civil terms. I too have observed an apparent abundance of individuals that decry various forms of social support programs only to change their story when it's suddenly a program that more-obviously hands them support. (There is also a strong argument for social support programs as a method of minimizing the loss to society of productive labor as well as prevention for forcing individuals towards lives of crime so they can put food on the table.)
  - jeffdavis 7y ago
    So... Many people are hypocrites and/or inconsistent in their politics? Not exactly insightful. Go ahead and point out whatever bad policies you think lead to this outcome, and why you think they should be changed. But calling people hypocrites on a tangential topic (social services) doesn't add anything.
pnutjam 7y ago
There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.
- pwthornton 7y ago
  This is missing from this. There aren't many small towns anymore. Those have been decimated. It's now random strip malls in random places. There is no reason that people should need a car to do everything in life, and that's not how things used to be, but that's how things are now. In fairness to individuals, the federal government drove this with subsidizes for highway expansion and making it hard to get loans on denser building types (even something like an apartment over a store was hard to build). The federal government basically forced this shitty sprawl on all of us and played a major role in destroying small-town America.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    You seem to be confusing small towns for suburban sprawl. Small towns don't have the problems you list: build a massive McMansion on the edge of town you are still walking distance to the other edge of the town. The whole value of your house will be more than a tiny house in San Francisco despite having 10x the floor area and 100x the land. Hiways have been good for rural areas overall, because the few people who live there can get the things they need quicker. (when the trains existed before they didn't come often enough to be useful). In the suburbs the hiways killed the possibility of useful trains, but in rural areas that possibility didn't exist anyway. (if the hiways were worth the cost is a different question)
    - corebit 7y ago
      Actually OP is more right than even he knows, because the small towns themselves should never have been built but for massive federal government land subsidies for railroads in the 19th century - huge sections of which were never sustainable even when built, let alone a century later.
CharlesColeman 7y ago
> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. You don't feel bad because of their word choice? That reflects poorly on someone, and it's not them. They're solving their local problems by starting co-ops, who cares if they use your preferred branding for it or not?
ad_hominem 7y ago
> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them. You might want to talk to some farmers in these small towns, because co-ops aren't what they used to be and farmers often don't have a kind word anymore for the local co-op. As the food economy consolidates around large producers and the small farms that built the co-ops are going broke, co-ops are complicit in switching their support to the corporate producers and not sticking up for the little guys who built them, sometimes actively kicking them out to make room for larger contracts with the bigger producers. Historically, co-ops were ran by and populated by workers who were ex-farmers or who had other close ties to farming. Nowadays they're managed by suits, and the workers have no ties to agriculture and could care less about inefficient practices burning through struggling farmers' capital. Ask a farmer who is working 18-hour days and can barely pay his bills how he feels about his local co-op showing up with 3 trucks to spread fertilizer and 2 of the trucks sit with engines idling for hours while the guys inside play slither.io. Anyway the ignorant sweeping dismissals towards white* rural America I see so often from urban bugmen really disturb me. You think you have your finger on the pulse of "the country" because you have a vacation home there you visit once a year or you have some distant family members that live there (which you apparently secretly disdain?). Your brain is so infected with ideology rooted in urban leisure-time that you project that onto people who don't even have a grocery store and think it's perfectly logical they'd continue driving hours out of the way for supplies rather than patronize something with a "cursed word" in the name. You're living in la-la land if you think the majority of these people have the time to mentally masturbate to politics to your extent, much less burn time and money for some kind of political statement. * Because you never ever see this kind of callousness directed towards poor minority communities, only whites deserve to suffer.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Counterattack doesn't help, and is not the way to argue against callousness. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 7y ago
The political flamebait in your last paragraph breaks the site guidelines. That's not ok because it leads to flamewars, as it did—wretchedly—in this case. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit that out of your posts in the future, we'd be grateful. Your comment was great otherwise.
- mieserattedrei 7y ago
  Oh look, slap on the wrist for a bigot. You’re a fucking shill.
  - dang 7y ago
    That is standard moderation practice, no different from many warnings we've given you over the years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21140529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21140529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618865 Generally we try to persuade people before banning them, especially if there's evidence that they're otherwise using HN in good faith. Speaking of which, why not follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? It's in your interests for at least three reasons. First, those rules are what keep HN interesting and prevent it from burning to a crisp. Scorched earth is no good for anyone. Second, I realize that you have reasons to be angry about things some other commenters say, but if you just blast everybody with a flamethrower, it only discredits your positions. Keeping your cool, staying neutral, and explaining your point of view in a positive way would be more effective and have more dignity. Third, following HN's rules takes discipline and self-control, two classical virtues which we all profit from cultivating.
- wil421 7y ago
  Understood.
- joejerryronnie 7y ago
  Whoa Dang, you've got a hot one here! Glad to see the site guidelines being applied equally, as other times I've felt you were a bit too lenient with the left leaning comments (perhaps that's just my own bias).
abetterday 7y ago
>vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability. Much like people rally against sprawl, but move the burbs for their kids; or rally against global warming, but don't live minimalist lifestyles. It is reasonable to optimize your life around the world as it is. And if you use the extra resources this world provides to move things in a direction you consider better, then it isn't even necessarily hypocritical.

by wil421 7y ago

mieseratte 7y ago

> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them. It’s the same with my family in the country. Lots of people vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability. You don't feel bad for them because you've speculatively determined they're all hypocrites? Glad to see casual bigotry is acceptable on HN. People like you are the problem, you are so arrogant as to assume that your speculation is correct and above reproach, and that you can not only judge by condemn someone based on your errant speculation. And you sit and defend your own bigotry with pride!

pstuart 7y ago
Not OP. It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery!
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery! So, you're going to speculatively stereotype an entire group of people and condemn them based on your own hunch as to their politics and station in life. While you're certainly entitled to an opinion, nothing about your entitlement precludes that opinion being a bigoted one. What a bigoted existence. > Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets. Ah yes, the classically conservative Illinois which shares so much in common with the Deep South.
  - wil421 7y ago
    Yea I am stereotyping people based on my personal experience and what the author echos in the article. I’m in the Deep South and the article spoke about Illinois. Pretty far away but also the same mindsets. There’s nothing bigoted about it. Every one has an opinion, call it what you want. I don’t feel superior compared to them.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Read about Cairo sometime.
- CharlesColeman 7y ago
  > Not OP. It's more like they're willfully choosing to suffer. So in that case, enjoy your misery! They're not "willfully choosing to suffer." They're actually starting co-ops but choosing not to call them by that word. The OP just decided to be needlessly judgemental over that, and lead us down into this stupid, prejudiced subthread.
  - pstuart 7y ago
    > They're actually starting co-ops but choosing not to call them by that word What are they calling them? I'm curious.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't break the site guidelines by taking the thread further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong another comment is or you feel it is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - pstuart 7y ago
    Sorry. Not trying to fan flames. Admonishment taken.
magashna 7y ago
Red states that vote the most against social programs are the biggest beneficiaries. It's the leech screaming "Leech!" in the mirror
- mieseratte 7y ago
  > Red states that vote the most against social programs are the biggest beneficiaries. It's the leech screaming "Leech!" in the mirror You're assuming in a "Red State," all those using social programs are the same ones screaming "Socialism!" This entire premise is based on your stereotype of one's politics. Perhaps you need to step back and re-examine your assertion. > Or based on what the politicians elected by those states say and then vote for. "Vote the most against"... You're stereotyping entire states and condemning the value of the people therein based on your ghostly spector of a Red State politician. Yours is a stereotyped, bigoted position.
  - hirsin 7y ago
    Or based on what the politicians elected by those states say and then vote for. "Vote the most against"...
  - magashna 7y ago
    You are assuming my political leanings. I'm more conservative than you think. I'm only stating what I observe in regards to states like Kentucky and Mississippi. The people continue voting in representatives that say one thing, then work on doing the opposite.
- refurb 7y ago
  Really? Because this poll suggests that Republicans are pretty supportive of things like Social Security and Medicare. https://socialsecurityworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Nat-Social-Security-March-18-2-Results.pdf https://socialsecurityworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/N...
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Sure, and yet somehow they are consistently voting in people who want to dismantle both.
wil421 7y ago
They’ve made their bed and have to lie in it. You reap what you sow mieseratte. If you’re against having a local grocery because it’s called a co-op then I don’t feel bad at all. As the article said, farmers invented co-ops but somehow that’s been lost because of political lines.
dang 7y ago
We've asked you repeatedly not to use this site for political and ideological battle. Since that's all you're doing, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. Please don't create new accounts to break the site guidelines with, though. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ptah 7y ago

people opposed to "socialism" always say they don't want to queue for bread. it looks like these folks don't even have a queue

bryanlarsen 7y ago

> A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow. A 1/2 cow would probably require buying a new freezer, but splitting a 1/2 cow is quite common. (splitting a half gets you a better mix than buying a quarter)

HeyLaughingBoy 7y ago
Not to mention that if you can come up with the cash, a quarter is far less expensive than buying beef at the supermarket. Last time I did it (2 years ago?), it came to under $3.00/lb total (farmer's price + butcher shop) for about 200 lbs of beef. There's a natural incentive for a couple families to band together and buy a whole or half beef.

oxymoran 7y ago

To be honest, 3 years later and you still can’t figure out why Trump won. And no, I am not a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for him. I won’t vote for him. But it’s really easy to see how he won.

kevin_b_er 7y ago

> “There is no funding for rural grocery stores,” said Nancy McCloud, who scraped together $200,000 in personal loans and crowd-funded contributions to buy and reopen a closed supermarket in Mountainair, N.M. “There was nothing to help.” Funding that would be an anethma to Republican ideals. You must pull yourself into the air with your own bootstraps. They have professed their political belief in greed as the be all end all. They've professed against any communal acts as "socialism". They've professed for the economics to decide in a cruel fashion. They got the consequences of that they so love.

asokoloski 7y ago
One can look at it from another perspective -- when Walmart comes to town, typically they'll receive a tax break, which is an unfair advantage over a local grocery store. They'll also typically get a massive investment in terms of newly built infrastructure -- roads all around the lot, pipes, electricity, etc, compared to a local grocery store. When you compare the revenue the WalMart (or any big box store) brings in compared to the amount of space it takes up (with a massive parking lot), it's typically WAY less than a small neighborhood grocery store built in the older traditional style. It's only because towns and cities have effectively subsidized these big-box stores that they've taken over. They're really a terrible deal for municipal governments in terms of economic benefits. In many places (such as Texas), people don't consider space to be valuable because it's so plentiful -- which is true in one sense. But it's not just space we care about, it's infrastructure-supported space. Space that has roads to access it, water pipes, electricity, police and fire services, etc. will ALWAYS be scarce. These resources are expensive, and the more spread-out things are, the more money we're forced to spend on infrastructure. This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly.
- kaibee 7y ago
  > This is a good way to present the issue to anyone who identifies as a free-market capitalist. Free markets require a level playing field to work properly. If people were ideologically consistent in their views, yes. However, look at the reaction here on HN and elsewhere to where AOC opposed such a tax-break for Amazon's NY HQ, and blamed her for Amazon deciding to not build the 2nd HQ there.

jeffdavis 7y ago

"Lots of people vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability." That reasoning is shallow. They can't opt out of paying the taxes that support those programs; so what sense does it make opting out of the benefits?

mjevans 7y ago
It's a poorly worded and incisive line. However the sentiment that they were trying to express does have merit in discussing under more specific and civil terms. I too have observed an apparent abundance of individuals that decry various forms of social support programs only to change their story when it's suddenly a program that more-obviously hands them support. (There is also a strong argument for social support programs as a method of minimizing the loss to society of productive labor as well as prevention for forcing individuals towards lives of crime so they can put food on the table.)
- jeffdavis 7y ago
  So... Many people are hypocrites and/or inconsistent in their politics? Not exactly insightful. Go ahead and point out whatever bad policies you think lead to this outcome, and why you think they should be changed. But calling people hypocrites on a tangential topic (social services) doesn't add anything.

pnutjam 7y ago

There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.

pwthornton 7y ago
This is missing from this. There aren't many small towns anymore. Those have been decimated. It's now random strip malls in random places. There is no reason that people should need a car to do everything in life, and that's not how things used to be, but that's how things are now. In fairness to individuals, the federal government drove this with subsidizes for highway expansion and making it hard to get loans on denser building types (even something like an apartment over a store was hard to build). The federal government basically forced this shitty sprawl on all of us and played a major role in destroying small-town America.
- bluGill 7y ago
  You seem to be confusing small towns for suburban sprawl. Small towns don't have the problems you list: build a massive McMansion on the edge of town you are still walking distance to the other edge of the town. The whole value of your house will be more than a tiny house in San Francisco despite having 10x the floor area and 100x the land. Hiways have been good for rural areas overall, because the few people who live there can get the things they need quicker. (when the trains existed before they didn't come often enough to be useful). In the suburbs the hiways killed the possibility of useful trains, but in rural areas that possibility didn't exist anyway. (if the hiways were worth the cost is a different question)
  - corebit 7y ago
    Actually OP is more right than even he knows, because the small towns themselves should never have been built but for massive federal government land subsidies for railroads in the 19th century - huge sections of which were never sustainable even when built, let alone a century later.

CharlesColeman 7y ago

> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. You don't feel bad because of their word choice? That reflects poorly on someone, and it's not them. They're solving their local problems by starting co-ops, who cares if they use your preferred branding for it or not?

ad_hominem 7y ago

> To be honest I don’t feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op. I am assuming it’s too liberal for them. You might want to talk to some farmers in these small towns, because co-ops aren't what they used to be and farmers often don't have a kind word anymore for the local co-op. As the food economy consolidates around large producers and the small farms that built the co-ops are going broke, co-ops are complicit in switching their support to the corporate producers and not sticking up for the little guys who built them, sometimes actively kicking them out to make room for larger contracts with the bigger producers. Historically, co-ops were ran by and populated by workers who were ex-farmers or who had other close ties to farming. Nowadays they're managed by suits, and the workers have no ties to agriculture and could care less about inefficient practices burning through struggling farmers' capital. Ask a farmer who is working 18-hour days and can barely pay his bills how he feels about his local co-op showing up with 3 trucks to spread fertilizer and 2 of the trucks sit with engines idling for hours while the guys inside play slither.io. Anyway the ignorant sweeping dismissals towards white* rural America I see so often from urban bugmen really disturb me. You think you have your finger on the pulse of "the country" because you have a vacation home there you visit once a year or you have some distant family members that live there (which you apparently secretly disdain?). Your brain is so infected with ideology rooted in urban leisure-time that you project that onto people who don't even have a grocery store and think it's perfectly logical they'd continue driving hours out of the way for supplies rather than patronize something with a "cursed word" in the name. You're living in la-la land if you think the majority of these people have the time to mentally masturbate to politics to your extent, much less burn time and money for some kind of political statement. * Because you never ever see this kind of callousness directed towards poor minority communities, only whites deserve to suffer.

dang 7y ago
Please don't break the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Counterattack doesn't help, and is not the way to argue against callousness. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang 7y ago

The political flamebait in your last paragraph breaks the site guidelines. That's not ok because it leads to flamewars, as it did—wretchedly—in this case. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit that out of your posts in the future, we'd be grateful. Your comment was great otherwise.

mieserattedrei 7y ago
Oh look, slap on the wrist for a bigot. You’re a fucking shill.
- dang 7y ago
  That is standard moderation practice, no different from many warnings we've given you over the years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21140529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21140529 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21139071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17618865 Generally we try to persuade people before banning them, especially if there's evidence that they're otherwise using HN in good faith. Speaking of which, why not follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? It's in your interests for at least three reasons. First, those rules are what keep HN interesting and prevent it from burning to a crisp. Scorched earth is no good for anyone. Second, I realize that you have reasons to be angry about things some other commenters say, but if you just blast everybody with a flamethrower, it only discredits your positions. Keeping your cool, staying neutral, and explaining your point of view in a positive way would be more effective and have more dignity. Third, following HN's rules takes discipline and self-control, two classical virtues which we all profit from cultivating.
wil421 7y ago
Understood.
joejerryronnie 7y ago
Whoa Dang, you've got a hot one here! Glad to see the site guidelines being applied equally, as other times I've felt you were a bit too lenient with the left leaning comments (perhaps that's just my own bias).

abetterday 7y ago

>vote against “socialism” and then collect Medicade, social security and disability. Much like people rally against sprawl, but move the burbs for their kids; or rally against global warming, but don't live minimalist lifestyles. It is reasonable to optimize your life around the world as it is. And if you use the extra resources this world provides to move things in a direction you consider better, then it isn't even necessarily hypocritical.