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Comment by bayesian_horse | Hacker News Reader

Maybe small town America has to go?

Not saying it should. But it may be a valid question.

Local papers in cities like NYC and Baltimore are also shuttering, so this is more about local journalism than it is about small towns.

It has to stay. Farms, mines, and factories (usually in small towns, anyway) aren't going to run themselves and cannot all be outsourced.

These seem like problems that could be solved with applications of proper mass transit.

Your solution to small town newspapers dying off is to make people ride hundreds of miles a day on buses?

Where did he mention buses?

Do you realize how spread apart farms are? They aren’t stackable.

My parent’s farm is in a town of 2000 people, their land is a 10 minute drive from town if direct. The nearest city is 2 hours driving. If you had to bus all the farmers to their different fields that would take all day. Oh, and these guys will have multiple properties scattered all over the map to attend to.

Really, the majority of America’s farm land is not near any city at all. Cities tend to push out and run farmers off. City planners see farm land as land that should be developed.

Then there are the small town people themselves. And the end of the day, none of those people want to live in a city. I live in a city, frankly, city life sucks.

If you switch to saying “we should do more urban farming”...which you should, please do. That works until you start talking about meat and dairy products. You probably don’t want animal operations inside a city (check out Chino, CA dairies), and even if you do, the feed for the animals will have to come from outside the city.

There's really no way to optimize public transit in such remote areas. A lot of farmers will have a few hundred acres in one section and another 800 a few miles away, they're constantly traveling around to where their crops are.

Also, they can't fit their gear in a backpack like most office workers. There's really only one option when your payload varies from hundreds or thousands of lbs to a few lbs, and that's living reasonably near your land, not to mention the variety of equipment that requires driving.

I see this asserted frequently, but I'm not convinced it's true. Focusing on agriculture, say that in 2020 a vindictive President Warren passes the Farmer Retribution Bill, banning commercial agriculture in the US, effective 2024. Would people starve in the streets, or would food prices rise slightly as international markets massively increase production and export to the US? Considering how much California and Mexico produce I already see in New York my hunch is that food can be shipped cheaply and efficiently, but I'm not basing that on much, and wasn't able to find any relevant research.

I would guess that you are massively out of touch with how much agriculture there is in America.

Without googling, I would estimate 50% by land area, between 1% and 5% of GDP. As America is about 5% of the world population, it wouldn’t significantly alter everyone else’s food production to supply you, leaving only the question of transport logistics.

The frozen pizza right in front of me is 240 cal per hundred grams; assume the average American consumes 3000 cal per day and that pizza is a representative calorie density, 1.25kg per person per day = 148 million metric tons per year.

Googling now, USA ports handle 2.3 billion tons per year [1], so that’s fine. Internal transport I don’t even have to think about because you must already have it in place or you’d already be starving because you couldn’t get the food from your own farms to your own shops.

[1] Figure 3-2 https://www.bts.gov/sites/bts.dot.gov/files/docs/browse-stat...

It's about 1% of GDP and employs less than 2% of the population.

Wikipedia says 922 million acres of land are used for agriculture in the United States, or about 40% of the total area of the country. I would guess that you'd have a hard time finding that much spare land lying around. Particularly in places that have the soil and infrastructure needed to support farming.

The population of the US is only 330 million. It's a net exporter of food, and Americans eat much more meat than most of the world, but even if you round up to the equivalent of feeding an extra billion people it looks like it's within the realm of possibility to replace all that agriculture:

https://www.livescience.com/16493-people-planet-earth-suppor...

And this article claims that the limiting factor is transportation infrastructure, not food production:

https://www.theguardian.com/preparing-for-9-billion/2017/sep...

If that's the case then it seems like it's definitely possible. The US has good transportation infrastructure.

This doesn't even make sense as a hypothetical.

Why not? People assert that cities need the food grown in rural areas, so that implies the hypothetical that cities would suffer a lot without the rural areas. That goes against my general economic belief that production of easily transported goods in one country is usually easily replaced by production in another country, without large changes in prices anywhere.

Even if that were to make economic sense (it doesn't), you'd still have a major defence issue relying entirely on external food supply.

I will grant you the defense issue, that's important. But everyone commenting finds the economic argument so obvious that no one's bothered to make it. In normal times, why would moving food production out of the United States have a more significant effect than displacing some other industry of similar size (1% of GDP, about 2% of employment)?

Automation and mechanisation is increasing in all of those three examples. Give it a generation and they may well run themselves.

Trade in the output of farms and mines literally predates writing, and whether or not the same can be said for factories depends entirely on what you count as a factory.

The very same thing which allows rural farms in America to sell to American cities also allows rural farms outside America to sell to American cities. Likewise factories and mines.

But where will we put the odd little thrift shops and antique stores that only open a few hours on the weekend and don't seem to be economically viable despite lasting for years? They're fun to browse with a friend who appreciates your sense of humor.

What if I told you it was possible to have "odd little thrift shops" even in large towns and cities, because at that scale, neighborhoods replace small towns culturally?

It's just not the same without the run-down boom town aesthetic. Big town stores might have things from the '60s/'70s/'80s/'90s, but not things that have been there since the '60s/'70s/'80s/'90s.

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