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Comment by matthewdgreen | Hacker News Reader

I haven't been to Iowa since the late 1990s, but when I did visit Cedar Rapids I was struck by how nice everyone was. It was like going back to the 1960s: nobody swore, everyone was ridiculously polite, people seemed to have visible respect for engineers and other expert professionals. I'm struggling to reconcile all those nice people in Iowa with a state that is repealing basic child-labor protections.

ETA: sorry, I seem to have offended someone. Not sure if this is off-topic, also not sure what the "HN appropriate" discussion is on this story. It's just depressing.

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Maybe because being nice is an important social lubricant but is vastly overrated as a measure of character?

This is just “ Minnesota nice”. Cultural expectations of politeness are not really correlated with any specific ethics. As to the downvotes, you are inadvertently opening a can of political worms around competing values of the coasts and the Midwest.

It is also possible that Iowa has changed; certainly the voting patterns of the state have. I'm not looking for a flame war: I am curious if people who know the state better have things to say about what's going on there, because that would be much more interesting than every other comment in this thread right now.

My honest opinion? Iowa was creepily lacking in any visible diversity. People were polite, but I was traveling through as a straight white married couple. Nebraska, on the other hand, felt outright hostile.

Edit to add, I also know someone who teaches at a university in Iowa and they love it because of the prairie biodiversity.

These aren't basic child labor protections though. These are complex child labor restrictions. we aren't talking about sending Timmy to the mines or the assembly line, we are talking about letting 14 year olds get regular, every day simple low risk jobs, letting 16 year olds be independent if they want.

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