everytime a small businesses owner complains about the government their taxes should go up another 10% until we seize all of their assets. you are a pathetic worm with a pool supply shop, you contribute so little to society.
I mean, the guy's right that it's a bad thing all the young people are fleeing his town, but he'll never address the fact that it's core cause is capitalist compulsion which forces people to pursue economic resources or risk dying in the rain. Conservatives suck because they're the only other people wearing the they live glasses but they keep blaming the problems on Jews or some other minority group instead of reckoning with the actual causes of the woes in their life
Love to be the owner of a newspaper and also against literacy, it's good business sense
It's only a "bad thing" because this guy doesn't have as many desperate young people, who he will still claim "have no skills" as an excuse to lower wages, to exploit as he wants.
There is NOTHING romantic about small town life, and it's a good thing when people escape some provincial shithole full of people like the dude being dunked on.
It’s a bad thing because it’s a direct outcome of the capitalist coercive forces that constitute wage slavery as a concept in the first place. These people have no choice but to leave their small towns and urbanize because there’s no economic future for them where they were born. Urbanization is coercion. This guy sucks and small towns are strongholds or local capital just like cities are the strongholds of global capital, but getting away from your chud relatives to experience eye watering alienation in the city isn’t romantic either.
getting away from your chud relatives to experience eye watering alienation in the city isn’t romantic either.
Sorry, but I really, really, really hate this take and find it to be incredibly reactionary at heart. Small towns have plenty of "eye watering alienation", especially when you have a small family or one that moved away! Urbanization is not really coercive either. There's no fucking jobs in cities! All the jobs are in far flung exurbs and suburbs, where it's easier to commute to from a small town than from an actual city.
There is NOTHING romantic about small town life
The shitty parts of small town life are well documented, but there are good parts:
- It's one of the easiest places to have a real sense of community.
- Because there just aren't that many people, you get opportunities to dabble in stuff you'd probably be shut out of somewhere larger. This is especially good for kids -- you can try a bunch of activities and sports well into high school because you don't have to be super talented at 15 to avoid getting crowded out.
- There are fewer police, which means less police harassment. This is also especially good for kids -- kids do reckless stuff, and this can be the difference between getting chewed out by your parents over it or getting arrested.
- The low cost of living makes a middle class lifestyle more attainable than maybe anywhere else.
- If you're paid well, that low cost of living can be the difference between being middle class (some financial security, but you still have to worry about bills or large purchases) and being rich (your financial security is near-guaranteed, you don't have to worry about bills, and large purchases are a lot easier, too).
- There's less pretention.
Plenty of parts of small town life are awful, but it's silly to pretend that there's no reason anyone would want to live there.
i grew up in a small town but with cops everywhere because the town has a strong Klan presence
All 59 students of my high school graduating class either moved away, died, or are currently in horrifying poverty. About 30 of them moved away, the rest all died except a few (before the age of 40) due to health problems, death by cop, suicide, car crashes, or meth overdoses. I don't know how standard this experience is, but I felt like sharing it.
I can't disagree with the cost of living. My parents had jobs that would be solidly lower-middle class anywhere else, but we never particularly struggled financially. We owned an acre of land and were left alone. Were able to go on vacations and stuff.
The American heartland is already collapsed no sane perosn would stay.
People in their late teens and early 20s have always fled home for adventure and bigger cities. That's just been a part of life going back to ancient Rome.
What these guys should care about is attracting people age 30-45 i.e. people who are ready to settle down and start a family. Those people aren't profitable though. They're more experienced so they demand higher wages and better benefits. They buy modest houses instead of overpaying for particle board luxury apartments like a 25 year old would. They want good schools, so that costs more money, etc. They'd rather have 20-somethings they can boss around in their little fiefdom.
they have a point tho, engineers deserve to be shot
t. engineer
"payed" isn't a word, you think a newspaper publisher would know that. Grammar aside, being 18 in a rural town in 2021 fucking sucks, of course those kids want out.
"Oh, you're going away to college? Naw dog, I want to make $11.50 an hour working the overnight shift at the gas station. Maybe I'll see a cool truck."
It's accepted unfortunately and English is not a prescriptive language, but nevertheless I'll die here with you on Paid Hill
It's unfortunately a bit of a lose-lose. Anything other than extremely surface level updates to the spelling system will disadvantage speakers of nonstandard dialects. If we decentralize spelling rules and have everyone write as they speak, only those who speak standard-adjacent dialects will be widely understood in writing. At least in its current state, the spelling system is more or less equally shitty for speakers of basically every dialect.
paid for disproportionately by local business
uh, no? commercial share of property taxes has been dropping continuously in California since [spits] Prop 13
This is an increasingly thing as capitalist decline geta accelerated. The near hinterland and the far hinterland of capital will look increasingly like eachother. The near hinterland is already here in Flint or Wisconsin or Youngstown or pick any rural southern community. All there will be are glittering cities where capital is concentrated and hinterlands and frontier all around them.
If your graduation class has 27 people in it, theres probably not a whole lot going on there
probably also doesnt have a college. is he just mad people are going to college?
paid for disproportionately by local business
I guess we need to federalize the public school system
Whaaaaaaaa! Nooooooooo! Big gubermunt!
Pretty sure that not teaching people to read means that the economy suffers from people not being able to follow written instructions
See that's just elitism. Also people can read I'm talking about the level of literacy needed to understand signs
See that’s just elitism.
Could be, doesn't have to be.
I work with like nearing 90% college graduates and they refuse to read any instructions. Unless you're telling me a large swath got through university being functionally illiterate I think amenazaroja's point holds up
you can teach a person to read but you can’t make them do it.
I feel seen
property taxes shouldn't fund schools. it should be a federal thing where each school is given the same amount of money. or at least the same amount per student that attends the school. property taxes being used to fund schools is why poor neighborhoods have shitty schools.
this guy's take is obviously shitty in that he's looking at it from a "business owner" standpoint - however, the way schools are currently funded by their local property taxes is fucking heinous.
You're partly right. Property taxes fund schools but a lot of states have statewide funding that (inadequately) tries to make up for the difference. The main reason poor neighborhoods appear to have shitty schools is that kids have lower test scores, not because the school system is inherently worse. And the kids have low test scores because home life for many of them is unstable (bc their parents are fucking poor).
I'm not disputing that school funding doesn't help - it definitely does. But home life, the quality and stability of which is directly correlated with material conditions, also affects student performance. Think about latchkey homes, houseless kids, parents with addictions, etc. One of the best ways to uplift those kids and help them do better in school is to pay their parents more, and there's research to support that, too (see basic income experiments).
He’s a goat rancher. The “community” of rural petit-boug larping as working class that is dying probably sucks shit.
