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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: Small towns
Thread: Small towns This thread is 5 pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · «PREV
mvassilev
mvassilev


Responsible
Undefeatable Hero
posted August 29, 2018 08:02 AM

Returning to this thread almost a decade later, hopefully with a better-informed take.

To be fair, there are a few things that can be said in favor of small towns. Low crime rate. No openly-urinating homeless people in Noplace like I occasionally see in San Francisco. And housing is cheap - a three-bedroom house there can be less than one room in a shared apartment here. But you get what you pay for - you can live like a king, but decidedly among peasants. There's no hope of any intellectual life worthy of the name, little opportunity to indulge in your hobbies in person, and good job openings are scarce (plenty of janitors and clerks, but not many for software engineers). Those who find that life unappealing move away, so the place selects for the kind of people who either like it there or can't leave, so, slowly, over time, it becomes a more extreme version of itself. But eventually it goes too far in that direction even for the residents - bad social pathologies start to come out (e.g. opioid abuse). Of course, they're not going to blame themselves for it, and "scary" foreigners are an easy target.

But while I agree with my past self that their culture makes it unpleasant to live among them, there is a sort-of excuse for some of it - in some respects, their ignorance is rational. For example, most of them would never use trigonometry in their daily lives, so why would they bother to learn it? They're right to resent and resist being forced to waste their time and energy, sometimes being put into embarrassing situations (e.g. failing a test), when most of them get so little out of it. When I look back at my own formal education, a lot of it was useless, and I was relatively good at school. If I had been bad, it'd have been torture. And of course their political ignorance is especially rational, since becoming adequately informed is difficult and the payoff is basically nonexistent.

What is to be done? Build more housing in cities, so people who want to leave small towns could do so more easily. Other than that, let the process of rural->urban migration continue to take its course, and don't give government favors to either side. In a loose sense, there's a certain kind of justice in people being surrounded by others similar to themselves.
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Salamandre
Salamandre


Admirable
Omnipresent Hero
Wog refugee
posted August 29, 2018 08:17 AM

Small towns/rural areas are dying in France because no doctor is willing to move in. They proposed a law forcing them (the left), but it got rejected in senate. Prices for houses in such areas start at 1 euro, no kidding.

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Kipshasz
Kipshasz


Undefeatable Hero
Elvin's Darkside
posted August 29, 2018 10:23 AM

Salamandre said:
Small towns/rural areas are dying in France because no doctor is willing to move in. They proposed a law forcing them (the left), but it got rejected in senate. Prices for houses in such areas start at 1 euro, no kidding.


Same thing in other EU countries I assume. Here a general practitioneer position in some towns come even with an apartment thrown in with other perks. no dice.

Other con, at least in my neck of the woods, is the local government made up of "siberian deportees", commies and cucks. which translates into power abuse.
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"Kip is the Gavin McInnes of HC" - Salamandre
"Ashan to the Trashcan", "I got PTSD from H7. " - LizardWarrior

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Zenofex
Zenofex


Responsible
Legendary Hero
Kreegan-atheist
posted August 30, 2018 06:35 PM

What's a "small town"? In this corner of Europe that would be something along the lines of 1000-5000 people living around one or a few former COMECON factory(es) which is/are rusting for the past 25+ years, a once-functional small hospital or rather a polyclinic which will soon run out of nurses and has already ran out of physicians, a once-functional school which now barely manages to teach the alphabet, several general stores, no big supermarket or a severely compressed version of what you will see in the bigger towns, a number of pubs for the bottle philosophers and maybe some sort of a restaurant; that thing slowly dying out as both the local industry and the local agriculture have been dismantled along with the "communism" and the private employers are to be found almost exclusively in the big regional centers, if not solely at the capital. If there is no tourist attraction in the vicinity, the place is guaranteed to expire in a few decades and as such attracts nothing but melancholic poets (a variety of the mentioned bottle philosophers) but loses its population in active child-producing, labour-capable age extremely fast. What makes it all sadder when you pass through one of these towns is that you can see the signs that it had been quite alive just a few decades ago. The housing is much cheaper than everywhere else, including in the villages, but who care since you can't pay for it if you don't work somewhere else (somewhere with jobs, for starters), which kind of defeats the purpose of owning a house or apartment.

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