https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/11/how-fast-is-a-car.html
The median American worker earns $23.80/hour, or ~$19 after taxes. A used car driven the US average of ~10,900 miles a year costs ~$8,200, counting $1,700 a year for a parking space at home. That is ~430 hours of work before the car moves. A new car takes ~700 hours. A $999 e-bike ridden 3,000 miles a year takes ~25 hours.
All of which you are arguing against here
Not at all. Let’s go Romanov some billionaires and get to work. I’m down.
What’s the end goal here as per the problems and such you mentioned about rural life? All the billionaires get merc’d, socialism instituted - how’s that look like?
Well we’re not going to solve climate change under capitalism that’s for sure. Are you asking what my ultimate model of rural life would be? Like if I was a god just designing society from scratch? I don’t really operate that way. I don’t have some like “I want it to be this way” perfect utopia in mind. I think we’d have to do tons of experimenting and figure things out. While learning from existing socialist projects in the meantime to try and catch up to them. I’m also in favor of learning heavily from indigenous communities about how to do things. Food forests seem like a super viable option for farming for example. I also think people would generally speaking just need to use less resources.
But that’s not what I think about typically. I am more thinking about immediate results. And looking to historical examples for inspiration on how to get them. Lenin, Mao, etc. Taking things one step at a time. I see it as kind of impossible to figure out how to get from where we are to a utopia right now. We just don’t know that. So we have to figure it out over time. Through lots of trial and error.
No, I am asking you how you figure any of the problems that rural life brings could be solved. Like not by you as a person doing things, in a systematic way.
Nothing can change in the now and there’s 0 vision for how anything could change either under the current system or an optimal one doesn’t seem like a compelling argument for one particular reason; it doesn’t grapple with the today. You can be stuck in car-dependent-bullshit through little to no fault of your own - I’ll fully accept that’s your situation. Where does one go for here?
I buy the consumer goods made with child and our slave labour, hard not to do unless you go full hermit about it, this isn’t moral grandstanding by me. The car transportation I solved, don’t ask me who mined my phones rare earth minerals. My solution to make this better though would be state mandated laws that make phones repairable, better laws around software so they don’t brick your shit (either directly or indirectly) and you don’t buy them new every 2 years on a contract. I am as powerless or powerful to enact any of this directly, but I’d argue for it at every opportunity. What’s the exit scenario here?
I mean if it’s as broad as ANY of the problems there’s tons of solutions. I think people should go back to more subsitence farming instead of being entirely reliant on grocery stores. You can’t grow all your food at home, but if you’ve got land you can have a sizeable garden and prevent the need to import as much. Doing this properly takes time to develop. Letting fruiting trees and bushes mature for example. But it’s doable in the near term. Solar is a huge one. Everyone should have it. There’s no reason not to as it’s super cheap these days. Build smaller, better insulated, homes. But honestly? The biggest problem is just the economy. For a very long time rural communities would have their own internal economy with their own shops, and services, and it worked well. But then Walmart style stores came in and decimated it. Rural areas in some parts of the US are essentially the stereotypical “3rd world” conditions. Do you ever wonder why people out here can be so insanely reactionary? That’s why. Even decently wealthy rural areas have pockets of extreme poverty usually because the local economy is just gutted. All the wealth is extracted by massive companies and sent elsewhere. With very little being invested back into the community. The wealth that IS invested back here is to build massive private estates and mansions for the few really rich people.
You also mentioned right to repair for phones. Tractors are a big one for this. Idk how much most people know about that, but companies like John Deere will sell someone a tractor and then make it impossible to repair it with software locks and shit. So you have to get it serviced by them and it costs an arm and a leg. You start talking about that and watch the farmers start to decide socialism aint so bad after all.
Dawg c’mon. I’m picking up other posts of you here but the rural countryside can’t be the backbone of society and also be subsistence farming - that doesn’t work out, nevermind the truck trips that require all of the rest of society to pay for this stuff.
So what do you figure happened here? Why did people abandon all of their own shops for walmart?
I’m being super for real right now: What fucking wealth does your average rural community create unless it has an active coal mine or similar attached to it, which is in the decimal of percents - at least in the west. Statistically all of this stuff is getting subsidized to no end by every city or halfway urban development.