I'm healthy but I pay for those who are not.

I grew up fine but I pay for those with special needs.

I have a job during Covid but I pay for those who don't.

I guess in Europe we call this 'society'.

Europeans really barely understand the US. Yes, of course, we understand how investing in communities makes a society work. What Europeans don’t understand is just how fucking huge the US is and how low-density huge swaths of the country are. Farmers might live 500 miles from a metro of 100,000 people. It’s a huge challenge to give everyone fiber without the 1% of hyper rural America doubling costs for everyone else.

This argument shows up in all these discussions and is way way overused. The EU only has ~2-3x the population density of the USA. It's not even a single order of magnitude and people have already given examples of how very remote places in Europe have very reasonable infrastructure. If you already have telephone and/or electricity poles to somewhere running fiber is definitely an easy problem to tackle for what is supposed to be the world's most advanced economy. Capture by telco special interests is a much more likely explanation.

3x population density is a lot, no? That means for every person that can access, say, a fiber line in the US, 3 people could access it in Europe. That would seriously change the economics.

Further, the US's population density is very varied. About a third of the country (the non-coastal West) is very, very sparsely populated, punctuated by only a few semi-large cities like Denver and Phoenix. If you live on the coasts or the Great Lakes, density is a lot like Europe and the services are similar. In between, it's really, really sparsely populated.

https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/512popdn.pdf

Yes, yes, all of Europe fits into Texas, and even Texas fits into Texas, and that's just one state. We get how mind-bogglingly huge the US is. It's been said over and over again by every single american whenever the subject of your subpar infrastructure comes up.

Europe is just as big. Not as dense, maybe. But your telcos were given hundreds of billions to do something (that should have been the job of the government), and simply pocketed them, with your government doing nothing about it.

So, if that money was properly invested, instead of polluting low orbit, that'd be nice.

I have zero intrest in having the government control my access to information, no thank you

That the biggest thing Europeans do not understand about the US, many of us hate our government, distrust our government, and the only thing we desire from government is for them to leave us alone..

The US is a individualist nation, not a collectivist nation, though many are trying very hard to change that.

You have it backwards. Almost none of the telecom infrastructure in Europe is state owned. As the comment you are replying to explained it's in the US where huge government incentives were paid out to telecom companies for broadband deployment who then proceeded to pocket that money and sit on their hands.

>I have zero intrest in having the government control my access to information, no thank you

They kind of already do. NSA splitters are common knowledge by now, and PRISM was yet another proof that they have access to most of your data. Make no mistake, if the US government wants to find you or what you've been doing, it won't be hard for them.

You're either dealing with Mossad or Not Mossad: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/mickens_on_se...

You're dismissing the very valid geographic argument completely by being snobby.

If, in Europe, if people decided to pave over every natural area within 100 miles of where you lived because they want to live far away while, you paid to make it cheaper for them to do this, would you still be ok with that?

If this caused all of the water (streams, lakes etc) in the area to be polluted and unsafe to swim in and drink without heavy treatment, would you still be ok with this? I can't think of a single body of water where I live that doesn't have excessive algae growth from fertilizer runoff from the massive number of suburban/exurban lawns. I was exploring in my favorite nature preserve that has a nice size stream (well, one of the few over 10ft that hasn't been culvertized) and one of the park rangers told me to be mindful that there was a septic system a mile upstream leaking E. coli in to the stream. In a city that has a "township" designation literally so they can get tax breaks and grants for roads meant for farmers. There isn't a single farm in this city, nor in any of the other "townships" in the area.

I can go on and on, do you still think subsidizing this life for people is reasonable? It certainly isn't done to this level over in Europe. Why not?

How many of those things are choices? Can you not think of other alternatives to this "problem"?

This seems wholly different to the point of making the analogy laughable.

I love that we still live in a world where different countries can make different choices about how they want to structure their societies.

Kind of telling that North America immigrants were largely people escaping European utopian society. I guess different people have different values?

Exactly, Why did all those European immigrants leave what many now call a more civilized and progressive place.

It makes no sense. I mean it’s not as if Ireland has changed at all since the potato famine when my ancestors came over right?

As you can tell, I do not think highly of the argument you have made. It seems to ignore something important.

I vot for calling it civilization.

Boldly asserting that we already pay "enough" subsidizing other utilities is lazy. Why are "road, water, power, etc" subsidies fine but internet subsidies not? They all fall within the same category: essential services that would be low-return/high-risk if provided by private entities.

In fact, your argument basically boils down to "Why should X pay for Y?" So why should astronomers pay for Starlink?

Oh, I'm not fine with many of the other subsidies as I think they are incredibly excessive at this point.

I should add that I live in the midwest (Cincinnati) so I directly see a lot of rural/exurban areas people are talking about here. There are just miles and miles and miles of suburbs out in the middle of nowhere because people here are obsessed with the idea of them. The amount of money that gets dumped in to those areas while people complain up a storm when the urban areas try to build out their own infrastructure is insane.

I can't tell you how many coworkers I have had that drive 45mins+ just so they can live in some suburb far away from everything. If they want to do that, fine, but don't beg for internet, roads, etc to be paid for at the cost of sucking resources away from people living in urban areas.

Because we need rural areas to supply us with food and other materials.

A massive number of the people that live in rural areas are not providing food and key materials. In fact, the amount of farmland and farmers has been declining for years due to increases in agricultural efficiency (green revolution).

I've got no problem (to a point) subsidizing infrastructure for farmers and other key jobs, but acting like all of these people who insist on living in an incredibly unsustainable way deserve to be subsidized is ridiculous.

Does that matter? Not really. Infrastructure (Internet counts as that) should be available everywhere people live. Who knows, one day you might be in such a situation.

Sure, just expect that if you're going to live that way by choice, pay the costs for it!

What costs? Of course I'll pay for internet/power/water.

Why should the rural people in podunk nowhere subsidize our food?

Ultimately it is in the best interest of cities to keep on good terms with their breadbasket.

Again, people are trying to frame this as an "all people in exurbs and rural areas are farmers" and this straight up is not true in the slightest. The issue here is that massive numbers of people move to the far out of the way places which requires an inordinate amount of resources to support, and there is this expectation that everyone else should pay up to let them live that lifestyle.

Here's a example of these sort of areas on the midwest: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9232568,-84.4006112,11979m/d...

Almost none of the land in that area is farmland, yet I've had coworkers who got USDA loans for houses in the middle of this area while working white collar jobs.

For the last couple of few years a local developer keeps lobbying to have a multibillion dollar highway built through this area so they can develop more suburbs. http://www.cincyeasternbypass.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02...

Why does everyone else have to keep paying for this garbage? When you bring up things like toll roads all of these people scream their heads off, because they know it means they wont be getting their subsidies (ironic considering how many people in these areas are highly conservative, anti-subsidy).

This isn't about subsidizing farmers, this is about subsidizing people's choice to live an unsustainable life style.

The economics of farming barely work out at market value. How are they subsidizing others and how can they afford to given those margins?

Because that's what a country is.

Some things are just common goods.