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.