[DaltonCoffee]

Increasingly, many of these rural primary industries will need on site tech workers as well.

Rural Canada is where I'm located at the moment. I tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.

[toomuchtodo]

Cities are the centers of knowledge work and financialization, not heavy industries and agriculture people need to survive. Humanity could live without cities, we did before, but it couldn’t live without what makes cities possible from afar.

[analog31]

Try tilling 40 acres with a horse. Imagine getting sick, or giving birth.

We lived without cities, but with a vastly lower population and quality of life. Things like knowledge work and financialization are what made possible great ventures such as energy distribution, transportation, mechanized farming, medicines, and so forth. I'm not sure agriculture would even sustain the existing rural population without the infrastructure of a complex modern economy.

We're all in this together.

[TulliusCicero]

Somehow I doubt that GP was arguing that literally 0% of the population would be outside of cities.

[sojournerc]

How can you say unsustainable when rural communities are where food comes from? Mass famine is unsustainable...

[TulliusCicero]

I wouldn't call them "unsustainable" because even though I disagree with the subsidies I think they're pretty easy to sustain.

But your reasoning makes no sense. You don't need subsidies to have food. Here's a study on farm subsidies that found that removing them would increase prices only slightly for most goods: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.agri-pulse.com%2Fa...

> The impact of premium subsidies – which work as discounts on the amount that farmers pay for crop insurance - varies widely depending on the crop and the policy. The price of corn, which is primarily used for livestock feed, would rise by nearly 5 percent if the subsidy were withdrawn, which would hurt livestock operations as well as foreign customers and ethanol producers.

> Lusk says that removing subsidies would lead to at least small price increases for all foods, with the largest increase, of 1 percent, for eggs. Meat prices would be about 0.55 percent higher. Fruit and vegetable growers also benefit from the insurance, so prices for those crops would rise by 0.67 percent, Lusk found. The price of dairy products would be 0.14 percent higher.

[bombcar]

The argument is you can’t have cities without rural areas supplying what they need.

To disprove that you need cities that are self-sufficient.

Subsidies don’t matter in that question.

[TulliusCicero]

Uhh no, who was arguing that you can have cities without anyone in rural areas? This just looks like another ridiculous straw man.

[bombcar]

> cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency and that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state

Was what the whole thread started with.

[TulliusCicero]

That says nothing about there being nobody in rural areas, just fewer people, and it being an unsustainable welfare state obviously refers to the current subsidies.

So yeah, it was a straw man on your part.

[justin66]

> tend to agree with GP that cities are an inevitable migration towards efficiency

This is why cities came about in the first place.

> that rural life is increasingly an unsustainable welfare state.

It's not the case that all rural areas are subsidized in the way those in the US often are.