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Amazon Prime Is a Blessing and a Curse For Remote Towns (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch. One dozen five-gallon barrels of hydraulic oil. A 2x4x8 of lumber. A pallet's worth of 10-ply, heavy-duty truck tires. These are just a few of the heavy, cumbersome orders one Redditor on the Alaska subreddit claimed to have ordered from Amazon Prime, with free shipping, before users started to notice difficulty finding eligible products. For many remote and rural communities in the U.S. and Canada, the arrival of Amazon Prime, with its low prices and free, expedient shipping was a boon. Hard-to-get or expensive products were now accessible, and reasonably priced to boot. For the cost of a membership (which now runs $99 per year), residents were able to get deals on everything from food to diapers to truck tires. But sometimes when something seems too good to be true, it is. Prime has proven to be a bit of a double-edged sword for many of these communities. Residents become dependent on Prime as local retailers struggle to compete. If access to Prime is reduced, or in some cases, cut off, it can leave many remote towns in the lurch.
You're welcome to live in a small city if that's what you want. But:
1. Just because you prefer it doesn't mean the rest of us should shoulder the costs. Those small towns exist because of heavily subsidized roads and laws on utilities mandating universal services and flat pricing, forcing people living efficiently to subsidize your fat ass.
2. Just because you prefer it doesn't mean everyone does. Since the 1940s, not only have cities had to subsidize suburbia and "small towns", but they've suffered planning laws forbidding urban development, and suffered from roads-only subsidy policies, restricting government spending on forms of transportation that work for cities, while leaving spending on forms of transportation for suburbia pretty much without limit. The suburbanites and country advocates have waged a culture war on cities, which has raised the cost of living to astronomical levels in the US as people have been forced to live inefficiently regardless of their own natural preferences, and pay in taxes for the subsidies to do so.
I'm all for farmers getting help to ensure they can continue to be farmers and part of society. What I don't see the need for is software developers and car mechanics to get huge subsidies to live in the middle of nowhere. Pay for yourself, or move to somewhere with lower living costs.