this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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A Boring Dystopia

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[–] Ragdoll_X 59 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (12 children)

It's kind of wild to me how many really small towns there are in the US. About 32% of towns in the U.S. have less than 500 residents.

For comparison, here in Brazil I lived most of my life in a town with ~35K residents and it was already considered a small rural town. Some of my family lives in a neighboring town with ~11K residents, and even in my hometown people joke about how small it is, and that there's basically nothing going on there. 1288 of towns in Brazil have less than 5K residents, or about 23.1%, and there are no towns with less than 500 residents. Meanwhile in the US 76% of towns have less than 5K residents.

Again, it's just kind of wild to me. I remember playing (reading?) the Echo VN and thinking "Man, a dying town with only 50 people? That doesn't sound realistic," but apparently that's way more common than I thought.

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce 46 points 3 months ago (9 children)

My slightly educated guess would be that's a consequence of America's race westward in the 1800's, only stopping long enough to annihilate the indigenous population and set up a rest stop for the next batch.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Bingo, the town I went to school in had barely 500 people when the school which had taken over for two other closed schools kids. It’s even less now. My grade was the largest at 32 kids too. There were former “towns” dotted all over from the rush west where train tracks used to be. All gone now and just somewhere used for cow shelter in the winter. These towns were simply stops for railroad cars to result water on the route west. Once that wasn’t needed the slow march to 0 began. My nearest non family member was over 7 miles away. There is a lot of interior USA that is really sparsely populated and is really just returning to pre colonial eras of mainly giant farmland or grazing pastures.

[–] DarthBueller 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Precolonial big ag? What on earth are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Population sizes in pre colonial times.

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