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Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 27, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I've been noticing a lot of interesting trends as I read comments here, and I have a few questions for anyone who would be willing to answer.

For these distances, I'm only looking for rough numbers.

  1. How far away is the closest symphony orchestra that pays it's musicians?
  2. How far away is the closest bespoke suit shop?
  3. How far away is the nearest commercial farm (not hobby), and what do they farm?
  4. How far away is the nearest Amtrak station?
  5. How far away is the nearest Walmart?
  6. How far away is the nearest international airport?

Fifteen miles; Three miles; three miles; three miles; eight miles; thirty miles. Slightly changed distances in different directions.

The Farm sells all kinds of things, and it’s a perfect example of how poisonous foreigners are to a community. This is a locally owned multigenerational farm, so they price things fairly because their neighbors are their community. They pay good wages, because they hire their neighbors and their neighbors are their community. They are devout Christians, so so they live humbly and give back to the community, which is their neighbors (the list of their giving is absurdly long). There are a lot of older adult workers, who are definitely “inefficient”, but there’s not a sociopath or a foreigner or a corporation owning it, so they care for those whom they hire. It’s a beautiful Americana farm and store. They sell organic, because like most Americans they have a distrust of most commercial pesticides.

If Indians bought the farm, all the employees would be overseas relatives; some of the proceeds would be sent back home; they would have to signal their wealth more, meaning resources wasted on commercial goods; they wouldn’t care about fleecing others; it is unlikely (but I suppose not impossible) that they have the morality to give lots of their profits away, and if they do, it is unlikely to be toward the White American community nearby but instead toward various Indian things, or perhaps to an elite institution that doesn’t need the money. If devout non-Christians owned the store, they would be giving back to their non-Christian institutions, meaning the resources are gone from the community.

Visiting is wonderful; everyone is nice and everything is cozy. It stands in stark contrast to the convenience stores (and in past decade, Dunkins et al), where you have some aggressive impolite overseas Indian staring at you the entire time, and everything is ugly and cheap, and they only hire their relatives.

This got reported for your gratuitous shoehorning of an anti-immigration rant into the thread. While you are allowed to rant about immigration, you should do it in a thread where that's actually the topic, rather than derailing some other discussion so you can rant about your thing.