To be fair, I bet there is a town named Iran in the US. There’s a Cuba, Bolivia, Lebanon, and others.
Okay, I just looked it up and no, but you can see where I coming from - lots of places named after foreign countries/cities. It probably is stupidity, but with included confusion.
I wonder if it asked them to point out “the country of Iran.”
Of course people also confuse cities and states. Like on the game shows, people will say things like Los Angeles when they mean California, and vice versa.
I know it’s a rhetorical question, but briefly. I ate a burrito in Fort Smith, stayed at a crappy motel by Fayetteville one time in the shadow of Jesus billboards, and drove through Little Rock. It was very “natural”.
It was a very average burrito in a sit-down Mexican restaurant, one of those places that has a nice building and atmosphere but seems to cater to a midwestern palate. I think it was La Huerta Grill. Probably would have been better any state to the Southwest of there. Looking at the map now, if I was there again, I’d go to a pupusa place… those are always super good.
Western european countries would definitely do better. Every time I see one of those videos of a guy on the street asking people geography the Americans are completely worthless but and random european is almost perfect. Americans can’t even get their states of our own country correct
Electric cars don’t solve every problem with private vehicle ownership but they’re certainly a step in the right direction. Most EVs average an equivalent of more than 100mpg versus most ICEs, which are around 30-40. You can also power an EV with renewable resources. This isn’t possible with ICEs (yes, I know you can power certain diesels with biofuel, but it’s horribly inefficient).
“Buying a new car is worse than keeping an old one” is an incredibly situational phrase that has a million exceptions for so many people.
“Buying a new car is worse than keeping an old one” is an incredibly situational phrase that has a million exceptions for so many people.
Yeah, but this still holds a lot of water. More often than not people buy a new car to have a new car or even worse they buy one specificcally because they are misguidedly trying to lessen their carbon footprint.
Just because I wanted to be sure I am not being mistaken for some reason I just googled a couple different search terms for motivations to buy a new car.
None of the results is even close to confirming your ludicrous quote from above.
So again I am baffled by how confidently wrong you keep on posting here.
People aren’t just buying new cars for fun in a recession. The point is people will need to buy a new car at some point. Either because they now need their own car or their old one isn’t viable. At that point, choosing an electric car is a step in the right direction. That’s why this post is stupid, it’s acting like buying an electric car is just a frivolous purchase and not acknowledgeding that when someone needs to buy a car there is a choice to be made.
But by selling there old car more people can affort to buy a newer cars and fade out old cars wich overall is going to decrease carbon emissions because newer cars are on average more fuel efficent.
Not sure why you are having trouble finding support or what anal tugging even is, but looking at Americans at least. They get a new car. On average every 6 to 8 years. A decently maintained car will easily last 11-14 years. If you are finding a better explanation that genralizes than what I described to explain this gap I’d love to hear it
After 8 years you’re getting to the point where the average person is gong to start running into problems with their car, especially if they bought used. At that point a person may buy a new car for many reasons not “just because”. But even in your example, it’s a 3 year gap. That could be accounted for by someone commuting more than average or taking long trips and getting more wear and tear.
I can’t even. Where are you getting that data? Unless the average person is driving a bmw they don’t start running into any kind of serious issues until 11-14years. Anything sooner than that is typically easily fixed and much cheaper than buying a new car. I don’t understand why people here don’t realize there is a huge push by advertisers and American culture to buy new cars well before they are needed. People want new cars >> than they need new cars. I’m not fabricating that. Even in a recession yes this mentality remains strong. If that’s important for you go for it I guess and yes of course buy electric or hybrid if you can. If you really want to make a carbon footprint dent though, hold off on buying a new car for a few years and with decent maintenance and minor repairs you will save yourself money and save the environment. Jesus
People don’t run into issues for 11-14 years? You’re assuming everyone is buying a brand new car. You’re entire stance is destroyed by the simple concept of buying used cars.
I’m assuming nothing now other than this sub must be overrun by car salespeople. You all are insufferable. The average age of a used car being bought is 6years old, not 11-14. Also, no one is taking issue with the carbon footprint of buying used cars. That’s not the point of this post. Buying and maintaining a used car is a wonderfully conservative practice. People aren’t buying used electric cars (by and large). The point here the OP is making is that it’s better from a carbon footprint standpoint to not trade up to an electric (typically new car) than to keep an existing ICE car at least until it nears end of life. That is a factually accurate statement that all of you car sales people apparently are upset about.
This is often repeated and very damaging misinformation. An EV powered purely by coal is significantly better for the environment than an ICE car over its lifetime. This is because coal fired power plants are more efficient than internal combustion engines due to economies of scale, even after taking into account transmission losses.
Oh today I learned, TBH my information was probably out of date. But this is good to know. Definitely a step in the right direction even if more diversified public transportation options are better
It’s more so outdated parroting than deliberate misinformation. A lot of the times I see people trying to back this one up, it’s with Hawkins et al.'s Comparative environmental life cycle assessment of conventional and electric vehicles paper. A 2012 study that analyzes emissions based on manufacturing and energy production capabilities of the time doesn’t hold up well over a decade later.
You would think that would be obvious, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Also, what do you think happens to your car when you replace it with an electric car? Do most people just drive their old cars into the ocean when they upgrade?
My frustration comes from the fact that hybrids exist and are not used nearly as enough as they should (all cars should have been mandated as hybrids a decade ago) and this would reduce the downsides of electric car production.
I’m not defending ICEs here, I just think the overall environmental credentials of electric cars at this point in time isn’t as good as hybrids.
I fully expect this to change in the future but I’ve got entire fleets of vehicles which are less than 5 years old being replaced by electric and that makes no sense.
Also cars generally are just a terrible solution to mass transport. We already have the most environmentally friendly option known to man. Bicycles and trains.
Edit: for further information on hybrid vs electric see this analysis:
I’m huge into going green, going mass transit, and everything else, however, most people cannot fit into one worldview, which is why this is more nuanced than your meme suggests.
As an example The Midwest in the states does not have mass transit, so they have to drive. So trains and bikes are out. Hybrid still uses gas, and for the vast majority of them they will be on the freeway, so a hybrid is basically the same as an ICE car anyway, so yeah, I’ll push them into getting EVs if what they’re doing is commuting. However than it gets more nuanced to “is this for roadtrips”, because then maybe hybrid is better.
Which is why again I say it’s a person-to-person basis. For you maybe a hybrid is the only option, but saying EVs are wrong for everyone is a very naive approach.
China is unmovable by vehicle at all such that their failure of a mass transit system is trying busses on stilts.
Japan is tiny. I mean very tiny minuscule area of land.
Most of EU has no such thing. You are assuming it EU is Germany, France, and Belgium. PS, all the actual Countries (which EU isn't one) in the EU are tiny.
Size is a factor in cost and that is the real reason most Countries have no such thing as viable mass transit for the majority of their citizens. Paving sold cars and cars made corporations lots of money. Mass transit does the opposite and is thus objected to by same corpos.
China has a working HSR system connecting all their major cities. The fact that their population scale is so massive means they also try weird shit to get what they can.
Japan is very narrow but it’s also very long. The actual amount of miles a train much cover from one end to the other is very large.
Yes the EU is not one country (though it is a polity). That should make it harder, not easier to cover it with rail, and yet there’s rail lines connecting all the major cities crossing national borders. Does the “size” counter reset once you cross a line on the map?
It’s not the size, it’s the political organization. You even hint at this when describing how we paved America: the political and economic configuration was aligned to make it happen despite the massive cost. The USA was crisscrossed by passenger rail and street cars, and still is for cargo. We just took a different path later, but it doesn’t actually have to be that way.
Absolutely doesn’t, and we should push them to bring back rail, but that will take a very very long time to build. Even major cities are missing rail links, they would need huge infrastructure to add it there, and then smaller links for the teeny tiny towns. We should do both - invest in good public transit, and also embrace stopgap measures.
We can both say “EVs are the solution for now” and also do things like “No new lanes will be added unless rail is considered first”
Public transit is cheaper and more accessable. It would be quite easy to make it profitable. Private transportation is more expensive both on the production side and infrastructure side. The auto industry did a lot of scummy shit in order to make it profitable. In the US, they bought up and shut down just about every public transport corp in order to force the public to buy cars and force the state to build infrastructure.
They say, as I know people in the midwest who commute 1.5 hours each way to the city for their job and then turn around and drive home. I have a friend who lives in a town of no shit, 400 people.
There’s no bus that goes there. It’s 30 miles from the nearest “city” of 15,000, and he works another 20 miles past that.
You can survive without cars
Sure, they’ll just not eat, not work, and not do anything. Dude I’m all for urbanization and adding mass transit, but you’re going to be hard pressed to add rail routes or even bus routes to not just that one town of 400, but all the other thousands of tiny towns. Hell even the town of 15,000 doesn’t have a rail route. Hell even the state capital is missing a rail route. Let alone commuter options.
I’m not saying America is an exception, I’m saying you’re naive for thinking your one opinion will work for everyone, and that the problem is more nuanced then you understand.
That’s why I brought up Cali HSR. It’s been over a decade of planning and building that, and that’s connecting two of the largest cities in the country, and you’re just casually saying “Just build it everywhere”. Like yes we want that too, but the realities of building that would be centuries of work.
If you’re aiming for a huge change anyway (buying new EVs for everyone, installing chargers everywhere) why not consider the other one - adding more transit and bike lanes? It’s not an easy shift either way - but one involves various unknowns and unforeseen difficulties. The other has been put to use across the world already.
Because we have people spread out all across a massive landscape in the USA, it’s not ever likely to be feasible to build public transport to reach everyone. No, we don’t all live in the big cities and we never will.
Personal transportation will always be a necessity for Americans, except for those who choose to live inside large cities that do have public transport. EVs with Sodium ion batteries would vastly improve our emissions and eliminate the problem with sourcing Lithium batteries’ minerals.
What do you mean “not ever likely to build public transport”? That is literally how the West was first settled, and the reason many of those towns exist. We already had train networks, and abandoned them only because of car trendiness.
I’ve read accounts from people who actually live in those small towns - even if they exist a long way from cities, they’re still generally walkable (because of the low traffic volume in the area). Any place where each individual home and store has been spread out such that literally every trip for any purpose necessitates private transport is just forcing its own worst-case scenario and would benefit from a redesign either way. As long as there’s any kind of civic center with a few stores, it becomes reasonably practical to at least have a bus route.
I’ve read accounts from people who actually live in those small towns
Haha, I’ve lived that life for about 80% of 4 decades already in several small towns and out in the woods far from town. Public transport is mostly non-existent, and people live all over the place where there is nothing but a narrow winding road with no sidewalks. It’s generally only the city center where the buildings like courthouses and banks are located that are walkable in the average American small town. Basically there’s no option but cars for these small towns.
When you go on about how they should all be built up into an urban paradise with sidewalks and buses and trains going everywhere, it overlooks the fact that we already don’t keep up the infrastructure that we have well enough. There is no money to just rebuild everything into the version you imagine would be ideal.
That sounds like the most backward design even of a rural area. This is not a dichotomy between cities and towns complete with pedestrian bridges and electric crosswalks, it’s also about planning that amounts past random, long-distance scattering of destinations.
I’m trying to even understand how you claim those towns become unwalkable, since that’s not due to lack of development - it’s a matter of overdevelopment of roads with wide lanes. A small grid of old buildings with dirt between them is perfectly walkable. If someone built those stores 4 miles apart from each other all in different directions, then even for car users that’s a design failure.
If you insist there is no money to develop anything in those towns or re-plan the environment, that’s an unfortunate diagnosis for the area, but that also means EVs won’t work there because of lack of charging infrastructure, and the town will die out since nothing is being maintained. Let’s keep the discussion to just places that at least have enough money to reconsider their 8-lane stroads.
That’s unfortunately the truth in most American rural towns. Take my town and their grocery store. My town back in the day apparently had a great town square, vibrant, very walkable. Over the years it’s become more delapidated due to neglect, and businesses don’t want to open there. Our grocery store left the downtown area so they could build a new one on the outskirts of town. People love it, it’s bright, big, huge even, and of course, plenty of parking. So they think it’s an absolute win. Except it’s not. It was the town’s only grocery store and now rather than having a walkable store from all the houses in town, everyone now gets in their car and drives 2 miles out of town, parks in the massive parking lot, and walks inside.
This is how commercial has all happened in small towns. It’s left the downtown which you’re right, would be very walkable, and has moved outside of town. On top of that, it’s extremely anti-pedestrian, so even if there would be a bus added eventually, it would still require walking 1/4 mile from the bus stop across a parking lot just to get to the entrance of one of the stores.
The entire thing is ridiculous, and you’re right for not understanding it. The only way it makes sense is if everyone is brainwashed into thinking that “it’s better that I get to get into my car, drive 2 miles, and pick up my groceries, put them all in my car, drive 2 miles home, then bring them all inside”
I will say EVs do work there, and it’s not because of charging infrastructure, but because everyone forgets that you can charge your car at home. Most residents are single family homes with 2, 3, hell even 4 car garages. Each space could have a charger, and every home could have solar added. Places like grocery stores can add chargers. In that small town we (for some reason) had 6 gas stations for our 15k people. They could be mandated to add some chargers, but even then, if everyone charged at home it’s like leaving your house on a full tank every day. Very few people seem to think that way.
Transit is by far the superior option, but we’re talking decades, centuries to hook up these small towns. In the short term, EVs will lower our dependence on fossil fuels at least.
My issue with typical hybrids is that they got all the complexity of an ICE powertrain, in addition to all the complexity of an EV powertrain, plus the complexity of merging the two.
Slightly less efficient, but I think I’m more in support of EVs with gas range extenders. Maybe it’s just a question of semantics. But more than that (if we’re gonna keep cars) we need to invest in charging infrastructure. Idk why it sucks so bad, and why gas stations aren’t installing charging stations.
It’s a fair assumption that adding extra systems to the car makes it overall less reliable, but it’s not necessarily true. Electric motors, compared to IC engines, are extremely simple and reliable. The servicing guidelines for the electric drivetrain in my hybrid is essentially “replace the battery if it stops holding enough charge”, there is no schedule for any routine maintenance of those components. Adding the hybrid system also reduces the wear and tear on the conventional drivetrain and brakes. Hybrids can do regenerative braking, which means that (for my vehicle at least) most of the braking down to maybe 10mph is done by regen, which functionally has no wear and tear. The electric motors also assist the ICE at the times where peak wear and stress occur, reducing the load and stress on the motor, and extending it’s lifespan. By adding the hybrid system, the overall reliability and lifespan of the vehicle is increased rather than decreased.
My issue isn’t with adding electric to a gas car. My issue is adding gas to an electric car.
The ICE drive train adds a TON of complexity to an EV. If you’re gonna add ICE to an EV I think that it makes more sense to have a little range-extender generator, which is simple and cheap (because it only needs to run at a single RPM and constant load) which you can just run to add a bit more charge to your battery on long road trips.
But ideally we’d just have better charging infrastructure.
Even without hustle culture I’m not going to be as motivated as a crackhead looking for a fix because I am not powered by addiction. I’m more motivated to sleep and eat way too much pie so a pothead would be better competition.
Learned this hard while playing alien isolation, especially since my night vision has been going to shit. My eyes were watering while I was playing, it was so dark
What I found is that videogames, are usually tailored to the eyes of younger audiences. Young adults and teenagers. Typical “playing in dark room with only a screen illuminating” stuff.
As I grow older however, I found that I need my rooms lights to be turned on to be comfortably plsy, with my screens brightness turned up just slightly. I also much appreciate features that help with vision impairment despite having an otherwise perfectly fine working vision.
Funfact to tell the haters(since I assume few if any are here): The gays are not doing this to Disney. Disney is doing this to the gays, they make 17 first openly this or that kind of queerness because they want the gay peoples money.
Yeah, and maybe its just me, but I had never though before this meme to phrase my thoughts about it the way I did, and I like the way it explains where the ‘action’ is coming from very plainly, since I hear opponents of representation claim that it works in reverse and somehow the gays are forcing media conglomerates to bend to their will, instead of the media conglomerates putting out whatever extracts the most cash. Like I don’t expect the right leaners I know to understand and agree with this comment I’m typing, but I really feel like I could get somewhere if I phrased it like in the one you replied to. Of course not everyone can be moved in the first place, but its the idea I get from my experiences with them.
They will then counter this with "Well if they just shut up and minded their own business instead of telling everybody all about how much cock they suck, it wouldn't matter", completely missing the point that these folks have been minding their own business for centuries and regularly getting murdered for it, and also completely missing the extremely obvious parallels to Jim Crow and the civil rights movement (or maybe not, maybe that's why they hate it so much). It is their opinion that they shouldn't have to know you're gay, and that you should have to live in fear of revealing that fact for your entire lifetime. And that's just the crowd that doesn't believe that homosexuality is a direct affront to God and should be stamped out as a moral imperative.
I've had this conversation before a few times, it always comes back around to the same points. Conservatives become extremely unconformable with the knowledge that The Gays(R) exist and typically wield misunderstood Bible quotation in defense of that. Those who don't, will resort to the argument that they shouldn't have to have it "thrust into their faces", as though the knowledge that gay folks exist is some great personal burden to them. They will happily tell people to "mind their own business" and "keep it to yourself" so long as their lungs have air with which to speak, but when told themselves to mind their own damn business, suddenly this is unacceptable.
Someone made a filter for that and it works well. It’s in one of the posts that talked about YouTube doing that (I think the one in the Technology sub).
He’s not even the main character, he’s a sidekick and not even the most prominent of the sidekicks really. (Despite the fact that he appears first in many character lists for the movie, the protagonist is Searcher)
Idk you’re really underselling Ethan’s role in the story. If anything him being gay is such a side plot it doesn’t even matter. But I wouldn’t say he is a “sidekick” lol
the question is: is a skeleton that’s missing pieces still “one skeleton”? And if so, at which point does it become not a skeleton? Because i’m reasonably sure you wouldn’t call a severed foot a skeleton even though it is still arguably “one skeleton” that is just missing a lot of pieces.
It’s a war of attrition. Slow and steady will win this race.
Lemmy, just like Mastodon has seen spikes followed by users leaving. But every spike leaves more users on Lemmy/Mastodon than previously.
Truthfully, in the event another Reddit Exodus, which will happen, we need to try and be more of a content-oriented system during that era. Making more posts and focusing on adding to niches.
Reddit is about Niche communities and Content Saturation. Lemmy isn’t really about that, but it can be for moments at a time to pull users in. At some point we’ll reach a critical mass of users that leads to easier justification for new users to join.
We just need a group of extremely disorganized and disagreeable people to organize and and agree on this.
I think Lemmy would either need to find a way to wean Redditors off of their dopamine machine or replace that dopamine machine long-term to sustain an exodus from Reddit. Either that, or Reddit will need to break their dopamine feedback loop. There are some cracks showing, and that might have already killed the platform in the long term, but it’ll keep going from pure momentum for a while. Maybe as long as months or years.
Seems like there’s more sexists and racists than I used to see over there, which is definitely offputting. I’ve found communities that are supportive of thoughtful discussion are more appealing, and Reddit definitely lacks that lately, outside of some small, relatively niche communities.
Another hurdle is getting game devs to treat Lemmy instances for their games as official points of contact, which is definitely something reddit still has that Lemmy doesn’t, unfortunately.
I like your optimism but theres not a lot of great examples of the little guys winning lately. I’m not sure exactly how, but I predict things end badly for Lemmy. Just seems like a more likely outcome in today’s world. Guessing reddit does ok everyone just ends up a bit more miserable than before. Sorry for being a turd, I just think your prediction is statistically unlikely.
Except Lemmy isn’t a single Lemmy.com that will one day run out of money and implode into nothingness.
Lemmy, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub based Fediverse Networks are muliti-node systems.
This is just pure nihilism without a hint of thought put into it. Nothing short of the world exploding and human annihilation will kill Lemmy, And even then, there are bots.
Bonkers. There is a critical mass that keeps people willing to support it. I can run an original Quake server and find a few people to play with, but distrubuted multinode systems don’t mean a damn without a critical mass user base. Lemmy is far from bulletproof.
I’m not suggesting this social media format will die, it’s just likely that a corporate entity will develop a lemmy alternative that becomes more popular and causes fatal atrophy or Reddit will get new leadership and Lemmy hopefuls will cross back over if content development here is slower than the collective patience. I’m pro Lemmy FYI, I just don’t understand the unbridled optimism about it’s future.
Reddit also gets a little bit worse every spike, too. There are few mods remaining on Reddit who are doing anything more interesting for their communities than basic spam removal. Automod does all the work when all the largest subs just repost the same content and fake stories anyway.
It’s not like going to implode or anything anytime soon but the quality (from my perspective at least) has totally flatlined since June because why would anyone in their right mind invest creative energy into cultivating a unique community? I think that eventually a Lemmy community will pop up that simply couldn’t exist on Reddit and will serve to illustrate why I believe this model is better.
There is still some new content (rocket league videos come to mind) that is hard to move to a federated platform, because video streaming is expensive.
Tbh I don’t think humanity was ready for social media. In the past, complete and utter fuckwits would be shamed into silence. Now, they’re all connected to each other, reinforcing their shitty hot takes until they reach a critical mass; attracting other morons like a black hole of idiocy.
Forget technological singularity, we’re rapidly approach a singularity of stupidity. Idiocracy was supposed to be a comedy, not a how-to manual for fucks sake!
I find grass so useless. Every boomer parent I’ve known is just obsessed with it, too. They think that not having a green, green monoculture lawn means you’ve failed morally or something, and that it’s how they show the neighborhood how responsible they are. One GF’s dad came over to our random Winconsin lawn of grass and weeds and strawberries and was “I WOULD JUST PULL THIS ALL UP AND START OVER”. Uh… no?
Then I had an across the street neighbor (guy with a bumper sticker “I’ve never seen a FLAG burned at a GUN SHOW”) who would mow his lawn every single day with a riding mower. You couldn’t even tell what part he had done yet. I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn. I left my backyard just go and it was awesome… after a few years, birds started nesting in the middle of the prairie, and I had flowers growing I’d never seen anywhere else.
i never understood why american front yards dont have fences. just a barren wasteland of green from the curb to the front windows. fence your garden in!
do you have kids? they love playing outside. barefoot. and a nice lawn is a paradise for bare feet. not to mention the actual process of mowing (electric mower) is very peaceful and good for my mental health. super therapeutic.
seems pretty naive to think that it’s joe homeowner that’s the problem, and not insecticides and fertilizers from mega farm corporations like monsanto. let me know where to mail my apology letter lol
I get it as a dog owner with only a courtyard. But he goes on long hikes in the bush and big walks a few times a week. It’d be nice to give the little fella a patch to hang on while I’m at work. And I mean a patch—I hate mowing and any yard work motivation in me is for citrus, chilli, and grapes.
There is the risk of tick transmission of Lyme disease in tall grass. I suppose you can pretreat to prevent contraction, but mowing grass means you don’t have those threats/hazards to worry about.
I still hate lawns and wish more would be native, but I wonder if there’s a way to grow a native lawn such that you invite the good wildlife and keep out the bad. Would need a biologist to chime in
My yard was very low with ground cover. I actually did mow the front, I just didn’t care if it was grass or a bunch of random other plants. I had a dog when my gf lived with me, but at this point, didn’t. There were so many rabbits and deer I actually just grew my vegetable garden on the front porch in containers.
That guy was an asshole for doing that to you. I wonder if that might be considered trespassing. Dunno if you can have any civil remedy served to you, or if it’s even worth it, but still sucks.
Low height ground cover type plants grew naturally there. Clover, alfalfa, strawberries, unknown other plants, with an occasional thistle. Larger plants (whatever they were) would grow on the periphery. When he mowed my lawn it was maybe about a foot high.
We were surrounded by acres of forest where plants grew wild, so if there was a problem with pollen, it wasn’t the .4 acres of my front lawn. Myt front lawn, I did mow occasionally. The back I let grow wild and yes, one could still walk through it.
One of the lame things about lawn is that people don’t let them go to seed. If grass goes to seed, it not only regenerates itself, but also provides food for birds and squirrels. I was on an acre and a half across the street from this guy, and bounded by 30 feet of trees on ones side and 200 feet of forest on the other.
I doubt that I could have demonstrated real harm, or even proved that he did it. I got back into town a week later and my brother, who had been watching the house, said “huh, the guy across the street mowed the front yard”.
I mean that’s probally overkill, that person was either OCD or was thinking he was doing them a favor. That sounds like a great way to have a pissed off neighbor and a potentially hostile neighborhood
I’d feel a little different (still pissed) if it was a next door neighbor who extended their mow. But to cross the street and change someone’s property without permission is already hostile to me.
I’m 52 and hate mowing yards. Most other people my age are also obsessed with their lawns or simply “enjoy getting out and working on the yard”
There few things worse than doing yard work. I think dying is one of them, maybe.
Anyways, yeah we have a yard. We try to keep various bushes and wildflowers as we can. We go as log as possible in early spring to not mow and get all the clover and stuff to bring the bees and like insects over.
As for mowing, I pay someone 50 dollars every 2 weeks to keep it not looking like crap.
My father-in-law, who lives with us, used to do most of the gardening and lawn stuff. He is too old now to do any of it. He’s always trying to get the rest of the people in the house to do stuff in the yard. I keep telling him "you know you are the only one who really gives a shit on how ‘nice’ the yard looks. My only goal is to keep the city and neighbors off our back, that’s it.’
EDIT: Also neighbors seem intent on having a single uniform grass breed and obsessed with having no weeds. Nah, I have all the grasses and weeds. I have a neighbor down the street who is always just HAND PULLING weeds out of her lawn. Like hours and hours of it. I mean… wat
It seems to be something that retired people love, to keep them active and give them something to do (a sense of purpose besides grandchildren?). I don’t mind yardwork myself, but I don’t feel like it’s virtuous or something. I also understand that a chemical-sodden monoculture isn’t really the best for humans and wildlife.
My mother used to try to get us… oh, she still does… to come “PULL WEEDS”. As kids it made sense, like okay, she wants us to get away from the video games and be outside and do whatever she’s saying, but at this point…
I went out of town for two weeks and he rode over and mowed my lawn.
This happened to me too. grillman are so violently obsessed with inch-high fuzzy green rectangles of obedience that they’ll sometimes invade your property to make more of them, overriding any of their own pretenses about the sanctity of private property in the process.
I think he thought he was doing me a favor, but really was just jerking off his lawn obsession. Same guy told me one time “HEY i saw a bear in your driveway and I was gonna come run it off so it didn’t mess with your garbage but it left!” I was uh, okay… no, please don’t come confront a bear in my driveway. Dude drank light beer all day.
In my case, it was deliberate aggression because I had told him, in person and to his face, that those were protected native plants and I had a legal right to have them on my property.
But grillman “did me a favor” with a disgusting little smirk when I confronted him about it later. He even implied that I got nothing to prove what he did because I don’t have the surveillance state shit that he has on his side of the fence.
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