I love my backyard garden (even though my Brussels Sprout experiment this year proved to be a huge waste of time). I also love the aesthetic that cottagecore is revitalizing. I love drinking at local wineries, buying stuff at my local farmer's market, brewing beer and swapping bottles with homebrew friends, etc...
But holy shit am I repulsed by the influencer aspect that is growing with this "movement". Ways of Seeing taught that publicity (aka marketing) is tied to envy. There is such a deep schism between the Web 2.0 communities that exchange ideas on a forum and the vapid glamour shots posted on Instagram and Tik Tok. I think the takeaway is "Don't trust anyone in your hobby who is making money off their social media account."
Maybe this is why I like homebrewing: everyone is a bearded, chubby 35 year old nerd and there no way to make a 5 gallon carboy of bubbling alcoholic liquid into something "glamourous"
| "Don't trust anyone in your hobby who is making money off their social media account."
That is a remarkably accurate, but sad observation. There’s always been folks trying to hustle in various hobbies and interest groups, but these days they seem to take up all the oxygen in a space.
The glossy image/clip video nature of things seem unavoidable and make many people with humbler aspirations more reluctant to share their works, thoughts, and perspectives if they aren’t able to be turned into the visual equivalent of a sound bite.
I feel the same way about woodwork, sure there's gimmicky creators but the reality of the hobby is nobody is getting rich or famous, selling pieces will barely cover material costs and having the fanciest gear won't necessarily give you a better finished piece.
Although epoxy river tables make me cringe everytime I see one...
I hope you're kidding! ... if you're buying plywood spend the extra buck or two to at least get one finished size. Furniture-grade veneered plywood really isn't that outrageously priced and for a pro-am like me, it's dimensionally stable for bigger pieces and I can cut out parts that don't fit in my thicknesser and/or finish planer.
I prefer epoxy fastened wooden boats (whether on a river or not). Amateurs out there who are following these "tutorials" beware ... you can become allergic to epoxy with repeated exposure so wear your PPE.
Van lifers feel your pain. The instagram influencer skinny young cute blonde girl with painted toenails and backdoors open to reveal the grand canyon is a far cry from the reality that's 90% pooping in a composting toilet in a walmart parking lot and spending your entire weekend trying to install a water tank to supply a shower.
I lived the van life for a bit, and did not find myself pooping more frequently than usual... Usually I went in a toilet, which are numerous almost everywhere with a road. In the few occasions one was not available, I was in the woods, and I did the classic "dig a hole and cover it after" maneuver. I must say, there was something very primal and distinct from pooping in a toilet in that, the smell was different, and I was able to gain some kind of indicators from it.
Anyway, that covers the number one question most people ask me about that, showers probably a close second. I just didn't shower as frequently, but did not mind it, since I was alone or with others who didn't mind. For showers, I went to gyms, dance studios, friends' showers, public showers, and so on.
It always seemed to me overkill to try to do all that yourself, when all you really need is a bit of personal space where you can lie down flat and sleep...
Generally affects people's expectations - even if you personally have zero interaction w/ social media, incl. no accounts. Alternatively it affects kids, which are exceptionally subjected to peer pressure.
Previous comment was a quote from the song “Losing My Edge” by LCD Soundsystem. The genius of the lyrics is in sardonically complaining about the new generation but also admitting the real problem is that the singer is growing old.
> Maybe this is why I like homebrewing: everyone is a bearded, chubby 35 year old nerd and there no way to make a 5 gallon carboy of bubbling alcoholic liquid into something "glamourous"
Alcohol is very prominent on Instik, don't give them ideas. They might not have the brains to actually make it but they sure can buy the equipment and use water pretending it's moonshine :D
I find myself struggling with this sometimes. I know I shouldn't, but it's easier to justify time spent with some sort of idea that it will be "worth it" in some way in the future. This is mostly an issue with new interests- I'm more content with old hobbies just for fun.
It's the same about any hobbies/communities really, it's 90% acting, some of them aren't even that deep in the hobby, they're just very deep into marketing/"influencing"
I agree 100%. We also have this local vibe where I live and it is mostly composed of 40+ people who have no idea what TikTok is. By the way...you can make the jump from Web 2 to Web 3 and skip Tik Tok altogether.
Marie Antoinette and her friends would dress up as young shepherdess or milkmaids and wander around the hamlet pretending to be peasants, while still surrounded by the comforts of a royal lifestyle. A team of real farmers appointed by the Queen looked after the farm and the animals, and produced fruits and vegetables consumed at the royal table.
https://www.amusingplanet.com/2019/11/hameau-de-la-reine-mar...
It's pricey but 8 days of burning man is cheaper than 8 concerts. Apparently they have low cost tickets too that are only like $200. I know some festivals like bonnaro let you volunteer for a free ticket.
At least in NYC it is still fashionable to dress well (as in curating one's own style or to the upper-end styling haute couture well). If in NYC it is still fashionable, I am pretty sure it is still fashionable in a lot of places :)
My finger may not be on the pulse here, but I think we all deep down believe that a classic suit and tie is still dressing well... even if we choose not do it.
Even though Shatner's "singing" is pretty mockable, I think in this case he brings a tone of working class anger that elevates the cover above the original.
I was at university when that song was released and it used to amuse me greatly at the number of rich students singing along as if the song was some show of unity with “common people” - not taking a second to actually think about the lyrics.
"Born in the USA" continues to be a staple of Republican rallies.
Michael Douglas' "Greed is Good" movie speech had a bigger cultural impact than the actual plot of the film (Wall Street, 1987), where the exploitative nature of private equity takeovers is shown, and where both Douglas and Sheen eventually land in prison for insider trading.
As someone who actually grew up in a village of 1000 people I find this nostalgia a typical product of the imagination of people who never actually tried living outside of the city, and are therefore free to imagine it as beautiful or horrible as they want without nuance getting in the way. As for myself I like to visit my family for even a week or two, but I sure don't miss living in a village.
Also, every year there are a few people who actually try to move to the village I am from. Most of them sell their house again within a few years because they don't understand that living in the countryside sucks if you're not trying to be part of the local community, and if you move in acting like you're better than the locals that's not going to happen.
Its the result of complete burnout of a large portion of society. So many people feel they work too much and dream of just getting away to something simpler. I think its a reflection of so much going wrong currently with society and the way we live in general. But I'm just some guy on the internet; I am probably projecting :)
Edit: I often think about buying a cheap old isolated house on a couple acres in Italy, fixing it up and just putting the world at arms length. Kids and wife make it impractical so I will continue to trudge :)
> So many people feel they work too much and dream of just getting away to something simpler.
I agree that this the popular sentiment, but I think work is a smaller part of it than we like to think. I think people are simply overwhelmed with the always-on, always-connected lifestyles that fill our every waking moment with outrage-bait headlines and more entertainment media than we could possibly ever consume. Anyone with a phone is always seconds away from piping stress and bad news and drama and conflict and ragebait straight into their eyes for hours at a time. And many do!
Wage stagnation is one thing, but I think the actual amount of work we’re doing gets less and less each decade. When I was young I remember my parents making fun of me for working “bankers’ hours” because my job was 9-6. For them, 10-12 hour days were the norm. Before that, my grandfathers on both sides had to work two full-time jobs simultaneously at different points to support their families. Before that, my great-grandparents started with a homestead where every day was filled with hard labor just to survive when winter rolled around.
Cottagecore aesthetic encapsulates a romanticized version of the laborious homesteading lifestyle but in a way that assumes all of the modern amenities and none of the labor. It sells because most people are so far removed from the idea of how much labor it takes to survive and be self-sufficient that the idea seems downright romantic.
The notion that things would be easier if we simply rolled back the clock to simpler times is demonstrably not true, but the idea of “born in the wrong era” is a common result of romanticizing the past.
I grew up on a 10 acre block in the country, most of which we rented to a local farmer who put cattle on it, and it was great. It's interesting to compare and contrast with cottagecore, which emphasises cosiness, because the thing I liked most was having space.
Want to make a desk? All it takes is asking your dad if you can tidy up the garage a bit and finding some cheap wood. Want to plant some apricots? There's space out back near the veggie garden. Want to learn to drive? You've got a big paddock and the farmer you rent it to doesn't mind as long as you take care near his cattle. Want to build a hut and take photos for a school project? Sure, go down to the windbreak and look for sticks, just take a snakebite bandage with you.
The labour involved in keeping a modern rural property going isn't impossible to sustain, and there are a lot of tangible benefits, particularly if you've got kids. You can even pick a few old-timey hobbies like spinning or making jam if you want. You don't have to go all-in on living at an 1800s technology level.
"I think people are simply overwhelmed with the always-on, always-connected lifestyles that fill our every waking moment with outrage-bait headlines and more entertainment media than we could possibly ever consume" I completely agree with you. I think the worst thing that happened to modern societal culture was the invention of the pay per click model. Everything changed at that moment; politics, consumerism, even they way we form opinions and gather information. All for the worse.
You're right that surviving on a homestead sounds very... unromantic to me. I planted a bunch of apple trees, berry bushes..etc, over a year ago. I fertilize and water, but somehow blight took it all. It seems like nature is constantly trying to fight you on everything.
It seems like it's you fighting, but that's only from your relative perspective, it is a windmill you are fighting, like Don Quixote. In terms of the grand scale, ecology exists on an equilibrium. When you shift that equilibrium and create an abundance of resources that weren't there before, the system will respond and attempt to consume that newfound abundance. Pests will consume available food and pathogens will spread to available hosts, if these things are allowed to happen.
This has happened to me in my garden just this season with looper caterpillars, grasshoppers, aphids, spider mites, and rats. I've practically opened a grocery store for them so I can't blame them, but in knowing that my directed change of the local ecology leads to this localized response of more aphids or whatever, I am able to take preventative measures to make my crop less attractive to interlopers (neem oil and bt in my case), and combat the response that happens from me shifting the ecological equilibrium by growing all these tasty plants from all over the world in my garden in an area where they wouldn't normally be found naturally. Maybe in your case combating your blight pathogen in the future means work making sure the soil is free of spores, planting practices that might avoid blight to a degree, or selecting hardier varieties that are better suited to your local conditions or resistant to blight if such cultivars are available. The battle becomes less like a fruitless effort (pardon the pun) and more like a game of chess when you start studying this stuff a little bit.
Thanks for the tips. I kinda just figured it would be easy lol. It certainly isn't. I've tried some Neem oil and fungicides that have helped, but it's a full time job.
This is it. All of my friends are now toying with a plan to work less, remotely and on their own terms. We've never had this conversation before but now everyone talks about it.
People are just tired of the commute, the mindless work and the idle time. They don't identify with their job, and don't expect any superfluous loyalty from their employer.
Stardew Valley disturbs me, because it makes farming and even gardening seem too easy. There's too little substance between planting and harvest; playing it feels like eating candy for dinner for a week.
Strange… I found the cave full of monsters in Stardew Valley makes it seem way too hard to cut your way through slimes, skeletons and beings of darkness.
Sometimes the economic scarcity is relatively less scarce than in urban areas. For example, at least during the depression those with farms had to ability to grow their own food.
To be fair, sometimes the government would allow urban households to garden in a 1/4 acre or so plot in designated areas as part of a program to help people be more self sufficient. Although my grandfather said not many people took advantage of that.
> For example, at least during the depression those with farms had to ability to grow their own food.
Those without farms overwhelmingly didn't need to. The only place in North America to have widespread hunger during the Great Depression was Newfoundland. If most people didn't take advantage of allotments it was because it wasn't worth it. After the fall of the Soviet Union lots and lots of urban ex-Soviet citizens grew their own food. They needed to.
My understanding is that while they didn't need to, it did help. Especially with variety and specific items, like meat, or grain for making beer. But in general it would help provide more than the bare minimum.
My grandpa remembers many urban people during the depression complaining about food, but unwilling to work a garden on a government plot.
Having grown up during that period no one needed to. You could survive quite easily on whatever you could buy in the stores. The diet you could get from growing your own food was much better than what you get even in the west today.
The one thing people who haven't experienced it can't understand is the taste of the food. I don't know what price I'd put on a breakfast made with fresh milk, eggs, home baked bread and salted pork but it would be at least a few hundred dollars.
If I didn't live in a region where any rural property is expected to burn down once a decade I'd have bought a weekend farm a long time ago.
My great grandmother lived on a farm during the great depression. They had plenty to eat, but she said that what hurt them the most was the city folks couldn't buy their produce or eggs, so they lost their ability to largely make additional cash for odds and ends.
True. My grandpa worked in the mines and a quarry to help make money in addition to the farm. I think some farmers were lucky enough to have the government pay for food (or even the destruction of food) so that they could distribute the food and drive up prices for the people who did have money.
The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.
There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
I think that sums it up better than I could ever do.
Don Quixote replied that he himself was to be called the shepherd Quixotize and the bachelor the shepherd Carrascon, and the curate the shepherd Curambro, and Sancho Panza the shepherd Pancino.
Both were astounded at Don Quixote’s new craze; however, lest he should once more make off out of the village from them in pursuit of his chivalry, they trusting that in the course of the year he might be cured, fell in with his new project, applauded his crazy idea as a bright one, and offered to share the life with him. “And what’s more,” said Samson Carrasco, “I am, as all the world knows, a very famous poet, and I’ll bealways making verses, pastoral, or courtly, or as it may come into my head, to pass away our time in those secluded regions where we shall be roaming. But what is most needful, sirs, is that each of us should choose the name of the shepherdess he means to glorify in his verses, and that we should not leave a tree, be it ever so hard, without writing up and carving her name on it, as is the habit and custom of love-smitten shepherds.”
This is, in reality, probably less 'green' than living in a city. Multi-family homes tend to require less energy to heat and cool, because you share walls. You can also walk to many things, bike, or take transit. My bet is that most of the people living in these rural places aren't so into the 'rural lifestyle' that they don't own a couple of cars that they use for ... pretty much everything in life.
Making large life decisions based on your own personal GHG emissions is living as though you are already dead.
I moved out to the country. Bought a big diesel. Started a farm. My GHGs went way up.
And yet, my lifestyle change has zero impact on climate change.
It's like voting--if you know game theory at all, you know it's a waste of time, just like it's a waste of a life to spend your time calculating and optimizing how "green" you're being. Zero real impact, beyond whatever it makes you feel.
Hey, I enjoy dirt bikes and the shooting guns on my land. My kids do too. Maybe you enjoy riding the bus and being efficient. To each their own. But don't live a lesser life just to live up to some lifestyle meme--whether it's the homesteading trend or the green trend--just do what you like.
I can understand the argument that individual consumer changes are not enough to stem the tide of climate change. But I’m not sure that means individual choices have zero real impact.
I think the voting analogy is good, but I take a different lesson from it. Not that voting is pointless. Individual actions matter a great deal in their cumulative effect.
Your impact is not zero. Small numbers exist. Unfortunately physics doesn't round down before aggregating individual numbers. You and your kids not living "a lesser life" just means your grandkids will. Mine, too. It's that easy.
Maybe people who don't think voting is a waste of time will generate an environment where these decisions are made on a societal level and individual responsibility is less important. Which presumably you'd welcome. It's unlikely.
It's all about aggregate actions and incentives. I have no problem if people want to live that kind of lifestyle - I think they should be free to do so. I do think we should have a carbon tax so that some of the externalities it creates are priced in. At the margin, perhaps some people would decide not to choose more carbon intensive activities, or work harder to find ways to mitigate them (buy a Ford electric truck instead of the diesel, say).
I've been saying since at least 2016 that I expect a moralizing campaign to guilt people into moving to the city "for the environment" as interests continue to pressure their pocket politicians to shift all responsibility for controlling climate change to individual consumers. "People who live outside the city use X times more fuel to heat and commute and contribute Y more to climate change! Do the right thing: move to the city." Devalue burb/rural housing with a glut of supply, indenture millions with enormous city mortgages or perpetual rent, profit, retire to island in South Pacific-- job done.
One of the worst things we did in the past century is paint the idea of an apartment high rise full of decent sized family apartments overlooking a green shady courtyard as some communist evil, to be actively outlawed. We haven't gotten past that sentiment towards apartment living to this day. Even what we do build in terms of apartments is only really studios or 1 or 2 bedroom units. If you want to have a family, there's nothing like that on the market like there is in other countries with dense family housing.
Living as a SINK/DINK? Yeah sure. Look at just about any show about raising children at or above the replacement rate and the vast majority are all in homes. Even the family in shameless had a home. The only counter example I can even think of is smilf.
You're right that families with children living in multifamily dwellings are under-represented on American TV, but that's not because they are rare in real American life. I can think of a few examples of course, like "The Jeffersons", the whole premise of which is how their success led to moving from a house in Queens to an apartment in Manhattan.
Everyone does it in their 20s. Everyone likes being walking distance from the bars at that age. Few last into their 30s or 40s with kids in tow unless they are very wealthy or too poor to afford the high upfront costs of moving to a cheaper area.
There is more to life than bars: More likely, where I am, you are walking distance from grocery stores as bars aren't peppered everywhere. (Going to bars is an expensive hobby in Norway, and pre/post drinking is quite normal). Also, you can't bring the kids to the bar in most places (It used to be legal in Tennessee to a point)
So sure, they aren't going to bars. But they are going to work. They are living in areas where their 6-year-old child can walk to school. Where they can take public transportation to work. And so on.
> Even what we do build in terms of apartments is only really studios or 1 or 2 bedroom units.
In suburbia, sure. In urban areas, 3+ bedroom apartments are definitely a thing, as are relatively spacious apartments for their bedroom count, and overlooking luxurious courtyards.
They are as expensive as you’d expect from places where studios are more expensive than suburban 3 bedroom single-family homes, though.
I live in a city of 4 million people and I can tell you that in these new construction builds that they legitimately do not build for families. You will rarely if ever see a new construction 3 or 4 bedroom, its typical for these builds to have some studios and 1 or 2s but hardly ever larger units. All that's available of that size is old housing stock from the 1970s or before.
That's just your area. I live in a city of around 200,000. They definitely build for families here. I can buy a new 2 or 3 bedroom apartment - a brand-new studio might be more difficult. You can find older ones, though.
(Most families only need 2-3 bedrooms due to family sizes)
>One of the worst things we did in the past century is paint the idea of an apartment high rise full of decent sized family apartments overlooking a green shady courtyard as some communist evil, to be actively outlawed.
How many large apartment blocs have you lived in? It's not a very enjoyable way to live, particularly with a family.
People want houses, garages, yards, and cars. Don't try to paint the selfish reality of human nature as being corrupted by some propagandistic force against collectivism.
None were decent sized family apartments overlooking a green shady courtyard.
They were all cramped 2-bedroom units overlooking shopping malls, designed for people who didn't want to buy a house in the suburban sprawl around my Midwestern city. The courtyards were decrepit and unmaintained, the only nice green spaces had 'keep off the grass' signs. Obviously no one wants that, it worked as a college student and a newlywed but when we started a family I did, indeed, buy a house. But not because I actually wanted a house, because I wanted something other than the crappy apartments that were in my local market.
My parents recently bought a condo - it's in a green, forested neighborhood in some quiet residential streets, they have a two-car garage, they have four bedrooms - theirs, spare upstairs, office, one downstairs for visiting grandkids, storage space downstairs, upstairs they have a living room, dining room, and large kitchen. Theirs is a duplex, a few of the units in the neighborhood are larger quad-unit townhomes.
As relatively wealthy seniors, they were able to buy that outright. But nothing like that (except regular homes) is available to rent within several hundred miles, as far as I know. Nice apartments are just not a thing that we build, in part because culturally, "nice apartments" is an oxymoron.
I would like a large house with a huge yard right in the middle of a lot of amenities. And a pony.
The reality is that land in desirable areas is scarce, so people ought to be free to choose the tradeoffs they prefer.
In Italy, my family and I actually did live in a home in a 6 unit building and it was just fine. 3 bedroom, 2 bath. Rather than the yard, the kids would go over to the local park, where they'd actually find other kids to play with, which is way more important to kids than the big yard in the house we rent here in the US.
How many are constructed to be desirable? Would a nice apartment complex be legal in most jurisdictions? Luckily, the First Nations in Vancouver don't have to worry about NIMBYs, so they can show us a good example: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-senakw-in-van...
20th century history is littered with these types of developments [0]. They all turn out the same way. Decrepit and abandoned within 20 years. No one wants to live like that. Living your life in a 30th story studio apartment is a dystopian nightmare. You are completely disconnected from your environment, and daily needs like grocery shopping, package deliveries, buying furniture, all become herculean tasks. It's why these places very quickly become slums. The only people willing to live like that are those with no other choice.
Your link is to a public housing project. It discusses the reasons why it became a slum, such as white flight and desegregation.
Not sure if you have ever lived in an apartment if you think grocery shopping is a “Herculean” task. You just take the elevator and walk a block or two to the grocery store. Furniture is actually easier than in a SFH because you don’t have to struggle to move it up stairs, you just pop it in an elevator. Package deliveries go to a concierge at the front desk rather than being stolen or getting wet on the porch if you’re not home, etc.
In general looking at trends of the 1960s to predict behavior today won’t work - there’s been a trend toward reurbanization in the last 30 years and white flight has reversed and been replaced with gentrification. The “slums” are now being pushed into city outskirts and suburbs themselves.
Personally, I do see a relationship between crime and people fleeing the cities, for obvious reasons. What is concerning is the increase in homicide rates combined with an epidemic of DAs that refuse to prosecute crimes, all against a backdrop of remote work making outmigration much easier. That may well reverse the gentrification trend and we could see a repeat of the 1970s-1980s.
I lived in one about three years ago and it was full of children and families. It was constructed in the 1960s so it still had a few larger units. The grounds were recently renovated, so the children had an astroturf half length soccer field, a new playground area, a basketball court, a tennis court, and two pools and jacuzzis on each end of the property. The kids ran around the grounds absolutely amok with their little kick scooters unsupervised since the entire property was gated and patrolled by a security guard. I always thought living like that all year jumping into the pool with your friends every day must be a wonderful childhood. Probably nice for the parents being able to kick back and let the kids run anywhere within the property knowing its pretty safe.
Although there is a lot of data to suggest that per capita green house gas (GHG) emissions from urban residents are less than rural counterparts this is not the entire story.
Absolute GHG emissions and impact are higher for higher incomes. GHG emissions are a function of wealth not geography. Urban areas have much higher concentraions of wealth. They also outsource much of their GHG creation to rural areas but are still the cause/consumer of it (concrete, energy, minerals, construction materials).
Also the perceived reduction in GHG emissions for urban areas is only true of late stage developed nations. Developing nations, those building out new cities, do not share the per capita efficiencies of full developed nations. The reason for this is that perceived per capita GHG reductions in developed nations were paid for by high GHG emissions of their past. New data on urban sprawl (sub-urbanization) sheds doubt on the idea that even developed nations cities per capita GHG emissions are lower than rural areas.
Ultimately, urbanization is a bulk consumer of Earth's natural resources and not a producer of those inputs.
Put simply: Cities are eating the Earth.
EDIT: Added point about sub-urban development negating efficiencies.
Sounds like you're throwing a bunch of arguments at the wall and hoping some of them stick rather than trying to figure out what's true. Wealth is presumably fixed at first-order, so comparing equally wealthy rural or urban residents seems fairest (unless you're trying to argue that cities are bad because they increase economic growth?); if the argument is something like "emissions are only higher in rural areas because rural residents are more likely to own cars because they're wealthier", that doesn't really refute the notion that rural is worse for the planet, it just means that poor people can't afford rural lives. I can't even follow what your unsourced talk of sub-urbanization is trying to claim.
The post you were replying to gave an argument for why GHG emissions would be lower in urban areas that, while not necessarily proven, at least passes the sniff test.
I agree that including upstream GHG is important, but you've got to compare like with like - is there any evidence that upstream-included GHG emissions are higher for urban than for rural? What would the mechanism for that be - are urban people consuming more things (or more energy), are things for urban markets produced less efficiently than things for rural markets (why?), ...?
OK, so concrete and cement more generally have high environmental impact. Do cities use more of them per capita, and if so, how? (And also, who is actually benefitting from that use - are we talking about concrete infrastructure like highways that are mostly for the benefit of those living outside the city?) Given that city dwellers generally have smaller homes than equivalent rural dwellers, share walls, and drive far shorter distances, I would've thought those living outside would end up being responsible for more cement use.
For cities to be able to exist, they need a steady supply of food, energy, people, and goods brought in from the surrounding areas. Remember, cities are basically parasitical organizations, being both financial, real material, and population sinks on net: they need to constantly import people, goods, food, and money, otherwise the city will not survive. They are the center of transportation networks sending goods into the city. There is not a single city anywhere that is self-sufficient in any of these areas, but there are rural regions which are self-sufficient in one or two of these categories (but rarely all four).
So I very much doubt that road networks linking the cities with each other and with the surrounding rural areas are for the benefit of the rural areas more than for the benefit of the city, although certainly both sides obtain some benefit.
This goes all the way back to Rome. Why did all roads lead to Rome? For the benefit of the provinces, as an act of generosity on the part of Rome, or so that a stream of goods can be brought into Rome and consumed there?
> For cities to be able to exist, they need a steady supply of food, energy, and goods brought in from the surrounding areas. Remember, cities are basically parasitical organizations, being both financial, real material, and population sinks on net: they need to constantly import people, goods, food, and money, otherwise the city will not survive.
Nonsense; cities are net consumers of food and people but net producers of goods and money (otherwise how would they buy all that food?), and rural areas benefit from the things produced there (otherwise why would they buy them?).
If cities were parasitical we'd expect areas with cities in to support smaller populations than equivalently-sized rural areas, which is false. You're putting the cart before the horse: why do people go to the city to seek their fortune? Because it's impossible for them to make a living in the country. Why are all the homeless people in the cities? Because in the countryside they'd starve.
The question we should be trying to answer is: for a fixed capacity of resources (land area, water, permitted GHG emissions, ...), how can we support as many people as possible. Having the majority follow efficient urban lifestyles does a lot better on that metric.
> cities are net consumers of food and people but net producers of goods and money (otherwise how would they buy all that food?)
Let's be careful with our terms. Money is produced in the Bureau of Engraving. What you mean is that people within cities earn a higher income, which is true. Urban populations have higher incomes and consumption. But that means that money is flowing into the city from outside. Every time you swipe your credit card, someone in Manhattan gets a cut. Every time you buy an online ad, someone in Silicon Valley takes a cut. When you buy insurance, someone in Hartford takes a cut. Money from all over the country flows into cities.
So why does money flow into the city? For the same reason that a marketplace makes money or a platform makes money. It is a schelling point, helping to bridge the gap between intrinsic worth and market worth. The app you wrote is great but it wont make any money without a platform to run on. The baseball player may be a hall of famer but his pay will be determined by the stadium he plays in. Cities are generally where various professionals, managers, and administrators concentrate, and these earn higher incomes as they provide support services or organizational services to the rest of the economy.
> If cities were parasitical we'd expect areas with cities in to support smaller populations than equivalently-sized rural areas, which is false
I don't mean parasitical in a moral sense, but in the sense of the flow of real quantities (as we are talking about transportation along roads), because the value add of cities is organizational in nature rather than productive in nature. What we see is that if you create a high population rural area, a bigger city will spring up somewhere in the middle of it, just like if there are more producers, a bigger marketplace will emerge to be the focal point of those producers.
> why do people go to the city to seek their fortune?
Because that is where higher income/higher consumption opportunities lie. Just like why every company wants to be a platform. Or why ambitious corporate types want to be near the HQ. If you are a budding manager or would-be corporate lawyer, do you set up your shingle in Bullhead City, AZ, or in NYC? You want to be where all the money flows so you can be there to receive a cut. That's not to say you are stealing or being lazy. Obviously the competition to get that cut is fierce.
> The question we should be trying to answer is: for a fixed capacity of resources how can we support as many people as possible.
There is not a single pattern. You need a market place and you need producers to meet in that marketplace. Life is heterogeneous.
> What you mean is that people within cities earn a higher income, which is true. Urban populations have higher incomes and consumption. But that means that money is flowing into the city from outside. Every time you swipe your credit card, someone in Manhattan gets a cut. Every time you buy an online ad, someone in Silicon Valley takes a cut. When you buy insurance, someone in Hartford takes a cut. Money from all over the country flows into cities.
I assumed money was shorthand for value. If cities are running a balance-of-payments surplus compared to rural areas, that's because they're producing more value (I guess people move into the city when poor, do a bunch of valuable work that makes them rich, and then move out of the city), so it's weird to frame that as "parasitical on money".
> I don't mean parasitical in a moral sense,
Then why use such a morally loaded term?
> but in the sense of the flow of real quantities (as we are talking about transportation along roads), because the value add of cities is organizational in nature rather than productive in nature.
You're drawing an artificial distinction between "real" and not. The farmer who grows the food, the engineer who produced the fertilizer, the chemist who did the fundamental research, the banker who loaned them the capital... you can portion out the crop yields between them, but no-one's contribution is more real than the other, given that at the end of the day without any of them there'd be fewer kilos getting grown. If you want to compare the value of things that different parts of a society are producing, your measurement for that should be, well, value.
> There is not a single pattern. You need a market place and you need producers to meet in that marketplace. Life is heterogeneous.
Sure, but there are better and worse ways to do it. Put it this way: for someone on the margin at the moment, if they switched from a rural to an equivalent (and that's a whole other can of worms) urban lifestyle or vice versa, in which they were equivalently productive for society, would they be consuming more or less resources/GHG emissions/...?
> I can't even follow what your unsourced talk of sub-urbanization is trying to claim.
I can't find the paper at the moment. I will try to get it posted here tomorrow.
The gist is that suburban grow is an overflow of city growth onto the surrounding area. When a suburban areas GHG accounting is taken into consideration it further removes any "apparent" per capita efficiency of the city.
It is really all just another case of Goodharts Law [1] with the addition that the measure was never comprehensive in the first place.
> The gist is that suburban grow is an overflow of city growth onto the surrounding area. When a suburban areas GHG accounting is taken into consideration it further removes any "apparent" per capita efficiency of the city.
I'm happy to believe that suburban lifestyles are inefficient, but I don't find that a good argument for discouraging urban lifestyles - wouldn't that increase rather than decreasing suburban sprawl? (E.g. if you limit development in city centres, that's going to push more of it to nearby suburbs).
Urban and suburban are different lifestyles though. Suburban residents typically have a SFH and need multiple cars to do their errands and commute. Residents of an urban core would be more likely to live in multi family housing and use public transportation or walk/bike to their errands and job. Disputing a rural v urban GHG comparison by pointing to suburbs doesn’t make sense in that model - a suburban lifestyle is much closer to a rural one as both are car-dependent.
> if the argument is something like "emissions are only higher in rural areas because rural residents are more likely to own cars because they're wealthier", that doesn't really refute the notion that rural is worse for the planet, it just means that poor people can't afford rural lives
They don't clearly state their argument, so maybe I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure they're arguing an inverse correlation. IE: Urban areas produce less because urbanites are on the whole a wealthier population.
>They also outsource much of their GHG creation to rural areas but are still the cause/consumer of it (concrete, energy, minerals, construction materials).
If this is true, wouldn't it lead to ridiculous conclusions like a cow farmer being responsible for the GHG emissions of all his cows?
Why is that ridiculous? If you set up a farm that releases GHG surely you are the producer of it.
Oil industry spinned us to calculate personal carbon foot prints [1]. That’s a good tool, but at the same time it dissolves the responsibility. In one hand the people actually producing the harm get to blame consumer demand and consumer can aknowledge that what ever they do makes no difference in the big picture.
If you go to work somewhere and release lots of gasses heating the planet you should probably think long and hard why you are doing that.
I think trying to get average urban/rural numbers is interesting but also misleading. What matters is what is actually happening and where the harm is produced.
My city is heated with district heating, which comes from coal. Thats big chunk of my personal carbon footprint and makes living in a city look bad vs rural life.
I think focusing on consumers and making this about urban/rural lifestyle choices is only half the equation and to change things you need to go in and swap the power plants, farms etc.
Having escaped the necessity of living in certain ways, we find outselves voluntarily adopting older forms of human behavior.
That's what exercising is. It's what gardening is. It's what having pets is. These are behaviors that mimic the surface characteristics of old ways of life (hunting, farming, animal husbandry).
What does the -core suffix mean in this context? I get that it is a mix of words, like hardcore, nerdcore, etc.. but why? I figured that was reserved for fringe extreme genres. Does anybody have any info on this?
I don't consider myself an authority on this, but I take it to be a gentle bit of comedic irony, used to describe aesthetics that are generally the opposite what people associate with "hardcore," the best known earlier use of the suffix. Compare hardcore with, for example, prairiecore, cottagecore, dadcore, nerdcore.
All of these terms describe an aesthetic that references the stereotyped essence of a way of life. But these new uses reference a way of life typically stereotyped to be approximately the opposite of "hardcore."
Edit: Language is fun. There are eight replies to the parent comment so far, and almost as many interpretations of "core," with different connotations. We're all sitting here understanding the word "cottagecore" perfectly well, but having subtlety--yet importantly--different subjective experiences while doing so.
I must take exception though, as the American tallgrass prairie looks nothing like that photo. Checking wikipedia, that would be pretty indicative of perhaps the very thin shortgrass prairie from pretty far west (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico) where the cowboy lifestyle was prevalent?
It reminds me of the "-gate" suffix denoting scandal, originally derived from the name of the Watergate Hotel, his B&E crew's actions at which ultimately brought Richard Nixon low.
Wiktionary [1] describes the "-core" suffix as a similar backformation from the musical genre name "hardcore", and as with "-gate", it seems to have developed into a general-purpose inflection denoting a genre or subculture - to the extent, I suppose, that those two concepts can any longer be distinguished from one another, at least.
In hip fashion circles, I've seen it crop up regularly. Dadcore, Normcore and the like. I've always taken it to mean the synthesized essence of an aesthetic, or at least the adherents believe that to be the case.
": Cottagecore, a movement hearkening back to agricultural life, skills, and crafts, is on the rise. “As a concept, it embraces a simpler, sustainable existence that is more harmonious with nature. Aesthetically, it’s a nod to the traditional English countryside style, romantic and nostalgic,” says Davina Ogilvie, founder of Wovn Home, a start-up that makes custom (but affordable and accessible) window treatments."
I.e. a <prefix>core person is one whose central foundational part is based on <prefix>. Material related to <prefix>core is from/for/focused on that type of identity.
I think the cottagecore aesthetic grew out of representation in anime and Tumblr reposts, along with other less-practical/mundane aesthetics like goblincore. Rather than an actual back-to-the-land movement. With the pandemic it became sort of mainstream and synonymous for a desired or actual lifestyle and not just fashion and aesthetic sensibility, which is why the core suffix seems out of place.
-core suffix, at its most brief, indicates an aesthetic of some type. In this case, "cottagecore" is a rural, traditional, "Little House on the Prarie" aesthetic.
My grandparents and great grandparents all lived on 4+ acre properties in rural Louisiana. Not quite cottages, but a similar concept. They had 1100 - 1300sq foot homes but lived along the river and you could get to all of their houses without ever leaving River Road. They lived about 1 hour from the nearest city and were about halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans and had a gigantic community social group. They knew everyone in town and my folks knew everyone in their town through them. Hell, I know a lot of people in their hometown through them.
My parents own a 1600 sq foot house but live on a quarter acre lot and my dad has always regretted not purchasing an additional lot back when he purchased the land to build their house. They live in a suburb of New Orleans. They knew the neighbors and some of the people in the community who were from their hometowns.
I live in a 2400 sq foot house on a 1/5th of an acre lot and I am within a short drive from all the amenities of city life near Dallas. Can't say I know a whole lot of my neighbors. Everyone keeps to themselves.
Any time before second day shipping, if you had asked me if I wanted to live out on the land like my grandparents, I'd have looked at you like you had 3 heads.
Now though? I'd take it in a heartbeat. They had a garden that was over an acre. Trees filled with figs and oranges and pecans. A trellis built with railroad ties that was covered with grapes and blackberries and chayote depending on the time of the year. They always had enough root vegetables, cabbage, etc. to last through the winter months. No HOA to worry about, no zoning ordinances to mess with, you just live your life on your property.
Most of the people on this site have plenty of resources to buy into a lifestyle like the one you are describing. But for some reason they don't. To me, it seems likely that there are some serious drawbacks to that lifestyle that you're leaving our, which if further probed would change the equation.
That lifestyle does take a lot of experience your average knowledge worker just doesn't have.
People back then knew how to farm their land, they knew went to till and when to harvest, what to plant when and where. They were handy, they were carpenters, but also plumbers, roofers, painters, tailors, mechanics, menders of all things. Skills acquired by being a young child and holding the tools for an adult doing the task, engaging in a de facto apprenticeship for all facets of life since they could first learn to walk on their own and follow dad or mom around their chores.
You couldn't learn all this even in a year of ownership of land like that. Its the product of lived experience. Years of dealing with one catastrophe to the next and having no one but yourself and a few local friends or family members to help fix the situation through experience and physical labor. This is why when most rich people decide to take up farming on some land they've bought, they hire an actual farmer to actually do the farming.
If I were to guess, it's the choice of community HNers want to engage with on a regular basis. It's not other people who live in the country, it's other nerds who live in the country, which once you leave a city starts to have very low density!
Sacrificing your personal interests and goals because you want to be in a place with people where you fit-in is the very definition of popularity, regardless of your social rank within the group.
At this point I think we are talking about different things. I’m not sure I disagree with you and I’m not sure if I agree but mostly because it seems like we are prioritizing different things in this thread. So that said, anything to do with social rank will be hard for me to follow, so best to just leave it :)
Wanting to fit in to me is about feeling a general comfort with your surroundings, not having social status. And by fit in, I mean not being ostracized for being yourself, a thing that happens to me in a lot of places, I don’t want to be popular, I just don’t want to be denied service or have my property vandalized.
Also, by socialize with people like yourself, I mean going to a user group for some tech you like, etc, these are fewer and far between in rural areas. So even accessing such a community in person becomes a hurdle. This is something folks may take for granted. Or maybe not, I don’t know any more :)
This reads as if it’s written by someone who has bought into the imagined influencer sanitized idea of rural life which thoroughly ignores the _many_ reasons people move away from rural areas.
I mean, even just the idea that people outside of cities somehow have more “human spirit” is kind of strange and absurd.
Gosh, no. It's because roughing it actually sucks if your survival is truly at stake.
Right now you don't have to know anything about how to survive in order to survive. You just need to trade some of your time for money, somewhere, somehow.
Lack of opportunity? Poverty? Disease? Broken homes? War? Sexual/physical/emotional/spiritual abuse? To make new connections? To find a partner? To explore the wider world?
You can’t have lack of opportunity, poverty, diseases, broken homes, war, and domestic abuse in a city? I don’t get your point and the blind defensiveness.
If I’m not being a hypocrite I certainly moved to the city for the comforts of the modern world, but I’ve learned a lot since to learn that consumerism is wrong and there’s much that needs to be changed about capitalism.
It’s amusing how different people’s wants and desires are.
I live in a very small town from the POV of what I perceive as the majority of HN - <15k people, and it’s the largest town in an hour’s drive in any direction. My home is in a neighborhood on the edge of town that was annexed only a few years ago, and as a result even though my property has city sewer access, I still have a septic tank. I dread the day that I’m unable to legally keep it operational and have to tie in to city sewer. It’s just one more monthly bill I’ll have to pay. The zoning here is such that a homeowner can do any repair work they please on their own without having to get a permit or licensed contractor.
I have gigabit fiber and solid, level floors though. :)
I could easily increase my income by $75-100k if I were willing to move to LA or SF. I’m not even tempted by it.
My town of 800 here in Montana has literally zero building codes. Almost zero zoning laws. If I want to split my property into little 5 acre ranchettes and build houses on 'em, I can, no permits or approvals or anything needed.
"The zoning here is such that a homeowner can do any repair work they please on their own without having to get a permit or licensed contractor."
Wow, that's pretty strict for a "small town". Most places allow you to make repairs without a permit or contractor as long as you're not making changes.
For example, I needed a permit to put in an interlock and receptacle for a generator. If something breaks the receptacle, I can replace it with the same model/type/size without a permit. If I replaced it with a different type/size then I would need a permit. On a side note, the inspections are mostly a joke and just a way for the municipality to make money (permit costs more than the materials in many of my cases). The inspector had no idea about electrical stuff and didn't ask any questions about wire gauge/run, receptacle sizing, receptacle height, or how the breaker box was balanced. You know, the stuff that's important to do right to avoid fires, etc.
It's not about the law, it's about what's enforced.
Where I live you theoretically need to permit the typical stuff but the official unofficial policy is that they don't expect anyone who isn't a professional to pull permits.
Many pros don't even bother with permits for smaller jobs, like installing a generator (my neighbor's experience).
One thing to consider is that most insurance companies will not cover a house if it had unpermitted/uninspected work on it that could even possibly be the cause.
>One thing to consider is that most insurance companies will not cover a house if it had unpermitted/uninspected work on it that could even possibly be the cause.
This usually (I'm sure someone somewhere has a cut rate policy that states otherwise) only matters if the unpermitted work was what causes the claim which basically just means responsibility is back on the owner. In practice this is mostly fine since people doing their own work for their own houses tend not to half-ass things.
Not just if they identify it as the cause. It can also happen if the cause or location is undetermined. Like if you did some electrical work and they could determine that it was an electrical fire at the box but couldn't determine which circuit caused it. Even if you do the job perfectly, you could still unknowingly get a faulty material. Not to mention that even without an issue they can drop your policy due to risk associated with unpermitted work.
Yes, I learned my lesson after moving into a 400-year-old thatched cottage because I thought it was quaint. The roof and windows leaked. It had limited central heating and was largely heated by a multi-fuel burner. That meant spending an absurd amount of money on wood, which I had to schlep around and split while the weather was appalling and then spend far too long lighting a fire and keeping it going all day, only for the heat to escape out of the ill-fitting single-glazed windows which couldn't be replaced because it was a Grade II listed building. The lovely ceiling beams and all the doors were slightly too low, so I was constantly banging my head on them.
All in all, not a great experience, although it looked very cosy in Instagram photos.
On top of which, this "cottagecore" trend is one reason none of the locals in my area can afford to buy a house. The house prices have skyrocked since Londoners decided living in the middle of nowhere was cool.
I live in one of the few newer homes in an old mill town and it's great. I get to stroll the narrow streets, and admire the quaint architecture all around.
The locally quarried stone used for the walls of the oldest buildings (which obviously made things difficult for accommodating additions containing bathrooms and kitchens).
The charmingly narrow and irregular front doors on some houses, making it an impossible dream to move a typical new couch or appliance in.
The turnbuckles used to stabilize some houses after all these years, and those cables being one more thing to hit your head on.
Then I get home from a walk and enjoy the central air conditioning, tall ceilings, modern windows and level floors of my home. I know some of my neighbors in the older houses really enjoy them. They research the history of the houses and are enthusiastic about maintaining them and keeping things mostly original. The house basically becomes a hobby. Just about everybody likes looking at quaint old houses, so you have to find out if that's you or if you'd actually enjoy living in one too. I know I just like looking at them.
Yeah, you fix the roof and windows. You buy and split all the wood during summer and place it as conveniently as possible. Building grading is major bullshit in this case, as is Instatok
Same, if I were to move I'd go for something modern. That said, it's an idealized lifestyle, everyone's guilty of some of that - "I'd love to live in a van" but where do you shit? "I'd love to become a digital nomad and live in a cheap 5-star resort" but where do you keep your stuff? What about family and friends? "I'd love to retire to a cabin in the woods" but what about all the amenities you're used to, like electricity, heat, food, water, and internet?
I mean don't get me wrong, I can see the appeal in 'cottagecore', but at the same time I'm being realistic about things.
Since I am close to retirement been watching videos about tiny homes and van life and log cabin in the middle of the woods and of late living on a narrowboat on the English waterways.
But I then go camping and realize after a few days how much I would miss my modern amenities.
I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht next year. The answer for things like digital nomadism, van life, and that sort very much boils down to "own less stuff". For me if it can't fit in my 40' of boat it's either getting sold or put into storage.
It's not difficult for a subset of the population who lack certain ties (or prefer not to keep close ties). Digital Nomading is obviously much harder if you've got kids to put in school, or elderly parents to check in on, or a partner who wants to keep their non-remote job, etc.
When I was in my 20s and put everything in storage and traveled for a while it was great. Now my wife and kid (and the grandparents who want to see the kid), etc would make such a move a lot tougher in a lot of ways.
I live in a van 2 month/year, sometime with a friend, sometime alone. Pretty usefull to really visit/hike across France, Spain, Italy (Balkans are next i guess).
Public toilet, camping toilet, or behind a tree, to answer your question.
Having just bought a cottage, here are some things that have changed recently.
1. P2P wireless means you can cheaply get a 50/10 internet connection in remote areas. This is plenty for most users. Also starlink is apparently pretty good.
2. Just pay someone to pump your septic. You don’t have to pay city taxes covering sewers so you probably come out ahead.
3. Plumbing and electrical is usually exposed, making it very easy to work on. For plumbing, shark bites and pex are way easier than soldering copper.
One thing that does suck about owning a cottage is needing to worry about mice…
What's a good resource to learn about septic? I'm interested in moving somewhere more rural at some point in the future but have no idea how septic works. I admit a slight squeamishness at the thought of our waste accumulating in a tank, but the part that I'm more concerned about is not knowing what the risks or processes involved are.
Is this somehow different in the rural US? I'm in Canada and while part of a large metro area I am far enough out to have a septic tank. I never so much as spent a second of thought on it. We just get the tank cleaned out every two years. The city even has a by law requiring that and you have to send in the invoice to prove you had it done.
My theory is most people do not realize just how much of their "water" bill is actually sewage costs. Pumping clean water is nothing compared to sewage. Yet most cities present the water bill as a split cost between water and sewage.
We are on septic despite being 100meters from the border of tokyo. Our costs for quatery inspections, and a yearly pumping are about 220 dollars. In exchange our water bill is about 40dollars every two months, so twenty a month. This is half what we paid in Tokyo while using much less water.
Now compare to many water bills in the states where many towns have over built sewage systems and you often year families spending a hundred or more a month. I strongly suspect cities hide the cost of sewage behind the water supply charge. They run the departments as one and assume all supplied water is drained.
I've never lived in a place that uses septic, so to me septic is something that feels quite rural, even if it's common in places that are more suburban than rural.
The one advantage of uneven walls and non-90° corners is that my DIY fixes to everything fits in nicely and even looks good when done with care. Everything is easier to fix.
I've lived in cities all my life and had pretty similar experiences to be honest. I thought it was from opting to live in older buildings with 'character,' so one lease i went with the isocube and that was hell. My one neighbor played drum and bass music all day and it went right through the walls like paper. The other neighbor would sit there for hours every day on the balcony calling everyone they know and airing out the latest drama of the day on speakerphone. You could hear everything from the hall right through the front door, every door slam, every step, every dog bark, every time the elevator went ding. I even tried sealing the doorjam at one point with new weather strip when I was particularly desperate but it was no use. I thought maybe this was a lemon apartment so I asked all my friends in similar new construction looking places, and it was the same story with the thin walls and doors and borderline evil property management companies. Ended up lucking out with a new place where I don't have anyone above me, no shared heavily trafficked hallway outside my door, and the neighbors are churchmice. Don't think I'm gonna be stepping back into the unknown for a while.
As of writing, I live on a farm an hours drive from the nearest grocery store. It's still a first world country, but people have a lot less disposable income than the states.
The floor boards do suck, and the electricity gets cut more often.
But I get 58.6Mbps down, 21.4Mbps up. Ground to ground satellite.
If its first world and not the united states, the people there probably have a lot more disposable income to be fair. 40% of Americans can't come up with $400 in an emergency without taking on debt to do so.
I dream of quitting my job and living on some land. My wife refuses to "live in the middle of nowhere, where there's nothing to do". I guess I shall continue to work a job I hate in order to live in this expensive area.
Maybe your wife is onto something? I mean, I live on some land in the middle of nowhere, where there's nothing to do, but we both want to live here. Some people really don't. It can sound nice, but if you're the kind of person who wants to be near restaurants other than McDonald's, or to have playmates for your kids nearby, or doesn't want to get in the car for a minimum half-hour round trip every time you need a gallon of milk, it might not be for you.
Being out in the country where you can do whatever you want also means that your neighbors can do whatever they want. So some idiot setting off cherry bombs, or another one shooting skeet/target practice in his backyard, or heating a house with wood and smoking out the entire neighborhood when there's a temperature inversion is just as valid a use of property as your gardening. And when the various hunting seasons start, well, gunshots carry a pretty long distance at 6AM.
On a good day, I think the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. On a bad day, I just want to shoot everyone else, but that's me.
Have you ever lived off of the land? If you haven't, you should question how well your visions of the lifestyle match with what actually happens in reality. Just like you might see a beautiful picture of a beach and dream constantly of going there, but once you get there you are swarmed by mosquitos, cut your feet on sharp rocks, and get poisoned from the industrial runoff that was cleverly cropped out of the picture.
I frequently see this as an idle dream but assume most people who dream of it would not last a year before quitting or getting themselves seriously injured or killed in some manner.
Not quite. I understand how hard it can be. It also depends on just how off the land one wants to be, like a guy I know living in a self built log cabin in Alaska. I'm not going that far. It would be nice to have land for my wife's horse, to expand my beekeeping, and to expand my garden/fruits/mushrooms/etc. And like most people on small farms, I'd probably need another job to make ends meet.
It takes some effort, but you can have it (mostly) both ways. I live in a little rural town (Hillsborough, NC) that has farms in the woods and a great tiny downtown with several really good restaurants, pubs, and even a tiny art scene and it's only 15 minutes away from Duke/Durham, NC with tons of great dining, shopping, events and so on.
I'm sure there are plenty of other situations like this, nice semi-rural/rural towns on the edge of a metro and all it's services.
Yeah, most places I was looking at would be 30-60 minutes outside of large city, and only a short 10 or so minute drive to the local town.
She told me one day that she never wanted to leave the current county (her home county). Now she is also determined to move into her old school district (much more expensive and more developed), even though the school scores aren't much higher than the current one and just with the money that we save in property taxes we could send a kid to a private school. Needless to say, this issue doesn't come down to having a rational discussion to find solutions that fit both of our criteria. I'm wrong, she's right, always.
just to add on, not that anybody's still reading :)
and a ritzy private school not only would not get her into the higher status neighborhood, it would potentially expose the family to more scorn for not living there
your comment takes on a different sense if we guess that your partner shares giantg's sentiments, which in many cases could well be true. Without saying anything personal about you (I don't know you and have not researched your comment history, for example), a narcissist would be highly likely to bristle at the idea of giving-in to another person's preference, maybe even to the point of being moved to comment on an internet forum!
my point is, there is a lot of complexity to different personalities interacting that is not captured by your somewhat idealistic view of giantg's life.
That's a hobby farm. They both still work full time day jobs. She's a nurse, he's in marketing (remote work). I guess that's what HN really wants-- having it both ways.
Most small farms require a second job to make ends meet, or at least one person who can provide benefits from a "normal" job. Even if it's more than just hobby level. I know quite a few people waking up at 4am to do farm chores and then going in to a fulltime day job.
Most states have legal definition to determine if you're a farmer, like if you make more than 30% of your money from farming.
Work hard to get your lady onboard. Step one is to find an outdoor activity you can progressively gain sill in, e.g., dirtbiking. Soon buying 80 acres in the sticks will become something she needs!
Even if you're not planning on getting divorced soon or at all, there's no harm in talking to a divorce lawyer now to figure out how to minimize the damage when things change and you get tired of working a job you hate to live in an expensive area that you don't want to live in.
This form of lifestyle pornography is not remotely new, just moved online like everything else. For decades the UK has had a successful newsstand magazine, "Country Living", which panders to the rural fantasies of bourgeois urban/surburbanites. Not to be confused with its counterpart "Country Life", which is published for the real village-dwellers and leans more towards aristocratic interests.
"Leaving the city to own and operate a small poultry farm is racist, misogynist, colonialist, and CANCELLED: a thread." I wonder if I get a pass since mine is in Ireland.
There needs to be a Rule 34 variant which states that for any given thing there is someone saying it violates progressive principles.
Boy, videos like that are a testament to how awful Tiktok is for long-form, interesting content. You can tell how the platform is straining under the weight of her intelligence.
If people are fixed and not transferred, people will not think of outside things. Not thinking of outside things, the people will turn cottage inhabitants. Cottagecore will succeed, and the country will be rich.
Cottagecore succeeding, and the country being rich, the army will be strong.
I grew up in a farming area, and my family had a 30'x30' garden.
Farming is a lot of work. It's a job, not a hobby.
Even the garden was a fair amount of work, but more importantly, it's a lot of veggies to eat after harvest. I had tomato sandwiches daily for months. Plus insects to control. Doable, but not glamorous like the "cottagecore" photos.
If I did a serious garden again, I'd focus on becoming a skilled grower of certain veggie strains over a period of decades, and not focus on quantity.
Also, know your soil. If you're in an urban area (or downwind) that used to have steel or auto factories, then your soil is contaminated with heavy metals.
Eh, you can do it the hard way, or the fantastically lazy way. We just grow tangles - basic trellis of offcut branches, and then seed with a variety of complementary species, a few sacrificial pest magnets, and a few pest repellers. Irrigation is all automated drip, no feed - river (lovely and clean - there’s very little upstream of us, no industry) floods our garden each winter, does the job nicely.
What grows, grows, what doesn’t, doesn’t - and this year, even through a bitter drought, we have enough that we’re giving it away. Harvesting involves rummaging, so it isn’t exactly scalable - but for feeding a household, it’s perfect.
We have deer and boar here - so we also plant hemlock around the border of the garden, which they stay well away from. Also helps to piss on their trails nearby - discourages them from visiting. The boar, we actually take advantage of - there’s a meadow they love to turn over every spring, digging for tubers - which we then throw potatoes in.
I mean, outside of that, off grid life is humblingly challenging - but I’ve never been in better shape, and growing food is easy enough if you just let nature do its thing.
I like your description of "pest magnets", I have been referring to them as plant tanks. My overgrown raspberries tank the japanese beetles for the blueberries. Plus the yield of the raspberries isn't significantly dented by the japanese beetles.
My favorite piece of equipment is my wood chipper: I can turn all of the delivery boxes into mulch. And yard waste. And... basically any other biomass that will turn to dirt in 6-12 months.
We are not off-grid (dude, that's so much work). But I build most of my projects out of found materials (raised beds out of old fencing, etc). I tried my hand at making a basket out of grape vine, but grape vines are really "shreddy" and the basket is no fun to use. I was going to try coppicing some willow next -- baskets are really useful.
It's a fun hobby, but I am lazy. And I still end up with too much produce (though I have a lot of space, so that makes it easier).
Agreed on the wood chipper - we’ve fed vast volumes of organic waste through ours as we’ve 8ha of badly overdense and bramble/suspended dead wood choked woodland to manage, and the mulch is dead handy for paths and garden beds - our soil is very low in carbon, so everything helps.
Re: weaving, vines are impossible, rett them first - soak ‘em, maybe in lye, and then pound them with a rock to get fibres. Baskets, willow works great - we’ve goat willow all over, here, and use it for smaller stuff. Bigger stuff we use olive, as green it’s supple and dry it’s like a rock, and very rot resistant - we’ve made half baskets on a steep hill slope to catch runoff and encourage tree growth - the oldest ones (two years) are hosting self-seeded oak saplings now, which is kinda cool.
My focus is on "lazy gardening" -- or how much can I get nature to automate things. How much can I use waste biomass as a resource. Etc. I end up with a lot of failures, but the successes are really satisfying. The main challenge is that the feedback loop is ~1yr which means that it's not a hobby for the impatient. :)
This is exactly what I do. I try out things and if they aren't mostly hands off they just not for me. But I learned enough that if I had the time I could grow other stuff too.
Cabbage doesn't do well without a fight here. Potatoes? Grow themselves! Carrots? Very finicky to get to grow at all here but if they do they are just so much better than store bought and hands off too. Cherries are awesome once I wasn't lazy enough to skip the netting. Not that much work in the end.
Have you researched "forest gardens"? Lots of good information about lazy gardening there. In reality it is extremely thoughtful gardening which lets you (hopefully) get to a point where the garden runs itself save for a few hours/week upkeep.
I’ve been watching a YouTube channel called Parkrose Permaculture by a woman in Portland. She doesn’t even have to water in the summer, which in this Mediterranean climate blows my mind.
Yeah, in my country, people like to buy a "lifestyle block" when they've acquired enough capital and reached their mid 40s - 50s - usually a big house with say 10 acres of land or so.
Not enough to run a financially viable headcount of stock. Maybe enough to run a midlife crisis horse for your spouse who desperately wanted a pony as a child but couldn't get one. Now you have a horse that's desperately lonely, and costs a metric shit ton to keep in reasonable health.
And then, you find out the maintenance required... ...how the local government will fine you if you let your grass grow to the "massive fire risk" level, so either you acquire sheep/goats etc. to graze it - and lose money on doing so, or you buy a ride-on mower / small tractor with mowing attachment, and spend one day a fortnight (at least) mowing, wondering what the hell the "lifestyle" you were buying actually is.
Oh, and of course, maintaining your own water supply. Nothing says "living the dream" like E Coli in your private well from your grass maintaining animals shitting too close to it (or your well being too shallow to avoid aquifer contamination from dairy farmers upstream).
Not if you have white collar standards for "sportsmanlike behavior" it's not.
That said, I agree with you. If I want X pounds per year of venison I'm gonna get it and I see no reasons to spend a few hours sitting in the woods during a particular part of the year to do it.
Metal fences are tricky for groundhogs. my parents have one that is welded wire (comes in a roll) and its not sturdy enough for a fat groundhog to climb all the way up and get over, they aren't the most athletic. once they shored up some holes along bottoms of the fence the groundhog wasn't getting inside anymore.
I have the similar plastic-coated hex but ran a cable across the top because I was thinking about deer. Never knew those porky groundhogs could climb so well. I buried a few inches and that’s enough to keep them from digging it seems.
I was thinking barb wire, too. I need to do something because I bought a lot of my fruit trees fall of 2019 and so they should be producing next year and they’re pruned low, not to mention I upped my berry game this year.
Not barbed wire: high voltage electric fence wire. Run a single strand near the top with a charger (you can get solar powered ones if there's no AC nearby) and that will stop them in their tracks.
It's not just a lot of work, depending on how much you can automate irrigation and weeding, it's a fairly sure-fire bet that you cannot travel during the summer.
Living a more sustainable life is the key to human survival. If you can grown your own food and produce local cleaner energy, humanity MAY survive. The existing American-model life guarantees human civilisation will not live past 2040.
Australia is a well developed country and an analogue to your "the American-model". I'd call it the "Developed Industrial Nation"-model to be more precise.
Not implying this with you, but I think it must be a trend of Australians to consider Americans "elitist"-- that the rich, obese Americans are the greedy ones ruining everything.
It's just funny to me, since Australians follow the same model of western-european-derived economics & western-european-derived government.
You can't actually compare them very well because commercial food production uses fossil fuel derived fertilizer to feed its yields. Small subsidence farms often don't use any fossil fuel derived fertilizer, and is thus infinity sustainable, but also low yield. Big commercial farms rely almost entirely on fossil fuel derived fertilizer, which is unsustainable unless we pull ass tons of clean renewable energy out of our butts to replace it, but have extreme yields.
We can make artificial fertilizer without fossil fuels, but the energy cost is atleast 10x what our current usage is for fertilizer and is already over 1% of global power. And we are still a ways off of producing an extra 10% of global energy output via completely clean power.
No, they would just be more profitable but not more efficient. Large farms select the most profitable crop but that can often mean a lot of ecological harm for a crop that isn't being used to feed the local area, as it might be exported to markets where it fetches a higher price. Like cotton grown in water scarce california since water is very cheap for these large farmers, which is used to build mattresses in mexico. Smaller scale farmers who might show up at a farmers market grow a variety of different vegetables. There are still these sort of farmers in southern california in santa barbara county, out by san luis obispo, or in ventura or east of the redlands past san bernardino. They grow all sorts of produce on their land and bring in to sell in local markets, as these heirloom varieties are usually too fragile for mass export. Not sure about the central valley.
Depends on what efficiency your measuring and if you have any other factors to consider. Larger farms tend to be more economically efficient (at least for basic commodities, or because the margins are to low to support a farm under a specific size). But it's not a one to one comparison because the models and practices differ. You could say that a COFO is more efficient than a small ranch because they produce more beef on fewer acres and utilize brewer's grain from ethanol production. It's possible that a small farm raising organic wagyu might actually be more economically efficient since it's a higher margin product.
But holy shit am I repulsed by the influencer aspect that is growing with this "movement". Ways of Seeing taught that publicity (aka marketing) is tied to envy. There is such a deep schism between the Web 2.0 communities that exchange ideas on a forum and the vapid glamour shots posted on Instagram and Tik Tok. I think the takeaway is "Don't trust anyone in your hobby who is making money off their social media account."
Maybe this is why I like homebrewing: everyone is a bearded, chubby 35 year old nerd and there no way to make a 5 gallon carboy of bubbling alcoholic liquid into something "glamourous"