idio3
10mo ago
That's great. But is your conception of a proper life at fifty limited to sitting on a couch, watching Netflix, and occasionally (as a treat!) visiting the local Red Lobster? Because there are indeed more things to life than fun party substances, but equally there is far more to it than what a endless field of cardboard boxes on grass could provide.
idio3
10mo ago
And you're never going to " 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex" because the patches of lawn are all in separate strips of housing and separated out by the various towns.
That part is literally the simplest fix imaginable. A stroke of a pen changes that. Imaginary lines on a map are hardly the biggest obstacle here.
You can't magically clump them all together to get "same surface area as Disneyland plus Champs Elysees", so it's not really a coherent argument.
I'm not "magically" clumping anything together, I'm merely making a point that the same area housing the same number of people in units of the same size could easily be accomplished in a tiny fraction of that area, with additional space left over being enough to have a [insert large landmark].
It's a thought experiment.
If you want to argue "the money and time spent on maintaining lawns would come to X amount and could be spent elsewhere" sure, but given my cultural background, very much I go "fuck you, this patch of land is MINE not the possession of the landlord or the Crown and if I want to grow a lawn I damn well can and will do so because it is MINE and belongs to ME"
Exactly, lol. This is precisely the attitude I have described in this post.
"Public" does mean the HOA or other pinched-face clipboard-holder coming round to tell you what you can and can't do with that piece of land.
Sure, the city won't let you have a toxic waste dump or a bottomless pit, but their decisions are based on public good and real, objective realities of an urban environment. Not conceptual unity with some grotesque local aesthetic chosen by a class of office plankton as a ludicrous way to signal their status.
idio3
10mo ago
Are you suggesting the middle or upper middle class would stop working if homeless people were less visible?
No. I'm suggesting that homelessness and extreme poverty could in most cases be easily be fixed by any modern society. The cost of such a collection of measures would be tiny in comparison to the externalities associated with actually having homelessness and associated social ills. But it's not being fixed, since it provides the working precariat something unbelievably scary to prevent them from quitting. Existence of homelessness is kind of a virtual whip for the modern proletarian.
idio3
10mo ago
As I said, many a kid is likely incubating there and maybe spending some baby years there before their parents relocate to where the schools are better but I've lived nearby and despite the density you really don't run into local kids very much.
That area is at the price level where accessibility of private schools is of a larger concern - and the best ones are unsurprisingly all clustered around there (and north to Lincoln Park, yes).
There definitely are kids there.
The knowledge that you're locked into proximity with a financial obligation that has a duration measured in decades encourages investment in the relationships.
That's kind of sad. While it's perfectly valid way for children to form bonds (they aren't extremely particular) it becomes somewhat less appropriate for adults, who typically look for something other than just any random person who happens to be nearby. In any case - nothing at all is stopping you from doing that in a huge block house. The problem you're describing lies in transient nature of housing which is overwhelmingly rental in American urban areas. But that's a consequence of American middle class idiosyncrasies, not a cause.
I do not want my relationships to be a competition and that might mean that the people I spend my time with won't be the most perfect match possible, but the fine details of the match are so much less important than the depth of the roots.
Intersex relationships are going to be somewhat of a competition due to simple biology, we can't really do much about that as a species or society, outside of weird stuff like arranged marriages, which carry a huge amount of their own burdens.
But you misunderstand my point about regular connections. These aren't meant to be competitive, they simply select for compatibility. Surely you've had friendships that faded away over time, right? Not necessarily because you lack physical access to someone, but simply because either you or him (or both) have, over time, found someone else they choose to spend time with. It's not about someone winning or losing here. And trapping you both in a close proximity without any alternatives would hardly be a better outcome...
I think you probably have very little idea of what motivates them really. The number one motivation is school district. I don't think it's controversial for me to say that, at least in Chicago, the urban public schools are simply unfit and it's not a matter of funding (...)
Okay, well here we go to the crux of the matter. Just as before - this isn't the cause of American middle class behaviour, it's the effect of it. There is nothing inherently bad about schools located in dense urban environments. Ability to quickly and easily walk to your school could hardly be considered a detriment by any sane person.
But yes, when a large proportion of people with the means to do so - do, in fact, flee to a lawn - the ones that don't - are quite strongly pushed to do the same. Overwhelming majority of above-average schools in, say, continental Europe are in major cities. Some Parisian schools have great reputation, while their suburban ones are widely considered to be dogshit. This follows the exact same indicators as it does in America, by the way.
So yes, you have discovered yet another extremely negative externality of lawn worship. It fucks up the urban livability in yet another way...
Pretty much all semi-successful cultures have developed some conception of a dense city as soon as they could. First cities, in fact, have (rather counter-intuitively) sprung up even before agriculture. If we're going to Paleolithic - you'd be right. But that wasn't due to social preference or something as much as it was about the fact that hunter-gatherers in general have a limit to the amount of people their lifestyle can support. As soon as that natural limit was lifted, tribes (or by that time - villages) started growing exponentially and combining into even larger polities. In many places and entirely independently.
The idea that homo sapiens is a solitary creature like a tiger is a very weird pseudoromanticism. We are in fact hard-wired to loathe loneliness above nearly all else.
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