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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23597 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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I will absolutely tear down civilization before I live in the world Europoors and "walkable cities" types want for me. If I have to visit the grocery store more than once a week you won't need to use public transit to see someone get set the hell on fire.

Yeah I shop regularly at Costco. There's no "walkable Costco infrastructure". I'm not carrying a small bag with one day of groceries. I use my car instead.

If your grocery store is 2 minutes down the road going to it multiple times a week is not an issue. In fact it's preferable because you can get stuff when you want it and not have it clogging up space in your home.

This might work, but I doubt stores that close together can match the selection of the one I have to drive five minutes to. It probably takes a minute or more just to walk across the store. Some of it is duplicative (multiple brands of milk), but you'd still lose selection pretty fast.

Living a block from (the entrance of) a Walmart is actually an amazing thing for QOL if you can manage it. I walked to Walmart a lot when I was living right next to one.

I think we should build housing on the roofs of megamarkets like walmart and costco.

I think we should build housing on the roofs of megamarkets like Walmart and Costco.

There was a news story about this back in 2023.

The nation’s first mixed-use development to feature 800 apartments above a Costco Wholesale store is in the works in south Los Angeles.

The community will include 184 apartments, or 23% of the total units, dedicated to low-income households. There will be a mix of offerings at 30%, 50%, and 80% of the area median income (AMI) levels, with the exact unit allocation still be to be finalized. Plans call for the remaining 616 units to be non-subsidized affordable and workforce housing, serving households around the 120% to 150% AMI levels.

The project is being developed by Thrive Living, a national real estate firm that acquires underutilized properties in urban markets with significant housing affordability gaps. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles is a partner in the project.

Like Thrive’s other projects, the development is privately financed without the use of government subsidies such as low-income housing tax credits, according to officials.

A groundbreaking ceremony was held for the 5035 Coliseum development last September. Construction is expected to take up to two-and-a-half years as the team transforms an old commercial site into a new retail and housing community.

However, Google Maps does not indicate that construction has progressed very far.

Huh, nice.

I don't wanna go to a tiny ass overpriced bodega. I want Walmart. Unfortunately due to physical limitations it's impossible to have everyone live 2 minutes from a decent sized store.

10-15 minute walk is doable depending on the urban layout but that's pushing the distance where you start considering driving.

I want Walmart. Unfortunately due to physical limitations it's impossible to have everyone live 2 minutes from a decent sized store.

A two-minute walk will very literally not get you across the parking lot of the local Wal-Mart Supercenter, but that's not quite a physical limitation. Let's take a closer look.

A two-minute walk is about 160 meters (at 3 mph), which means there is 80240 m^2 within a two-minute walk of any specific point. Given a population density of 100k/square mile (0.039/m^2) (fourth highest in the world), that would mean 3100 people in range of the store.

Locally, each Wal-Mart serves 100k people. You can play around with the numbers a bit by counting Wal-Mart or Costco or etc, and also reduce their required population, and also increase the density above 100k/mi^2 and also this, and also that, but it gets really hard to make up a >30-fold difference by playing around the edges like that.

A 10-minute walk would be approximately possible, but not two.

I have lots of room for food in my large house. I don't even go to the store and pick it up off the shelves myself, I order it from Wal-Mart and have them stuff it in the trunk for me. I will absolutely sell out to transgender wokies, or Sharia law types, or literal fascists before I carry home my one little bag of groceries with like a stalk of celery and a baguette sticking out the top like someone living in some Old World city originally designed for donkey carts.

Recently, I've been giving some thought to the question of what I would do if an intermediate amount of shit hit the fan, such that I couldn't just drive as much as I want but grocery stores were still available. The solution I hit on was the adult-sized cargo tricycle, which is an actual thing that multiple companies offer, and it seems like a decent option for transporting stuff in a degrowth future. Of course, then we're back to the problem of having a big bulky vehicle that needs parking space while you're shopping, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The solution in that case is carpooling. You can get an additional three or four Mad Max cannibals to the grocery store if you just allow them to hang from the sides of your dump-truck-with-a-flamethrower.

[Standing ovation]

Right-materialists unite! Economic growth is all.

All I'm saying is, if you want me out of my hobbit hole you better bring a flamethrower.

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