suburban rule

spujb@lemmy.cafe to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 708 points –
109

'Bessie' is a preposterous name for a chicken.

Yeah, I always thought Bessie was a cows name lol

Who says cows can’t lay eggs?

And don’t say “literally everyone”, that’s a cop out answer

Actually I would say literally no one. I don't think it's ever come up before just now. Just so you're aware though, those things the cows are "laying" out in the pasture are definitely not eggs

Fr. I took a double take when I read the meme. What kind of cow lays eggs?? Oh, wait... Who the heck names a chicken Bessie?

Be me: has chickens

Also me: is a surburbanite

#restingchookface

Is it weird to say that your chicken looks straight gangsta? Like I'd invite that chicken to my smoke circle

Not at all, she seriously is. She will steal your lit cigarette or joint and run off with it. Look at this chook, she’ll cut a bitch.

It was 42°C out so I had them inside to cool off.

Edit: Also, that is my smoke circle in the first pic haha

I think birds are just kind of smug and self assured in general.

i just want to thank you for starting a thread of people posting their chickens im the midst of a bunch of debatelords being debatelords.

the internet is a better place with you in it💗🐔

Same. Four hens and this big bastard.

The suburban council area I live in doesn’t allow keeping roosters. Probably a valid rule to have.

What's their stance on dogs that bark all night?

Because this guy shuts up between the hours of 7 pm and 6 am.

That it’s against the noise curfew? Which ends at 7am on weekdays and 9am on weekends and public holidays. There are ~12 dwellings within 50m of my backyard. I would be an arsehole to all of those people if I kept a rooster. In fact, Void, the black chicken in the picture, has a brother named McFly. When he started crowing at around four months, we drove him out to my friend’s place in the country. He can be as noisy as he wants out there, and is living his best life.

Same.

Omgosh, your lovely lady looks very very similar to my old lovely lady that passed last year!

She was a rescue Issa Brown, we think she was a former farm layer due to the clipped beak. Absolute badass too tho.

God I wish. I live in an American city, so it's too dangerous to walk along the 4 lane stroad to get to the grocery store a block away

When I look at those neat American suburb grids and imagine to be a shop owner, I would love to put my store directly into the grid. Is it just not allowed to have a shop in those neighborhoods? Isn't that anti-capitalist lol?

That's correct, suburbs are the product of the worst housing experiment in the US, in which racists fled from cities to suburbs. They were designed to benefit white people in the aftermath of WW2, because white people were more likely to afford a car. More racism prevented POC from buying in the suburbs or qualifying for housing loans. A second layer of racism came when the Department of Transportation intentionally used Emminent Domain to design the highway network for disrupting and dividing neighborhoods of black people. The whipped topping of this racism pancake came from an unassuming supreme court case, which allowed for municipalities to "preserve the character of the community", which cemented racist single family zoning into city ordinances and prevents literally anything other than a single family home from being built

Suburbs without cars are food deserts. No shops, no public transit. Only single family homes, schools and pedophile shuffling services (churches). If I had to walk to buy any food (even fast food) it would be a 45 minute trip minimum.

Unironically agreed. Suburbs suck and apparently they're also bad for the environment.

Oh god.

almost: car-centric suburbs suck, other kinds are generally perfectly fine.

Like there are many suburbs throughout the world built around public transport and they're great, my fave is one to the northeast of gothenburg that is just a bunch of high-density housing and a tramline slapped into the hilly forest. Same population as my town and everyone living there has like a 10 minute walk to the forest at worst, and most people have a 5 minute walk to the tram.

Imagine being able to walk or cycle to a store in a few minutes while also not being in some dense urban hellscape 🇳🇱🇪🇺. Hopefully the US will learn to build better cities someday.

while also not being in some dense urban hellscape 🇳🇱🇪🇺

Fun fact: Although Amsterdam (~5,000/km^2^) fails to match the population density of New York City (~11,000/km^2^), similarly-human-scale Paris manages to almost double it (~20,000/km^2^) despite not having skyscrapers. Because of things like progressive setbacks and the need to build parking decks to comply with minimum parking requirements, NYC-style skyscrapers really don't buy you as much extra living space as you might think, compared to mid-rise apartment buildings that can use the entire city block curb-to-curb.

That's already how my life is in the USA. I live in the woods, and I can get to 2 grocery stores within 5-10 minutes.

The most frustrating thing is being in a place with dense outwardly building urban development. Watching more and more copy/pasted strip malls go up with plans for "Subway. Smoke shop. Nails. Maybe gas station." (Yes, every time)

Aside from copy-paste labyrinthine housing developments.

You just wish you could shout loudly enough "You're doing it all wrong and there's still a chance to make this better!"

But it keeps on going.

The most frustrating thing is being in a place with dense outwardly building urban development. Watching more and more copy/pasted strip malls go up with plans for “Subway. Smoke shop. Nails. Maybe gas station.” (Yes, every time)

If it's a strip mall with a surface parking lot (as opposed either having a parking deck, or having very little parking at all because it's TOD), it categorically doesn't count as "dense."

The suburbanite sounds like she had a lot of other issues besides just owning a car lol

Some of those other issues stem from being a suburbanite. No social interactions, no casual exercise by walking more than the length of their driveway, no easy access to either cultural institutions nor quality green spaces, etc.

Wat. I know it's cool to hate on the suburbs but in my view it's the best of both worlds.

No social interactions? I go to trivia night every week at a local suburban bar, it's very social. Or just out and about in my neighborhood you can easily run into folks walking their dog and have a some chitchat.

No casual exercise? My neighborhood is super walkable with hills and winding roads, and most houses have beautiful landscaping. There's no HOA so every yard is different, and most people put a lot of work and pride into it. So walking my dog or going for a jog is easy, safe, and pleasant.

No easy access to cultural institutions? I can easily go to local shows in the suburbs - and not just cover bands, but original music too, by some pretty well-known bands. Just as an example, a few years before covid we saw a double-headline show by The Psychedelic Furs and The Church at a theater 10 minutes from my house. There are also arboretums and preserves that have light shows with music, there are local playhouses, and there are even galleries and museums (though I admit these don't really compare to the art museum downtown, but it's rare I would go to one anyway).

No easy access to green spaces? Like I said, there are several parks, preserves, and arboretums near me. I can get to a small local park on foot - it's right outside my neighborhood. The closest arboretum is an easy 5-minute drive. I can get to a local farm in 5 minutes. There are a ton of streams (in fact my neighborhood has a sizeable stream in easy walking distance), and because of that, my backyard is filled with nature. The other day we had nine deer in our backyard. There's a red-tailed hawk that stalks our yard in the summer. We have chipmunks, garter sneks, raccoons, opossums, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, and all sorts of birds.

And if I need eggs I can walk five minutes to the market right outside my neighborhood, or be there in two via car.

Maybe I'm lame, or maybe I live in an unusually good area, but I love the suburbs.

Good for you. The meme is about those terrible suburban areas where none of that is true. If you can walk five minutes on a winding footpath through your local park to a small local shop, your street probably doesn't look like this:

That is the same thing as Urban Hellscape. They just changed the vertical density to horizontal density.

Only a moron would buy a house like that with no yard, when there are many rural homes available with far more space for less price.

why did u assume the suburbanite’s gender lol

Sorry, I'll fix it... The suburbanite sounds like he, she, and/or they may unfortunately have a lot of other non-normative and potentially problematic life journeys going on besides just owning a car. Perhaps we should educate them by exchanging platitudes about living our best life?

It was all the "oh my gosh" and "child get in the car" for me

Suburbanite: Child, go open the instacart app on my phone and have some eggs delivered by an underpaid driver for $35.

Fuck suburbs, probably the one thing rural and urban people can agree on.

Yep, it's their fault for living in a food desert and not the fault of the corporations that made it a food dessert 👍👍👍

Food deserts are mostly not the fault of corporations; they're the fault of zoning. Some of that blame admittedly rests on misguided (to say the least) modernist urban planners back in the '30s, but most of it rests squarely on the shoulders of NIMBYs.

Neither of you seem to know what a food desert is.

Yeah. "I have to drive for 15 minutes to access an endless range of fresh produce. Food desert!"

When the store is 100 mile/160 kilometer round trip, you either figure out a substitute or do without. And if you don't know what else to use, your favorite search engine is only seconds away from helping you with your problem. It ain't rocket surgery.

if i'm feeling restless i'll just bike 20 minutes to the local egg farm and buy the eggs directly from their little unmanned shop, for a hilariously low price.

i have a lot of complaints about sweden but god damn stuff like this is nice

Same here. Living in the boonies in Germany. The shop is a freezer sitting outside under their carport and a tin can for the money. And it works.

it's such a good business model, provided you can trust people not to steal

effectively 0 overhead and people can go there whenever they want, everyone wins except big companies, which means everyone else wins EVEN MORE

here in sweden we have an app called Swish which makes it trivially easy for anyone with a smartphone to send money to anyone else, so these places will just have a sign with their QR code that you scan and it automatically inputs their account number and the cost of the item. I want to live in a world where this is the standard way to sell things.

For the vast majority of my suburban life, whenever I needed eggs mid-recipe I just walked across the street to either the local grocery store or local convenience store to get eggs.

Now, which artist or thinker said that a suburb is just the city spread too thin

I live in the suburbs and am within walking distance of 3 places that sell eggs. Which is an anomaly, because yes this is one of many problems with suburban sprawl.

Where I live suburbs (both those with apartment blocks and those with detached houses) usually have stores within reasonable distance

Me, being a suburbanite with backyard chickens and a store I can drive to in 2-3 minutes

Why do you need to drive to a store that close?

Because America was built for cars, not pedestrians. You'd be surprised how hard it can be to walk just a block or two down sometimes....

Also in some parts of the country we have ridiculously fast roads right in front of neighborhoods so 3-4 minutes might be at 55mph (88kmh)

There are no sidewalks, bike lanes or even a shoulder on the road. I walked home from the tire shop next to the store one time last year and four people stopped to offer me a ride because it's that dangerous.

Also it's currently way below freezing here. I would still walk in those temps but not many people will, and not everyone can walk two miles each way (which is more like 1-2 hrs of walking total)

So like a 5 minute walk to the store?

There are no sidewalks, bike lanes or even a shoulder on the road. I walked home from the tire shop next to the store one time last year and four people stopped to offer me a ride because it's that dangerous.

Also it's currently way below freezing here. I would still walk in those temps but not many people will, and not everyone can walk two miles each way (which is more like 1-2 hrs of walking total)

Honestly, that's the biggest problem with suburbs; that they are often purposefully designed to not be walkable.

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The only reason I know what a Wawa is, is because of the Philadelphia International Outreach Program

I know wawa because there's three within five minutes of me

That I'm sure of

I love them, 24/7...ish stuff! Hot food! Packaged goods! My vice of soda! All available at 3am.

Gotta drive to food lion, walking near those stores almost guarantees a stabbing.

I can buy free range eggs at the farm gate, a five minute drive from my house. It's pretty handy actually.