Lives my ideal life
Ftfy
Let’s be honest, the countryside sucks. 4 miles until the nearest store, and surrounded by weird people.
Can confirm. Grew up in the hellhole that is rural America. Will never go back.
surrounded by weird people
Have you ever set foot in a city?
Yes, and I’ll tell ya what, I ain’t yet felt like if I stayed over too long the locals were gonna start raising some planks and rope like I do if I even look like I’ve so much as thought of walking into the gas station store to get a bottle of water out in the countryside.
Those rural folks want me dead just for existing and what I believe about the world ain’t doing many favors to that inclination.
deleted by creator
No, but things can totally get ugly
It’s probably not that extreme most of the time, but there are plenty of sundown towns in the rural US. If the other poster is a minority it can certainly get ugly just by them being there at any time. Just because it isn’t nighttime doesn’t mean that they will necessarily refrain from targeting them.
Hell, even being a white man who doesn’t look like a local can get nasty looks and unwanted attention. I’d say it’s risky to be there for anyone who doesn’t have a local traveling with them.
Countryside has more weird people per capita.
different flavors of weird for sure. Depends on which type you’re more comfortable around.
I’ll take the smelly screaming drug addict with a knife over the quiet, peculiarly sweet smelling drug addict with a dozen guns and a cousin-wife on the police force.
I wish I lived in a place with only 4 miles to the store. It definitely can get obnoxious haha
Yeah, try a 25 mile drive.
Unfortunately I do :'( lmao
Like you don’t find tons of weird people in Cities.
Anon has never heard of the term “target audience”.
See “every Hallmark TV movie”. High powered female executive from the big city ends up in a rural town because of family/friend/work, falls in love with local stud and small town life, quits and moves to small town, cut and wrap.
This is 3/4 of their production and it works because it draws in the urban women who actually dream of this and the rural women who want to believe they’re living a dream and all city folk are jealous of them.
What about both?
Go watch KiminonawaEh, my friend actually did that. I assumed that she had some sort of awful family she was running from, but actually they’re nice and she visits them on holidays. She just wanted to be in the big city so much that she was willing to rent a single room in a bad neighborhood and constantly look for odd jobs rather than live out in the countryside with her parents.
It’s a sense of adventure and wanting to try new things. I grew up in a very small town, lived in a couple large cities (not Chicago, but you would get robbed every once in awhile and hear some gun shots). I currently live in a medium size city a few states from where I grew up and it’s depressing to me than going home and seeing the people who have never even tried anything else.
I mean I can imagine the dating prospects are really terrible in the countryside, noone talked about that yet.
Dodging accidental incest is basically the most popular sport where I grew up.
Joking aside, where I grew up there were certain “clans” as we only somewhat jokingly refered to them. Basically large interconnected family units that were usually dominated by a single central family with smaller branch off families on the periphery. Dating someone within your clan wasn’t necissarily off limits because that person may not actually be related to you, but if you were in the same clan then you knew your families were very closely linked and you have to be careful. If you wanted to be safe though then you just date someone from outside your clan. Basically if you mention the last name of that central family and they don’t recognize it, then you’re usually good; if they do recognize it then you need to do some more digging.
in a bad neighborhood
If it’s not built after 2000, then the only reason it is bad is because people think it is.
Another issue is that LBGT people often have to flee hostile rural towns for a city where they can be free to live. We’re currently in the middle of a refuge crisis as trans people flee red States for mostly cities (small towns in blue states can be scary too) in places like Minnesota.
I understand the draw. It’s boring in the country for most young people. At least there’s always something to do or something to see in the city.
I was a city kid that ended up in the country, and it’s like a different world. It took me years to slow down to country pace. Now that I’m older I enjoy it, but it took a lot of getting used to. There’s things I miss about the city but I prefer being out here where I never have to lock things up for fear of it getting stolen, cleaner air, and all the other issues city life brings.
The biggest issue I have out here is keeping the deer out of my garden.
Put in some big T-posts around the border, like 10 ft ones, one on each of the four corners. Once they’re pounded in, string up some fairy lights around 9 ft off the ground and then another set around 6 ft off the ground. Assuming you have a ~4 ft fence with chicken wire for squirrels, this light configuration will keep them out–even if you don’t keep the lights on overnight, since deer hate jumping into stuff they don’t see ahead of time.
With this configuration, our garden has been deer-free in an area that has a ton of them. I see around 20 unique deer literally every day on my property, and I’ve never seen any of them in my garden, nor have I found any deer-eaten veggies.
I may try that. Some people down the road put a 8 foot chicken wire fence around theirs to keep them out, but I kind of wanted to avoid looking like a prison yard.
A tip I got from an orchard owner is to use human hair clippings. They just got them from a barber shop and stuffed them in cans attached to the trees. Aparently the smell helps keep the deer away.
Also cat or dog urine can help keep them away. If you have an indoor cat then you can “mark” the area with used cat litter and that should keep them out. You can also just buy straight up bobcat urine online for that purpose. I’m not sure if it works any better than regular cat or dog pee, but it is available.
I’ve tried the hair clippings and these guys don’t seem to care. I’m a hairy guy, so maybe I smell too much like a sasquatch?
Haven’t tried the cat thing tho… there’s strays that live out back but I’m not sure if they do their business there so I may give that a try.
There is a good amount of evidence that the US government contracts some of the bigger studios and makes deals with them so that they portray things how the government wants them to be.
A big example is any movie involving the US military. They’ll rent out all the military equipment for free as long as they get final say over the movie.
Not sure if something like this would fall under that, but I wouldn’t be shocked.
Isn’t that a good strategy though if you’re trying to project soft power by using your domestic film industry to your advantage?
American culture is one of its big exports, and you can gain a lot more cultural influence around the world by making cool movies with multimillion weapons systems by cooperating with filmmakers when they’d otherwise be sitting at the ready or in storage.
But also, the US government didn’t have a hand in Zootopia’s plot.
I love the common American boogeyman known as “government”. I like to imagine the president or any other of the fuckers in high positions going to the film studios and explaining to them what the government has chosen and what they’re gonna show in the movie. Instead of their more common leisure time - coke, hookers and moralizing.
Some military movies are sponsored by the military (not the government), but as much as you’d like there to be some conspiracy, it’s dead simple - the marketing guys decided it’s a great opportunity to recruit people and the director got to make an expensive movie for cheap.
“Stadtliche luft macht man frei” is an old German saying. City air makes you free. Life in a small town can be stifling. That close-knit family wants you to be just like them. God forbid you want to do or see anything new. The moving-to-a-big-city trope is as old as cinema, and has strong roots in reality.
I agree with the sentiment, but Germans have a horrible track record on what makes you free.
Came here to try to make this joke. You did better than I could have, I was trying to create a Germanic folk hero named Arvid McFry
The prefix “Mc” or “Mac” is Celtic anyway, not Germanic, so you failed in that sense too.
And Arvid is Scandinavian. That’s why I didn’t do it.
“Stadtluft macht frei” but yes, everything else is spot on.
The background back then was, that citizens of towns weren’t owned by anyone in the feudal system unlike people that lived outside the walls.
There were free peasants outside cities. The specific reason is a serf could run away to a city, and if he managed to stay long enough, he stopped being a serf and became a citizen.
In the middle-ages in at least in what is now Estonia, if you ecaped to the city and lived there for a year and a day you would be set free from your serfdom. “Linna õhk teeb vabaks” same frase was used for that.
Why do we accept that urban life is worse than rural life?
In some cases it is.
I live on an acre about 100 miles from the nearest sizable city. I’ve got a workshop, pecan trees, a pool, a smoker trailer, a bonfire pit fifteen feet across, and lots of peace and quiet. No HOA, no city ordinances, no traffic, and the only loud neighbor is a donkey that brays a few times a day.
That would cost me at least half a million in the city. The little apartment I used to rent Pre-COVID cost me nearly as much as the house payment I pay now.
Is it for everyone? No. There’s no excitement, limited shopping and dining options, and anywhere I want to go is at least a twenty minute drive. But it’s great for me. My job sends me all over the world so I get my fill of the city while living in hotels. Going home is a breath of fresh air.
The key is to live in the countryside but not actually work in the countryside.
Yep.
Suburbs!
Having a decent income and wealth makes living on a rural location idyllic. Someone with a low income farming job and an acre in a rural location won’t see the exact same house the same way because they will be struggling financially.
Oh, for sure. I lived not too far from where I do now when I was younger and flipped burgers for a living. I had holes in the floor of my trailer where possums would come up at night and raid the cat food.
Still, being able to wake up, walk outside, and take my morning piss off the front porch while watching the sunrise was some compensation. Being out away from everyone is appealing to some people.
Ignorance plain and simple. Most people nowadays live their whole lives in big urban centers, they have an idealistic view of country life and take the conveniences of city life for granted. City life can suck, I won’t deny it, but living in bumfuck nowhere also has it’s major drawbacks.
Eh, I’ve lived both, now in the city, it’s got its advantages but I’d be lying if I said I don’t dream of going back from time to time.
Cars ruin cities. There’s more we can do to make cities better but that’s the big one
A lot of things that people cite as benefits of small old towns are just benefits of not requiring massive amounts of parking and huge roads.
I mean, do you think cars aren’t a thing in rural areas or something? You think us country bumpkins are riding our horses around?
Yeah, you didn’t know? As soon as you leave a city all vehicles disappear.
There’s enough space out there it’s not an issue. Cars are a rural technology we bulldozed half the city to makebroom for and then complained about not enough parking and too much traffic
deleted by creator
Rural areas don’t have the same density of cars that a lot of urban areas do, so a lot of the problem of high density traffic just don’t apply.
It’s like saying that rural areas also have people, so it’s not like urban areas have any unique people based problems.My grocery store is on the intersection of two five lane roads that are busy all day every day. The crosswalks are about a 20 minute walk apart.
No, but it’s much, much easier to get rid of them in cities where they can be replaced by subways, tramways, buses, bikes, and the like.
What if you want to leave the city?
When you want to travel to the third world countries that connect the cities of the US you could rent a car, which is necessary because rural areas have apparently forgotten about public transit of any kind. In civilized countries, there’s a solid network of mass transit basically everywhere. It doesn’t matter that you’re in a podunk town, a bus comes by every half hour because it’s a necessity to have a regular bus more than a full one.
Bullshit. There are vast areas of the western US and Alaska where this simply is not economically possible or even desirable. The same is true for huge parts of Canada and Australia and other countries that have very remote and thinly settled regions. Even when I lived in Ireland, which is tiny and relatively densely populated, there were rural communities that only had bus service once or twice a day.
this simply is not economically possible or even desirable.
Life is not economically possible or desirable by capitalism.
Then you take the train. If this is not an available option, you take the car, one of which you either own but barely use when staying within the city, or that you buy (which is the option I chose, it’s a lot cheaper than to own one).
There also should absolutely be trains that connect cities together too, it’s already mostly the case in Europe which is around as big as the US, including high speed trains between major cities, but there is also a lot of regular trains that connect moderately sized towns with their nearby city. This can be both a cheaper and faster alternative to driving a car if you go somewhere you won’t need a car (say, a city with very good public transit). China may be more comparable to the US as it is a single country with a similar size, but the size of their train network grew tremendously over the last twenty years, especially their high speed network. I guess a good start for the US would be to connect the major cities on the East Coast with high speed trains, such as DC, New York, Chicago, and other cities nearby, I can guarantee you there will be demand for that.
In fact, I’m about to take a high speed train from Paris to Lyon. Including the time I’ll have spent in public transit to go to and come back from the train station, it’ll take me three hours total vs four and a half hours by car without stops on traffic jams to travel some 400km (around 250 miles). The tickets cost me 90€ both ways, including the subway and tramway, while the same travel by car would cost me at least that much in not double.
ЭД4
Dunno. In rural areas I know there are more bikes than in city or cars in same area. Cause you know, cars are expensive.
All of which make for a way better quality of life than car hell. If people wern’t sitting in unbearable traffic all day complaints about urban living would be far less common
Mr green text has no idea what he’s talking about.
I grew up on a farm you’re telling me that was an idyllic life?
Farmwork is stupidly long days in awful weather, it’s either hot, or freezing cold, or raining, or snowing. The pay is effectively abysmal and makes you wish you worked in Starbucks on minimum wage because that would be an improvement. You have all this necessary equipment you’ve had to “buy”, which despite costing more than most houses is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
And that’s just growing props if you’re mad enough to also raise cattle then it’s even worse because you’ve got all them to deal with and sheep in particular are more suicidal than a depressed lemming.
But hey, you get a nice view.
deleted by creator
Also less diversity, and rarely any good/interesting restaurants. I ran to the city for 15 years, now I’m in a small town and it’s fun to have private land (a little anyway), but I still miss miss late night outings, once a month brunches, and really good Indian, Mexican, Ethiopian, Chilean, etc food I could get within 20 minutes in the city.
The incentive being otherwise you die
Well, at least a soviet tank can be repaired with a hammer, unlike a deere
Soviet equipment is much more repairable than any of the modern crap we have nowadays which is designed to be used and tossed in a relatively short timeframe.
Thick enough wood log works too
There’s a reason the kids aren’t taking over the farm. Not to mention that a 50 acre returned soldier lot can’t provide for a family of six anymore.
Well it isn’t subsistence farming by any stretch of the imagination it’s full on industrial farming.
Most farms these days, at least crop farms, grow only two or three different crops. Mostly dictated by what will fetch the best price and what is currently being subsidised by the government. Often times you will find that farms are not growing any food stuffs at all.
I grew up next to a farm. They stopped growing produce because the government regulations got to be crazy. They just grow soy beans and hay now.
Can they not poison the water supply anymore or were there too many strings attached to get their subsidies?
You know nothing about them.
Is green text talking about the specific character in the picture?
I currently work at a farm and it is fucking hard work for $15 an hour. The only reason I stay is because family friends own it and I need money for college. At least I don’t have to deal with sheep lmao.
Wait, you got paid? I just got grabbed by the neighbor whenever he needed another hand
is about as reliable as a Soviet era tank.
Are you praising farming equipment or saying Soviet era tanks are unreliable.
Almost certainly the latter, though im sure some soviet era tank specialist nerd will write up a ‘bhut achthually …’ 5 paragraph essay on how soviet tanks were the best of the best and could be repaired with twigs and mud
You are currently depressed lemming
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Wow, good call. The highlight there is:
Urban consumers (may) spend more money.
rural life can not be austainable.
move out of city for cheap house etc - than complain about no wifi, no doctors etc - force government to have fiber internet - yadda yadda
people who advocate rural areas are just big egoists and ignorant
You literally cannot grow sufficient food to feed the population of the city within the city. Every city requires massive rural areas for sustenance.
Rural areas have sufficient abundance to both sustain themselves and the cities.
But there’s no jobs in rural areas. That’s why they’re emptying out
Why is “a job” considered so essential to life?
Everything costs money for some reason
When you understand that reason, you’ll understand why it doesn’t need to be so.
can you give me any source for that?
i heard paris is considered a beautiful city. if all humans lived in a city as dense as paris we could all live in an area the size of germany.
growing population says it is impossible to feed the world with conventional farming as this will further reduce nature.
rural areas are whats destroying the planet.
also, were i lived the farmer has an ipad and the machines do all the work. nobody really needs to live there anymore as you can easily check from the number of employees in farming. constant decline. it is bs to think people need to be in thos rural areas but you can wait till it is 100% machine made.
Rural areas provide food and raw materials for the cities. That’s their entire purpose.
If all people lived in a city as dense as Paris, they would all starve: Paris does not have a single farm producing food.
If all people lived in a city as dense as Paris, every manufacturer would be out of business due to lack of raw materials: Paris does not have a single mine.
If rural areas are destroying the planet, it is because the cities are demanding from those areas more than the planet can provide.
the cities
It’s not cities doing that, it’s capitalism.
Socialist cities make the same demands on rural areas that capitalist cities do. It’s primarily a function of population density, not economic model.
At best, a square mile of farmland can feed about 6000 people. That’s under ideal conditions and assuming vegetarians. Want a little meat in your diet, and 2500 is a more realistic number.
A square mile of Chicago contains about 12,000 people. That’s 2 to 4.8 square miles of farmland for every square mile of city. Chicago is about 230 square miles.
A square mile of New York contains about 30,000 people. That’s 5 to 12 sq miles of farmland for every square mile of city. New York is about 300 square miles.
A square mile of Paris contains about 53,000 people. 8.8 to 21.2 sq miles of farmland for every square mile of city. Paris is about 40 square miles.
rural life can not be sustainable.
Cities need farms to feed the inhabitants of the cites, farms can’t exist without farmers (yet) and there’s plenty of types of businesses farmers need to visit fairly frequently in order to live. This creates and sustains the small farm communities the dot the rural landscape between large cities
move out of city for cheap house etc - than complain about no wifi, no doctors etc - force government to have fiber internet - yadda yadda
Farmers need services too. Are you just saying everyone unlucky enough to be born outside of a major metropolis must go without medical care or access to modern services?
Also fiber is literally cheaper in the long term. It has effectively infinite bandwidth, requires no maintenance except repairing damage by excavation/natural disasters/wildlife (which any kind of utility line requires) and can run literally hundreds of kilometers without any repeaters or anything else to maintain the signal inbetween.
ISPs were (and still are in many places) utilizing worn out, sometimes over a century old telephone and cable television infrastructure to deliver internet to places that hadn’t yet gotten fiber, and it perpetuates a digital divide that prevents kids growing up on farms from accessing services that might help them be the most productive members of society that they can be
people who advocate rural areas are just big egoists and ignorant
I think you’re the ignorant one in this case
assumptions assumptions.
look at the facts.
co2 -> rural homes cause way more emissions
…so does their commute.
they cost, we pay
internet…extremely expensive to get fibre everywhere. …so is public transport.
the cost, we pay
i do not see how a planet with growing numbers of ppl could allow rural areas really
internet…extremely expensive to get fibre everywhere.
Fibre cost per kilometer is much cheaper than copper. Fibre is cheapest way to get internet everywhere.
starlink not cheaper?
the point is that it costs money to get infrastructure anywhere. and those ppl that just want to live out their fantasy to build their own ugly home somewhere in the woods just care about themselves.
Starlink is actually extremely expensive and slow. About $600 for the dish and about $100 for speed slower than my cable plan in 2003 as slow as 25Mbps. Worse even though rural areas are spread out a good chunk of people tend towards smaller clumps close enough to be sharing the same bandwidth. The entire constellation doesn’t scale to supporting a reasonable experience to even a fraction of rural America let alone planet earth.
You still basically need to run fiber into every town however small.
thanks. i hoped it was faster really.
assumptions assumptions. look at the facts.
I literally provided facts and linked on the ones that are not common knowledge
i do not see how a planet with growing numbers of ppl could allow rural areas really
WHERE WILL THE FOOD BE GROWN THEN?! WHERE WILL THE RESOURCES TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN THE CITIES COME FROM?!
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/vertical-farming
all caps does not make anything right
Also housing in cities is artificially expensive because it’s illegal to.built dense housing in.most of it.because of suburbanites who wanna play pretend farmhouse
paris.
dense enough? considered worth living? because if all ppl would live i a terrible terrible city like paris, we’d have a shitload of nature back.
anyone who thinks one deserves to live rural just says his/her personal choice of lifestyle is more important than a future for the kids. rural areas destroy so much nature and take up way too much land.
Worse yet is when people claim to want to live rural but just end up in some distant suburb instead
Suburbs are part of the spectrum between rural and urban. Some population density and some open space.
The main problem with suburbs is that they are exclusively residential instead of a mix with commercial.
Suburbs are worst of both worlds. And american suburbs based on what I know about them are worst type of suburbs.
I lived in a suburb that had shopping and a city park in easy walking distance as a kid and it was pretty awesome. I now live in one where the nearest business is 2 miles away and it sucks. Both in the US and with wildly different experiences.
I also lived in a fairly dense residential area that was great as there were businesses in walking distance that were fun to go to, and another where there were businesses, but they all sucked so I had to drive somewhere else.
The real problem is the separation if residential and business zoning to such a degree that going to any business requires transportation.
it.because of suburbanites who wanna play pretend farmhouse
And don’t pay for it
Because those “loving family members” IRL are usually nosy dickheads, and there is no dating scene in small towns. So it’s either marry your cousin, or move to the city.
Not to mention job opportunities…
Her dream was to be a cop. Having it be a low paying career, living in a small apartment, and being away from friends and family are things we call sacrifices.
I’ve lived in high urban, low urban, suburban, and rural. They all have pros and cons.
If you’re dating tho, the city is way better, but good luck finding practice space - if you’re into that sort of thing.
There are dating practise spaces?
Haha, yeah, it’s called the bar.
She had 275 siblings. Getting away from that farm was the smartest thing she’s ever done. She has no hope of any kind of meaningful inheritance. I’m honestly surprised a farm could support that many rabbits and still turn any kind of profit. It must have been subsidized out the wazoo. The last thing it needs is her hanging around, getting hitched to some redneck just out of high school, popping out a couple hundred hungry mouths of her own right before the inevitable foreclosure and declaration of martial law as the farmpocalypse occurs when her parents finally kick it and the tens-of-thousands of children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren raze the countryside in search of fodder. Just ask an Australian what rabbits are capable of.
Also the explicit reason stated that she went away was because of basic empathy for others and duty to others for a positive impact on the world. I just realized that the entire plot of zootopia would be lost on a lot of people purely out of apathy.
