Reply #128: well a day late I guess, but my two cents [View All]

[sui generis]

I'm all for requiring a certain percentage of every residential lot be permeable ground cover. Austin has a law like this.

Other than that, my dear fellow liberals, get over yourselves. Some of the crap I've read here borders on psychotic. It's a big country - there are plenty of "charming" neighborhoods that have building restrictions, and there are plenty of neighborhoods that have McMansions. Some people have no hobbies and sit at a keyboard day and night and sleep in a twin bed - boffo for you. Go live in a dorm somewhere, nobody is preaching to you, and if you're concerned about shared resources and space then lets talk about overpopulation, not housing choices.

Some people actually have hobbies that require room - I have a concert grand piano, dozens of neo-renaissance paintings in progress, the SO has byzantine mosaics and other hobbies that REQUIRE space, and many other things that require proper appropriate display space, before anything like kids even come into consideration. Space is an absolute requirement - and somebody else's idea of how much is enough is just busybody silliness.

Everybody wants to right-size everybody else's life based on their own. That's what I find absurd. Not elitist. Just absurd. If you're happy living in a 30's bungalow with aluminum wiring, floor furnaces and just enough closet space for your work suit and your sunday suit, nobody is critiquing your choice.

I think it's sad that if you ask anyone what the oldest thing they own is - it's usually less than 50 years old. We're already harvested for taxes, personal time in the corporate world, interest on borrowing and education, and social security that we'll never see by corporations and our own government who claim to know what's best for us. Now we have "concerned" liberals of our own who claim to know what's best for us, how much money is too much money to earn, how much space and paid resource is too much per person, who we should be married to, what kind of house we should live in and what kind of car we should drive - that's the psychosis here. You may have that opinion but trying to enforce legislatively is anti-liberal and anti-progressive, and does not address the problem causing the resource impact, just the symptom.

If people are dying out in their McMansions in their bedroom communities tied to an ARM with no limits and no gas, and not enough water to keep their lawns green or shower in the summer; why do we think the buyer is at fault? Wouldn't it be better to have to adjust by making telecommuting more viable? Is there something wrong with revivifying a dying or dead small town with new infrastructure? There's nothing charming about a pop.300 town with nothing left but a gas station and an falling down old folks home - there are plenty of those all through the midwest, and the fact is that the cost of urban living is so outrageous that you can spend half what it would cost to live IN the city on a very nice home outside of the city, and people do. As a species, we really don't take well to being warehoused.

:rant:

eh - sometimes winning in the more-progressive-than-thou arena isn't worth the prize.