There was a tangentiel post earlier today on HN about letting your garden grow wild.
Also, when I was a kid in southern California, my parents used to dry laundry on a clothes line, outside. We were lucky to have a big backyard so you would imagine not many neighbors would complain.
We got a letter from the neighborhood saying the laundry was unsightly.
This is strange to me to this day. First, air dryed laundry smells and feels amazing. Second, you're saving a ton of energy by not using an electric or gas dryer.
But the sight of some towels and bed sheets on a clothes line makes people really upset....
Line-drying vs machine drying was, and I suppose still is for some older people (who probably inhabit the bulk of HOA boards and such) a class issue.
People with means had mechanical clothes dryers; poorer people didn't. (Clothes washers achieved much greater market penetration and did so significantly before clothes dryers.)
Even going back to before home laundry machines, to what is today an older person's grandparents' era, in big cities the low-cost option was to have your laundry returned to you wet, and you dried and folded it yourself. People with more money, naturally, got theirs returned dry and folded.
Scratch the surface of any obnoxious neighborhood rule and you'll find some sort of class-consciousness or economic insecurity behind it. People don't want to see laundry because it reminds them of poor people, or they're afraid it will make the neighborhood look poorer than it is. I'm not saying that's a good opinion to hold, but I think that's why it's a weirdly sensitive issue.
In another generation when it's firmly an ecological/"green" thing to line-dry your clothes, and not a sign that you can't afford to do it any other way, there probably won't be any opposition. Then it's not a social class signifier, it's just an individual oddity.
This is such an interesting perspective. Though she's never said it, I suspect my grandmother (96! this year) sees vegetarianism the same way— people with means could afford meat, whereas poorer folks simply couldn't. Intentionally choosing to limit or eliminate meat consumption just boggles her mind. This perspective kind of boggles mine.
I hadn't though to extrapolate that position to other topics!
From drying clothes to getting the right nutrition, there are clearly superior and inferior ways to do get any particular result. But of course people don't have the knowledge/skills to figure it out for themselves and come to that judgement on their own. Instead, they use monetary value (price etc) associated a particular method as a proxy for superior/inferior. Once you are down this slippery slope, it is easy to jump the next few steps of this lazy-yet-practical logical staircase that leads to class hierarchy in society and what outwardly behavior brings class status in your society etc. Since these implicit logical models are taught and reinforced generationally, only generational shifts can break the cycle and that makes it hard to change the stereotypes.
There is a story that made the rounds on HN maybe 3 weeks ago about beriberi in the Japanese armed forces caused because soldiers didn't want to eat brown rice as white rice (which is less nutritious) was a sign of wealth.
This is just one of many reasons that it seems it will be difficult to get people in developing countries to forego the western lifestyle for the sake of the environment.
It's hard to get humans to save their immediate self, if it requires foregoing a class symbol, talk less of something as relatively esoteric as the weather.
Where has she lived in that time? Many her age were very affected by the great depression along WW2 and it's aftermath, they learned to be very frugal. The one's I've met around that age bracket seem to see meat as only a small part of a meal with lot's of roast veggies and the like on the side, contrasted with the more modern expectation that the meat is the main course with the sides being much smaller. Manual labor and physical strength was also much more important in her day and meat is important for that.
what food is easily available to the poor and hence looked down upon has changed significantly over the years. people used to be embarassed to have to eat lobster.
Friend of mine has a masters in Medieval sociology. He said one of the places he studied there was a law that you couldn't feed your servants salmon more than X days a week.
I was surprised to learn that some food we nowdays consider expensive was very low-class back then, and viceversa, as availability and costumes changed over time. Salmon being one of the examples.
I recommend that series of videos if you like this kind of stuff.
My mother said her 1958 cookbook she got as a wedding gift suggested that 'budget conscious' (meaning poor) housewives could consider cheaper types of meat like salmon.
My ex's family if I can tell were immediately descended from impoverished sharecroppers. Grandma picked tobacco when she was a little girl. Her family when they had money ate badly cooked steak a couple of times a week. Definitely a class thing. My family being pretty much solidly middle class and from California that sort of thing just wasn't.
Can't hang out your laundry? Can't grow veggies? How common is this sort of thing in the States, I had no idea. Are there other things that are frowned upon or forbidden over there that might be perfectly normal elsewhere?
Casual sex in the south. I said it as a joke, but this is only comparing it to living in Europe, the stigma around sex or being called derogatory terms for it is much less of a thing in Europe.
But other things like washing dishes by hand. Owning an old car while being middle class. In general everything "laborious" while being in the middle/upper class or living by.
No permanent laundry lines is a very common restriction. Some probably restrict hang-drying clothes at all. Landscaping restrictions like that are common. Fence material/style/height restrictions guaranteed, and unless you're in a damn rich neighborhood with large lots you probably can't even do the full-on 50s dream white picket fence up to the sidewalk, since you aren't allowed to fence your front lawn. And the rich neighborhoods like that probably require brick or metal anyway. Exterior paint options usually restricted. No outbuildings or various restrictions on them very common. Shingle colors and/or material. Everything, really.
It's driven by a turtles-all-the-way-down thing where we're afraid that some future potential buyer of our houses or or neighbors houses will be turned off if they see those things, not necessarily because they care about them per se, but because they either see them as signaling a neighborhood in decline (so, a bad investment) or they're afraid other buyers will see it that way in the future (when they want to sell). As you may notice it's possible to end up in this weird state even when most people don't actually give a damn if you put up a clothes line, but at the same time a lot of them will support restrictions on your doing so, for the above Iocane-powder-scene reasoning.
This all applies in newer neighborhoods, and by newer I mean built after 1985 or so, certainly since 1995. HOAs[1], which are a kind of private hyper-local quasi-governmental thing, are ubiquitous now. Developer buys a big chunk of farmland, runs some squiggly roads through it, builds a bunch of houses (or has them built by other people and companies to whom they sell the lots), maybe a pool and a park (HOA maintained, not city, those are dying with the rise of HOAs—why would I want to pay into a city parks and pools system when I also pay, separately, for the ones provided by my HOA, which are the ones I use the most anyway?), perhaps a golf club and kinda bargain-basement country club thingy if it's a ritzy neighborhood, then sets up an HOA with a bunch of rules that will cover all the houses and their owners, acting effectively as dictator of it until some percentage of the lots are inhabited by owners (HOA members) at which point they take over, to some degree or another.
Further, the HOAs tend to delegate a bunch of stuff to management companies—I mean, even the kinds of busybodies who usually run the HOAs don't have time to do everything. There are fortunes built in those companies—there's real money going around. All this is funded by annual fees charged to the homeowners. Failure to pay will result in liens against your house (can't sell it without paying them off) and even foreclosure, as in the HOA will take your house because you didn't pay your $500/yr or whatever.
Condo associations are similar but with elevators and such to maintain, too, and no lawns to worry about. HOA's basically a condo association for detached housing.
This sounds like another planet to me. In Australia it's completely normal to put clothes on the line for anyone that doesn't live in a building of at least several stories. Every house has a clothes line and most apartment blocks have communal ones. Not using them (weather and time permitting) is usually considered laziness. The closest I've come to rules like this is one apartment that didn't allow small lines on the balcony.
Here in Japan everyone dries their laundry outside. It’s a bit of extra work but we save a ton of energy, stuff doesn’t shrink as much, laundry smells like the sun, I like it.
FYI this creates a lot of dust, everything that you'd see in a lint trap on a drier gets spread about the house. It's not a good solution for the lazy.
Sure clothes create dust, but the majority is created because during regular wearing and/or packing. (The dryer tumbles the clothes, whereas indoors it barely moves.)
We also dry ours inside when it’s raining out. For those occasions we have a dehumidifier. Many newer Japanese homes come with a small clothes drying room for when the weather is not suitable.
I'd be hesitant to try it in urban areas, since the air pollution particularly above streets could be quite bad. I'm sure it depends on a lot of particular local factors though.
These kinds of local ordinances are the same reason my partner and I don’t just rip up our entire front lawn and replace it with native wildflowers and vegetables. Our backyard has walking paths of cut grass and is otherwise vegetable plot and flower prairies.
The U.S. laws and norms that enforce cut lawns are crazy to us. They are biological wastelands.
I feel like the drought in CA helped change at least some of those attitudes. Just today I got a check in the mail from the state for replacing my front lawn with low-water plants. The local water district matched the state’s rebate. We got enough to plant a fairly large tree, which should hopefully provide enough shade in a few years to further reduce our resource consumption. If you live in a drought-prone area, I would encourage you to see if your water provider has a similar program.
That's the point. The whole idiotic point of grassy yards was that only rich people in feudal Europe could afford them historically because they were such an utter waste. The planners of these great nations thought what a great idea, what if everyone could be rich like that... yes we'll make everyone waste land so they can pretend that they are rich... while the banks own most of it.
That's not really what the linked article is arguing; while we could blame Capability Brown, a lawn is just a pasture that's been tidied. In the UK you can usually keep one just by mowing and ambient rainfall. No, the problem was copying that in a very different climate - and then Leavittown, which forced lawns on people with restrictive covenants.
Minnesota is offering incentives to turn lawn back to more natural vegetation to help out the local bee population [0]. I definitely enjoy the natural prairie land look many yards have gone back to. We've tried this in recent years and have fireflies again after not seeing them for the last couple years. It's also great work for our hive.
My side-project, AutoMicroFarm has a secondary goal of keeping your edible yard beautiful and HOA-compliant (if your house is in an HOA neighborhood). The primary goal is to help you grow the majority of your food in your yard).
And an enormous yard, at least if you really mean to grow over 50% of the food required for a family of four people, which will take about an acre (or 4000 m^2) i.e. more than four times the usual front lawn space in a suburban home.
There's a difference between a law that tells you your hedge cannot block a pavement / sidewalk and a law that tells you what plants you can have in your own garden.
A lot of people think they have the right to micromanage your home and garden in order to maintain their own property values. That doesn't seem to be the case here though. I'd think few would object to living next to this beautiful garden.
So what's left besides a hunger for regimentation, uniformity, control? What's the best available argument for stopping people from growing veg in the front yard?
It might attract more pests. It might be a pain for the bureaucrats to have to distinguish between gardens and overgrown jungles, so easier to ban the lot. Nefarious activity could be hidden in the foliage.
I guess there's always a plausible excuse for central control.
Urban/suburban government tends to be... anti-self-sufficiency. Not so long ago a Florida town was making headlines for going after a resident who'd disconnected from the power grid. New wells and septic permits are often disallowed once a city starts offering water and sewer. Etc.
I'm on the border of where my area turns more rural. There are a couple of properties with horses just outside my single street subdivision where I have ~1 1/2 acres. I can have chickens but I can't eat them. Can't have any other foul or livestock without at least twice as much land and a bunch of other restrictions, and I wouldn't be allowed to eat them, either. There's actually _no_ land zoned for general agricultural purposes in my county. None at all. In theory we have a zoning classification for a small farm / ranch type property that allows a smaller than 3ac lot and fewer restrictions on setbacks but I can't find any actual properties with that zoning in the county GIS.
I am allowed to shoot a gun in my back yard tho. Just not at any of the delicious wild animals that pass thru.
The wells thing is tricky, though. There is only one water table, and we all need to share it. Is it ok for one person to dig a well on their property, and say, pump millions of gallons out and sell it?
It makes sense that we want to regulate how much water each person is allowed to extract.
"Is it ok for one person to dig a well on their property, and say, pump millions of gallons out and sell it?"
--> This is an actual problem in India. The govt made electricity FREE on farm lands. So, now people with farmland dug borewell, pump out water and sell them in tankers in the city, where many apartments don't have municipal water connection.
Water is cheaper for apartments where there is low ground water, as cost of electicity consumption for farmers is nil.
Hens are allowed for "personal enjoyment." Eating their eggs is fine. Slaughtering them myself for meat is not. Might be a loophole if I took them somewhere that could legally process them but I can't imagine that's a commercially viable service at the backyard chickens scale.
In Florida I have a friend with a 5ac farm. He can send his pigs and goats to a USDA-approved facility for slaughter when someone wants to buy them for meat, sell them as live animals, or slaughter them himself for personal consumption. Sells the honey his bees produce. Can grow plants and sell their edible parts.
What recently brought code enforcement to his door was growing plants in pots to sell as plants -- that's running a nursery, which isn't allowed in his zoning and would come with a slew of requirements if it were.
Zoning talk on HN tends to be about density and off-street parking and recently ADUs with the CA legislation encouraging them... But once zoning starts in an area it tends to grow until it touches upon _everything._
(I also have an ADU [not in CA] that would not be legal to build under current zoning [it was at the time], and my purchase of the property included tenants in the ADU which is not technically legal [no idea if it was when they signed their lease])
I think it's wrong to tell someone what they can do with land they own. If you want to decide what's done on land, buy it. This would also work as a solution to NIMBYism.
You wouldn't want someone to run a foundry or a slaughterhouse in a residential neighborhood, unless you can work out some kind of tax (aka a fine) that could compensate for the externalities of noise, unsightliness, etc.
You can think of a municipal government as a group of people who decided to do that. They could used a co-op or LLC or whatever instead; it would change the paperwork but not the reality.
If these kinds of rules are enforceable under any legal structure, people like them, and the people who don't like them still buy property encumbered by them, they will persist.
That's the weirdest idea... that your property value is anyone's concern.
In my country if neighbours don't make your property unlivable by emitting smells or noises or being source of insect ifestation and obey the laws they can do whatever they want and nobody cares how it affects price you could get for your house or land if you decided to sell it.
If I were to buy a house, I would make sure that it has no HOA bullshit. I am willing to drive farther into the outskirts of the city but there is no way in hell I would ever want any HOA police my own property. It just feels wrong. Just thinking about this sort of thing makes me angry.
Paradoxically, it's more likely you'll find a HOA-free house in an older more central part of town. The 'burbs are the prime breeding ground for those kind of organizations.
I’ve owned 3 different homes, all built around 1975, only one had an HOA (that did practically nothing and everyone was happy).
On the downside, some of my neighbors have not watered their lawns in a long time and the weeds creep from their yards into everyone else’s. But most homes keep things tidy (which does not always mean grass).
But every single newer home I’ve looked at all came with an HOA and a ton of rules to abide by. Number of trees, number of bushes, all are specified. No cars outside, trash cans can only be left out between certain times. Grass must be cut to a height range.
I don't think it's that the problem is that there are rules, it's just that they are too strict. Next to my area there are houses in an "unplanned" (i.e. rural looking) area, and par for the course is 3 rusted up car wrecks in the yard. Having a junkyard is unsightly. Growing vegetables or drying laundry isn't. Edit: important note is that there are is HOA deciding - it's the local authorities that set these rules.
I have a wonderful garden. Its full of healthy, pleasant things .. trees bearing fruit (best pears I have ever eaten), berry shrubs, fruit bushes, luscious section, native tea's, salads, pumpkins, sunflowers, endless other delights among the privilege of overseeing it all, a daily water, a fair bit of weeding, occasional critter control, but .. yeah. My family regularly enjoys a new jam jar, and daily herbs and salads enrich every home cooked meal.
If someone tried to take that away from me, I'd simply move the whole thing to another place.
I am yet to see a human being whose lives weren't radically improved by engaging in the fruits of their own well kept garden.
See, this here's what the rest a ya'll foreners won't never unnerstand bout 'Merica. We got what ya'll cain't never 'magine havin' and that there is a lil thing we like to call Freedum.
Many of my neighbors have front yard gardens, often because depending on the orientation of the house (it's a dense area) the front yard might have the best light.
Nobody complains, and if anything, such gardens are often complimented (often enviously by those of us on the shady side of the street). People here like the look a well tended space.
I'm sure there's some ordinance on the books disallowing it - like most US cities - but nobody would report it anyway, and the city (Oakland CA) has bigger problems to worry about.
Probably because, recently, CA passed a state law making these legal?... I also am in the Bay Area, and I assure you - we have more than enough busy bodies that would report (if they could).
They didn't really win it. A new law passed exempting gardens. One wonders if the law passed to save the ordinance, and others like it, from being uprooted in higher court.
Wait, what is wrong with having vegetables on your yard? I understand that if you want to raise chickens you need some kind of approval by the rest of the society, due to noises and smells. But what makes "vegetables" different than other flowering plants that you are allowed to plant? You can have plants as long as their fruits are tiny and non-edible?
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, under US military control, every year, millions of acres of Opium are planted, harvested, processed, packaged and shipped, suplying over 90% of the worlds' Heroin. [0]
The freedom is that the federal government has only a limited set of rights. The people also are given a set of unalienable rights through constitutional amendments (the Bill of Rights and so on).
Everything else is left up to the middle governments - states and municipalities.
Though the federal government has increased its scope massively since the early days of the country, and in some cases via sketchy interpretations of the Constitution...
> A government can take them away and the people can take them back.
An the people (you live nearby) can take them away if they deem you unsightly ... unless goverment first takes away their right to take away your rights. Which governments usually do in sane countries.
In the absence of top down rules, local level 'office politics' thrives making life worse for everybody.
“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
That's a view that seem common among extreme libertarians. An opposing view is that no person has any rights other than those that _other people_ agree they have. That latter view is more common among extreme communitarians, that _all_ rights are "given".
I'd say it's arguable whether we are (or should be) moving towards making your position, the first one, true.
But it seems clear that in the natural state of human beings there were no rights (e.g. certainly no complex idea of property), so we are at the vert least transitioning _to_ your position _from_ the latter.
I make no judgment of value, just pointing out you are at best "partially", or "not yet fully", correct.
Point in case, travel a few thousand kilometers in any direction and most likely everyone you meet will disagree on what are your rights - not the least because there you'll be a foreigner. Do you really have inaliable rights as a fact of nature when there's not a single shred of structure to support them?
Even more strikingly clear - were there rights before peoples? Were there human rights before humans? Was there a right to live before life? Rights as an intrinsic part of the natural is impossible in this view.
>Even more strikingly clear - were there rights before peoples? Were there human rights before humans? Was there a right to live before life? Rights as an intrinsic part of the natural is impossible in this view.
It’s not that complicated. Might makes right. If an organism has the power to do something, then it can do it. Everything is subject to the forces of their environment. For humans, the societies that created somewhat formal systems of power management seem to have thrived and out survived those societies (or lack of societies) that didn’t.
> That's a view that seem common among extreme libertarians.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
If that is “extreme libertarian” then count me in. The United States was literally founded on this concept. It’s extreme to think of rights any differently, at least if you are an American. ”Extreme” is the idea that rights are gifts from government or from the benevolence of a sovereign. The view of rights as being unalienable is distinctly American; Englishman Thomas Hobbes expounded on this and thusly planted the seeds of the American idea. Such seeds didn’t take root in England at the time as citizens there were subjects of a king, but it was Hobbes that set the wheels of freedom in motion.
Extreme? I suppose it depends on one’s perspective. At the time Hobbes was extreme, but then, as Americans, we might think of any idea contrary to liberty as a extreme.
> The view of rights as being unalienable is distinctly American
That's quite a claim.
> Englishman Thomas Hobbes expounded on this and thusly planted the seeds of the American idea.
John Locke is the usual go-to figure, no?
> Such seeds didn’t take root in England at the time
Are you sure?
“17th-century English philosopher John Locke discussed natural rights in his work, identifying them as being "life, liberty, and estate (property)", and argued that such fundamental rights could not be surrendered in the social contract. In Britain in 1689, the English Bill of Rights and the Scottish Claim of Right each made illegal a range of oppressive governmental actions.[18] Two major revolutions occurred during the 18th century, in the United States (1776) and in France (1789), leading to the United States Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen respectively, both of which articulated certain human rights. Additionally, the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776 encoded into law a number of fundamental civil rights and civil freedoms.”
I didn't mean that _only_ extremely libertarian (or communitarian) people hold one or the other end of the argument. Just that it it's more common, as these are most likely core concerns for those people
Sorry, you have it backwards. The people have rights, and the rights are presumed to pre-exist the US constitution. The government has powers delegated to it by the people via the constitution.
The Federalists argued that the Bill of Rights was redundant and unnecessary. The Anti-federalists were more skeptical of human nature, and the ratification of the constitution by several states was contingent on the first congress adding a bill of roghts via amendment.
George Mason, rep of 1st congressional district of Virginia to the first congress, was what we would call the “floor manager” of the bill. It was stonewalled by opponents, and eventually the bill had to be broken into a package of 12 amendments. 11 passed the house and were sent to the states for ratification. 10 were ratified rather quickly and are what we know as the BoR. The 11th was certified as ratified sometime in the 1970’s, I believe.
I know sharing feelings is risky around here but I'm gonna go out on a limb and share: it discourages me and deeply angers me that people are out here having to fight for six years to plant a vegetable garden in their yard. This is very grim.
It's gonna take the kind of courage and patience exemplified by Hermine Ricketts and Tom Carroll to grow in the ways we need to grow to survive and evolve as a species.
Please don't include bait like this in your comments. It triggers avalanches of offtopicness. (It's also not true—people share their feelings on HN all the time, and are welcome to, as long as the comments are substantive. The only kind of feeling-sharing that isn't cool is ragey venting with no information.)
I share my feelings all the time on HN. And I get a roller coaster of up and down votes... Never stop sharing your feelings, otherwise what's the point of a community.
I think you should always be encouraged to share your point of view, whether I agree or not (in this case I do), and only get downvoted if you're just flat out spreading misinformation. I often upvote opinions I don't agree to on the basis that they make their case in a valid way.
I have showdead turned on and always read the dead comments. Sometimes it's a mystery why they're dead (user isn't banned, not seemingly rude or controversial) and I always think it might have been an accidental swarm of down-voting mis-clicks by just enough random users.
Why don't you vouch for them? Vouching is a way for users to rescue [dead] comments that shouldn't be [dead]. Click on the timestamp to go to its page, then click 'vouch' at the top. (There's a small karma threshold for such links to appear.)
Comments can be [dead] for many reasons, including software (which doesn't get everything right) or the account being banned (which doesn't mean that every post is bad—indeed, some users start posting good comments only once we've banned them). So there are plenty of good comments that need to be rescued, which is why we introduced vouching in the first place. It works well when users use it.
Hey dang, thanks for the info. I always assumed I couldn't vouch as I didn't see an obvious "vouch" link next to dead comments. Now that I know I need to click on the timestamp I'll investigate this. I'm still not sure if I have enough karma to vouch, but I'll check it out.
EDIT: just checked a few dead links. It seems I do have the ability to vouch. I'll try to use it responsibly!
Quick question if I can. Have I triggered some evil spammer bit in the system somehow, as I haven't been able to vouch for a while - it no longer rescues anything. Or did it change to need more than one vote?
Yes, you vouched for too many comments that break the site guidelines, such as personal attacks and flamewars. When an account does that, we eventually notice and take vouching rights away. The feature is for rescuing good comments that are in the spirit of the site, not comments that violate it.
We're always happy to restore privileges if people give us reason to believe that they've had a change of heart and want to use HN as intended in the future.
Well my first reaction to that is one of amazed disbelief. Personal attacks and flamewars are usually bleeding obvious, and equally easy to avoid.
With it having been there a while, I can't think of any specific comments one way or another, but was and have always intended to use it to rescue (typically) a comment making a good point to the discussion, or the question I'd be interested in an answer to as well.
So I can't imagine how I crossed whatever line. I generally agree wth the tone of moderation here, and degree of leeway usually given. I think my comment history would bear out in tone and style that I'm using as intended, and I don't recall ever having had a mod pick up any of my comments. :p I disagree with the odd rare one - this is hard to generalise without going away to dig for examples - usually where it seems to get a slap on the wrist for a reasonable, or historically accurate point within the flow of a discussion where the complaint of nationalistic or whatever seems a bit of a stretch.
Case in point, the guy posting links that seemed to be reliably going on every climate related topic - I'd have said nowt for one or two, but had seen enough, like on every related post I'd read in a couple of days, that I thought it would have been missed by mods and worth a mention. Others trigger much sooner than I.
Maybe you and dang have a different ability to recognize sarcasm. Sometimes this is really difficult. Looking at comment history can often help you figure out if something is sarcasm or not.
There can also be words that some people find offensive. Not everybody agrees on the words that qualify.
That's also possible, being British I had sarcasm and detection built in at birth. We usually just call it chatting as most conversations get liberally laced with it here. :)
Decades on the net has been an interesting education that some, for some reason especially American, don't recognise sarcasm without the helpful /s. I learnt to pull my punches online on that score years ago. On the [vouch] front I'm not hugely bothered as it doesn't really detract from using HN, more surprised as I don't generally trigger moderator interest anywhere I've been since BBS days.
I'm sure dang will respond in due course as to whether I rate forgiveness or not.
Edit: I should add that I would think it highly unlikely I'd have resurrected comments heavy with sarcasm, I've been well aware for years it doesn't fly around here.
> "Maybe you and dang have a different ability to recognize sarcasm."
Sarcasm and snark rarely improve the quality and direction of a discussion, which is why at least snark is explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. Whether or not one recognizes something as sarcasm is orthogonal to whether a comment overall appropriate and constructive for the forum, and the latter is an overriding concern.
> "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You might think the comment is "overall appropriate and constructive for the forum" because you don't realize that it is sarcasm. The intended meaning is completely different from what you imagine it to be.
The opposite can also happen, particularly when somebody has a belief system very different from your own. You might wrongly assume that the comment is sarcasm, when in fact it is thoughtful and substantive.
That's hilariously Orwellian. I mean, I mostly like the mod atmosphere here. But removing user privileges, not for posting bad comments, but for silently and secretly suggesting that you reconsider some specific bad comments?
It's honestly confusing that you're telling us this at all.
It's not (just) a "secret suggestion", it automatically makes stuff visible again (with probably some ranking involved behind the scenes). And it's been announced from the beginning as something that'll be turned off for users that keep using it on comments the mods rather would them not do so.
> It's validation that a "sacred cow" has been cooked into tasty burgers.
Or that you’re being a jerk.
The HN guidance on commentary is clearly a large part of why HN hasn’t devolved into Slashdot, and the generally on-point and respectful discussions invite really interesting and knowledgeable people to hang around, from whom we all benefit.
I’ll admit that I’ve occasionally scratched my head over downvotes I’ve received. But while there may well be some that apply votes contrary to the guidelines, in most cases - if I honestly review what I’ve written - I’ve phrased my comment in a way that’s not conducive to productive discourse.
Votes receive no guidance and most people don't vote for the quality and accuracy of the comment, they do it based on how that comment fits with their personal opinion. I've seen civilized and purely objective comments being seriously downvoted, especially on polarizing topics.
Many go beyond just this and after you have one unpopular comment you realize all of your comments that day just received the same exact number of downvotes at the same approximate time.
So I wouldn't really call it 50/50 between "sacred cow turned burger" and "being a jerk" downvotes but it sure is too close to trust the voting system blindly. I will read even the greyed out comments.
[ I admit, this is heading offtopic, but still a useful discussion ]
most people [vote] based on how that comment fits with their personal opinion
Isn't that what the voting system is for then? When I see someone has already written what I was going to say, I upvote them instead of writing a "me too" comment. My other upvotes are reserved for posts that spark my curiosity, or grey comments where I think the downvotes were undeserved.
I almost never upvote comments I disagree with, unless (as above) they bring something new to the table. Downvotes I try to reserve for obnoxious or trollish comments only, but I admit there may be occasions where some man's troll is another man's freedom fighter.
I will typically upvote comments that elaborate, translate (DSL>English), or opine with corroborating evidence. The last I will try and do regardless of direction. I especially will upvote where one person offers a well written comment and another offers a well written rebuttal. I will upvote both as I want to promote what I consider a “healthy” discussion. I will sometimes downvote based on (poor) form irrespective of content. That’s because there’s always a way of getting your point across with being a jerk. Given that one can make a point without being a jerk, the choice to be a jerk is therefore a gratuitous attack in the person, and whether you’ve also attacked the substance becomes almost irrelevant at that point. My 2c.
I read using the Android app, "Materialistic" (on f-droid), which doesn't display vote counts. I think it's great -- I pay much more attention to the contents of comments and judge them on merit rather than voted. You can do a similar thing on desktop with ublock origin's cosmetic filtering (right click > block element).
> The HN guidance on commentary is clearly a large part of why HN hasn’t devolved into Slashdot
Well, there was kuro5hin! I think Slashdot didn't devolve, but perhaps fell off a cliff when it was sold; a strong correlation with Sourceforge. Acquisitions of communities are hard.
Sometimes that's the case. However, I've seen ample legitimate discussion following the guidelines & conducive to further discussion, being downvoted because the downvoter obviously disagrees with the post. It tends to occur on "controversial issues" when not enough "weasel words" & "neutrality modifiers" are being used.
After a while, one realizes the futility of chasing "karma". That being clear & forceful, according to one's ethics, in expression is far more rewarding.
You check for replies and you notice that all of your most recent comments have had a down vote in a suspiciously small amount of time, even if the comment was days ago in a tiny thread no one is reading.
It's not the likes people like, it's the pseudo social acceptance. Being downvoted would be like social rejection, a hit to your reputation.
As much as I would love to downvote some Facebook posts, I think they did well at allowing only positive reinforcement. If you don't care, you just don't interact. If someone managed to find a solution to destructive comments everywhere, that would be awesome.
It’s always worth it, but at this rate I’m never gonna get to that vaunted 500 HN karma so I can express my disagreement on comments too (I.e. downvoting)
See, you think 500 karma is something to aim for but then you get it and you can't downvote half the comments you want to because that person has 2000 karma.
I second this and will add that often, our value in these discussions come from our dissenting opinions as result of our experience. Rather than shying from, we should be embracing and encouraging our diversity of opinions as a community. Or as a wise sage once said to me... “fuck your eggshells” which for me has been a very handy approach... balanced with compassion and patience of course.
It baffles me that Americans call their country "the land of the free", but apparently they're not even allowed to plant vegetables in their yard. They're allowed to shoot someone on their own land apparently (only in certain situations I'm sure, but still), but they're not allowed to plant harmless and useful vegetables, because someone thinks it's "unsightly".
The “home of the brave” part is also funny since US voters are down to forego civil liberties at the slightest hint of risk, and most everyone is engaging in cover your ass behavior if they have any sort of assets or income potential.
Maybe it's the deep conviction that they are operating as part of a fair system (thanks to it having hijacked the name "Democracy") that legitimizes American regulators in their overreach ?
The UK seems just as obsessed about property as the US, but there's very little restriction on gardens, none on line drying, lawn mowing or tidiness that I know, just mainly planning restrictions for the house itself, alterations and new build. We have plenty of other stupidities in our systems though. :)
The infamous 25' shark through the roof[1] got to stay, despite the local council trying to get rid of it for years. Shark is still there 30 odd years later. The government's final appeal judgement is, surprisingly, perfect and beautiful.
No, the HOA problem in the US is a legacy of racism. Originally the contracts specified which races you were allowed to sell or let to. That was banned in the civil rights reform, so people went to all sorts of ridiculous proxies for the "wrong sort of person". HOAs are bullies because a noisy minority of people want to be able to get rid of neighbors.
Just a few months ago I read an article about zoning laws in Japan. They have them, but as I recall from the article, they're quite a bit less restrictive than such laws tend to be in the US.
Primary housing let’s everyday people use 5% down, plus the mortgage interest tax deduction, plus the desire to spend extra to be in a good school district (meaning surrounded by others earning as much or more), means people concentrate their wealth in their house.
In general, the front yard / side yard / back yard distinctions are entirely about the "character" of a neighborhood and making it look nice.
Most places that have regulations -- at the town or HOA level -- discourage you from doing anything in the front yard besides landscaping. Eg, a shed in a front yard will be forbidden.
Usually the restrictions will be more safety based for back and to some extent side yards. It's sort of a "do whatever you want but don't make us look at it" mindset.
It will cause the most problems if you build the house far back on the lot (since then you end up with a lot of unusable front yard and a tiny back yard), if your back yard is unusably shaded, if your trying to maximize the use of your small lot to the limits, or if you don't pay attention to the rules and either buy a house without knowing them or do a lot of work that has to be undone.
So maybe there was an opossum once, and now you have to forbid vegetables for life ?
Owning a house in the suburbs entails getting apossums once or twice a year: it's nature !
If it attracts an actual plague of opossums, I can understand measures to get rid of them, but the occasional opossum shouldn't be a problem if they occur naturally in the area.
I mean. They know what they were getting into presumably.
I live in a 24 flat complex, we have meetings at least every year, there's a law governing these HOA things. And if the community decides they want to paint the walls black, then the walls will be black. (Because a simple majority is enough for that.) And so on.
I know nothing about this particular case, and usually courts are pretty reasonable about these, so I guess this was a rather egregious edge case of community self-governance, but on the other hand it's not a bad thing that people can form communities and have some ground rules (bylaws). Sects are bad, monopolies are bad too, and there is a nice little Goldilocks zone, a balanced mix of rules that empower every individual at the same time, and so on. (Hence circumcising without consent is bad.) These are always trade offs, but when it comes to housing, usually people don't want to live in communities that they don't fit into anyway. (Of course again, bigotry is bad, racial/ideological/financial segregation is bad.)
germany has plenty of absurd zoning laws too. for example in many places the architecture of your house has to match the neighborhoods style. another example i just recently read right here on HN is that split aircon units are not allowed in many places because they make the walls look ugly. that fits right up there with blocking unsightly vegetables.
I can’t decide if I should be thankful for lawyers fighting to end the policy or pissed at them for establishing it in the first place. I’m leaning towards the latter.
They have always had the right (to use their property the way they see fit, as long as it didn't damage other people's property), but local government was violating their exercise of that right.
Remember that courts don't give rights, they only protect them.
Also, when I was a kid in southern California, my parents used to dry laundry on a clothes line, outside. We were lucky to have a big backyard so you would imagine not many neighbors would complain.
We got a letter from the neighborhood saying the laundry was unsightly.
This is strange to me to this day. First, air dryed laundry smells and feels amazing. Second, you're saving a ton of energy by not using an electric or gas dryer.
But the sight of some towels and bed sheets on a clothes line makes people really upset....