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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

Well, of course people aren't going to tell you they'd vote for Politician B, because that makes them look like jerks. But subconsciously, a lot of people do agree with Politician B. If you have a job in Palo Alto, do you genuinely want "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" to be able to move in next door? Have you seriously considered what sort of problems that would have on you and your fellow workers who want to get to sleep at a reasonable hour so you can be productive at work, when Cletus wants to shoot off fireworks all night?

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>Have you seriously considered what sort of problems that would have on you and your fellow workers who want to get to sleep at a reasonable hour so you can be productive at work, when Cletus wants to shoot off fireworks all night?

i cant tell if this is satire or if you actually agree with it

The fact that he chooses the hypothetical bad neighbor Cletus makes me think he's satirizing the people who consider "devoid of any visible or audible evidence of people lower class than me" a prerequisite of a "good " neighborhood. See also: Poe's Law.

That said, his point is totally valid. When you say "affordable" most upper middle class people hear "poor people".

> Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel

Just wanted to point out that Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is a character from The Simpsons who satirizes the type of person that people generally refer to as "hillbilly".

That was the first person I thought of when he said Cletus. I didn't know that was his full name. TIL

Background: I grew up and spent my young adulthood in poverty. I used a hypothetical character from The Simpsons, but I have in mind some very much non-hypothetical characters, including some who threatened my family after I complained about their playing loud music with a subwoofer in the wee hours of the morning. Nowadays, I've clawed my way out of poverty, and I pay a (very large) premium to have a house where I don't have to worry about that kind of stuff any more. I'm sympathetic to the problem of housing affordability (duh: I've been on the other side), but before you address that, you have to come up with a reasonable alternative solution to make sure the people who like partying all night go in one place and the people who like sleeping all night go in another place. Nothing to do with race or class, and it's super unfortunate that in our capitalist society, class is the only proxy for accomplishing that cultural distribution.

There was backlash about buildings in New York having two different entrances, one for the posh people in the penthouses and one for the other schmoes. I thought it was rather a good idea, everybody gets to live downtown but don't have to run into each other. Sometimes liberals aren't realistic about how people actually live life. https://nypost.com/2013/08/18/upper-west-side-condo-has-sepa...

You think this is satire until you live in a neighborhood where people do shoot off fireworks all night.

Well when are they supposed to shoot them off? They don't look nearly as impressive in the daytime. ;)

People always say "oh well if your neighbor did X you'd want zoning too". I've lived in those kinds of places and I mind the end-game of escalating lower class trashiness a lot less than I mind the endgame of upper middle class conformity. Bring on the fireworks, the ATVs, the loud music in languages I don't even speak and the drunken arguments.

I currently live in such a neighborhood that checks all those boxes. Honestly it doesn't bother me that much. An interior bedroom and solid brick exterior walls mean I don't hear much from outside while I'm asleep.

I agree zoning is the wrong way to address this. What's needed is a responsive police force that will address noise complaints. Unfortunately police in areas where these things tend to be a problem have more important things to attend to most of the time.

My dog almost pulled out of his harness and took off a few weeks ago because of some random evening fireworks. It's not a harmless thing.

someone's dog pulled out of their harness and attacked me because it didnt like the sound of my skateboard

it seems like people should be buying better harnesses

If you know of any, let me know. The problem is that any harness you buy will get more loose as it is warn, and panicked dogs can get out of a harness the same way you can get out of a t-shirt: line your head and arms up along the same axis and back up. A harness is only really effective if the dog is moving forward and away from you, not if they are backing away from you in a desperate panic.

Sounds like your dog is the problem here.

My dog is a 1 year old animal. Of course he is a problem. But he isn't the one exploding shit to amuse himself.

A few weeks ago was the fourth of July, maybe it wasn't that random.

On the 4th, it wasn't random. The days following? I can't predict when fireworks are going to go off. (That's irrelevant anyway, as the dog needs to go out regardless of the date.)

nah, i choose to live in a city with 3 million people. sometimes there's noise. sometimes the noise is inconvenient to me personally.

that's life

Rich people throw loud parties too.

I don't know, but I will say that it's easy to indignant about these things when they don't happen to you.

When I grew up, we lived in an unincorporated area with minimal noise and other ordinances. A new neighbor moves in next store and basically spends 20-40 hours a week shooting at a bell and fixed targets from 7AM-?. They would use everything from .22s ("ding, ding, ..., ding") to various pistols, AK-47/SKS rifles, to hunting rifles daily. After church on Sunday most summers consisted of watermelon demolition via shotgun. My mom worked nights, and it made her life miserable.

Fast forward to my recent past. I live in a city, in a mixed neighborhood of 1-4 family houses. Some asshole decides to illegally convert his 2-family flat into a 10 unit SRO. So now we're stuck with people who are willing to live in that kind of situation (ie. mostly drug addicts and drunks) hanging around yucking it up all night. We were only able to shut it down when the slumlord guy decided to illegally convert the front porches into two more units, and when cited by the code officer chose to assault him.

I get the pushback to zoning, but it exists because of substantial minority of the population are assholes. My dad ran subsidized housing programs for years and built personal relationships with many of the stakeholders that I got to be a small part of -- the narrative on HN is that poor people are fighting zoning, the reality is that poor people are often the biggest advocates for it, but are denied due process. Nobody wants to live around slumlord apartments, or have industrial activity in their backyard -- but the most vulnerable people have the worst ability to secure representation and demand attention.

I can sleep at Burning Man with ear splitting sound camps blaring mere feet from my tent. It's called earplugs, they work well and they're very cheap. I've used them to equal success at home on the Fourth of July, too. It simply isn't a big deal. Let Cletus light firecrackers and work on his car in his own drive way. Who the hell are you to tell him otherwise? Go live in an HOA if you want to tell your neighbors how they can and can't behave on their own property.

>Go live in an HOA if you want to tell your neighbors how they can and can't behave on their own property.

Err, right, that's pretty much what I said in my post. Please don't run to legislators and banning HOAs.

There are those of us for whom 32db NRR earplugs are a necessity when sleeping in a normal house in a normal neighborhood, where we don't have such extremes of noise coming from the outside world.

We would be completely unable to survive in the world that you so casually dismiss.

I would encourage you to be very careful in choosing the kind of world that would be turned into your own personal hell.

Just because something works for you, it doesn't mean it works for everyone else, or that everyone else would even find it tolerable.

I have a lot of difficulty falling asleep (exacerbated by even the most comfortable of earplugs), and a decent amount of difficulty staying asleep once I do. It is absolutely not unreasonable to expect that people adhere to low noise levels at night. If you want to stay in a place where people are exploding things outside your house, knock yourself out. You are certainly in the minority.

It is unreasonable. People comply with the law which set these noise levels, and you'll find is your not ganna be happy

Wait 'til they wake up your baby and toddler at OMG o'clock. At this point you value how considerate your neighbours are, because confrontation or police calls are inevitable if you don't have a good relationship with them.

Or your could tell your partner to stick earplugs in the baby's ears and see what happens...

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