France has passed a law protecting the sounds and smells of the countryside

Maybe that's the case where you live. I've seen other places where everybody was at war with everybody else. Did you just say "idealized view of the countryside"?

Not so extreme, but I grew up bordering the country and it was very annoying sometimes. Dogs barking all night long, very difficult to filter that. Lots of flies, wasps and other bugs. And then little village big hell. Give me big city any time.

Back when I was living in the South, I remember meeting a few people irritated by the cicadas who were allegedly « too loud ». Imagine that.

>I remember when a storm hit the region, everyone got out, cleared the trees on the road and repaired each other houses.

Was that the 99 storm ? Back then I was in the North-East, where it was the strongest. I saw an old guy walking his dog outside and almost getting beheaded by a rogue steel sheet. I also vividly remember people daisy-chaining 100m extension chords across the village to bring electricity to the side that lost it. A lot of people were panicking because they had four freezers full of meat hidden in the basement, and a lot of them were quite poor and couldn't afford to lose those.

One day I realized that I was no longer waking up at 6AM. Either none of the 6AM flights were running anymore or I just no longer heard the noise.

And of course, the flights were still running.

To be fair, I grew up into one of the most rural part of France as did my parents and my grand parents before them and I have a vivid memory of my father killing the neighbor rooster while he was crowning at three in the morning. Roosters are dumb animals. Keeping them in settled area is asking for troubles.

I have a neighbour in my village (and I mean, really 'in') who has several cocks, and he also has peacocks! The first ones start around 2 AM, the other ones basically never stop. I leave 300 yards away and I hear everything through the double window, every night. Oh, as I said peacocks, you probably thought "that neighbour must have a large property, a real park". Yeah, no, he has a standard detached house with its small piece of land, and the hens, the cocks, the peacocks spend their time on neighbours properties: a few remaining meadows (nobody really minds) and, what is more trouble, the gardens (they ate all my cabbages one year in a garden I have even farther from their place).

Also, sometimes people complain against traditional things, but they often complain about 'industrial' size farms. Farming has changed a lot in France in 30 years (even though it still operates at much smaller scale than in countries like the USA, the sizes and modes of exploitation have dramatically changed). So people often complain about a massive pig farm, a massive poultry farm with several thousands chickens, and so on.

In my village (coming back a bit earlier in time), people used to have 1 to 4 cows in a tiny stable, and would take them to the meadows. Now the few remaining so-called agricultors have a hundred cows in a hangar (often all year long). Actually they don't have a hundred cows: they have 99 cows, because starting with the 100th, the extra cows are no more subsidised...

Went on holiday to rustic Italy. Woke up by the freaking birds before 6, so, so loud! Louder than I've ever heard birds before, thousands of insolent cheep chirp squawk. It was amazing! I was/am a city dweller and was expecting Boccherini.

Well, they are less noisy than they used to be (think of the change of noise emissions for cars, though added dampening body), but the usage is now constant.

> I realize that a few acres an hour from the city isn't quite enough for solitude, you're mostly in a working food factory (fair enough I suppose); if you want real quiet it seems you might need 50-100+ acres many hours away.

If you have meadows around, that's easier: the tractors only pays quick visits in the course of 3 days, once or twice a year, to cut/ted/make bunches of hay. Cutting grass is faster than ploughing a field, it requires less power, and less operations are needed along the year. And it smells good :) Then you have the cattle, but cattle in a meadow is not a nuisance generally.

> if you want real quiet it seems you might need 50-100+ acres many hours away.

But then you are the one who must maintain all those acres :-)

I think it is a very beautiful lifestyle, to be able to live away from the industrialization and closer to the nature.

Honestly, aside from a few obvious things, "due diligence" is often pretty much impossible.

If you move into an apartment in the winter, there's zero way of knowing that teens like to blare window-shakingly loud music in the park across the street every other day in the summer.

Or that the seemingly innocuous speed bump in front of your building will cause the 10's of garbage trucks that race by at maximum speed at 2 am each night to rattle and bump with such a force that each one wakes you up.

Or that a month after you move in, you get a new neighbor next door who blares bass-thumping music all day long while you're trying to work.

Or that the building next door starts to undergo gut renovation and welcome to jackhammering all day long.

Except for super-obvious stuff like is this a street with noisy bars/clubs, or yeah an active train yard -- which isn't even "due diligence" it's just keeping your eyes open -- there really isn't much you can do ahead of time. You just have to accept it'll always be a gamble.

I would assume there are certain maximum sound volume regulations in France as they exist in many places.

“tradition” is all too commonly used as an argument to break the law. I do not believe it should play a factor at all whether something happened in the past, merely whether it violate the law.

If France have nationwide rules about sound levels and the rooster exceeded them, then that is all the diligence a man needs to have done. One may certainly expect that the government upholds the law uniformly throughout one's country.

All of our industrial equipment should be designed with this in mind.

Back up beepers are considerably louder than they need to be.

Weirdly, the police sirens in Germany towns like Frankfurt are incessant - it's a very piercing sound, they use them often, all day long, and the sound bounces through the walls of the town which is 5 stories everywhere and narrow streets. In a North American city you rarely actually hear sirens - maybe for firetrucks.

The low hum of gasonline engines really adds up, the electrics are so much nicer that way but I fear accidents.

Frankly houses for sale & rent should come with a sound recording of the last two weeks of use

Dilligence is hard as heck; who knows if there's som neighbor that habitually does carpentry at 2AM or whose dog goes apeshit a couple times a week or a delivery service va blasting it's noisemaker at 5AM.

I agree about doing due diligence but a lot is hard to account for. We are so much at the mercy of the outside world. Maybe the neighbors AC sucks & reverbs something wicked. How would a winter home buyer find that out? Or maybe it's the heater that's a problem.

And it just doesn't feel like we're in a world where people tend to be open to working together to improve things.

https://jalopnik.com/the-absurd-community-fight-that-could-c...

Short version: People move in next to an established race track and learn they don't like the sound of race tracks. You'll be shocked at what happens next!

Oh that’s going to go over well. Some people in my neighborhood tried suing and now we have every train blowing their horns through this entire section of the city. A dozen times a day and many of those at night.

It’s hard for me to not laugh at my neighbors every time it happens.

Do your due diligence when developing industrial properties, folks.

Because I was always wondering how that would go

If you want to see the non-theme park France feel free to ask, I can give you the address of my favourite kebab in a 70's style banlieue dortoir, you'll love it.