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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

Outlaw as the author calls them “groomed lawns”. They’re a waste of time, energy and resources that could all be going towards something productive.

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So are video games, alcohol, candy, pogo sticks, and about a million other things. I get that climate doomers are hyper fixated on lawns ruining the planet and leading us all into the apocalypse but you should just be honest about believing that rather than using lazy and trite arguments.

Those other things have a mainly personal cost, lawns have large negative externalities. Especially the people who regularly have their lawn sprayed with pesticide/herbicide. Never fun getting caught in a downwind cloud of that stuff on a walk through the neighborhood.

Those things all have massive external costs. How much energy goes towards powering computers and other devices playing games? How much time, effort and money goes towards developing them? How much power is used to power the offices where the games are produced?

All that candy needs to be manufactured and transported, and then the waste of the packaging handled, all for essentially zero nutritional benefit compared to other food options.

We should perhaps ban everything that isn't strictly essential for life.

Not to mention it's the most common crop humans grow and we don't even eat it. They're basically green deserts with the amount of pesticides it takes to maintain them and they're an incredible waste of water

Have you ever seen a tree lined residential neighborhood where no one cleans up the leaves at all?

It's like a dystopian wasteland with piles of leaves collecting on the sides of homes and in streets 5 feet high. Leaf piles don't just disappear if left alone - they turn into large piles of muddy mess in the streets and around the edges of homes and will be there next year - and build up year-over-year.

It leads to mold issues, rodent issues, car accidents, and an absolute garbage looking neighborhood. It doesn't have to be perfect - but the opposite extreme never makes sense.

Imagine the hubris it takes to think you have the right to choose what people can and "should" spend their time on. I'm guessing you have yet to grasp the concept of individual freedom.

Quite the contrary my dude. What I’m against here is the mandate that you keep yards looking “nice” to “not lower property values”.

In your original comment, you seem to advocate for banning groomed lawns, which is different than lifting a mandate in grooming lawns. Perhaps the mandate for groomed lawns could be removed without banning them? I wonder how effective that would be, knowing how ingrained in many cultures a "well-kept" yard is.

True. My words were uncareful and flippant response to outlawing one thing with the proposal to outlaw another.

My end goal and what were said are close but not directly in line. I don’t really care if a few crazies manicure their lawn, but it shouldn’t be a forced standard. Everyone doing it is terrible for the environment.

Any communities where you have a critical mass of people with spare fucks to give about their neighbors' power equipment is already rich enough that most people are going to have landscaping far in excess of the bare minimum because they can afford it and they like it or feel obligated by social norms to do it, basically the same bunch of reasons you find 2-child households owning 4Runners and people who barely cook owning a bunch of fancy cookware.

Lifting a ban won't do squat because it only affects a tiny minority. The only reason the laws and HOA rules even exist in the first place is because most people in the effected jurisdictions already kept a lawn and so nobody cared to raise any opposition when the jackbooted types wanted to force the few nonconformists to conform.

Cultures? Species.

Birds, small mammals, and octopuses all groom the area around their nest — getting humans to stop seems unlikely.

Talking about hubris and lawns you need to address how in many many places in the US it is a illegal to have untidy lawns.

Imagine the hubris it takes to say what another person should think?

Maybe they already know the concept of individual freedom allows them to think and say what they believe?

People have been doing this forever. It is nothing new. Don't act like it is.

outlawing them would be silly but HOAs and city ordinances should not be allowed to force you to have a lawn

It's immoral to impose your opinions on what is and is not productive on what other people do with their land and money, even if those opinions are correct.

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