Pretty much the exact blueprint in Omaha, Nebraska.
We moved there in 1990 and my dad worked downtown but we lived in the suburbs in West O on 132nd because city centers were not a place to live.
In the early 2000s, my parents started to notice more minorities in our area so they got a new place further west on 152nd. Same thing about a decade later and now they live on 184th.
Omaha is a lot more multicultural and I’ve noticed more foreign restaurant options which is nice, but you wouldn’t know it from the white bubble my parents live in. They just keep stretching the city more and more and traffic is a nightmare.
After living in Mexico where I can walk everywhere and see neighbourhoods with interesting architecture and jam packed with restaurants and places to go, it’s brutal being in Omaha back to visit and just being stuck in a car on the roads all day.
As the icing on this shit cake, Omaha used to have a nice little neighbourhood with beautiful historic brick buildings that they bulldozed so Con Agra would move in, but they wanted a massive, boring campus to seal the deal. Of course the morons in charge acquiesced. Fast forward 20 years, and Con Agra moved to Chicago anyway, so now there’s nothing in a crucial, central part of Omaha.
There are pockets of interesting neighbourhoods but they are so disjointed, especially thanks to the highways and freeways, and of course public transportation is an afterthought.
It’s not just the racism (although an awful lot of it is). Suburbs have existed as long as cities have existed, and having a home with a bit of land some distance from the urban center is something people of means have always aspired to. As horrible as the suburbs are, they do offer respite from the noise and bustle of cities. It’s also worth noting that N American cities of the early-mid 20th century were a whole lot grimmer than they are now.
This is true, but in my personal opinion the suburbs are just the worst of both worlds. My house is in a rural community where the extra space and peace and quiet and access to nature and recreation are very real. The suburban areas between my house and the city are very dense but lack amenities. Its just block after block if tightly packed houses with no retail, no sidewalk, no vibrancy at all, and no nature either. These long tracts of housing are interspersed with some big box stores and chain restaurants. I think there are very few tangible benefits.
This was published back in February, but I guess I missed it then. It’s a very (very) long read, but remarkably well written and enjoyable for non-fiction. It’s apocalypse porn.
The West has been beset by historic drought and heat waves this year exacerbated by climate change, but among the small towns that have been threatened by the Bootleg Fire — Sprague River, Beatty, Bly — there is little talk of global warming. Instead, residents vent about the federal government’s water policies and forest management. They blame liberal environmentalists for hobbling the logging industry and Mexican marijuana farmers for sucking up the area’s water.
“Now the top end of the Forest Service are a bunch of flower children,” said Jim Rahi, 71, who was filling up his 3,600-gallon water tanker to deliver to firefighters in the town of Lakeview, east of the spreading fire. “That’s what the real problem is. It’s not that much hotter. It’s environmentally caused mismanagement.”
“Global warming?” Lawrence said as he sat drinking coffee with three friends on Wednesday morning around a table at the back of the Sycan Store in Bly.
“Yeah, right,” one of the others muttered.
“Poor suckers now can’t charge their electric cars,” Lawrence said.
Last month was the hottest June on record in Northern Ontario. July has been pretty much the same. Super hot with little rain.
There is some rain in the forecast for tomorrow but it’s supposed to be thunderstorms. Better be lots of rain cause lightning is going to set everything on fire.
Here’s a map of forest fires in the region and danger ratings.
It’s a very good reply. Canada has a huge tree planting program. The goal is 2 billion trees by 2050. I’ve heard about this from van life/nomad videos as a good way for poor/young people to make decent seasonal money. There’s potential for a lot more. It’s easy. Not that expensive. Has other benefits. Doesn’t create a goofy company that would create billions of dollars of equity in stock regardless of whether it worked or not, so I’m thinking Elon won’t be giving tree planters that $100M.
I picked strawberries when I was a kid, but not many times. They paid by the container. The pickers were all either young teenage Americans or Vietnamese refugees (this was not long after “the boat people” came and it was in Oregon). Many of them were adults, but still, they picked like 5x as much as I could.
The video I watched made is seem fun though. Like, I’m probably too old to enjoy it, but the young people living in a remote camp working hard all day seemed to have fun.
Straw baling bales of hay as a teenager. Went out of town for a week working 13 hour days. On the way back the hay fell off the truck and we lost most of it.
We were paid per bale. Ended up getting paid about 90c an hour.
