Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Damn You, Marko!

I was going to give the gun thing a rest for a few days. My next (metaphorical) shot was going to be about real estate; riffing about couples with one kid who buy 12,000 sq.ft. homes in places like Westchester (NY) and Fairfield (CT) counties. Or the 22 year-old spawn of a British tycoon who bought a 123-room mansion in Los Angeles for $85 million.

Because, seriously, who has a need for that? Who needs a car elevator in a private home?

Why does a single person need more than 900 square feet of living space? Two people, 1,700 sq.ft., and an additional 400 sq.ft. for each additional person. Why does any single-family home need more than a quarter-acre in land? After all, there is no Constitutionally mandated right to live in a McMansion. Think of the benefits of cutting down on exurban sprawl, saving open space, making residential areas more amenable to service by mass transit, so on and so forth.

At least that's what I was going to expound upon. Until Marko beat me to the punch. With a much better post, I might add, which you should go read.

5 comments:

  1. The car analogy was interesting... although the big difference between cars that kill 40k people a year and guns that kill 30k people a year is that our economy wouldn't collapse if we got rid of guns. (The Congress IS tasked with seeing to the common welfare, after all.)

    But if you take the arguments against gun control the other way: Why are there legal penalties of any sort about hard drugs? Cocaine, heroin, bath salts, botulinum toxin...

    Responsible ownership doesn't hurt anyone. Some people use the drugs, against all common sense, but that's not the fault of the drug dealers or drug manufacturers, right?

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  2. That is all fine and dandy in a 'city area', but I live in the deep dark end of the road country, for a reason. I am one anti social sob. I Need as much acreage as possible to keep me from getting pissed off at neighbors. I like to be able to shoot off my front porch if I want, I own big dogs that need to have room to run.
    I currently own less than 2 acres but I have owned 60.
    I am the reason people own acres of land.
    w3ski

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  3. Our family home is just over 1700 sq feet and I reared three children in that space. Now, with a returning disabled vet son and his bride to be with us, we made a 500 sq foot exterior workshop into living space to add to that; while they both finish college we need a bit more room for them and their pets. We have just a bit under a half acre and yes, we do need that. We garden and raise geese or ducks for eggs in the household. A quarter acre, by the time you put a single story ranch style house on it, is pretty small and doesn't offer much space for play for kids.

    But yeah, 123 rooms and a car elevator? Some asshat watched "The Omega Man" one too many times.

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  4. Comrade Misfit asks: "Why does a single person need more than 900 square feet of living space? Two people, 1,700 sq.ft., and an additional 400 sq.ft. for each additional person."

    The answer is simple: so the person who has all the excess footage can boast to you (or just to himself) "Nya nya, mine is bigger than yours." Same goes for how much money the boaster has in the bank, or what he paid for his rag-roofed, 700 horsepower, gull-winged Testosteroni.

    That single and singular desire to have more than everybody else is what powers the whole accursed argument over taxes, tax brackets, inheritance taxes and government regulation of private enterprise robber barons.

    The only solution is to make the greedy s.o.b.'s walk around naked from the waist down, so we can all see, at any time, if theirs is really bigger, or not.

    Very, very (very) crankily yours,
    The New York Crank

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  5. Set device sarcasm=on, type=caustic

    Oddly the 30K gun death thing is wildly uninformative as to the source of the lie. First we take out suicides as they are already illegal and they could have used a car. Then we need to take out the criminal shooting criminals
    and civilians. Of course we need to take out all the cop shootings. But the result would be mostly those people that obey laws and cause gun deaths. We get a small number but hey small and accurate number doesn't work for the big lie.

    I'm with the car thing myself.

    Cars kill, oh right, cars with negligent drivers kill. We keep forgetting that subtle difference thing. Just think if we could keep the drunks and the phone/texters off the road how many deaths would be prevented? Maybe we should regulate them just like guns.

    What car ownership would look like if the laws were written like MA gun
    laws. After all if you need to travel you can walk, ride a bike, of horse.
    http://mozambique-drill.blogspot.com/2010/09/rights-right.html

    Oh, quarter acre is enough if you put a more vertical dwelling on it. Think
    floors and stairs. Those sprawling ranch homes are a waste of surface space. It sucks having bad legs but just thing going up and down all those stairs and cleaning all those small rooms will be good for you. But hey with a vertical home the space for crops (I meant more homes) is possible.

    Set device sarcasm=off


    Eck!

    ReplyDelete

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