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Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

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Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#391

Post by willcipriano »

Teever wrote: post #384
moduspol wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours? If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.

Maybe you don't need to track down and collect every single leaf? Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance. There's beauty in chaos.

Lots of HOA's will be right up your ass if you don't take care of the leaves on the lawn. That's one of the reasons I won't buy anywhere that has one, but a leaf free lawn requirement with a leafblower ban seems punitive.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#392

Post by dimitrios1 »

Teever wrote: post #384
moduspol wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's a myth that groundskeeping is more costly without them A... myth? Have you ever used a rake, and a leaf blower? How about for many hours? If there's no change in costs when switching between the two, it's getting hidden or absorbed somewhere. It takes substantially less time and effort to use a leaf blower than a rake for the vast majority of tasks that call for either.

Maybe you don't need to track down and collect every single leaf? Like it's okay if things have a slighty not perfectectly tended to appearance. There's beauty in chaos.

Perhaps you have never experienced mold issues due to excessive fallen foliage then? Or a copperhead nesting in a pile and biting one of your children? These things happen frequently. Or perhaps your neighborhood has a nice tree canopy, but the excess foliage causes a safety concern to motorists and cyclists alike. There are good reasons to clear excessive leaves that don't involve only looks.

In fact most of the times the city will provide a truck a few times a month that will vacuum the leaves from the road, provided you push them all to the curb.

Not every suburb is this desolate, cookie-cutter hellscape like you see in places like Texas. Many of the historic neighborhoods, especially in the northeast, have real reasons to manage foliage.

And if you think leaf blowers are bad, just remember, people just used to collect them into huge piles and just burn them (still do in very rural areas), or worse yet, just toss their bags of leaves into the trash can. Leaves and landfills are a bad combo. With yard waste collection, towns will compost them and turn them into compost or rich soil: https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2017-12-18/you-asked-we-answere....

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#393

Post by seattle_spring »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #315
seattle_spring wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are so unbelievably disrespectful with noise in the US. Peaceful hike? Here's Katy Perry crackling out of my iPhone at full blast! Luxury apartment at $4k a month? No insulation between units, and the guy above you comes home at 2am and never takes his shoes off. Small country street? Here comes Chad with his straight-piped civic with the muffler removed!

We call them "DJs without headphones" in Poland. They're [1] obnoxious in public transport. Now, I often considered speaking up, but figured out that if they're such a retard to do this, they probably won't listen and it could end up badly. [1] Or maybe had been, seems they're on decline. Albeit when powerful BT speakers were all the rage (like JBL Flip), they were overused in public spaces as well.

A lot of folks inexplicably defend these "DJs without headphones." I've seen some go so far as to claim being against them is an act of, yes, racism.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#395

Post by scythe »

boredumb wrote: post #360

It's hard to take noise pollution seriously when you so much as read the comments here after reading and agreeing with much of the article. Yes I believe living under an airport to be detrimental to anyone's sanity, but yet it devolves quickly into an agoraphobic hand wringing competition going from city sirens, to cars in general, to the neighbors dog barking sporadically. There are prices to pay for living in city…

People don't move to cities for "conveniences". They do so because it's necessary for their livelihood. It's also dramatically better for the environment and economy for people to live in denser settings. Life shouldn't be so miserable, and the idea that the city is an ~aesthetic~ rather than a necessity needs to die as soon as possible.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#396

Post by smallerfish »

colanderman wrote: post #382
smallerfish wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fucking loathe leaf blowers...Get a damn rake! I fucking loathe chain saws...Get a damn axe! I fucking loathe lawn mowers...Get a damn scythe! I fucking loathe loud diesel trucks...Get a damn wagon train! I fucking loathe cellphone ringers...Get a damn semaphore! Seriously, until you've done a full day's landscape maintenance yourself, you're not qualified to talk about leaf blowers. Luckily battery powered leaf…

50% of the time my neighbor's maintenance company spends with leaf blowers is chasing individual leaves across the yard and through shrubbery (not exaggerating). They'd save themselves time if they just bent down and picked up the damn leaves with their hands. Or -- novel idea -- left the last couple leaves anyway, because just as many more will accumulate 30 minutes after they leave.

Fully agree. Leaves happen. I'm just pointing out (apparently in a too sarcastic manner) that the technology is the best we have right now for clearing a lot of leaves within a ton of manual labor (raking leaves over a large area is a decent workout). Banning a technology when its overuse is due to poor landscape planning is a knee-jerk reaction that doesn't address the underlying thing that's really causing the frustration. I.e. we'd all be better off if houses had gardens designed with lower maintenance requirements in mind.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#397

Post by lkbm »

sarchertech wrote: post #67
gonehome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours. Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.

>Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. That's hugely hyperbolic. But in the city there really are constant sirens, car horns, diesel trucks, construction noises, roadway noise etc... The most comprehensive study done on this (admittedly a long time ago in 1970) shows a clear correlation between po…

So, I'll agree that suburbs are likely quieter than the city, but those particular items definitely vary by city and neighborhood.

I live in the densest neighborhood in Austin (West Campus). Sirens are rare, and car horns are moderately uncommon. Construction noise is near-constant during the day, as are big trucks related to the construction. Car noise is ever-present, but more of a problem on the larger roads. (I'm currently sitting outside a coffee shop on Lamar and the traffic noise is indeed constant and terrible.)

The two biggest sources of noise pollution in my neighborhood are 1. the construction and 2. leaf blowers. Leaf blowers might be third if you split the construction-related trucks into their own category.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#398

Post by nradov »

smallerfish wrote: post #337
iostream24 wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reductio ad absurdum Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil the temporary owner is trying to destroy by monocropping homogeneous “grass”, I’ll hope that generally makes collecting organic matter to waste wrapped in individual virgin plastic bags obsolete itself. Groundskeeping could do with a 21st century ecological update… we even had the native plan…

> Blowing leaves is perhaps not the way to manage the organic matter that needs to be embedded in that soil You're doing your own reductionism. Not all leaf blowing is to collect leaves for disposal in plastic bags (and I'm 100% for using leaves as mulch where they fall on beds, and also with not having lawns). Leaves need to be blown out of gutters, drains, and ditches - otherwise the road will start being eroded. L…

How did landscape maintenance workers perform that task before leaf blowers?

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#399

Post by astura »

mechanical_bear wrote: post #90
gonehome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find by far the biggest disruption in US suburbs is lawn equipment. Suburbs are louder than cities imo because there is always a leaf blower, lawn mower, and weedwacker going at all times during the day within 100 yards of you. Often for hours. Moving from Palo Alto to SF things got way quieter.

I fucking loathe leaf blowers. I can tell what day of the week it is by which neighbor is going for an hour or two straight with the leaf blower. Get a damn rake!

Maybe I'm really weird but I don't even bother raking leaves, I just run over them with the lawn mower and let em decompose on the ground. I do sometimes have to remove some of them from the driveway but I do that with my hands and takes like 5 minutes.

Re: Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart (2021)

#400

Post by bogomipz »

xattt wrote: post #269
agumonkey wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And electric vehicles are a lot less so. Everytime I get passed by an e-bike my brain has a little pleasure seizure from not having to suffer the expected rawkus.

I am dreading an EV dystopia where all vehicles are going slow enough to create a cacophony from the mandated low-speed sounds. It would sound like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I apologize if this is a silly question but is that currently mandated or is this something that will likely be mandated when the EVs become dominant? My impression was that they are currently relatively silent but that might just because they are always in proximity to a combustion engine idling next to them.
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