kingludd

They had feed mills in carting distance, and they had hundreds of acres to grow their own food. With more people on earth, we usually have dozens of acres, at best, and one feed mill in the county, at best.

I definitely should have been more specific. I wouldn't think of 4km from groceries as being rural at all-- like you said, I think that car problem can be solved with normal urban solutions.

Renting a car to haul is just... not even close to viable. That would approximately double my annual expenses. Besides, I can't rent a car with no credit history and no way to get to the city to rent a car.

Hauling really does seem to be the sticking point. If you have to haul you're kind of stuck with a car.

Yeah, I was surprised how many responses didn't consider hauling at all. I really don't need to commute anywhere at all. I'm happy just staying home. But I do have to haul hay bales, feed sacks, and 50lb sacks of groceries.

That could work. I've been thinking for awhile that if everyone around here were on some kind of uberlike carpooling app, we could combine trips into town.

The park and ride is a cool idea, and that might be an option. About 5 miles from my place there's a sort of gravel lot that people sometimes park in when carpooling into town. Not sure about hauling loads of feed sacks, though. It's too much for a bike.

I honestly really have a problem with this mentality. I would like to try to find common ground with you around the things we both think are problems, but I don't know if that's possible.

See, to me, it's just the opposite. It's all the cities where peopke are mashed in together like a factory chicken farm-- that's where the problem comes from. If we could just have fewer people living further apart I think a lot of the problems with society would more or less solve themselves.

I'm not here to pick a fight, and I am listening to you. But how can you think that more bigger cities is an improvement? I really don't understand.

What's the longest amount of time that you personally would be willing to travel to buy groceries?

I really wasn't thinking personal transport. People in my area don't really need that except maybe once or twice a season. What we here really need is to pick up livestock feed, and we get groceries maybe 4 times a year.

We need to be able to haul large quantities (like, by the half ton at least).

This is a good point. I should have been more specific; I wasn't thinking of towns and villages as being rural, but most people do. Really the alternatives need to be organized by use-case rather than geographic location.

I use a little truck as the all-purpose vehicle that can haul whatever and it works, but it sure ould be nice not to need it.

Eagle flag moonshine gun flag eagle

I mean, it's legal under faa part 103...

There has definitely been a renaissance of old school forums since social media started to decline. One advantage to them ia that to bother registering and tracking a separate website for one topic, you'd have to be pretty interested in that topic. So the tiny barrier to entry seems like it promotes deeper discussion and higher quality responses.

Simultaneously, some really cool new forum software has become available with useful and elegant features that the old forums didn't have, but without the attention traps and monetization of the corporate web.

If you have a hobby, look for a forum; you might be surprised at how may have sprung up.