April 27, 2023
A man in unincorporated Antioch in Illinois was charged on Tuesday with shooting and killing his neighbor over a noisy leaf blower earlier this month. 59-year-old William Martys was working in his yard with a leaf blower when he was shot in the head and killed during an argument with his neighbor, 79-year-old Ettore Lacchei, who the Lake County Sheriff's Office said had "various perceived grievances" with Martys.
Ok but leaf blowers actually are fucking heinous and should all be destroyed
Electric ones are great, they're abut as loud as a hair dryer and don't have the environmentally unregulated combustion engines
The plug-in blowers have been around for decades at this point. And now with the battery-powered models for suburbanites that don't want to use an extension cord, in a sane society new gas blowers would be banned.
Idk why average home owner would buy a gas one now. I bought a battery one and it was cheaper then gas, I don't have to mess with maintaining the engine or starting it or keeping another dangerous fuel around, its very light, and the charge is both pretty fast and enough for basically constantly blowing a normal sized lot.
0 reasons for anyone except lawn companies to own gas. Even then, they sell bigger ones and have fancy multi-battery chargers now. Some companies even advertise as all electric and were charging the same down in Florida.
Yeah I'd never hire a company that would use gas blowers, the noise pollution is fucking insane. If I had a plan to stay at my last apartment any longer than I did I would have really let them have it for fucking up my Tuesday mornings every week from the company they hired.
Every Tuesday morning I have to fight the urge to [redacted] my leasing office when I’m woken up at 7:30 by leaf blowers
I feel like the percentage of people who actually do their own yard work is rapidly approaching zero, between wealthy homeowners too lazy/old/rich to do it themselves and people renting
The total cost of ownership of an ice mower/trimmer/blower/chainsaw is lower.
The biggest problem is finding a shop that’ll work on electronics of any kind at all, let alone at an affordable rate. Even the most rural county has a small engine shop somewhere.
On the one hand electric lawn equipment has fewer moving parts to fail and require maintenance, on the other the things that fail are massive: motor, battery, control board. When one of those drops out it’s unlikely you’ll find a replacement at all, let alone for a price lower than buying an entire replacement unit.
Of course the type of engineering and economics that lead to this situation has been in effect for low end ice equipment for the last ten years or so as well.
E: I just had someone bring in a nonfunctional electric trimmer that needs a complete tear down and cleaning because it got left out in the rain. Electric stuff has a completely different storage requirement than ice. Leave the gas pushmower out in the lawn over the winter (gotta keep those property values down)? Just drain the tank, replace the 50 cents worth of tubing that rotted, fill it back up and get going! At worst you gotta clean the carburetor or replace it if it’s a new one with a plastic carb. Still ~$20 in annual maintenance.
Leave an electric mower or trimmer out in the weather for a week and its gonna need significant work.
I know people “should” put their shit in a shed or inside, but plenty of people grew up with the ice maintenance ideas firmly established and knowing how to barely take care of their equipment can’t be underestimated.
The fucking engine care! I still have 2 tools that are gas powered, a snow blower (way too much snow here for an electric) and a generator (fucking power grid is dogshit).
There's always something wrong with the fucking things, they can get hard to start, you gotta prep them for storage, it's just such a goddamn hassle.
I switched all my lawn equipment over to electric over the past couple of years. The noise reduction has been great, and I don't have to smell 2 stroke gasoline in my garage (my stupid gas trimmer would drip too!). The up-front cost is higher for the battery powered ones, but it's worth it if you stick within one brand's ecosystem, so that you can share batteries. It takes me about 3 batteries to mow my lawn, and 2 batteries to blow the snow out of my driveway, which isn't a problem because I have 4 of them now. I don't have solar panels installed yet on the house, but once I do, I'll certainly be using them to power stuff in the garage, so that I can power my yard tools without relying on fossil fuels from any source. Electrification is great, because it makes it possible to go green on your energy inputs.
I drive forklifts for work. The electric ones are my favorites. They are quiet and much more precise. The gas ones all have a clutch. You gotta be real careful with that clutch or you can jump it while carrying a palette of 1000+ pounds. Meanwhile the electric ones are smooth as butter.
Way of the future. cough cough
We’ve had a tool for removing dirt and leaves from pathways for thousands of years. It’s called a BROOM.
the real brain damage was the american culture we learned along the way
I unironically believe that we built yeehawd domestically in the same way that we did it to Afghanistan, and ultimately for similar reasons
we built yeehawd domestically
I have no earthly idea what this means. Although I will say I have more faith in the Taliban as people that can be reasoned with than Americans
I mean we built up a large and motivated contingent of people who believe they are currently in a very literal holy war, within an Evangelical context and with a US-Southern aesthetic
We helped more children be educated with fundamentalist pro-martyrdom curricula in private and home-schooling settings, like mine, and bolstered lots of associated far-right mobilization efforts. We did the same to Afghanistan, and in both cases it's been to challenge the growth of Communism
Edit: Though don't get me wrong, I'm certain the Taliban can't be as unreasonable as the US. The material incentives mean the US has to go, while idk shit about the Taliban
I don't think that's a very good comparision. For one thing Afghanistan was also heavily Islamic back when it was communist and that worked fine until the more pragmatic revolutionaries were voted out and more idealistic people were voted in.
Also I really don't think that murdering someone over a leafblower can be considered a religiously motivated killing. And this I got mine fuck you attitude seems to have been a staple of American life since the frontier
So, I want to be very clear about what I'm trying to say here: I don't mean that we propagated Islam in Afghanistan or Christianity in the US, I mean that we exploited some of the theological structures present in both to anticommunist ends, and I'm saying this having grown up in a malignantly yeehawdist town and house. Religion contains multitudes, so the ones I stand against are the ones that hold and abuse power where I live
I think it's really hard to separate secular US culture from religion, even specifically Protestantism. The US civic religion, with its white supremacist deism, permeates virtually the whole US right wing both inside and outside nominally religious spaces
the US civic religion I would argue isn't Christian at all it's its own thing.
I can see how prosperity gospel and the doctrine of hard work negatively impacts US society and religion. I just think that this guy killed his neighbor because Americans are taught as a foundational notion the idea that it is ok to kill people over property disputes
It's as Christian as Mormonism, and I'm not interested in avoiding stepping on toes there. Each religion contains multitudes, and when I tell you that there is a big chuck of the Christian US that bases all their US-ey brainworms in their understanding of their own religion, it's not up for debate
I'm not completely sure of that as I think people like Aaron Sorkin believe in an athiestic varient of US civic religion
I'm sure you're right about a big chunk of US Christians basing their brainworms on their religious faith but I also think those brainworms exist in US society absent from any religious faith
That's fair, it does go into an area that I don't have a very nuanced vocabulary for. For the purposes that I usually talk about, the lines get very blurred. I mean, a lot of people are surprised to find out how rare it is among Evangelicals to read or understand the Bible, but it gets hard to draw a line between religion and ideology when nobody in your religion actually knows anything about it outside of a shared US ideology and a vibe
But then, where you might think they'd be less devoted for that reason, they'll jubilantly agree with Pat Robertson that the people of Haiti brought earthquakes upon themselves via wickedness. An atheistic version of US civic religious would reject that as silly, but would probably still say that it's Haiti's fault for not having been a better-behaved colony that would deserve help. You're probably right that it's a stretch to use the word "religion" to describe something potentially atheistic, but admittedly I usually use the litmus test of "do they implicitly uphold the Doctrine of Discovery?" for whether or not I lump them in with Evangelicals
I think the difference here can be simply explained with one legal difference. American conservatives defend child marriage. The Taliban based on the fact the Quran demands marriage be between consenting adults have banned child marriage
:data-laughing: that is a perfect contrast
I didn't know that about the Taliban but I can't say I'm surprised. I worded my yeehawd comment clumsily for having only meant to compare the US' tactics and goals between the two, but the results are radically different. I'd wager that no matter how much you stoke far-right elements in any other country on earth, you will never be able to make them ontologically evil like the US
This is my fault for not thinking about what my comment might line up with. I think it's because I forgot that most people online don't categorically refuse to condemn governments outside of the imperial core, and you'd have no reason at all to assume that I do, so I'm sorry for getting snippy
nah it's cool I didn't think you were being dismissive at any point
americans and killing their neighbors over bullshit name a more iconic duo
So glad that I don't live in America and my neighbours Atleast have a sense of community.
I remember watching a video, some chud firefighter shoots his boomer neighbour who was mowing his lawn on those mini lawnmower cars. Lots of cussing before the shooting. Pure 'Muricana
Two common types of random shooters: incels, and super old guys, always white
This site has fallen into the "always white" assumption a couple of times cause people comment before reading the article.
The boomers are just reenacting old SpongeBob episodes but with more guns.
they said this isn't the first time he waved a gun around while arguing over lawn care. what a stupid country.
Pretty wild that you can wave a gun around in such a petty dispute and still get to have one.
Dementia and guns is not a good mix. every video you see of old folks freaking out and acting bizzare is due to dementia.
On the one hand, murder is bad.
On the other hand, I have felt homicidal urges about our neighbor running their goddamn leaf blower at 6am on my day off. That's reactionary and unneighborly of me, I know.
