People Who Live In Suburbs: Classy, Icky, or Dudes?

By mail order with shipping and handling included?

A gallon of milk ($4.50)
Cereal and a blow-job ($6.50)
Plastic bowl and spork ($1.50)

Smug superiority: Priceless

Who is being smug?

I'm not saying that $6.50 is the mean price there, but that's what chocolate Cheerios cost the other day when I didn't buy them, and comparable cereals cost about the same.

Cereal and a blow-job ($6.50)

The free toys have gotten way better since when I was a kid.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iI2eqAZ0q6I7ym72GvpK1rz773cQ?docId=CNG.947744aa7f2a9543ab7c4b0e24b9136c.81

The small bubble-shaped Bluecars were designed by legendary Italian coachbuilder Pininfarina

SIGN ME UP.

what else has pininfarina designed beside bubblecars and ferraris?

http://www.passportmagazine.com/blog/uploads/843526-0-20111003035854.jpeg

Porches, Jaguars, Alfa Romeos. They also had a lot of influence on some early Volkswagons, Kharmann Ghias...I'm not sure if it was a former designer or someone moonlighting or what, may not have been the official design house, but the lines are def there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pininfarina#Notable_car_designs

?

the pininfarina collective

I get confused because there's a design house but also a person to whom a lot of the iconic designs are attributed to

tbh design houses are kind of a "head guy tells people broad strokes, accepts or vetoes their work, stuff goes out the door with his name on it" sort of thing

same with big time music producers, really

design farm

iirc Peter Saville, on the graphic design end of things, can't use Photoshop

are you saying timbaland didn't have a personal hand in all of his beats especially ones he's done in the 00s?

hehe

I think the service will do very well in paris (haven't looked into the costs) esp. since there's already a strong bike-share culture and this will be seen as a complement to that

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/chinas-giant-deserted-malls-wait-for-reluctant-consumers/article2188199/

I thought of this thread many times while I was in Vegas; it seems like they are attempting to turn the strip into a concentrated urban living space filled with gigantic hotel and residential buildings with certified 5-star LEED ratings.

vegas is a strange place, a significant % of people already live in apartments but the streetscape is pretty horrible and just walking across the street is extremely unpleasant. the strip is super walkable in some ways, but the actual street-street is as bad as it gets. but it's a city that can be reformed in some interesting ways tho unfortunately it will always be in the middle of the desert, so,

I think a lot of the strip residential buildings are like, time-share / 'I have a place in vegas' type things and are not priced for workers on the strip. I think you could turn a lot of the hotels into apartments one day.

Off-strip housing is pretty cheap in LV now! The real estate market crashed so hard.

yeah I have friends who have been trying to sell their house for years now. they had been planning to move to Washington and just had the worst timing possible.

I've got an internet buddy from Vegas who posts these ritzy rat pack/"Casino" places for sale on the market for $150,000.

And there are a lot of 'em.

sadly none of those are in CityCenter

lol citycenter

electric bills are probably a motherfucker out there.

It's just down the road from one of the largest hydroelectric plants in the country!

how much is a water bill out in these places (desert communities)? the same as everywhere else or...?

i ask this because a while ago i swear i read that Phoenix water bills were very low (less than even water rich states).

You know, I've never lived anywhere with a water bill, not even growing up. How much are water bills??

Obviously I've lived in many places with "city water," but never anywhere where I or my family got a bill for it.

Ours in the Little Rock metro is $32 a month. That's water and sewer, according to the bill.

Oh, so it doesn't vary depending on how much you use? My parents had a water bill when they lived in Michigan, but I can't remember if it was metered.

They lived way out in the middle of nowhere, but they had municipal water and county trash pick up. The trash service was paid for by their taxes. Michigan is a state with a fuckload of problems, but I've never known anywhere else with better public services, and public schools. The schools were great in a lot of ways, but the biggie for me was: They provide free paper! It still blows my mind a little.

(done digressing, sorry)

My friends from Michigan were appalled to learn that free paper is not the norm around the country.

(I lied, I wasn't done digressing.)

We have electric/water/sewer/trash combined in one -- ranges from $150 in the winter to $350 in the summer.

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/10/suburban-sprawl-ponzi-scheme/242/

I'm liking this atlanticcities site

Pasadena, CA charges me a connection fee of $14/mo and a usage rate of $1.63 per HCF. I used 5 HCF over the past 2 months (they bill bi-monthly), but I'm the guy with the dead lawn.

ok, here's a quote from the Phoenix water department

Phoenix’s combined water and sewer rates remain among the lowest in the country at $58.46 per month

http://phoenix.gov/waterservices/customerservices/payment/rates/index.html

it's weird to me that cleveland, where there is practically unlimited freshwater, pays more for water than a city like phoenix. i suppose infastructure costs play a bigger role in pricing than the acutal water itself.

My water bill in Cleveland Heights is about $35/month, and then there's the quarterly sewer bill that's like $60.

Phoenix is relatively close to the Colorado river, so transportation costs probably are low. I think I also read once that one of the reasons John McCain is so popular in AZ is that he made some kind of deal that got the state lots of cheap water.

OK, a friend and I were just talking about some of the ridiculous real estate deals available around town:

http://iowarealty.com/buying/detail_ml.asp?SearchFilter=8&list_numb=384569

4 bedroom, 1.5 bath, older well-maintained house, limited yard because it's on a corner but you can walk to a huge park, garage, seven blocks from a large grocery store, and right down the road from a bar/restaurant district. $150k.

This is in the 1915ish area of the city, so it's older growth but still "in the city" as far as my area goes. People still are all about buying new houses in suburbs with no trees and no walkability, but to their credit, probably less home maintenance. Still, my mind boggles.

The Southwest has its eye on the Great Lakes. My gut reaction is that they need to step off. They've almost tapped out the Colorado River by stupidly building lush Oases in the desert, and it's time they face reality. Fortunately, there are international laws that prevent diversions of water outside the Great Lakes basin, but it seems like they're not fail-proof. How is Canada's military doing? Could the U.S. hold its own in a war over water? Chicago would probably be a big target.....

Wow, that DM,IA house would be a find. Must be haunted or have tree branches growing in the walls.

PP, the entire block is like that. This one is a little larger for the price than most, probably because it looks like an older couple is selling it. afaict from the assessor's website, they moved in after the gentleman came back from the Korean war and have lived there ever since.

Is there some sort of stigma attached to being south of the Interstate? Weird.

And that vent cover going 65º up the wall, is that a Midwest thing?

I have some personal ish with that house, like, "laminate flooring" and the fact that if the inside ever had the tiniest bit of architectural detail, it's gone now. But it does seem like a fantastic deal, if it weren't so hard to get a loan that you basically had to pay $150K in cash to buy anything right now?

Looks like it used to be a nice foursquare until That Deck came along. The siding + stucco = exterior combo is something else I don't understand. But again, in sheer value, that's crazy.