dave78

I think "easy and cheap" was when a new key cost a couple bucks at any nearby hardware store.

That said, the increased security of modern keys plus the remote control capabilities definitely adds some value.

I guess my point was that the socializing depicted in media was older people, not just young singles.

If I didn't have kids, would I want to go out multiple nights a week for a few beers with friends? I don't know. I'd certainly think about the cost of it more now than when I was 25.

Similarly for restaurants - they've gotten so expensive, and often the food isn't as good as we remember - that my wife and I don't seem to be as interested in going out to eat as we used to.

I have often thought about how many movies and TV shows in my childhood (1980s) focused on plot lines of people regularly gathering at a bar after work. Did people really do that or is it just a Hollywood thing to put people in the same place? Now that I think about it, actually, I guess my department at work did this when I first started in the early 2000s, going out to the bar once or twice a week.

It's hard to imagine doing that nowadays. I have a family, so doing that instead of going home in the evening would be selfish (if done too often), but even if I were younger and had time, it would seem very extravagant now. When a beer is $8-10 or even more, it would be an expensive proposition to go to the bar every night after work. And if you order food it's even worse...

I think many people would have a hard time believing that a new tax in one area would be offset by lowering taxes in another. Even if they did reduce property taxes shortly after passage, many people would assume they will raise them again later on.

I don't know what your flying experience is, but mine is that you're lucky if the cleaning crews have a chance to make a quick sweep of the cabin before the next flight's occupants begin loading. I'm usually towards the back of the plane and the cleaning crews are already 10-15 rows into the plane by the time my row can exit.

There's no way, in my experience, that they'd have time for something like that. Especially since anything that moves will invariably have mechanical issues from time to time. I've had to sit in a broken seat before because they simply do not have time to fix it between flights.

When there were shortages and they were rationing, they explicitly stated it was to protect their commercial customers. The shortages were across all SKUs, not limited to compute modules.

I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.

> their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers

I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.

I've always wanted to have a "shop" - a detached space, like a pole barn, where I could work on projects and store things. A lot of people I know in my life have such an arrangement and I'm occasionally jealous.

These days, I live on a large enough piece of land that I could pretty easily construct such a building. However, I've stopped myself because I've realized that I just fill up whatever space I have. If there's room to store something, you can just put it there and plan to deal with it later (of course, later almost never comes). I'm the type of person that has a hard time getting rid of things that I paid good money for or that have sentimental value, and as I get older I'm increasingly envious of those people who have less hesitation about throwing stuff out. For some things, selling is an option, but that has its own set of hassles.

I have a garage like you that has one stall full of stuff - family bikes, tools, a table saw, grill, etc. Stuff that we do use, though some of it is probably not used enough to justify the space it takes up. Every time I clean up the garage now I try to make a point to get rid of some things, though all that does is tend to break even with the new stuff that inevitably gets added.

Do people in Tahoe heat-tape their whole roof or just the edge where ice dams would otherwise form? I've only ever seen the latter, and even doing that will be noticeable on your power bill.

My home airport is a major hub; it is very common for some destinations to have a dozen or more flights across the various airlines. Quite often the American and United flights are scheduled similarly and leave within 30 minutes of each other.

I don't think this is that uncommon, so I've only ever paid attention to airline and flight number. I would recommend everyone else do the same.

> That’s the disparity at issue. However there’s no law from you putting up your own camera, pointing it at a public street and publishing the details of every car that drives past and highlighting any interesting once’s, like the mayor, police chief, etc.

Yes, and I keep thinking an organized, crowd-sourced effort like people do for capturing ADSB data or weather stations would be tempting. Setting up the hardware would be a little more involved though (mostly because of needing to locate it near the street). Cost is probably not even much worse than an ADSB monitor now.

Something like this is probably inevitable, either as a grassroots effort or via something like Amazon's Ring network. Short term it could prompt officials into action, but I fear long term it would be bad for society - laws might be written to prohibit it, but those would have side effects of limiting other things (like the aforementioned ADSB monitoring network).

> I would want police to know where I live ... but I wouldn't want that accessible to others.

Oddly, this was 100% commonplace before about 2000 or so, in the US at least. Every household got a free phone book from the phone company that contained the name, address, and phone number of everyone in town. I think you could opt out, but almost no one did.

It was incredibly handy and sometimes I still miss it. I'm not 100% sure why it was considered OK for so many decades but today would be considered a PII data leak, though I suppose it being limited to your local area vs. searchable by the whole world has something to do with it.

> There have been more cases of "someone broke into my house at exactly [time]. Can you track their license plate and track them down" that I'm willing to make that tradeoff.

I'm not, especially since anecdotally, police are generally unwilling to use these tools to solve petty crime anyway.

Can I submit a FOIA request to get all the plate reads from Flock for my town's mayor or police chief (their private vehicles) so that I can create a map of where they go and share it online? I genuinely don't know the answer as I've not tried, but from things I've read I'm pretty sure they will not provide this. And that's the point - why can a police officer search the database for any plate they feel like but the public cannot?

Flock cameras are everywhere all over my very blue area in a blue state with new ones appearing every day. I really don't think this is a Republican/Democrat issue.

And I think as people are learning about it, they are outraged across the political spectrum; perhaps we should capitalized on that instead of trying to turn it into a red/blue thing.