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 the answer to your question is right there in your post:
> 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,
This still happens. Young people get together and go out after work. I don't go to pubs often, but when I meet up with someone after work the crowd is people meeting up after work with each other.
If everyone in your department is over 35 and has kids, you won't have much luck with this. If everyone is in their 20s and friendly, there's probably something going on.
I think a lot of people forgot how to be friendly with coworkers, especially if they spend a lot of time online. Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway. I have to remind a lot of people younger than me that it's okay to have friends at work. You need to have friends outside of work, too, but you can be friendly with people at work.
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'm afraid to have friends at work because I get attached and I feel bad when I leave after 2-5 years. I have to make career moves to get raises and progress, and it's easiest if I'm not too fond of the people around me.
This is also the same reason that companies push "culture" and try to emphasize how we're a team or a family.
In university, I made a few friends who went to different international schools growing up. Their parents were diplomats or executives who moved cities/countries every couple of years, and they'd switch schools to go with them. They were charismatic and personable, and quick to make friends.
But at the same time, after our natural relationship ran its course (due to graduations or leaving a student team), it felt like they disappeared. My relationship with them wouldn't linger like with other friends (even if weakened).
Another friend of mine directly described this view that "friendships have a time and place" in life. I thought about that perspective and didn't fully agree, but it still taught me that it's perfectly possible and even healthy to make friends quickly even if circumstances are temporary.
My view is that even if you become good friends with someone (at work or elsewhere) and they leave, you still end up with a network of friends across the country in different workplaces. Even when the nature of the friendship changes, you can still catch up with many of your old friends on occasion (like around the holidays).
And even if relationships completely fade, I believe that genuine relationships will always be a nice experience.
I can, but it probably won't work out, and I don't want to dump my old projects off on them and make them suffer, and I don't want to disappoint them, etc.
> Online discussions about jobs mostly read like it's a cutthroat single player game where you shouldn't get too close to anyone because you can't trust anyone and you should be planning your next job hop anyway
You don't think this is a response to corporate culture? Especially over the last few years.
People really did that regularly. It does seem to be economically related, for a lot of reasons.
One aspect is that a single income really was enough to not feel extravagant to have a home, a family, and afford to go to the bar a few nights a week. (Part of this was there wasn't as much random other stuff to buy, it wasn't being marketed to you nearly as aggressively either.)
I certainly did this quite a bit in the 1990's, and in the early 1980's I definitely remember my father going out at least twice a week and then the weekends also being for going out and doing something as a family at least 2/3 weekends per month - like trips to a nearby city, or to a sports game, or visit other family, or whatnot.
It used to be fairly common in smaller but densely populated areas in the United States, not so long ago (pre-2020). A lot of breweries were setup so that there were even outdoor areas that kids could be in. Usually one of the drafts was priced drastically lower than the others, and there were many unspoken relationship-based discounts or "try this" from the bartender or owner.
The unfortunate thing to me is that outside of VERY upscale or VERY downscale dive bars, every place is full of screens now. People go to bars and look at screens instead of talking as much as they used to.
I live in an urban area. Most bars in the area have a decent crowd after work into the night. The demographics of the crowd varies based on the bar. Based on your description we're roughly the same age, as a data point I wind up out after work usually 2-3x a week.
There's one bar I go to regularly where there's a couple of guys who I've literally never seen absent over the years.
It was mostly a fiction to advance the plot. Going to bars after work has always been a thing for young singles or old alcoholics, but pretty rare for parents/married people to do routinely.
In my experience this is not true. People of all ages would pop off for a pint after work or cut out a little early at many places I've worked. It was never hanging out for hours. It would be like an hour and you would usually just talk about the stuff at work that you're frustrated about. Not everyone would go, but high performers were usually well represented.
I think the demographics of HN would explain why this seems like hollywood fiction when it is/was very normal behavior.
Interestingly, "went to a bar in the past year" is one of the few questions in the survey whose answer basically didn't budge (52% in 1995 vs. 49% in 2026).
I went first time with office team this year a couple of weeks back. Needless to say whole experience was atrocious. No common reference, movies, sports, TV and so on to talk about besides work. It was just: "Oh, what do you do on weekend? I do x,y,z " in a round-robbin manner.
It was definitely not good time, or even bad time one can remember, just an insipid gathering for 3 hours of doing nothing. $8 for a beer and $15-20 per person for lukewarm food not sure I'll be excited for another meet any time soon.
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.
If it wasn’t combined in the same bill, the people will just have two taxes going forward. Effectively every “temporary” tax becomes a permanent tax. During the last local election, our city council was asking people to vote to replace an expiring tax with one at a lower rate and trying to sell it as voting for this reduces your tax.
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.
> 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.
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.
It's fairly technical and it is very configurable (so it can take some fussing to get it set up the way you like), but it pulls data directly from NWS and has been very accurate for my family.
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.
Yeah it’s usually just 3-6ft on the edges of the roof. But this whole roof is tiny. Covering a 12x12 roof would be much less than one edge run on a big house . Also they only turn on when there’s actual snow falling so doesn’t use as much power as you might think
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.
> 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?
They will generally deny you access, but they will access it freely themselves despite this being data collected on public streets. 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.
I suspect when there’s been a few cases of that sort of thing happening the attitude of local politicians towards these cameras will change quite quickly.
I generally thing this data is a good thing, provided it’s locked behind solid 4th amendment protections.
> 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).
A number of states already have laws preventing individuals from setting up ALPR. I can't image state or government officials that don't lready have those restrictions in place would allow the public to set up tracking of their movements for very long if someone did try to set up something crowd-sourced or easily searchable.
e.g.:
Arkansas:
https://law.justia.com/codes/arkansas/title-12/subtitle-2/ch...
> Except as provided in subsection (b) of this section, it is unlawful for an individual, partnership, corporation, association, or the State of Arkansas, its agencies, and political subdivisions to use an automatic license plate reader system.
I doubt the use laws would stand up to much pressure if tested. It’s long established that a private citizen can film nearly anything on public streets, including filming the police and public officials. It’s a leap to suggest they can’t take that footage and then apply a license plate reader to the same footage. I doubt these laws would survive SCOTUS if tested.
ADSB stuff falls into the much broader legal concept in the US that airwaves are public and if you can receive it and aren’t cracking encryption then it’s fair game to listen to. Many countries have a far more restrictive view of radio traffic, and encryption in ADSB isn’t likely to happen anytime soon if ever.
That said, the increased security of modern keys plus the remote control capabilities definitely adds some value.
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