> No-one wants noise, so we have noise restrictions. Oops, construction is constrained.
I spent the last couple years trying to get contractors out to pave our private road. They'd either no-show, or ghost. It didn't make any sense since these were all 5-figure jobs. I'm trying to give you money, what gives? I learned from the contractor who did end up taking the job that our city is absolutely brutal with contractors... which can be a good thing for quality of work, but too much in this case means many contractors just refuse all work in the city. They're big enough that it's no great loss.
Because the contractors can be arseholes and still make enough money?
Why bother heeding requirements not to run heavy machinery outside people's houses at 4am?
Why bother getting proper utility surveys done, just yolo it and if a few thousand people end up without water/power it's fine because the people profiting from the work live elsewhere and can just blame the workers?
The problem is that municipalities absolutely love HOAs. They get all the tax revenue and get to wash their hands of most responsibilities involved with them. From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Oh, but if you want to do anything, you still need to pay those permit and inspection fees! No, we won’t help you find a paver at a reasonable rate even though putting those contracts out to bid is what we do all day long.
What is really bullshit is that HOAs aren’t granted a property tax abatement for absorbing many municipal functions.
I understand why they do that though. Cities don't usually make enough money from property taxes to fund the infrastructure in the suburbs. That why they always seem to be on the verge of budget cuts, raising taxes, or bankruptcy.
> From their perspective, they get to found little vassal townships where they can say “it’s your problem” to little people problems like “there’s too many potholes in the road” and “that sewer lift station is making weird smells.”
Roads and sewer are two things I've never seen an HOA have jurisdiction over; in every HOA community I've lived in, the municipality still owned the roads and the water and sewer infrastructure. The HOA was only responsible for things like mowing the grass in common areas and maintaining play equipment there.
I am a president of an association that handles all aspects of road maintenance (construction, sweeping, snow removal), a full commercial sewer lift station, stormwater drainage, trash / recycling, street lights, interfacing with utilities, forestry maintenance, and permitting along with general Q&A. We are a volunteer 3-person Department of Public Works.
I’ve lived in two HOAs and they both owned and maintained roads in the community. One of them was a new development, and making the roads private was probably a big reason the county required an HOA for it.
Hubs were still just barely still relevant when I first started learning networking, but it was late enough that I don't think I've ever encountered one in serious use. Especially after port mirroring became a common feature even on affordable switches. I think we had an old pile of industrial/scientific test equipment in grad school nobody wanted to touch that was using an old Cisco hub, but my memory is fuzzy.
I've definitely never seen any old Thicknet networks in use, though I have seen Token Ring in active use semi-recently. I never learned anything about Token Ring other than I remember old CompTIA mentioning it existed.
I do have a fondness for seeing this old tech that was way out of my reach or just barely too old to encounter back in the day being used, it's so neat to learn about. ClabRetro on YouTube is one of my few "drop everything and watch a new video" creators.
This reminded me of my first encounter with Thicknet (and thinnet) just a few years ago.
We'd never gone over it when I went to college in 2012 but come 2022, I found myself learning about it by pulling it out of the ceiling during a decluttering project.
Made some sense, though. Being a TV station, coaxial cable was probably very plentiful when it was installed. We saved a couple of the vampire clamps at the time just for laughs. I wonder if they're still in the office.
Back in 1999 I was still doing the crawling-under-desks thing. I was at a tobacco companies sales office... and they had a wallplate with ports labeled token ring, ethernet, and appletalk (looked rj11, so phonenet?). A year or two later I worked at their central location in Virginia in a warehouse decommisioning old equipement, got to see some FDDI and HIPPI hardware. Never saw it being used though.
And at my previous job, in a quite normal office, there was a wallplate labeled DEC with the weirdest jack I've ever seen. I couldn't visually identify it, and I thought I knew everything. 1.5" inches wide, with a plastic spring-loaded cover that came down from the top. Maybe only two conductors in it, not normal rj-style pins at all. I'd guess something Vax, but I thought those were always ethernet since the early 80s, and anything older still wouldn't likely have survived until 2025.
Hubs were pretty common when I went to college (2003-2007), but not for the school's infrastructure. They would lend them to students because the rooms only had a single network port. Not sure how long that use case lasted; I imagine by now renovations have happened and rooms have multiple network ports (and the dorms would have wireless in any case).
You were one generation before me, I started college in 2007. By then it was all those super cheap little 4 port Netgear switches most people reading this have probably owned at some point. I don't remember us having official dorm wifi but we were allowed to have our own wireless routers, probably an IT nightmare by today's standards. I recall we also all got publicly routable IP4s.
I like to avoid dentists with flashy “STATE OF THE ART WHITENING/IMPLANTS” advertising and gleaming new expensive equipment. They need to make payments on all that stuff, so they’ll go looking for problems that aren’t there.
My erstwhile dentist had a quite unassuming office that seemed to be a quite low-rent neighborhood, and all his equipment was rather ordinary and well-aged. Although he had invested in a modern 3D full-head scanning system, that's not unusual. And the front office tended to do everything on paper, had no patient portal, etc. But they were very good at what they did.
However, he was always pressuring me for more work and more profitable work. And here's the thing: all of the art in every room of the office was his own photography. These were large painting-size photo prints, and they were all taken on holiday, every single one in an exotic location. Ancient ruins, sheep in pasture in Ireland. He and his entire family were inveterate tourists and loved the outdoors. He also had at least 3 children, so not just a DINK household!
Also, and I learned this on the first visit: his mother was also a dentist, and her name/patroness was that of the Hindu goddess of wealth and money. The signs were there all along, just really subtle!
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