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Comment by quaquaqua1 | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna be real with you, the noise of private landscapers is infinitely frustrating to me, and nobody in charge has seemed willing to do anything about it.

I don't want to have a "nanny state" that seeks to regulate every possible little thing, but I just want to state a fact- leafblowers are loud and annoying!

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There are generally noise regulations, but they are not suited towards shift workers or night owls and they don't limit the noise much during the day. Also, at least for the City of Seattle[0], lawn maintenance equipment is allowed to put out at least 80db during the day.

[0]: Example for City of Seattle: https://library.municode.com/wa/seattle/codes/municipal_code...

They aren't enforced.

Nobody will regulate it because it's those same elected elite who benefit from it (big pay = big garden to maintain) the most.

They won’t regulate it because to them it’s just a necessary evil of having a perfectly-manicured waste-of-resources patch of green for seven months out of the year that they then complain constantly about maintaining. If I leave my windows open at night, I get woken up by weedwackers and leaf blowers at least once every two weeks by apartment complex maintenance. And why? So the patches of grass nobody ever uses look perfect.

I am thoroughly convinced that the powers that be make lots of money off of the equipment and licensing and enforcement fines related to the manicured lawn stakeholder nexus :/

Also rich people don't have that problem. They live in condos in big cities, or on properties far enough from their neighbors that the only landscaping noise they hear is their own.

Fortunately I don't live in an area with any gardens as I'm in the city centre. I have lived more rural though and leaf blowers and mowers were very annoying.

My concern with drones is simply the people density. Its one thing to say "you can't hear them 400ft up", however that assumes they never come down and given I live in a high density area, I expect many would be descending regularly.

And they are indeed banned or restricted in many countries. Even in mine (though it’s not being enforced at all, and the worst violators are local councils and other public gardeners)

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