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Comment by TwoBit | Hacker News Reader

If you live in a suburban area like I do, practically every day one of the neighbors has these running. And half the time it's just blowing it to the street to later land on someone else's property.

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Yeah, it's gotten a little better recently(dunno if it's just because of weather), but there was a long stretch where every day I would go out to my backyard and, on any given day of the week, there was someone mowing or weed whacking nearby. Weed whacking is almost worse because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button. But yeah, it almost entirely ruins the suburban experience for me because there are so few moments when you can just sit outside during the day without having some obnoxious motor running somewhere.

Then again, I'm also averse to the lengths people go through to maintain landscaping. Landscaping is necessary, but so many homeowners care so much about property values that they want everything to constantly appear uniform. Some neighbors even rat on each other to their HOA if one person went an extra week without mowing.

Yeah, I just recently moved to SF and it's a lot quieter in the city than it was in the suburbs.

The irony.

save for screams of demented people. closer to downtown, of course, but increasingly prevalent.

Those screams exist in Palo Alto too - just mostly in the city council meetings.

> because people love to "rev" the weed whacker constantly instead of just holding down the button.

With at least the weedwhacker I have, there's not really an option. If you hold the button down, it overheats. If you leave it up to long, it shuts off. As a result, any time I'm walking across pavement, or in between patches that need weedwhacking, I have to rev the stupid thing.

I agree with everything you've said though. I don't have a choice right now, but the way suburban/urban landscaping is done is a nightmare.

> I have to rev the stupid thing.

Or get a new one if you can afford it. They're not terribly expensive.

I can't :)

It's also not technically mine.

Ahhh.... I remember when we used rakes.

Happy days. Then some guy decided all tools should be 'powered' and here we are.

Who would have figured that the invisible hand of the market was pushing a lawnmower.

I hardly ever see a user of a blower actually blow stuff into a pile and pick it up. This is the part that makes me crazy. The wind is just going to blow it right back to where it was!

I've seen that happen right before a hurricane. Wind was already gusting, roughly at tropical storm levels. The full force of a category 3 was just a few hours away. There was my neighbor, blowing leaves from his driveway.

That's exactly how I see pretty much every professional gardener use them.

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