cucumber3732842

I work in a different embedded space but our keepalive heartbeat messages have a payload of <3

Axon and Motorola also do a lot more to court state agencies who have grand plans of monitoring some highway corridor so their buddies at DEA/CPB/SMD/whatever can tip them off and their "drug task force" can make a newsworthy bust.

Flock by contrast courts local PDs who will catch a package thief or two but they really just want to have the drag net at their finger tips so that when some more equal animal's cat gets stolen they can walk back in time and figure out the short list of who could've done it.

>Flock is a scourge on democracy.

Yes. Blame the pickaxe seller. Do not question the miners. Do not question the investors in the mining companies. Do not question the casual voter or internet commenter who thought all this was fine.

This isn't to say that flock not a scourge, but I think a lot of people (not saying you're one of them) could stand to look in the mirror here.

Back in ye olde dark ages of <checks notes> 2017, when YC was cutting Flock a check and when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.

Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that a camera on every street corner watching who's going where all the damn time would be where it goes.

Just blundering up to crosswalks because "they have to stop, hurr durr it's the law <foams at mouth>" results in a substantially more hazardous pedestrian (and driver) experience than timing your approach and using your body language so that the drivers know what you're gonna do and can take action to hedge against it.

The newest stuff is integrating with maintenance records so that things are timed really nicely.

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>but for pedestrians roudabouts are way better than traffic lights.

This is ignorant texbook thinking.

As a pedestrian it's far easier to safely time a light, even one without a cross signal, than it is to cross through the un-broken streams of traffic that are entering/exiting a roundabout. You basically have to cross a ways back from the roundabout where the traffic is more like "just crossing a normal road". Which sucks if it's 4-lanes or really busy or fast or there's no sidewalk provision for that (like in the case of roundabouts at highway ramps) and is just a lot more walking to begin with.

For roundabouts that wouldn't be deserving of a light (i.e. the ones replacing 2/4way stops) it's a lateral move.

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The replies to your comment would be a lot funnier if I didn't share a country with some of these people.

You're not gonna "driving culture" your way around a 10:1 volume difference and only a fool would act like you could.

And this is coming from someone who's a big fan of roundabouts (and 4-way stops) on the basis that bad drivers have a worse time at them.

While the exact point at which it becomes "anti-american" isn't clear there's certainly a category of rhetoric in which people peddle subservience to the state (usually dressed up in obfuscating words, like they'll use "society" instead of "the government") that is undeniably "anti-american" except perhaps by some obtuse technical interpretation of all the words. And I will die on the hill that those who peddle such ideals are bad people and ought to be looked down upon the same way we'd look down upon someone peddling phrenology as a basis for racism.

>or very specific politician/execs properties, not random people,

I don't know enough about dutch politics but in my country if the blue collar anti-regulation people wanted to annoy the white collar pro-regulation people without annoying other blue collar people stopping the trains would accomplish that pretty handily.

>and definitely not in a way that could result in deaths.

They laid pipes and jumper cables across the tracks causing the signals to be red.

The point of economic sanctions is to act like a several % ball and chain around economic growth so over a generation or two whoever you've applied them to is impoverished, relatively speaking, and don't have much of a surplus to spend really resisting whatever you (or your regional buddies) are trying to do that they wouldn't like.

Nor do they have much economic surplus worth extracting so there's no reason for the .gov to throw them a bone or otherwise curry favor with that demographic.

A lot of the older "no vehicles over X" signage is denominated in tons.

>we offshored all production (because it was cheaper),

And why was it cheaper? Shipping things from the literal other side of the world isn't free. Cultural and language barriers to efficient communication aren't free. Etc. etc.

They don't. They come in later and do their thing as normal.

MEP workers have huge regulatory moats and trade groups with war chests which is why their bit of the process isn't being discussed here. If the tech isn't at a point where it can beat the relatively "exposed to the free market" framers and brick layers then there's no way it can fight the MEPs who have the laws and rules and codes they can leverage.

It's not just the energy sector though being big business I assume they do the bulk of the lobbying.

The electrician's trade groups and that whole supply chain are also scared shitless of a future where you can't lord a meter connection over people.

To an only slightly lesser degree building inspectors and Karens of all colors are also not fans for similar reasons. In exurban and rural areas (i.e. below a certain density depending on climate) the idea that some guy could just move into an old house or slap up a new building, throw up a bunch of panels on a stand, throw a bunch of batteries in a shed and live there without cutting checks to all sorts of parties and jumping through all sorts of compliance hoops and that you'd have to go after them after the fact is a big threat to these people's ability to micromanage how other people live.

Doctors make bank they they were still happy to prescribe tons of oxy in exchange for pretty minimal kickbacks as long as it was plausibly deniable to them.....

At the end of the day most of these calls for regulation are about bucking responsibility. People want to go punch the clock at EvilCorp and they want to be given a set of rules that they can just follow without thinking that will enable them to look themselves in the mirror and say "I'm not evil, I'm following the rules, if the complainers don't like it they should write their congressmen".

Europe was deforested and you didn't drink from water downstream of cities long before the industrial revolution.

Not that it matters to your point about the moon.

>but my wife was too excited to try out whatever features.

God knows how many millions of people could drive a car from 2004 forever, use small dumb screens and other appliances, etc, etc, if not for other members of their household.

>so I can't really explain why HOAs go beyond the collective expenses into the draconian rules.

Grass is really good at filtering/absorbing/treating stormwater so you might have to force everyone to keep their lawns lawn because the way you've got the lots graded you need that little bit of extra because it lets you make your "shit parcel" where the basin will go a little smaller and squeeze one extra house into the development.

Beyond that I think what a lot of it comes down to is that local governments are invariably run by a lot of the same kinds of busybodies that HOAs attract and the way rules are written these days the "normal permitting process" exists only to let the useful idiots think that just about everything isn't discretionary. There's always some gotcha or twistable phrase so everything goes through a special permit or variance of some sort. That opens up all sorts of off the record dealing wherein the developer agrees to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the initial HOA rules and the Karens in government make sure those things are in there before deciding how to exercise their discretionary approval.

I find it hard to believe that someone somewhere isn't making an EV with a electric pump to supply a traditional hydraulic steering system. If I had to guess it would be Europe because they love electric over hydraulic steering.

Nothing that matters on "people who drive new cars" timelines.

Like yeah there's probably some box with gear oil might get a little nasty after 100-200k but gears are pretty hardy and don't demand all that much.

>If you have your own private back yard you're not allowed to refer to condominiums as "luxury".

I live on .1ac in a post-industrial shithole that remains a post-industrial shithole largely because the politics of snooty people mostly a hundred miles away.

The last thing I, or anyone else here, needs is "those people" in our midst telling us how to live. Our lifestyles are fundamentally incompatible.

Strongtowns is happy to follow the money and incentives on all sorts of other issues. Why do they just throw up their hands and say "it's the developers" on this issue?

Developers don't do anything that costs money, like set up an HOA, without a reason. The developers create the HOA because you need your >1ac residential development to pass stormwater permitting. While you theoretically could make each individual .25ac parcel you're putting a house on compliant it's infinitely cheaper to just ignore all that, grade everything toward the road, dig a ditch, send the contents of the ditch through your stormwater treatment features, build in a little margin to those items, show the permitting authority the numbers that prove it passes with flying colors and when some jerk says "but what if X Y Z changes" you point to the excess you built in and tell them to GFY.

Now, where it really gets evil is when you start really pinching pennies or where the rules change over the course of the process making your numbers not work. Say you've got a lot of grade, a lot of rainfall, a lot of stormwater you gotta "treat". Well, you start adding rules to the HOA. Require certain parts of the lots remains grass or planter or whatever. Disallow patios, but do allow wood decks because the municipality considers those pervious, etc, etc. Or maybe the results you've got are marginal but you throw the bureaucrats a bone by saying you'll disallow car-ports and sheds in the HOA rules to prevent people from adding impervious surface. Or maybe you're uphill of some wetlands but not close enough to be regulated by default you promise to disallow working on cars and require people pick up their pet waste and not use lawn fertilizer or some other laundry list of certain things in order to make the local town's wetlands people comfortable not raising objection and claiming jurisdiction.

And of course, however these rules and plans shake out, the HOA is responsible for implementation in perpetuity.

>Why is this so important to mention here?

Race baiting bullshit allows people to poo all over the discussion and avoid having to confront the actual reality of what kinds of people we make good immigrants and citizens and why, because the answers to those questions are gonna cast some shade domestically. Any correlation to skin tone is mostly coincidental or just a figment of how the cards fell historically.

>Much like owning a home without an HOA attached, it is becoming harder and harder to meet this requirement.

The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot for developments larger than ~1ac (the EPA threshold, some states/towns have lower) is something you can lay at the feet of the Clean Water Act and it's implementation and precedents over the following decades.

The exact area of the buildings, the driveways, the community park and gazebo, etc, etc, are necessary features of the site plan that makes the math that is required to meet stormwater/environmental requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. This is also why HOAs often won't allow you to expand your driveway or add a non-permeable patio, it could (prob not, but still) ruin the environmental calculations they're responsible for enforcing as a condition.

I'm not nearly as familiar with car regulatory stuff but I would bet a lot of money that they're using OTA telematics to check some sort of compliance box...

Their problem is they believed their own bullshit and thought they were offering people a good deal that basically amounted to "the government 1984s you more than they already do but your package thief gets arrested, maybe".

Ignoring the fact that that deal is not necessarily good, if they had been slightly scummier, not given two shits about actually reducing petty crimes against the people and instead set out to help municipalities collect civil fines (which have basically no 4th-8th amendment protections these days) they probably could have gotten away without scrutiny for a very long time and gotten their systems deeply entrenched. The useful idiots would've eaten it right up with the flimsiest of pretexts so long as each segment of useful idiots was peddled to individually.

"The truck we saw carrying 2-tons of waste tires away from your tire shop is not owned by an entity on the state approved list, pay up"

"We saw you leaving home depot with a water heater but you didn't pull a permit, prove it didn't go into your house or pay the fine"

"we saw your 2004 Altima emit a puff of blue leaving a light. Per vehicle code XYZ any vehicle that emmits a visible cloud cannot pass emissions inspection, submit proof of passing withing 30d or your resigstration is revoked"

If they had done that a lot of people would have eaten it up and asked for more. But nope, they believed their own BS and built a system for "real" law enforcement. And of course that leads to a bunch of bad interactions with cops and the public doesn't like that.

>So Californians pay to make home insurance lower for Floridians.

More like some the people in Ohio or Maine or Wisconsin pays for both. CA and FL are both natural disaster dense compared to the colder states.

Whatever appeal to emotion crime you want to cook up, violence toward women, unfair targeting of minorities, etc, etc. That's all already not allowed either by law or rule.

Fixing that stuff by enforcing the existing rules against it wouldn't make these systems fine. The fundamental point of these systems is to let the government screw the people.