I wouldn’t recommend that kind of behavior around Auburn.
My son attended a forest school for three years, located in the middle of a protected nature preserve. The preserve has clear signage posted throughout stating that dogs are not allowed on the trails.
Despite that, there were many mornings when I’d be walking back to my car after drop-off and would see someone heading toward the trails with a dog. I always made a point to politely let them know about the rule and that a staff member would likely ask them to leave once spotted.
This happened at least 70 times over the three years my son was enrolled. Out of all those instances, only one person actually turned around and left with their dog.
The issue became so frequent that preserve staff had to involve law enforcement and began issuing trespass notices. While I only personally witnessed this once, the director told me it became a regular occurrence.
The one time I did see it unfold was honestly kind of entertaining. I gave my usual friendly heads-up to a couple with a small dog. The woman scoffed and said something like, “It’s just a small dog,” and continue into the forest. I went back to my car to send some work emails and Slack messages — and a few minutes later, watched as she was led out of the preserve in handcuffs. Apparently, she gave the same attitude to the responding officer.
Just as some people are enraged by folks violating "no dogs" signs, there are people enraged by folks not following traffic regulations (including the speed limit).
Just as someone may think it's weird that someone goes on a very, very angry rant about people driving 63 mph on a 60 mph zone, lots of people find it weird when people go on a rant about dogs.
This is exacerbated by the fact that one of these is much deadlier than the other.
So when you go on a rant about dogs, just keep in mind a lot of people are viewing you in a way people view those who complain about people going above the speed limit (regardless of the lane you're in).
Anti-disclaimer: I hate dogs. Would never date someone who had one because I don't want to be around one, and also because I wouldn't want to deprive someone of one.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that people who are frustrated by others ignoring “no dog” policies somehow dislike dogs. That’s a false equivalence.
I love dogs. I’ve had one by my side since the day I came home from the hospital as a newborn. These days, I often bring my dog with me to the office. But I’ve never once taken my dog somewhere dogs weren’t allowed. Respecting posted rules doesn’t mean you love dogs any less.
> I don’t think it’s fair to assume that people who are frustrated by others ignoring “no dog” policies somehow dislike dogs. That’s a false equivalence.
An equivalence I didn't make. Whether someone hates or likes dogs has no bearing on my point.
Agreed. People are pushing the boundaries a bit too far and it's going to end up harming the people who truly do need animals like this with them in public.
I'm planning to share this article with my neighbors because we've been facing a persistent issue with our community dumpster.
Per city regulations, our small neighborhood isn't allowed to have individual curbside trash pickup. Instead, all 18 homes are required to share a single dumpster.
Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that non-residents have been using the dumpster as well. It’s often completely filled in less than 48 hours after being emptied.
I’ve personally confronted and successfully deterred several non-residents from using it, but I obviously can’t be out there all the time. More recently, we’ve noticed that people are coming into the community late at night or early in the morning to dump their trash.
I spoke with the director of our town’s Environmental Services board, and he said his code enforcement team would be happy to issue citations—but only if we can provide video evidence. That would require our HOA to install cameras to monitor the dumpster.
This is a brand-new community, and the HOA is still under builder control. However, another neighbor and I have started working on a plan to address the issue once the HOA transitions to homeowner management.
Personally, I'm thankful that this is only a temporary residence for me while I build my forever home. But this experience has made it clear: I will never again live in an HOA or in a place that relies on a shared dumpster.
Even without the issue of non-residents, I've learned that some households produce significantly more trash than others. My six-year-old son and I generate exactly one bag of trash per week. The neighbors next to me produce about one bag per day.
Given this imbalance, I hope the future HOA board considers a fairer system—perhaps one where trash-related costs are based on actual usage, rather than being split equally among all 18 homes.
Isn't that standard though? If I get a flat, I hop out and replace it with a spare. Then I drive to a shop to have that flat tire either patched or replaced entirely.
I know some new models don't include spares, but they often have run flats and temp sealant kits included.
Ya, changing a flat tire was once part of learning to drive. Also, manual transmissions, jumpstarting, swapping a fuse, and basic low-speed maneuvers like rocking out of snowbanks or crossing large potholes. All that is now gone. Most care owners dont know what a tow eye is, let alone where to find one. It is so bad that there are now university-level "adulting" courses for millenials. First up: changing a tire.
> It was a Sunday morning. Literally our only option to get it replaced that day was a Walmart location 15 miles away. So we had to wait for AAA for an hour and a half to tell us we were stuck using a donut to get there.
I would describe that as "inconvenient" but actually very fortunate!
Walmart was only 15 miles away? You have a donut/spare, or AAA has provided you with one? That's lucky! Nowhere near "problem" territory at all.
Just an interruption to your schedule, but that happens on road trips.
But it does sound like you didn't know how to repair a flat. Any hardware store and most gas stations will have either a plug kit, or some of that horrible blow-in sealant in a can. Either will get you back on the within an hour.
(Fyi, if anyone reading this does ever use that sealant stuff, when you get to a proper repair shop TELL THEM about the sealant before I pop the bead and spray it all over the shop.)
I would add a jumpstart kit and/or cables, preferably with the knowledge of how to use them safely. (Even teslas occasionally need to be jumped.) On long drives I also bring a small fire extinguisher (I take the one from my kitchen). Never had to use it but you don't need it until you do.
Most mechanics charge double time for working Sunday, even if they had not work at all the previous week (which doesn't happen, but if it did). Retail is open weekend, but mechanics like just about everyone else wants to work their 9-5 monday-friday job so they get weekends off.
In the US, I've only lived in Chicago, Portland (OR), San Francisco, Dallas, NYC, and Auburn, but I don't think I have ever seen an automobile garage open on a Sunday unless it was a WalMart, Sam's, or Costco.
Where do you live that has garages open on a Sunday morning? I don't think I've ever seen a tire shop or auto repair place (other than the big box and wholesale warehouse places) that's open on a Sunday.
I decided to take a very non-representative sample, and found that in many (but not all) parts of northern California, locations of the chain tire shop that I use are closed on Sundays, but most locations in the LA area are open 7 days a week. This chain has a lot of locations. It could be that they're responding to what their competitors do in both cases. So maybe getting tires on Sunday is a so-cal thing? TBH, I personally am more used to expecting the tire shop to be open 7 days a week, unless it was a small, locally-owned place.
LA is an anomaly. Most places are 5-6 days a week, tops. Around where I'm at currently, if the place is open on Saturdays, they're closed on Monday to compensate. There's a lot of those
The problem was less that we had to replace it and more that it was a fairly significant distance away. (A distance made longer because we weren’t on the freeway but heavily trafficked roads in a tourist-heavy area.) We were near downtown Gatlinburg, and there were places that were closer, but they were all closed because it was a Sunday.
We also would have had a better shot at not having our tire blow out if the closest gas station wasn’t 10 miles away.
15 miles is nothing on a spare tire. I'm not sure how many poor people you've spent time around, but I regularly see Nissan sedans driving around with multiple spare donuts on them.
Oh I know. Carlos Ghosn got them to focus more on the fleet market. I'll always be a Toyota/Lexus man, but I owned a Datsun wagon for a while and I followed the industry closely when I ran an import repair shop (which was never open on a Saturday or Sunday).
It's wild how that one man managed to change the entire path of a once great brand.
I think of it as one too many levels of management. At some point, your nearest understanding of the business is powerpoints about powerpoints about powerpoints... and then dumb ideas start to seem reasonable.
You don't know this, but instead assuming parent lives in some suburban area with lots of other cats. They could be living outside in the woods, 5km to any close settlement, with minimal side-effects of having a cat outside (besides the side-effect of having a few less rodents around).
But no, lets have a knee-jerk reaction to anyone who has an outside cat, without understanding any of the context.
Besides, many people put bells on their cats, and then they're unlikely to catch anything at all in the wilderness.
It seems that in the modern era of social media campaigns for everything there can hardly exist a perfectly chill, normal activity that someone hasn't somehow contrived into a type of moral and ethical sin. It's tedious, sad and ultimately, kneejerk stupid. I strongly doubt that the world's domesticated cat population is generally creating an ecological apocalypse and the studies I have seen around it are far from anything you could call solid. Either way, believe it or not, you can actually also use very practical solutions like bell collars to easily fix most of these situations. How about getting off your moral pedestal about such a silly "issue".
Maybe I've just had stupid cats, but they never managed to catch any birds, even when they were without bells. Plenty of mouse offerings though, but seems the bells help with that too.
Yeah, my opinion is a bit more pragmatic and attached to reality, where context, environment and your actions matter, not some "empirical" study done by universities.
Personally, I love my cats so I let them roam outside instead of keeping them inside like a prison. Then I also care about other animals so naturally they have a bell so they cannot (successfully) hunt other animals. But again, pragmatic approaches aren't for everyone, some people love books and/or data instead :)
The alternative to empiricism (science) is rationalism (wish-casting), not pragmatism (least harm).
I often let my dog off-leash. Weighing the risks & rewards, I pragmatically choose to break the law, knowing full well that I'm in the wrong, not some special case. I eat the tickets and social scorn without complaint. My dog has pretty good recall and is super gentle (esp w/ kids). But the big bad govt (and other parents) didn't write the laws with my special pooch in mind.
You're confident your cat doesn't harm birds. Terrific. It's still wrong, in the general case. So take your lumps.
A (huge) point in your favor is that 2/3rd of (domesticated) cats are feral. So keeping cats indoors in order to better protect birds seems quixotic.
In these parts, owners keep their cats indoors to protect them. Recently, my SO's cat escaped her "catio" and was swiftly caught by a coyote. (A neighbor saw it happen. Horrifying.) Maybe your locale doesn't have coyotes.
Edit: Another exception (that I can think of) is farm/barn cats. Pretty much a necessity. Alas, coyotes. And probably hawks.
Could be worth considering that outdoor cats in the US may actually be a positive because so many of our country's natural predators of rodents and birds have been wiped out.
I’m planning to play around with it a bit this weekend.
I deleted all my social media accounts a few months ago, and it’s been surprisingly difficult to find out about local events since then. Even if you are on social media, info is scattered all over the place—you have to check Facebook, Instagram, local subreddits, and sometimes even the Chamber of Commerce just to stay in the loop.
My son and I have missed out on some great events simply because we had no idea they were happening.
My CTO is always talking about Palantir and how they are the future and how we need to figure out how to implement their services into our work.
However, I can't find any examples of what they really do or what kind of product they offer. I've watched multiple videos about Palantir including many interviews with Alex Karp. But I still can't figure out exactly what they do and how their products/services would help us at work.
Pretty bog-standard analysis & import tools on top of a database, with a promise to give you the entire universe (but all of that's custom work, and you'll be paying dearly for it)
IOW I have yet to see anything that makes them look like more than your average data-centric service company. Pretty sure they're a normal business with a fairly typical offering that's been hyped so people in decision-making positions think it's Magic Sauce. Like a lot of companies that get talked about on HN, actually.
As compared to Argo et al, I'll say it's pretty slick, but it is unquestionably very "do things the Palantir way" and thus even as slick as it is I don't think it's appropriate for just any ole random startup. It's also evidently just recently been exposed outside of Palantir so it definitely is v0.0.00000009-alpha when trying to use it in anger
It's mckinsey but with tech people, not consultant babys. they actually have people who know how to speak to politics people, & they don't come from think-tanks like some other brands of loser. think outside the box. not every company is "really" a product company, i.e. Google is not computers company, it's an ads company, & so on.
My son attended a forest school for three years, located in the middle of a protected nature preserve. The preserve has clear signage posted throughout stating that dogs are not allowed on the trails.
Despite that, there were many mornings when I’d be walking back to my car after drop-off and would see someone heading toward the trails with a dog. I always made a point to politely let them know about the rule and that a staff member would likely ask them to leave once spotted.
This happened at least 70 times over the three years my son was enrolled. Out of all those instances, only one person actually turned around and left with their dog.
The issue became so frequent that preserve staff had to involve law enforcement and began issuing trespass notices. While I only personally witnessed this once, the director told me it became a regular occurrence.
The one time I did see it unfold was honestly kind of entertaining. I gave my usual friendly heads-up to a couple with a small dog. The woman scoffed and said something like, “It’s just a small dog,” and continue into the forest. I went back to my car to send some work emails and Slack messages — and a few minutes later, watched as she was led out of the preserve in handcuffs. Apparently, she gave the same attitude to the responding officer.