168: Car-centric infrastructure

I rode my electric skateboard ~40 minutes today (one way), to get to the University of Utah's surplus and salvage division (GOATED, more on them later), and it was on the way over there that I realized just how different Salt Lake and SLO really are, infrastructure-wise.

I had never been car-less in Salt Lake before, but my existence in SLO has been without a car the whole time, and I had them in my head as some kind of equals in infrastructure, and to be fair I am in the suburban hell section of Salt Lake (though that is most of it), downtown is probably better, but the route I took today was so much more hostile than SLO has been.

I've just never been the un-privileged class (transportation-wise) in Salt Lake before, so it was a little bit of an adjustment.

I also think that the speeds of vehicles is a much larger problem here, for people outside of said vehicles. In SLO, the speed limits are 25 almost everywhere except for the highway and a couple main roads, and people actually follow those numbers. On the big roads in Salt Lake the speed limit is probably 40, and people are probably going 50, and even on side streets, the speed limit is 25, but people will go 30 or 35.

I hate cars.

Surplus and Salvage is genuinely one of my favorite places though. The University of Utah sells off all of their old stuff for dirt cheap, and it's such a good way to get slightly outdated technology that probably still works for as little money as possible. The iMac that I have at my desk at home (and am typing this on) is a 2013 model that I got from them for $100, worth every penny. My projector, which lives in my room in SLO, and has probably 1000 hours of use on it from me, and retailed for something like $5000 in 2015 or whatever, was $100, also so worth it. I got my original server from there (an old HP desktop), it was $50, and is still running minecraft in my basement.

I was there today in search of a thunderbolt dock for my laptop, because my monitor decided to stop working 😦, and the best way to recreate that behavior is with an external thunderbolt dock. An external dock also makes getting a new monitor so much easier, because my current monitor was the dock, so a new monitor would have to fill both roles, but with a separate dock I can focus on monitor specs, instead of worrying about USB-PD specifications.

I did find thunderbolt docks, pretty standard Dell ones from a few years ago (that still work great), but they don't go on sale until the 29th of December (Surplus puts things out on their shelves for university claim before they're available to the public), so I'm going to have to go back on the 29th, but they're selling these docks for $10, so it's absolutely worth going back. Those docks are ~$150 new, so surplus and salvage is coming in clutch like they always do.