The HOA is the owners. The owners vote in some board members who do the work on behalf of the majority of owners.

Sometimes the HOA hires some 3rd party management company to handle stuff, but in our case we felt it was wasted money because we would care more about the results. In the end I can see why a lot of owner boards do that as the day-to-day of running the place is obnoxious.

The public spaces were on our property, so our responsibility.

Chuck Testa!!!

That’s exactly right. But much evaporates or is diffused over such a large area that no one particular piece of land gets a significant amount.

The alternative is landing overweight, risking potential damage or failure to the aircraft’s landing gear, full of human lives, while still full of the explodey stuff.

The other alternative is designing planes to land at heavier weights, resulting in every other flight being less efficient.

Really? I think a pretty healthy portion of the land above the 30th parallel until the Arctic circle looks something like this

Huh, you’re right. I didn’t know about that. From Wikipedia:

The Chinese startup claims to have the miniature device in the pilot testing stage. Unveiled in January 2024, it is allegedly generating 100 microwatts of power and a voltage of 3V and has a lifetime of 50 years without any need for charging or maintenance.

Wonder if it microwaves your balls when it’s in your pocket too.

Either way we can dream of a future where we never have to plug in to charge again.

Soon as we can figure out micro nuclear reactors it may actually work that way!

I was the president of my HOA. Somewhat not intentionally.

It was my first home, a condo, and I bought it at launch right after it was built. After about 6 months of living there, a neighbor approached me and said the whole rest of the board had flaked out, and would I like to be president of the HOA?

I said sure, it seems interesting and I definitely want the value of my ownership to be protected.

So me, him, and another guy formed a new board.

Oh man, the messes we started to uncover. The super low dues didn’t even cover the trash removal, hallway electric lighting bill, elevator maintenance contract… Much less any landscaping. No wonder the place was looking rough.

And of course there was no budget to put money away for long term needs like reroofing or whatever.

So we worked hard on a plan to propose to the owners to increase the dues about 70% so that we’d have a well landscaped place and hopefully no surprise expenses ever because of an ample rainy day fund.

Less than 10% of the owners even showed up to the HOA meeting, so we didn’t meet quorum.

We tried again, and finally got quorum after knocking on doors and asking for people to please come and vote.

This was just one issue. I’d get regular calls like hey, somebody dumped an old mattress by the dumpster. Can you call the removal company (the regular trash service wouldn’t take that kind of thing). Or calls like “there’s some sick trees in the front yard, when are you finally going to get an arborist out here?” And so and so’s room is leaving trash in the hallway, can you please go talk to them?

I resigned within a year. Screw those guys and I’ll never co-own without getting to choose my partners again.

One could argue that China’s governmental subsidizing of the industry just shows the commitment they have to be a leader and dominant player in the future of transportation worldwide.

Does the American government have such aspirations? Does the American Auto industry have the vision and goal to adapt to a disrupted market?

In my opinion the arguments surrounding this topic come down to which country is going to work harder to play a leading role in the future.

China is making their bet, and the quality of Chinese EVs is increasing extremely rapidly. If they can so easily dominate the American Auto Market that tells us that the Americans have been sleeping at the wheel and need to make some tough choices about spending. We can curtail the onslaught through duties and various taxes and regulations but not indefinitely.

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The US projects its own interests worldwide but those often overlap with the interests of other as well.

For example, the US often stipulates intellectual property and worker rights in it’s trade deals. The US actively protects shipping lanes. The US actively negotiates visa-free entry for American passport holders to other countries. The US invests in the economies of foreign countries to stimulate trade opportunities. The US controls the SWIFT banking network which makes it so that we don’t need to send gold bullion or pallets of cash to buy things from other countries, and participating in the system requires member countries to have certain controls in place that attempt to block bad actors. The US, through it’s embassies and ambassadors, deploys it ideology to foreign governments, and makes deals that allow foreigners to invest in the USA and Americans to open businesses in foreign countries.

The US actively shuns and makes life difficult for menace dictatorships on the global stage by creating trade exclusions.

There have been coups since the beginning of time and always will be, as it’s human nature. Many citizens of other countries have no belief that the future of their country belongs to them after decades or centuries of dictatorships or kingdoms. On the whole, history shows that kingdoms rise and fall for many reasons and the people sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer for it.

Obviously it’s a highly complex topic, but if the US wasn’t doing these things, then Russia or China would be, or there would be more powerful regional factions, which could reduce the size of the world in terms of travel and trade options for many.

Whether the US is the right one to be in control of this at this point in history is a matter of intense debate among some, but it could absolutely be worse than it is now.

Beacon of reality in this post, not sure why you’re downvoted

I’m not even sure I oppose this timeline

Whatever the guy with the biggest and/or most guns says they are

She understands there is a problem, just doesn’t understand the solution. Good on her for having privacy concerns and paying attention.

I for one would be fine going back to the ini files of win 3.1

Airbnb has been in a race to bring the worst of the tech industry’s profit consuming corporatism (no phone number, horrid customer service, lots of rules that nobody follows, privacy nightmares) to an industry that focused on hospitality - by definition a high-touch service - and we are all worse off because of that.

He was a democrat at the time too, right?

Thanks for your patience while I researched the details.

Yes, I’m free for a lunch meeting last Friday. See you then.

I feel like we should at least consider that DJI is a mainland Chinese company and nearly all drone innovation in the past decade has originated there. They are no strangers to extreme manufacturing or advanced automated drone technology.

Hahaha if true it would be some poetic justice, but unfortunately these dweebs are already hanging out there half the time and loving the oligarch lifestyle, so unless that’s taken away they will die happy