Where I lived there were regular fairs where different vendors would set up tables and sell parts and complete computers. They were quite fun even if you didn't buy anything.
I'm sure there were others but I think is was Ken Gordon computer fairs around where I lived. As I recall, they became less interesting over time as scavenging parts from used equipment became less of a thing and there were increasingly other sources for components, shareware/freeware, and so forth.
I volunteered to run my HOA in Massachusetts because I was afraid someone would come in and abuse their power and fine everyone for trivial matters.
What I learned was that the town "forces" all new developments to have an HOA because town politics prevents the town from adopting roads from new housing developments. Thus all new neighborhoods in the town have "private" roads.
It's a lot of "BS" work that's pushed on residents simply because of malfunctioning politics.
Sounds to me like the more effective use of residents' time would be to get several of them together to run for town office and break the deadlocks. Assuming you can contact enough other frustrated HOA members and get them onboard, even if the problem is several town board members (or whatever body it is), it could be possible to replace them with sane people.
I don't want to say too much because it would reveal where I live. But, to be general, my town has a very unique political system where a plurality of voters is the deadlock.
Basically, to break the deadlock, it would require a very large plurality of people to overrule a large group of retirees who have nothing better to do but reject adopting our private roads.
> What do we do with the $500k we have the operating funds and reserves collected over the past 40 years?
Uhm, return it to the property owners?
The real pattern is that HOAs have been abusing their power; or in other cases are required because municipalities don't want to do their job. As a result the lawmakers will, unfortunately, overcorrect.
I would guess it will vary by state laws. How about a force liquidation of all tenants in common properties and any other joint properties to pay off the HOA debts and disband the HOA's. Maybe even treat it much like a chapter 11 bankruptcy / reorg? Or get investors to pick up properties?
There must be cases of HOA's being force disbanded / dissolved in the past to use as a template. I think it's just a majority vote from home owners and submission of articles of dissolution? If enough properties could be liquidated then a good incentive could be giving home owners back a few years of dues. As a bonus all the over-zealous rules that have grown over the decades get dissolved and people just default to county and state laws.
You pay the current owners as of the date of dissolution. The current owners bought into the HOA from the past owners, and thus assume future liabilities (or profits) from the HOA.
Edit: If/when it becomes known that there will be some kind of a payout, people selling their homes will need to adjust the price and/or expect some kind of credit from the buyer at closing.
You need a majority of the members to want to do it. All have to respond to the ballot. Past experience is that the members generally don’t vote even at the annual meeting.
I think what GP is saying is that if I was a homeowner for 30 years, paid HOA fees all those years, then last year sold to someone else, who gets the HOA reimbursement then? I paid thousands over years and would presumably get nothing, while some other guy who just moved in all of a sudden gets a big check? That seems unfair.
I would assume the sale price of your property would be higher if it's part of a well managed HOA with 500k in reserves than if it's part of a dysfunctional, insolvent HOA, so the previous property owner kinda already got paid out for their contributions.
It's like selling shares of a company with significant cash reserves before/after they choose to liquidate a chunk of them into dividends or stock buy-backs, I would hope you priced the shares accordingly and have nothing to be mad about.
Where I'm from we call a HOA a body corporate, and every home owner in the scheme has a % ownership in the BC. The title deed includes the ownership share. So if the house ownership is transferred, so is the share in the BC.
Size of the share is determined usually by the dwelling floor area divided by the sum total of all dwellings in the scheme.
So if you sell your house after decades of contributions, and then the BC is dissolved, then too bad, you sold your share in a going concern and lost your say in it's affairs.
Arguably you benefitted from the contributions from someone who came before you, and now someone will benefit from yours.
Hoa funds practically never get redistributed back to owners. I've never heard of such a case. We are only talking about it here because a legislature is talking about changing something state wide (and realistically this won't happen anyways).
So there is no realistic scenario where hoa reserves factor into home price
Reserves are money available for HOA expenses which would otherwise require new money from the owners. For that to factor into home prices, you just need buyers and sellers to be aware of this and what it means for their wallet in the future. Which may not be the norm since people are often clueless, but it doesn't seem completely absurd.
What you are saying is not typically in HOA governing documents nor State law so law would have to be changed and / or governing docs updated which would take a majority vote by all homeowners (60% in some cases per State law)
Imagine you dissolve a company that has a lot of money in the bank. What do you do with that money? Distributing it to the shareholders seems like the right way to dispose of it. What if somebody sold all their shares a day before? Well, they get nothing, that's how it works. The company's money should be accounted for in the share price, so it all works out, there's nothing unfair.
An HOA is no different. All the owners are also owners of the HOA. When you buy a place in the HOA you also buy into the HOA, and when you sell you also sell your interest in the HOA.
High amounts of margin debt indicate that a crash is coming. When a lot of the investments fail, the whole house of cards unwinds: A lot of the debts go bad, and then there isn't enough lending to create investments which are then used to create jobs.
I just traded in a 6.5 year old model 3 with 75k miles.
Battery was at 87% of capacity.
The big problem was cold snaps. It had the older heating system and would lose a lot of charge in the cold. Our 2022 Model Y with the newer heating system doesn't lose nearly as much charge in cold snaps.
Just had our PTC (resistive electric) heater replaced in a 2018 3 with 110k miles. Sure wish it had a heat pump, but we don't suffer much range as we live in a mild climate.
Oh yes, the entire heating/cooling system is quite a beautiful bit of engineering. a very elegantly designed “supper manifold” and heat exchanges that can push or pull heat from any device to another in the vehicle. They don’t even have heating elements anymore, they just run the motor less efficiently to produce more heat!
Yeah, the old one heated the battery through similar tech as heated seats. I think the only problem with the tesla heat pump is that it doesn't function well below 20-30F. I'm not sure if that's all heat pumps.
Well, the problem with the heat pumps in my house, is that near or below freezing temperatures, the outdoor unit has the tendency to freeze over, then either it has to run its resistive heater, or intermittently cut out and blow some cold air inside. It's rather uncomfortable.
I'm not sure you can get away with a design that has to sporadically turn itself off, and melt itself down in an EV.
There are some cars with panels, but they can only get about 10ish miles a day with good sunshine. Stationary panels work much, much better.
> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.
What does that have to do with EVs? The inflection point for adoption is solid state batteries, and there are some experimental factories under construction. (Solid state batteries don't loose charge when parked and can charge about as fast as filling a tank of gas.)
> Also, not exactly the same thing, but they could remove those warranties and instead get some nice replaceable battery cells in there.
Battery exchanges are impractical because the battery is part of the frame.
I don't think the bottleneck for charging is in the batteries, it's in electricity as an energy vector. By its very nature, someone is either instantaneously dispatching it from somewhere, or it's already being generated and curtailed. I just don't see that being cheaper than even biofuels in the long run, because time arbitrage matters. Making fuel with overcapacity that is worth zero (or less!) probably scales better than trying to store it all in batteries, because holes and containers will always be cheaper and easier to expand.
> I find myself peering into the abyss of thousands upon thousands of people trying to game the system and "advance their careers", which they presumably do well.
I find LinkedIn is a career honeypot at best, and a dead-end at worst. I put as little time as possible into it; I stay on it "just enough" that recruiters can contact me, but otherwise I don't waste my time with it.
(Depending on company culture) There is a lot of risk in making a bad hire, because in many companies it's very hard to fire someone for poor performance or being difficult to work with. In those situations, it's safer to leave a position vacant instead of making a bad hire.
One workaround is to hire contractors, or contract-to-hire. It does put risk on candidates who are leaving other jobs, though. (I won't contract-to-hire when I'm leaving a job, but I will if I'm unemployed.)
If anyone's still reading this: As I read this, I think it makes more sense for the police to replace radar with a high-resolution camera and a computer that can determine speed of vehicles.
It's hard to find exact stats because of how procurement and statistics works across jurisdictions, states, etc... but from what I CAN find it seems that LIDAR is more common than Radar these days. Over the whole country it looks like a slight majority lead for LIDAR, but in some (quite populous) states they almost only use LIDAR (PA for example had 93% of their tickets come from LIDAR, and I believe most of the rest used speed cameras or 'clocking' rather than RADAR).
LIDAR can't be used in motion, the LEO has to be stopped to be pointing it. Your laser detector will warn you, but it's already too late at that point; my two cents is using Waze/Google LEO alerts is state of the art at this point (until someone starts multilateration of patrol cars using their radio RF emissions and SDR networks).
To be clear, the reason for this is because the width of the beam requires aiming it like a sniper rifle, not because we can't compensate for operator motion.
Most speeding offences require the use of a speed measuring device to detect and 'prove' an offence. However, a number of jurisdictions have a separate offence where 'speeding' can still be charged, including 'in motion', without lidar or radar.
For example an officer following or pursuing an offender can apply a 'negligent' or 'wreckless' driving charge based in context of the officer's observations and evidence gathered, such as following or pursuing an offender well above the speed limit, observing the calibrated speedometer in the patrol car, without the use of a speed measuring device.
It's been a while since I've looked at it though some Australian police forces have a calibrated speedometer installed on the dash that reads out the vehicle's speed based from the rear differential[1], separately to the vehicle's 'stock' speedometer. The reasoning, I understand, is that this is more precise, as legally the stock speedometer can display a speed up to 10 km/h lower than actual (but not above).
It's the other way around: the speedo can overestimate your speed but not underestimate it. If you follow the limits with an overestimating speedo, you drive under the limit. With an underestimating speedo, you end up over.
Anecdotally, when I pass those roadside speed alert signs, the speed they show and the speed on my speedometer is rarely more than +/- 1 mph. I think modern speedometers are pretty accurate, as long as the OE tire size is used.
That my experience too, the speedometer, speed my phone thinks I'm going, and static radar signs all more or less agree. Plus the only times I've been nailed for speeding, I was speeding, not "just kissing" the limit. Point being I don't think +/-1mph really matters in practice 99%+ of the time, it's usually getting tagged when being overconfident in the passing lane or something like that.
This is why I don't see LIDAR used much in the western US. Cops are lazy like everybody else and they'd rather fish with a net. Radar is a net. LIDAR is a speargun. It's too much work.
Its like the dumbest product manager meme. “Humans use eyes for this right, why can’t our gadget?” “It must work at night? Oh we will just use a thermal camera” “Pixels in an image are not all from the same time instant? We will just pay 10x for a global shutter camera”
The list goes on and on and on. No, they will not just be replaced by whatever is producing loose AI facsimiles of the real world in a smartphone.
Average speed cameras exist and are basically that. ANPR at two locations and measure the time it took you to get between them. It's actually more fair because an occasional accidental overspeed won't get you but continuous speeding will.
reply