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!!!

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.

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.

The moment I start to think about meditating, my mind explodes with alternative ideas until I forget. In fact it’s so efficient at not meditating, that even though I have time and space set aside for it daily on my calendar, some subprocess in my brain still often subverts the whole thing. It’s a scary place before I get there.

But I have never once completed a meditation that I regretted. Even the meditations that are difficult to get through - usually because my mind is really jumpy - still feel like a nice piece of self care at the end.

I think the more routine the practice, the easier it is to start and better your mind becomes at focusing on your breath without allowing all the various stressors of the moment take control. And that is a powerful muscle to build up.

It sounds like they’re going to rewrite a bunch of code and decided to not invest the capital into Linux.

That’s a strange problem to have these days since libraries like this are often designed to run on all platforms, but what do I know.

But if it’s true that fewer than 1% of users are on Linux and it’s costing them more than other platforms, it makes no financial sense to keep it going.

Driver support was so dicey. If you had anything even remotely not mainstream, you would be compiling your own video driver, or network driver, or basically left to figure it out for any other peripheral. So many devices like scanners and very early webcams just claimed zero Linux support at all, but you could at times find someone else’s project that might work.

I tried to switch to Linux as a desktop system several times in the late 90s but kept going back to windows because hardware support just wasn’t there yet.

Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.

Anybody seriously believing this has a misunderstanding of how little people care about what OS they use and how much they care that it works the way they expect.

IMO all forms of taking care of yourself are self care. You have to love yourself before you can offer anything to anybody else.

The effort starts an upward spiral of increasing rewards. You feel better about yourself, people treat you differently, you feel more confident, and the cycle repeats.