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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Thanks! I will give it a watch.

    It does seem to suck. I hope it can get better.

    Edit: Right, so in summary there is no regulation at all on American HOAs and they are also easily taken over by private companies. Makes sense they are bad. Though it’s still astonishing that an organisation can be so unregulated that it can enforce more fines than the local government, without any oversight.


  • Can someone explain why there are so many stories of bad HOAs in America? Don’t everyone in the HOA get to vote on who will be on the board and what rules there should be? Why do many of them seem to have strange and petty rules? What makes them able to issue fines for so small infractions? Where does the fine money go? Who sets up the HOA in the first place and what is the motivation to do so?

    We got plenty of similar associations where I live (both for apartments and houses, though not so often for fully detached homes) and they usually work great. Basically you pay a monthly fee to your HOA that the board use to keep the plumbing and outside areas maintained, pay for tv/internet for everyone at a much reduced cost or maintain other common areas like laundry rooms, guest apartment, parking garage, workshop etc. There are of course some restrictions too you need to follow, but those are usually minor and common sense anyways (like you shouldn’t play very loud music too late in an apartment in the middle of the week) and that you don’t get to do whatever you want to the outside of your place.

    (Another common rule is that you need HOA approval to sublet your apartment. This can be occasionally annoying to deal with, but is good because it prevents people from buying up apartments just to rent them out. And most of the time the HOA will approve you if you’re just moving away for a year or similar.)


  • In fact, functional cookies, that are only used for page functionality, like remembering your dark mode preference on the site itself, does not require consent under GDPR. Consent is only required for tracking cookies: cookies that are used to identify you (and then usually to remember what you’ve looked at, purchased before, etc).

    Unfortunately, because the law is not entirely clear, and because a lot of people don’t know exactly what cookies are or do, even sites that don’t even have tracking cookies have added consent banners just in case. And sites that don’t care have added banners without an equally visible “reject all” button, the absence of which doesn’t even make them compliant (but probably enough that they feel they can claim they thought they were).


  • I don’t have a spouse, no. But in this subthread we were discussing time available for recreation in general, and I personally definitely count spending time with family as recreation.

    And yes, If I’m not visiting family I do have time to sit in front of a computer for 14 hours on a Saturday, or paint, or go for a full-day biking trip, or anything else I want to do :) Why wouldn’t I?

    What I think some people do is take on responsibilities that they they think they “should” have, but not really appreciate the rewards of. Like cleaning their house every other day, or getting a pet, or a pool they don’t want to clean and barely use, or a too big garden they don’t really enjoy caring for. All those things will be worth it for some, but a burden for many others…

    But that’s why I’m asking, I want to verify if this is true or what else other people do when they say they don’t have time to have fun and relax.



  • Only 2 hours of recreation a day seems like a terrible time to me, unless you have kids, in which case I get that’s how it is when they’re small.

    I spend like 1 hour in the morning to get ready and travel to work, then about the same to get home and have dinner. Let’s say 1 hour for chores every day (though even if I do both laundry and cleaning the same day it won’t take that long, and I don’t do those every day.) That leaves me with at least 5 hours a day for recreation.

    But weekends are 14 hours of recreation per day, not 6.5 surely? 8 hours sleep + 2 hours for some extra time to cook good food etc. and we already did most chores during the week.

    I sometimes spend a weekend gaming, but most of the time many of those hours are spent on a variety of things like visiting family, sports, crafts, going downtown etc. because I like a lot of different recreation. But yeah, we can certainly agree on fuck arbitrary restrictions, and everyone should be able to own their own things. Would just be very interested to know where you are coming from with those numbers.

    I can only imagine you might be in the US and a lot of it is driving? That seems to suck, I would hate to drive for hours every day :(



  • While I definitely agree that most advertising these days is terrible, I do wonder how it should be done. How would you market a product you made? I genuinely want to know what you find acceptable.

    Say that you invent a new type of ladder that is much more stable than normal ones, or maybe you start 3D printing a very cool figurine that you’ve designed. In either case, you realize you have a product that some people will probably want to buy, if only they knew about it.

    You probably won’t go to an ad network, I wouldn’t. But do you make a post about it on Lemmy? That’s advertising. Do you tell your friends about it? Most of them probably don’t need a ladder, but maybe a couple would buy your figurine, though that is unlikely to be enough to kickstart your 3D design company.



  • My guess is that they will work just fine! Most distros will work equally well once set up, but some may require an extra step or two for driver installation. From what I’ve seen, Mint is a good starting point overall and is what I’m recommending to friends right now who are using Linux for the first time :)




  • You make very well expressed and thought provoking arguments!

    And while I can recognise myself in a lot of what you’re saying, I think that us millennials are just now beginning to reach the age (28 to 42 this year, by the definition I follow) where we have some weight to affect that system from the position in it that we grew up in.

    Any of us who wants to make our own space: work on a good website, start a coffee shop the way we want it, run a node in a federated social network… I feel it’s not until now that any of us have had the skillset, long-term motivation and economical position to be able to do any of those things seriously. Building a better internet is what we are doing right here and now :)



  • True. Doing that wouldn’t be easy right now.

    However, it doesn’t necessarily need to get back to Earth. If we have power up in space, it gets much easier to run mining operations on asteroids, the moon etc. As soon as we have both power and minerals, we can also start putting factories in orbit instead of on Earth, reducing energy need down here.

    The stuff those factories produce can be dropped down to Earth, OR we use that stuff in space to build even more infrastructure. In fact, at this point it becomes feasible to build really nice space stations that people can go live on if they want. Eventually, we’d even have the production capacity to build O’Neill Cylinders.

    Now we can just continue building and mining in space, while developing or preserving Earth as we like.


  • It sounds like they should be more careful with how they store their methane.

    I do want to stress though, that I think that space technology is the single most important subject we can focus on, except maybe medical. If extravagant trips for billionaire’s can fund a bunch of it for now, that’s fine by me. Only really means that governments should be doing more.

    Every day, the sun emits roughly a billion times more energy than the earth uses. That is, all our technology, all our food, all animals, all plants and all the energy needed to create all weather combined consumes about one billionth of the sun’s output. The rest is sent into deep space.

    This waste of the sun’s energy is so vast, that we as a species absolutely want to start capturing more of it as soon as possible, rather than squabbling in the mud for fractions of the 0.0000001% of the sun’s output the earth uses today. Obviously we need our planet to survive until then, but getting proper infrastructure in orbit and beyond is such a massive game changer.


  • I would say that 90 F won’t be a problem on an ebike, since you can rely a lot on the motor, and you have air flowing all around you. I mostly use a regular bike but then I just bring a spare t-shirt.

    I would rather say that I don’t like biking when it’s below 35 F. Still doable, but not having to deal with that it should be really nice for you :)

    Max allowed speed for ebikes on bikelanes varies but should be about 20 mph if you’re using only the motor.