The board is the developer. Sub-contractors have not been paid, lawsuits filed. Developer had contractor's license suspended for fraud -- promised pool, lawn care, mailboxes, didn't deliver.
The homes in this neighborhood are fairly average single-family homes, ~$400k, roughly the median home price in the US now. There's no shared roof or walls that would be the HOAs responsibility. There's no community pool. Does not appear to be gated. Only expense as far as I can tell is the periodically repaving street, salting, perhaps some gardening -- $2500/mo, even $1250/mo is not supported by those expenses.
Who is the developer? What is their financial situation? Did they take on debt to finance development when rates were near 0% when this development was built ~2020, now that debt has come due but rates are > 5%, and they cannot pay, so they figure they can up the HOA to drop the property prices, evict the homeowners, then drop the HOA again and resell the houses for a profit to shore up their balance sheet?
Developer is a guy named Aaron Guess, Story Homes LLC. Had his contractor license suspended for fraudulent statements (eg promised a pool, mailboxes, lawn care -- there's none) with a $15k fine. There are 80 homes in the HOA, a little over 20 are occupied, developer owns rest, is board president, and controls votes of the unoccupied homes presumably. Subcontractors have not been paid and have sued. Management company terminated contract with the HOA.
This has fraud and embezzlement written all over it -- developer is using the HOA as his personal piggybank.
Why not work to become a billionaire, then donate your wealth? Or begin donating your earnings today? I would guess most people on Hacker News are in the upper decile of wealth globally — there are still billions of people living poverty. Feels like a fairer way to help people than trying to do it with other people’s wealth — the latter feels like hypocrisy.
Nobody in history has ever worked hard enough to earn a billion dollars fairly.
It's crazy to me that you'd defend these people who have corrupted and degraded the entire system - the government, the finance sector, the media - to only favor holding everyone else to ransom. Not producing but holding. Societal wealth stolen without paying tax to benefit society. People didn't choose this.
I'm not starving, sure. And I'd be absolutely fine paying significantly more tax than I am now.
But I'm not about to voluntarily donate while I am still forced to work towards retirement, and there are people controlling literally 10,000 times more assets than I am that pay zero tax.
Do you not see the inevitable outcome of that?
You and your children, and their children, will own nothing because the super-rich will outbid you and everyone else for everything.
> Billionaires stole the profits of our work from us
This seems like a very skewed perspective. You work for a salary, I imagine, and you freely agreed to take that job and in return get a salary, even if the company was losing money or its share price was plummeting. I.e. taking a salary because of the security of payments.
Lots of people who invest in businesses lose all their money. You can't point at the very very peak performers who a) didn't lose their money and b) made a really valuable company instead, and decide that they owe you something other than what you agreed you would work for. That's just not how agreements work, and it's also the apex fallacy[0].
But there still needs to be some mechanism to limit wealth inequality or we still get the inevitable conclusion.
The US minimum wage hasn't changed in 16 years!
Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.
It's just not fair at all. Governments are funneling money to the rich hand over fist. It's obvious who they represent and who they don't.
You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.
I don't mind this, because minimum wage is a national minimum. States (and even more fine-grained than that) need to have contextualised minimum wage, or it's just silly. That's why it hasn't changed. Minimum wage increases wages at the expense of reducing employment, for any job that isn't worth that wage. You can't increase the national US minimum wage to what would get you an apartment in California and expect jobs to exist in Appalachia.
Honestly, the national minimum wage seems almost pointless. States should handle it, as they can contextualise at least a bit better.
And it not changing isn't evidence of anything when state-level minimum wages exist.
> Which means many of these peak performers are built on the back of poverty, people who don't have the luxury of "freely agreeing" to take their labor elsewhere.
Thus I don't think it means that. And also - your false dichotomy of you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage is not helpful either. People are paid what they can negotiate. Companies pay what they can negotiate. Companies exist if they charge a low enough price for their level of service or product. It's a tri-party system. The existence of other companies in in-demand businesses is what drives up wages, as if you don't like your job you can move, and people do. That's why I would say where possible, things that stop new companies springing up should be removed. Thinking it's all about national minimum wage is honestly the wrong approach, in my opinion.
> You have to agree that trickle down is not trickling down.
I don't know what this means. I didn't mention anything trickling down.
re: the minimum wage. I'm in Australia, not the US, but is there any place in the US where a fulltime worker on minimum wage is paid enough to have a reasonable life, let's say a 2 bedroom home with two children, without struggling?
I was not implying that "you're either a wealthy business owner or you're on national minimum wage". You can safely substitute a "middle class" person, or even a "rich, but not super-rich" person, for "on national minimum wage", because in a few years I believe the middle class will completely cease to exist.
This is already happening and is actually the inevitable conclusion of all the funneling of money towards the super-rich and the subsequent increase in wealth inequality.
I wasn't even actually talking about business owners, but the super-rich that those business owners borrow money and pay interest to.
That's the trickling down I'm talking about, which you didn't mention because it appears you don't think that som trickling down is even necessary.
Some trickle down or other mechanism to limit the rich from owning everything is necessary if that inevitable outcome of a tiny group of people owning absolutely everything is to be avoided.
Do you disagree with that?
I believe you're alluding to some kind of nearly perfect system where large businesses have not created artificial regulatory and other moats to protect their business and hamstring competitors.
eg, imagine a large factory that employs most of the people in an area. Potential workers for that factory do not have the ability to negotiate a fair wage, and also don't have the mobility to uproot their entire life to move somewhere else. Also another company cannot reasonably expect to move in and out-compete for the workers in that area. Thus the fictional factory is in a massively favorable position to "negotiate" wages for its workers.
I think we have largely differing views on the fundamental fairness of a system where low-paid workers are expected to negotiate with multinational corporations that already have all the advantages in any negotiation.
Those corporations are also able to monetize the profits from those workers productivity to actively lobby governments for even more favorable conditions in those "negotiations".
I believe it is a very unfair system.
I doubt we will end up finding a middle ground here if you do not think a system where the super-rich are not limited in some way from accumulating wealth is unfair.
Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway has over $300B in cash reserves, Buffett owns 15% of Berkshire and directs investments — he chose to park all that value in cash reserves, roughly $50B of that is his share.
> While Buffett has stated that Berkshire Hathaway will maintain a permanent cash reserve of about $30 billion to fund potential insurance payouts, Bloomstran takes a more conservative approach and adds about $50 billion to that reserve level to account for a full year's worth of potential insurance losses.
There is additional context there explaining why Berkshire holding cash reserves is unique to their needs, and historically has only represented 17.5% of their total assets.
Billionaires and large firms are not sitting on piles of cash Scrooge McDuck style, because holding cash is costly.
I’ve used first@last.name for the last 10 years or so. There have been probably a half dozen web forms where a regex expected 2-3 characters and I input an old gmail account that forwards to this address. Over the phone, the first@last part is easier to communicate since customer rep generally has the name info already. The .name throws them for a moment, but I’ve had one or two even tell me “oh, that’s cool, how did you do that?” which feels nice. It wasn’t my first choice, lastname.com was taken, but I like the precision of .name, arguably the most accurate TLD for a personal email address.
In some jurisdictions, like in Norway, for instance, if you are a craftsman working on your own property, you are (supposed) to pay VAT on the added value your work brings to the property.
I expect very few people to report this to the authorities, unless, of course, you are going to do something which is significant enough to require you to apply for a building permit.
You earn gross income with your labor, on which you pay tax. The net is used to pay Jiffy Lube, which pays employer taxes on the mechanic’s labor, and passes that cost onto you, the customer. If you do your own labor for yourself, pay neither.
I think there’s a common misunderstanding that with IPv6 anyone can connect to anyone else. That’s not true.
My laptop has an IPv6 address, as does the router that routes its traffic. There’s no NAT, that’s true, but there’s still a firewall — only inbound packets from a destination host and port that have been sent to are allowed in. And in enterprise environments, from what I’ve seen, there’s a symmetric NAT on IPv6 anyway — packet comes from a different IPv6 address and randomized port than the one client sent it from, making peer connectivity impossible, as the source port varies by destination host and port.
I suspect one is masking that a call center is in a low wage country, e.g. make customer in U.S. believe they’re talking to someone in U.S. while paying a fraction of the U.S. wage.
Right. I thought of that too, but it doesn’t mask accents, at least not yet
I suppose if you could make agents all sound the same they would be interchangeable, and companies always love that. It’s Anjali or Ligaya or Dolores but now they all sound like “Becky”?
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