The Very-Many-Questions-Not-Worth-Their-Own-Thread Thread 36

Status
Not open for further replies.
It's not an order.

Transfer deeds to houses built in relatively new developments include restrictions on individual decisions on what to do with the house. Those decisions effectively get placed in the HOA's hands. Failing to abide by their guidelines means that the HOA can fine you.

HOAs effectively have the goal of making sure that a place is a "good neighborhood". Sometimes this takes the form of services provided for residents. (In other jurisdictions, these services are sometimes handled by the local government.) Sometimes it takes the form of limiting what residents can do so that they don't negatively impact the lives or property values of their neighbors. They may have limitations on landscaping, house additions, fencing, house paint, sports paraphernalia, and so on; it's possible to get these limitations revised, but there's usually an approval process for that.

When this crosses the line into Stepfordian behavior is up to the observer.

Some HOAs have real teeth, and others don't. I worked for UPS for some time, and some of the neighborhoods I visited had HOA rules about picking up your own dog's poop. Those rules were...infrequently followed at best, as I soon came to learn. I had to learn how to balance safety, speed, size of package load, and avoiding dog poop. But then there are the HOAs that impose exorbitant fines for, like, an unapproved shade of beige on the house's siding.

Sidenote: a homeowners' association can legally order people to have a flowerbed? In the land of the free?)


To put it another way, as @JollyRoger has often said, homeowners associations are the most oppressive level of government in the US.


How do you control the stink?

For the most part people are only composting vegetable waste and yard waste. There's little smell to it. And what smell there is, since this is happening in open air, and not all that quickly, blows away faster than it accumulates to the point of being noxious.
 
It's not an order.

Transfer deeds to houses built in relatively new developments include restrictions on individual decisions on what to do with the house. Those decisions effectively get placed in the HOA's hands. Failing to abide by their guidelines means that the HOA can fine you.

HOAs effectively have the goal of making sure that a place is a "good neighborhood". Sometimes this takes the form of services provided for residents. (In other jurisdictions, these services are sometimes handled by the local government.) Sometimes it takes the form of limiting what residents can do so that they don't negatively impact the lives or property values of their neighbors. They may have limitations on landscaping, house additions, fencing, house paint, sports paraphernalia, and so on; it's possible to get these limitations revised, but there's usually an approval process for that.

When this crosses the line into Stepfordian behavior is up to the observer.

Some HOAs have real teeth, and others don't. I worked for UPS for some time, and some of the neighborhoods I visited had HOA rules about picking up your own dog's poop. Those rules were...infrequently followed at best, as I soon came to learn. I had to learn how to balance safety, speed, size of package load, and avoiding dog poop. But then there are the HOAs that impose exorbitant fines for, like, an unapproved shade of beige on the house's siding.
So…
To put it another way, as @JollyRoger has often said, homeowners associations are the most oppressive level of government in the US.
i.e. only in 'Murica. It's almost like living in a company town!
It doesn't smell unless you get down on you hands and knees and sniff it. Mice live in it and our cats often go hunting there. Every once in a while I go out and mix it with a shovel.
That's more of a bioreactor for toxoplasmosis than a compost heap.
Your cats have discovered the perfect place to farm mice (which because of the toxo don't fear them).
You could raise worms and use them for fishing. Some people here do that.
If your compost heap stinks, you aren't doing it right.

Stinkage indicates anaerobic fermentation, which likely means that you've added too much soft nitrogenous 'green' waste to the pile (kitchen scraps, grass clippings, green leafage), and not balanced that with enough carbon-containing 'brown' waste (wood chips, shredded newspaper, dry leaves, etc.). And an anaerobic heap is also bad for the environment, because it means your organic (carbon) waste is being converted to methane instead of carbon dioxide.

But if you keep your pile balanced, and aerated (like BJ says; though because of the way I've subdivided my bin, I find using a garden fork as a 'deep rake' is more efficient than turning using a shovel), and shielded from heavy rain (or at least well-drained), and accessible to worms, then everything should rot down with no stink, and right quick (in the warm season anyway: decomposition will obviously slow down/stop during winter).

Compost tumblers are also an option, or wormeries. They don't smell either.
There's always something new to learn. :)
What does stink is manure. The Irvine Company (which unsurprisingly, owns a lot of property in Irvine) adds it to all of their landscaping 3 or 4 times a year here and it's pretty terrible. It may be a compost/manure mix instead of straight manure but it stinks to high hell and sort of fouls up the air every time they do it. It's frustrating because I just can't believe that this amount of fertilizer is necessary to keep the plants happy. And if it is necessary then they need to plant hardier species. The building I live in and all the buildings around me are owned by the company and it can be a bit overwhelming when they fertilize everything and takes away from the beauty of the landscaping in my opinion.
:twitch: You can have companies own the housing in a city? That's, well, you're very close to living in a literal company town.
 
:twitch: You can have companies own the housing in a city? That's, well, you're very close to living in a literal company town.

They're just called the Irvine Company, they don't have some kind of charter to own all the real estate in Irvine.
 
Yes, well… here I've seen a marked rise in the proportion of apartments and houses owned by individual landlords, but an actual legally incorporated company dedicated to owning residential real estate is pracically non-existent.

It just sounds so weird, almost as if you'd been taken over by zaibatsu/chaebol-style groups.
 
Irvine's portfolio contains plenty of commercial stuff too. I know this because a large part of my job for the last three years has been researching real estate companies so we can organize the workers in their buildings more easily.
 
So it's definitely zaibatsu/chaebol 'Murica then.
 
That's more of a bioreactor for toxoplasmosis than a compost heap.
Your cats have discovered the perfect place to farm mice (which because of the toxo don't fear them).
We've been living pretty intimately with many, many cats for over 40 years. So, if at this stage, toxo kills us, we're good with that. If it kills the cats, well that is a different story, but life moves on within us and without us. :p
 
Is there a really high demand for amoxicillan or something? It just seems to be an antibiotic. Site's getting flooded with spam comments selling the stuff.
 
Amoxicillin is one of the base antibiotics for treating like anything (skin infections, throat infections, urinary tract infections), together with Penicillin G (or was it V?), and a few others.

I wouldn't read anything too big into this though. It just means that some bigger spam network got paid to distribute this. It's probably all the same source.Will probably die down within a week or so.
 
I think I had to take some in grade 11 or 12 when I got a bad throat that wasn't healing up. It left a super weird copper taste in my mouth. Since my throat wasn't bad enough to keep me out of school, I got permission to chew gum in class just to get rid of the taste.
 
They're just called the Irvine Company, they don't have some kind of charter to own all the real estate in Irvine.
They founded the town, put down the initial plans for it and own a good chunk of the property in the area. I don't know that they are a monopoly but they have a ton of weight in the market here. Where I live in particular is essentially 100% Irvine Company owned. They even have their own private security company that has committed some really egregious acts like proactively cooperating with ICE to drive out 'illegal' immigrants. Scare quotes because the drag net of course scoops up plenty of legal immigrants as well. It's been reported that they harvest license plate data and the like and just hand it over wholesale to ICE to help force undesirables out of town.
 
i.e. only in 'Murica.
As far as I'm aware, similar forms of ownership exist in most common law jurisdictions. Australia's strata/community title is a close analogue to condominium/homeowner association, and I believe the UK uses leasehold or freehold + strict positive covenants. I think the major difference might just be that community title is just more pervasive in American property ownership.
 
Yes, but the case mentioned by hobbs goes far beyond the usual (to my knowledge) practices in those other jurisdictions. See post #792 especially.
 
any way to make the windows 10 default email thing not have the focus/other stuff spilt?

it's extremely cumbersome
 
I participate in Martial Arts tournaments in the form of Taekwondo. There are different forms of completion you can do there.

One is creating a dance performance that incorporates the Martial Arts moves.

The problem is I have no idea how to dance even compared average person and as such my choreography knowledge is next to nothing.

I live in a small town (less than 30,000 people with virtually nothing else within a 60 mile radius) so place I can go for instruction are borderline nonexistent, at least to the best of my knowledge.

Anything I can do?
 
Watch youtube vids on it?
This is how I learned how to take apart and fix a broken monitor. Of course, I had to get a monitor first in order to see the video. Such is life.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom