HoA is not meant for access to a park. HoA is supposed to be for maintaining public spaces inside a community - a pool, community center, landscaping around common areas, enforce basic rules so people can coexist in tight spaces.
HoA might be pointless if everyone lives on 5 acre lots where the stuff your neighbor does won’t really affect you but if you have homes squeezed into tiny 8k sq ft lots, we absolutely need some basic rules to live together in such close proximity. The rules can just be common sense rules that everyone can agree on but something needs to exist so one person can’t ruin it for everyone else. In a condo, you can’t just blast music during the quiet hours so others can sleep and go to work. In a neighborhood street, you don’t get to permanently park your giant RV and a boat and inconvenience others because you bought too large of an RV to fit in your own lot or are too cheap to pay for storage somewhere else and so now you have decided it to make it be everyone’s problem. This is just common sense which a typical considerate person would follow even without rules on the books but there are always a few that think they can just do whatever they want.
That's what national laws and the city government do in Germany, and I presume a lot of the rest of the world. I live in a neighborhood where the average lot size is something around 250 square meters (2800 sq ft) for the single-family houses, and we're fine.
Someone is making racket after 10pm or before 7am, or at all on Sunday? If they won't quiet down after being asked nicely, or you can't reach them, call the city - that's against national law. Someone decides to park something too wide for the street or over a certain size and weight? Call the non-emergency number, and a very eager tow-truck driver will show up with a quickness you wish ADAC (German AAA) would. Something has been parked on the street and not moved within a certain period (that I don't know off the top of my head) - tell the city that there's an abandoned vehicle and they'll put a sticker on it alerting the owner that they have 48 hours to move it. If parking is really tight in a neighborhood, the city will create a parking permit zone if you and your neighbors campaign for it. Someone doesn't mow their yard by July (before that, it's for the sake of wildlife) or won't get their tree that is growing over your fence trimmed? The city will make them if social pressure doesn't do it first.
Don’t confuse yourself. HOAs are in addition to state/county/city regulations. A lot of local governments allow HOAs to enforce additional quiet hours or other things.
I’ve never lived in a HOA that had to maintain roads, sewers, or street lights. All the infrastructure is covered by the county or city. Neighborhood pools, playgrounds, and common areas are HOA. That’s in addition to local parks, aquatic centers, and all the other local public service stuff the county and cities provide.
I am president of our HOA board here in so cal and our biggest line item to maintain is our asphalt roads. They are technically private streets so we can set whatever rules we want (within the bounds of the law and needing a board approval) but we are definitely owners of the streets and have to pay to maintain them (which is absurdly expensive if you weren't aware how much asphalt work costs).
If HOAs stopped there, these points could be reasonably argued. But those I’ve worked with are as much, or more preoccupied with enforcing petty aesthetic consistency standards and pursuing perceived deviations with a zeal that would make one believe that the issues actually mattered.
I am conflating HOA with condo maintenance, but to add an anecdote re: Florida - my dad's condo was reassessed twice over the last 3 years. The first time, the balcony was cordoned off for about 5 months. This time, his balcony has been inaccessible for 4 months and ongoing. His maintenance fees jumped 80% to almost $2K for over this period. This is on top of mortgage. He paid for the view which he gets no access to. Somebody on that management board is laughing hard on their way to the bank.
Beware anybody who claims property-law is naturally simple. Triply-so so if they believe other laws should be "simplified" so that every problem is though the lens of ownership rights.
That's how you get Mr. Burns blocking out Springfield's sun.
City services are not as good as the private services I pay for though. The area behind my gate is a lush oasis; the surrounding area is bare minimum. My parks are pristine and have no dog poop. The public parks are not that. My life will not be subject to a large number of neighbor inconveniences; police would not do something about a dog waking me at nights or littering or speeding past my road where my kids play at 50mph. I get no solicitors ever because of the gate. The guards at the gate require salaries that someone has to pay for.
It's left fairly ambiguous by Frank Herbert's books. The Jihad is implied to have taken place over ten thousand years before the beginning of Dune - it's ancient history to everyone involved*, so it's only natural that the details are a little hazy.
*: except Leto II, and he doesn't say much about it
Interesting to note that despite the epochal changes Leto II wrought on human society in service of the “Golden Path”, he retained the Butlerian proscription against computers—despite his personal interest in & use of Ixian devices.
(This may have been to postpone or prevent the breaking of the Spice/Guild monopoly on interstellar travel by the Ixians.)
Leto II had visions of AI-driven Ixian hunter-killers annihilating all human life in the universe. That probably had something to do with it.
After the Scattering and the fulfillment of his eugenics program with the Siona gene, he no longer cares, because it is no longer possible for even AI to eradicate humanity.
The Siona gene didn't actually remove prescience, it hid people from prescience. That's why Leto II is still able to control events as far in the future as Chapterhouse Dune.
This is an important distinction. It's also the case that Leto needed the Ixians for the no-ship technology, which he also regarded as of extreme importance for the same reason. Which also, remember, the Idaho gholas had to be confined to no-ships so they, lacking the Siona gene, wouldn't be visible to prescience.
If you make jam at home you’re going to be adding a very similar amount of sugar. Ingredient splitting may be an issue, but a sweet fruit preserve is a silly choice for showing it.
They also charge a pretty hefty membership fee if you’re not at least a PR, and charge for physical book reservations. It was pretty shocking for me after the California library system.
And I’m a taxpayer.
Net, I pay more taxes than a citizen with the same income.
For libraries, does it really matter who pays taxes and who doesn’t? Seems like it’s a public good that should be available regardless of ability to pay.
I haven't looked in to this in ... decades, but I seem to remember stored procs executed measurably faster 20+ years ago. That was one reason a project I was on pushed them. And the benchmarks they showed... it wasn't unreasonable. But we have faster networks, more memory, ssd, etc - I'm unsure if speed is a big reason any more. IIRC cached execution plans was a big win back then, but may not be as a win today. I'm thinking about sybase and mssql from the late 90s when I was first getting in to this topic.
But... over the years, I've seen push to sprocs where the logic was never version controlled or subject to the same level of testing the regular app source code was. The DBA folks had total control and were treated as a separate class of engineer than mere 'app' engineers, which caused all sorts of problems...
I have this question as well .. granted there are a few targeted cases where SPs make sense, I generally agree with the headache perspective of SPs - such as: the business logic that inevitably ends up in SPs - how do you go about unit testing that in isolation, and particularly from a behavioral standpoint?
Maybe they’re not properly called sprocs, but there’s at least one good use for logic stored in the database: data retention. I like CREATE EVENT / pg_cron for trimming append-only tables when the data has aged out.
If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc?
What does it offer there that existing workflows can’t support? Do those advantages make up for the transcoding that every web publisher would need to do to make the outputs useful on the web?
> If JPEG XL doesn’t become useful on the web, is it really likely to become popular with camera manufacturers, professional image editing tools, etc?
I suspect that eventually, the browser makers that are reluctant to add JpegXL support will do so, even if reluctantly, and so it will eventually "become useful on the web".
The reason why is Adobe added JpegXL as a compression format for PDF's, and as every browser maker wants their browser to also be a "PDF viewer", this means they must include a JpegXL decoder to be able to support PDF's going forward. If they must have a JpegXL decoder anyway, it is not that difficult to also add it as another supported format for the tag.
You used to be able to DoS the user's browser by sticking thousands of tiny animated gifs on the same page. You can't do that any more (AFAIK) because that's a bug so the browser developers fixed it. This is the same thing.
It's odd that apple didn't proactively guard against such concerns when adding a new format.
Most people using dedicated cameras shoot in RAW, then use a program to process and export the photos afterwards. So camera manufacturer buy-in isn't super important.
I've been exporting in JXL from Lightroom for a little while now, you get slightly smaller image sizes and HDR with no real downsides. On the web I imagine this will translate to higher quality images on social media since platforms can get more out of the same file size. It will also likely be the end of HEIF which is a pain to deal with due to patents.
The second paragraph doesn’t follow from my question, because it assumes JPEG XL does become useful on the web. The author believes AVIF is too far ahead already.
I suspect the name alone will help drive adoption, especially from non-technical people. Heck, I'm reasonably technical myself (but not expert in image formats) and my first instinct on encountering AVIF was to say "AVIF? Does that stand for AVI File?" And I would have assumed that it's a video format, not an image format. Whereas JPEG XL would have everyone who has ever used a digital camera saying "Ah, it's got JPEG in the name, that means it's a photo format".
Never underestimate the power of a well-known brand name in communicating things to people who know nothing else about the subject. The name is a big part of why I suspect JPEG XL will take off in popularity. (The lossless conversion to and from classic JPEG format is the other main reason).
For me, the name JPEG XL evoked a feeling of “this is going to be a lossy-only format with visible artifacts when used on raster images”, so I don’t think it’s a good name.
There’s also a migration path where jpeg can be converted to jpeg xl losslessly. You can convert a jpeg to jxl then back to jpeg and its byte for byte identical.
JXL is moments away from having almost universal web support. Safari supports it already, Chrome and Firefox are already set to turn the flag on by default in the next releases.
Web publishers should definitely be stripping metadata at least, and transcoding isn't much harder. For anyone who cares about bandwidth, transcoding to efficient formats is non-negotiable; if you don't, then why do anything? Just ship PNG, who cares?
I think one of the compelling use cases for camera manufacturers would be an interoperable format for editors. Since JXL has support for so many channels, you could load your image into an editor, edit it, add layers, etc., and export as JXL, which could be used for other things.
> Web publishers should definitely be stripping metadata at least
No, they shouldn't. Not blindly. Metadata can include copyright license information, such that stripping it violates the license to reproduce the image.
