Its to distinguish them from traffic that originates from someone spinning up a thousand VPS instances in a datacenter. Its very easy to block data center addresses, but hard to block residential addresses without impacting real customers.
The marketers have completely taken over Reddit as of 2015 or so. Probably a couple years before as well. I wouldn't trust opinions from there to be organic at all.
I don't think you understand the graph. This is what percentage of income comes from wages. So for every dollar that people earned as income on their tax sheet, 42% was listed as coming from wages. The other 58% comes from other sources like non-wage employer compensation, rental income, private business income, etc.
But they do tend to have better speedy trial definitions and such. Although it seems they are rolling back bail reform (which may have been too lenient, but they didn't find a middle solution). And it seems they still have ex parte protection from abuse orders, which are notoriously abused in divorce cases.
>The DA (District Attorney) is elected, so they love to cite their tough-on-crime statistics.
Its the opposite nowadays. The current meta is to advertise yourself as light on crime. So you get to the point where Philadelphia has an open-air drug market filled with fentanyl, the DA was actually impeached for dereliction of duty by the Pennsylvania house of representatives, and Philadelphians STILL re-elected him with over 75% of the vote.
Think the Philly DA situation is a bit more unique and interesting. Yeah, agree, he was one of the first progressive DA's elected in recent times, and he is in many ways light on crime. But he just got re-elected by a 75% in 2025 for a third term. That's incredible and think there is a reason for this.
Am no expert on him, but as we're all talking about here, the legal system is really messed up. Yeah, there are a lot of terrible processes and laws that get in the way of justice, and a lot of the things his office did made a lot of sense.
Probably one of the biggest was the "Elimination of Cash Bail for Low-Level Offenses." The cash bail system for minor crimes really screws poor people, who can't make bail for things like shoplifting, and have to stay in jail until their pre-trial. (it's often something like $1000, which for middle-class people is not a big deal at all). But imagine a teen who had to stay out of school for a month or even two just because they stole something for $20 and his family can't put together $1k. The teen gets behind in class and stops trying, and this becomes the start of getting further and further behind in life. And a similar situation happens with poor working-class people for a minor crime, they can't pay bail, so they are in jail and can't work. They are often fired or just get into debt because they're not drawing a salary.
I don't know about anything about open drug markets, but think overall what the Philly DA seemed sensible (and just looked briefly and it seems like the crime statistics turned out well in Philly, but that could be from a number of things).
It's a feature of the US hatred of the homeless and lack of mental health care for the poor. The affected people end up clustered in cities because that's where the money is, and in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles because that's where they won't freeze to death in winter.
Think some of it this as we don’t have a strong safety net in the US. But also read that is because cities are just so expensive. Yeah, for people making something like $40k/yr it’s much easier to fall into major debt. Had a couple of roommates who went through this, staying financially solvent in the city was a huge deal. It seemed like they were constantly treading water.
But, agree that we as a country can strengthen to safety net, probably good for us as a whole.
You're not entirely wrong but I think that description of the situation is rather heavily colored by partisanship. Being lenient about a very limited subset of crime that "the system" is particularly ineffective at dealing with (to the point that it is arguably racist/classist/etc) is viewed favorably by certain (primarily urban) demographics. When you have broad support for an elected official who is exercising a great deal of discretion to not enforce the law that should trigger fundamental changes to the system as opposed to impeachment.
But that waters down the argument to the point of meaningless. For instance, did the egg shortage make the housing crisis worse, because every potential homebuyer has less money to buy a house?
I mean, if someone legally forced the homeowner to pay sell the house to them because there was a clause that required the owner to pay tens of thousands of dollars for expensive eggs and then sold the house again after and hoped to recoup the costs, then sure
>Florida ranks 1st of the states on HOA Spy for foreclosure suits brought by associations, with 10,296 of 14,168. The count depends on which courts are indexed in each state as well as on the associations, so it is a count of records, not a rate.
Florida is known for having the strongest "sunshine" laws in the country, that make government records transparent. That makes this statistic pretty useless.
Same goes with the whole "Florida man" shtick--news channels and YouTube channels dredging for wild stories are more likely to get the info on Florida-specific misdemeanors due to sunshine laws.
Court records are public everywhere. How companies like RealtyTrac get their stats/data, they grab records from county recorder offices. So what does that have to do with sunshine laws?
Technically public and transparent are different things. I looked up a couple HOAs on HOA Spy that I know have filed liens in my state–they come up green.
It is GOOD that HOAs can bring foreclosure suits. Suits are the only way to get maintenance fees from some owners. Without maintenance fees HOAs decline and their owners' values decrease. Foreclosure also has the side-effect of removing a badly-acting owner from the association and replacing them with one who WILL pay their bills promptly.
I think that property taxes and similars (e.g. HOA dues) should accrue as a lien against a property but not be foreclosable during the original owner's life. Then you create a state-backed entity that provides guarantees on loans against those liens for the municipalities and HOA subject to certain rules. (They could still factor those liens privately sans limitation.)
Really? In fifty years of home owning, not once with the "benefit" of a HOA, I've yet to see an owned house value decline.
Some countries just bypassed this entire US obsession with redlining and keeping the others out. Maybe try working more on community and less on uniformity.
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.
I did state as a fact that they are not required for park management. They're also less common than in the US and, so far at least, far less draconian (seemingly) in comparison to nightmare USofA HOA stories.
HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority. The legal frameworks allowing their existence should be dismantled with extreme prejudice and at the expense of those who benefit from the current system.
> HOAs shouldn’t exist. They have no justification for authority
Freedom of assembly. If my neighbors and I buy stuff, put it in a box and then buy and create rules around how its benefits and costs are divided, and I sell my share in the box, that should be fine.
Yeah but if you sell that box/stuff to another person, they own it now and shouldn't be bound by your rules. If that's not true, I didn't actually buy anything. I just paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have my name put on someone else's contract without being able to negotiate any terms.
It's like "buying" digital movies. The button says Purchase but you/Amazon still get to dictate terms long after the sale.
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