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Random Chat, Thoughts, Posts, and/or Rants Thread

Kak

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Are you in USA? Is this a USA thing?

The only place I have ever seen HOA in Canada is things with shared spaces and such. Places like apartment buildings, condo's, those brownstone style places that have a bunch of houses attached together. Some Duplex areas, again usually a giant shared lawn in the back, or shared parking, and all the houses have to look similar. Golf course communities... those sorts of places. Overall this is a miniscule portion of the housing.

Every time I hear about USA it seems like if you just live in a house it has an HOA. Am I reading too much in to that? If so it would drive me absolutely insane. Why would someone else get to have even the remotest say in what I do with my property just because they happen to live in the same community as me?
Ha, every home I’ve ever lived in had a Bolshevik HOA. You need to move to the country in the USA to not have one.
 
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Kak

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I'm very blessed to have a brick suburban home in a city with no HOA!
You should play the lotto LOL!

That’s rare.

Although, I’ve never made effort to avoid them. I just live where I want to live, so it is 100% my fault.
 
G

Guest-5ty5s4

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You should play the lotto LOL!

That’s rare.

Although, I’ve never made effort to avoid them. I just live where I want to live, so it is 100% my fault.
It's the town and area. Gotta move to a less popular town. You're closer to the good shopping. I ... am not. Lol
 
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loop101

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Are you in USA? Is this a USA thing?

The only place I have ever seen HOA in Canada is things with shared spaces and such. Places like apartment buildings, condo's, those brownstone style places that have a bunch of houses attached together. Some Duplex areas, again usually a giant shared lawn in the back, or shared parking, and all the houses have to look similar. Golf course communities... those sorts of places. Overall this is a miniscule portion of the housing.

Every time I hear about USA it seems like if you just live in a house it has an HOA. Am I reading too much in to that? If so it would drive me absolutely insane. Why would someone else get to have even the remotest say in what I do with my property just because they happen to live in the same community as me?

Yeah, in the USA. If I include HOAs (Home Owner Associations), the number of houses in a town that meet my other criteria might be 20-30. When I filter out HOAs, the number can drop to 0-3. I am looking at cheaper homes (under $350k), maybe smaller homes are usually part of a larger "housing project".

This house sold for $100k in 2020, and they listed it for $300k in 2022. I know this is dumb reasoning, but I'm not going to be the person to pay someone $100k a year to live in a house. The HOA is currently $137/month, or $1,644 a year. The current owner is paying 1.6% of their purchase price ($100k) every year, which seems like a lot. In 10 years, assuming the HOA cost does not go up, they will have spent 16% of their purchase price on HOA fees.

 

Private Witt

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Yeah, in the USA. If I include HOAs (Home Owner Associations), the number of houses in a town that meet my other criteria might be 20-30. When I filter out HOAs, the number can drop to 0-3. I am looking at cheaper homes (under $350k), maybe smaller homes are usually part of a larger "housing project".

This house sold for $100k in 2020, and they listed it for $300k in 2022. I know this is dumb reasoning, but I'm not going to be the person to pay someone $100k a year to live in a house. The HOA is currently $137/month, or $1,644 a year. The current owner is paying 1.6% of their purchase price ($100k) every year, which seems like a lot. In 10 years, assuming the HOA cost does not go up, they will have spent 16% of their purchase price on HOA fees.


Crazy sold for 400k in 2003, than for 100k in 2020. Fully aware of the housing crash back than and inflated prices around 03 but FFS was there a meth lab in the basement to get down to 100k.
 

loop101

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Ha, every home I’ve ever lived in had a Bolshevik HOA. You need to move to the country in the USA to not have one.
I'm not sure how I would react to a group of neighbors telling me what I could or could not do. I would probably do whatever they said because I am a coward when it comes to getting sued. A friend of mine had a side business photographing lasers in his house, and some neighbor reported him for "creating a fire-hazard". He stopped rather than fight it. The neighbor actually said he had peeked through the guys window to see what he was doing, lol.
 
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loop101

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Crazy sold for 400k in 2003, than for 100k in 2020. Fully aware of the housing crash back than and inflated prices around 03 but FFS was there a meth lab in the basement to get down to 100k.
I've seen super-high sale prices as the initial price, I think that was what a developer paid for all the land in the neighborhood. I consider it a bug in the data. It would be sad if they really did pay $400k for the house.
 

Kak

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I'm not sure how I would react to a group of neighbors telling me what I could or could not do. I would probably do whatever they said because I am a coward when it comes to getting sued. A friend of mine had a side business photographing lasers in his house, and some neighbor reported him for "creating a fire-hazard". He stopped rather than fight it. The neighbor actually said he had peeked through the guys window to see what he was doing, lol.
If I caught someone peeking through my window, it would be be the last time they did it, or anything else.
 

Antifragile

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If I caught someone peeking through my window, it would be be the last time they did it, or anything else.

That’s with bare fists! Now imagine if you had any weapons :eek:
 
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Kak

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Xeon

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heavy_industry

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A comment on YouTube about SkyCam, a camera rig suspended by cables.

TKfrSJMPuS.png


Huge respect to him for admiting on his failure.
"Ideas are pawns. Execution is king." - MJ DeMarco

Theory confirmed.

For every 1 person that manages to execute, there are at least 1000 people that have had the idea.
 

Kevin88660

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GPM

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I have never seen a urinal in a house.

View attachment 47974
Is that made for toddlers? It is barely above the level of the floor.

I am just throwing this out there, but what person who has to clean their own toilet stands to pee in their own private bathroom? For a fun experiment just take a bottle of water and squeeze it into a bucket at waist level, and then from like 5" from the bucket.

I'll take a clean bathroom and pants that don't smell like pee over "look at me I am a man I am forced to stand to pee at all times".

However, being able to stand to pee in the disgusting hell-holes that are public bathrooms? You bet!
 

GPM

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"Ideas are pawns. Execution is king." - MJ DeMarco

Theory confirmed.

For every 1 person that manages to execute, there are at least 1000 people that have had the idea.
I have a notebook with the idea for Uber described in it that I wrote in about 2004 after being pissed off one night about just how crappy cab service is. Know what I did with the idea after I wrote it down? Absolutely nothing.
 

Antifragile

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I have a notebook with the idea for Uber described in it that I wrote in about 2004 after being pissed off one night about just how crappy cab service is. Know what I did with the idea after I wrote it down? Absolutely nothing.

How painfully this hits the bullseye! Ideas alone are worth nothing.

Even a mediocre product that solves problems will pay better than a brilliant idea never executed.
 
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Xeon

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Private Witt

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Not ready for thread yet but put a free product in 52 local stores last week, launched the social media early this morning, my mail box and DMs blowing up. Noticed three things on the pulls.

1. Awesome pulls (solid players offering to help with my problems or wanting to give me $ for service)
2. Semi interesting pulls (not offering to help or as solid but not a total zero)
3. Dumpster pulls (going right to how I can help them without them paying a cent, how awesome they are and wanting to create more work for me)
 

BizyDad

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"Ideas are pawns. Execution is king." - MJ DeMarco

Theory confirmed.

For every 1 person that manages to execute, there are at least 1000 people that have had the idea.
I have a notebook with the idea for Uber described in it that I wrote in about 2004 after being pissed off one night about just how crappy cab service is. Know what I did with the idea after I wrote it down? Absolutely nothing.
How painfully this hits the bullseye! Ideas alone are worth nothing.

Even a mediocre product that solves problems will pay better than a brilliant idea never executed.

I've been sitting on an idea for 6 years.

I just never had the time or the bandwidth to try and execute on it.

Until 2 weeks ago. I finally decided I would move forward. I've had preliminary meetings with people to find/setup manufacturing. I spoke to a couple people I know in the industry to get educated on how to talk to a manufacturer.

I even visited a friend who runs a similar type of operation to get a sense of what it would take to run a business of this type.

And then I did a Google search.

The thing has now been invented.

By a company with bigger pockets than me. So I've lost first mover advantage. Which means it'll need a lot more of my focus to make this go.

Here's the thing.

I bought the item. It's perfect. It's got everything that I thought to put in it, and three other things that I didn't think of.

4 months ago they were getting bad reviews online. I saw none of the complaints present in the items I got. Which means they're responsive to their customers.

So basically I could go to market with essentially a knockoff, because their item is already better than I imagined.

I guess I'd rather be a loyal customer of theirs than a two bit hustler. They earned it.

Don't wait around too long people. Opportunity won't knock forever.
 
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Antifragile

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I've been sitting on an idea for 6 years.

I just never had the time or the bandwidth to try and execute on it.

Until 2 weeks ago. I finally decided I would move forward. I've had preliminary meetings with people to find/setup manufacturing. I spoke to a couple people I know in the industry to get educated on how to talk to a manufacturer.

I even visited a friend who runs a similar type of operation to get a sense of what it would take to run a business of this type.

And then I did a Google search.

The thing has now been invented.

By a company with bigger pockets than me. So I've lost first mover advantage. Which means it'll need a lot more of my focus to make this go.

Here's the thing.

I bought the item. It's perfect. It's got everything that I thought to put in it, and three other things that I didn't think of.

4 months ago they were getting bad reviews online. I saw none of the complaints present in the items I got. Which means they're responsive to their customers.

So basically I could go to market with essentially a knockoff, because their item is already better than I imagined.

I guess I'd rather be a loyal customer of theirs than a two bit hustler. They earned it.

Don't wait around too long people. Opportunity won't knock forever.

We have a saying in real estate industry: time kills deals.

It’s sad to hear of missed opportunities when time “killed the deal”.

@BizyDad can you iterate and create an even better product?
 

BizyDad

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We have a saying in real estate industry: time kills deals.

It’s sad to hear of missed opportunities when time “killed the deal”.

@BizyDad can you iterate and create an even better product?

That's what I was doing to come up with my original idea.

These people out iterated me. I realized it when the product arrived on Friday. They were at least two or three things better than I had already thought of.

Honestly, I'm way outside my wheelhouse on this.

Could someone else iterate this thing? Maybe. Probably.

But for me to iterate this thing better, I would have to talk to a lot of people. And I again just don't have the time.

The thing that really cinched it for me is the fact that they had reviews with some negative comments (The kind of thing that takes a review from five stars to four stars, the reviews were still overall positive) on their initial product launch, and 4 months later, at least based on the more recent reviews and the product that I received, they had already addressed the issues.

So they are iterating fast.

And that's how they're earning my business. They appear to be actually listening to their customers.
 

Supa

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Very interesting article.

And I agree with it.

Especially the AI trend shows this. Now, don‘t get me wrong, since reading @MJ DeMarco ‘s thread on how to use ChatGPT basically as a better search engine, I see a lot of value in it and it has helped me tremendously since using it this way.

But does every product need to have AI features, just because it‘s the trend right now?

No.

Google’s search engine was and still is one of the biggest things on the internet, but not everyone tried to put a search engine into their product. Why do companies seem to do this with AI though?

Why not let the AI companies do their AI thing and others focus on their thing and improve it?

Even if a big company wants to get a foot into the AI market, why not do so by creating a new product unrelated to your core one to do just that?

All in all, yes, the user experience of many big companies‘ products is getting worse and worse. There are exceptions of course. And those often have a really loyal user base.
 
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Xeon

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Not sure if there's any game artists here, but this tool (Leonardo.ai) is coming to screw game artists for real. Especially this part:

Train Your Own AI Models
In just a few clicks, you can train your own AI model and generate thousands of variations and deviations from your training data. Iterate to your heart's content.

I love AI but come on, at least slow down the development a little and give us some time to look for new jobs at fast food chains, ok?!
 

heavy_industry

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We have a saying in real estate industry: time kills deals.
When I first read this, I read it as: Time kills dreams.

I couldn't agree more. I have proven this theory experimentally.

Let's get to work. Time is running out.
 

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