Not necessarily. Sometimes the HOA (or "sphere of influence" which is the same thing minus the fees) is inflicted upon your property years AFTER you've bought your home, and you have absolutely no choice in the matter. I wrote a long post about this somewhere up above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryside_Agency "a statutory body set up in 1999 with the task of improving the quality of the rural environment and the lives of those living in it..... Its main aims were to 'conserve and enhance England's countryside, spread social and economic opportunity for the people who live there and help everyone, wherever they live and whatever their background to enjoy the countryside and share in this priceless asset more'"
All for just £100 million per year!!
Whenever I've seen something like that, it's been urban marketspeak for "we think you country bumpkins are a blight on the landscape, so we're going to make your lives just like OUR lives, whether you like it or not."
Same country that just passed some ridiculous legislation for vegetable rights, I shit you not. Now some people are being required to get sensitivity training so they don't diss the feelings of PLANTS. (I've lost the link but I'm sure you can find it if you care enough to look.)
I'm not. I'm saying that the corp HMO system is already bad; why would we want the same system as run by the gov't, who per all prior evidence will make it even worse?? Bah, better to nuke the whole system and start over!!
We'd be better off with a return to primarily private medicine, at reasonable prices, without the insurance companies and HMOs getting rich by being the middlemen. Back then, even people who couldn't afford insurance could manage the very occasional doctor bill -- typically far less than the monthly insurance bill!!
Some systems have an urgent-care-only type of insurance, which I think makes more sense for most people, but only works IF there are private doctors *available* to see for the relatively inexpensive stuff.
They cause fear of your neighbour, who MIGHT turn you in for practically anything you do that's the least little bit out of line, or that he simply doesn't like.
This in turn makes you LESS likely to band together with your neighbour to protest an overbearing gov't.
They also tend to suffer from feature creep. Dog waste today, fullblown witch hunt tomorrow -- and so much easier for the gov't to get the desired witch hunt going if people are already in the habit of distrusting one another.
It's not just British. And it tends to be a side effect of feeling like as a person you're helpless, but Nanny Will Fix (here represented by the cops, local council, or whatever Big Brothers apply). In farm country, where you're more likely to have to fend for yourself across the board, you're also more likely to speak to your neighbour about a problem, rather than reporting him.
Trouble is we've got all these black/white, on/off types here who can't see that reality is shades of grey and a very long sliding scale.
We feel our current gov't sucks because it's much worse than it used to be. It may still be better than most other gov'ts, but it's still worse than WE are used to. And we want it back at the top of the scale, not down here in the middle of the pack, even if that is better than being in the muck at the bottom.
HOAs often get created long after most of the people already own homes in that neighbourhood. And you seldom have any choice about "joining" -- some developer waves their magic money wand and the local city or neighbourhood council decrees it a done deal, or you're declared part of the "sphere of influence" of some community, and their HOA is extended to you whether you wanted it or not. That can include fees -- either pay up or they'll put a lien on your house.
These situations have become almost universal in high-growth areas, since new developments usually have all sorts of restrictive covenants, AND the developer has the bucks to bri^H^H^H encourage local councils to enact whatever rules he thinks will make his tract houses more salable.
The other thing that happens is that city folk move out to a rural area, then these yuppies (unhappy with how "nasty" those rural folks places are) form a neighbourhood council, and without anyone else's knowledge or consent, declare a very wide sphere of influence. Once this is done the county will usually back whatever rules the new council wants to put in place. This happened where I live -- our little rural village got some new yuppies in new McMansions, who then decided their "sphere of influence" ran 10 miles in every direction, including miles and miles of open desert AND the next little village 10 miles down the way. No one is happy about it (except the yuppies) but it was a done deal before anyone heard about it, and now we're stuck with it.
Furthermore, requiring specific activities is real borderline constitutionally... what if your HOA required that all children be home-schooled? (can't have them joining those school gangs and degrading our neighbourhood values!) How is that fair or legal? While I haven't seen a HOA get quite that drastic (yet), the principle is the same. Some already restrict what type of grass or flowers you can plant, and how many cars you can have on your property. That gets to be a real issue if you, the wife, and each of three kids all have jobs or school to go to, and no other way to get there, and your HOA limits you to 2 vehicles (which is the typical limit, when there is one).
Not only that, but you pay hundreds of dollars per month for the privilege, and often get very little in return.
My aunt just moved from a home where the HOA fee was $575/month. And it's an older, nothing-special, not-particularly-safe neighbourhood. What does the HOA fee pay for? No one seems to know.
My sister (who is a full partner in a large firm) was on the board for her local HOA, and damned if she could figure out where their $350/month fee was going either. That HOA takes in over $200k per MONTH in fees, and lays out about $100k/mo. for grounds care and trash pickup and such, but the rest of the money (over $1M/year worth) somehow wasn't there when they went to sue their builder for roofs that fell apart in less than 10 years, and everyone wound up having to pay $11,000 or more to help fix the townhouses' common roof.
The system we have in the U.S. used to be good when it was mainly doctors in private practice (now a rarity thanks to lawsuits) but became broken and inefficient when the medical industry was taken over by HMOs. HMOs are just socialized medicine as run by corporations. The government is MUCH more broken and less efficient than corporations. You've Been Warned.
I've watched it change over my lifetime... from being able to walk up to any private doctor's office and get an appointment that same day (or even immediately) and paying a reasonable amount out of your own pocket... to being required to have expensive, locked-in health insurance before the associated HMO will even see you, then having to wait weeks for an appointment... and then the co-pay is as much as the private doctor once charged for the whole thing, with no insurance involved at all.
Not only that, but if you're afraid your neighbours might turn you in, you're that much LESS likely to band together with said neighbours to fight government abuses. It engenders FEAR of your neighbours across the board, because you never know when one will betray you (or merely take a dislike to you and report you just to make your life miserable). So pretty soon you stop talking to them entirely.
So it's win-win for Big Brother, and lose-lose for everyone else.
One or another of the links I followed didn't seem to think much of Madison that way, which as you say doesn't follow, but it was the only connection I could see. Maybe it's the connection that's ineffectcual.;)
Seriously, maybe it's just some parallel of philosophy that I just don't see. Of course I don't claim to be an expert on any of these guys, either.
I don't typically orient by landmarks. I orient by "feel" then check landmarks, or my internal map system, as confirmation. In any event, this isn't a landmark thing, and applied both in places I'd never been before, and when I went back there 2 years later. It's a sensation rather like water in the ears, but more subtle. Almost like mild vertigo. Your description of "being on the wrong side of the land between" sounds about right.
Also, when I drove from Montana to San Diego, I could feel it getting more and more "rotated" (always in the same direction) as I went south and west, starting about the middle of Utah -- by more than the changed angle wrt magnetic north, so I'm inclined to think both distance and the direction of the field itself are involved. Check out the charts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_north !!
When I went to San Francisco the year before, I did not have this problem. Either not far enough south, or perhaps because the angle wrt the magnetic field was the same as in MT.
Looking at maps doesn't "turn me around", but I've always been a map freak, I think it's normal to carry both world and local maps in your head, and to be able to backtrack without thinking about it. I'm never lost, and I don't need a GPS either.:) Which is probably WHY I *noticed* this "turned around" sensation -- the earth-feel (for lack of a better word) no longer matched my internal map.
My, those are interesting numbers... Seems to me that's an incentive for the gov't to encourage high gas prices....
In California we get hit twice, since we also pay sales tax on the whole price of gas, INCLUDING the federal tax. Double taxation (tax on another tax) which to my understanding is technically not legal, but long since enshrined practice in CA regardless.
And the phone company can assess you as much as they want and call it "tax", so long as they send the mandated share to the gov't. Phone companies have a special dispensation to do that. Gov't gets the blame for the whole amount, and the phone company pockets the difference.
[laughing] Kinda like Rez's Quick Guide to the major political parties: ======== Democrat: Give us all your shovels, so we can dig those po'folks ditches, whether they need 'em or not.
Republican: Here's a shovel. Go dig your own damn ditch.
Libertarian: I ain't diggin' no damn ditch!
Green: You ain't diggin' no damn ditch!
Peace and Freedom: Hey man, spade me up a new patch for my pot.
American Independent: Covet not thy neighbour's shovel, and what is this 'ditch' of which thou speaks? =========
So how would you distinguish Madisonian from Jeffersonian??
BTW (having lost track of that other thread, I'll reply here) apparently if a candidate is not *registered as a candidate* in California, write-in votes for him are not counted AT ALL. And I'm told Our Hero is not reg'd as a candidate here anymore.:(
The subject came up on Another Mailing List[tm] and that's the gist of the response I got.
This is principally aimed at big-ticket purchases that require licensing, like cars and boats. When you license the vehicle, you're also required to declare where it was purchased, and if that was outside your home sales-tax jurisdiction, you then get dinged for that sales tax (even if you paid sales tax on it where you bought it). With cars, this even applies with USED vehicles, whereas sales tax is not collected on most other used items, unless you sell over -- I think the threshold is $500 worth per year.
I don't know about other states, but that's how it's done in California.
Definitely good advice. Remember the vintage car that was put into a buried and supposedly sealed time capsule, and dug up just a couple years ago? The car had suffered so much water damage that it was beyond restoring, in fact it was close to beyond recognition. Made me cry to see it.:(
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. Sometimes the HOA (or "sphere of influence" which is the same thing minus the fees) is inflicted upon your property years AFTER you've bought your home, and you have absolutely no choice in the matter. I wrote a long post about this somewhere up above.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_community_vibrancy_index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countryside_Agency .... Its main aims were to 'conserve and enhance England's countryside, spread social and economic opportunity for the people who live there and help everyone, wherever they live and whatever their background to enjoy the countryside and share in this priceless asset more'"
"a statutory body set up in 1999 with the task of improving the quality of the rural environment and the lives of those living in it.
All for just £100 million per year!!
Whenever I've seen something like that, it's been urban marketspeak for "we think you country bumpkins are a blight on the landscape, so we're going to make your lives just like OUR lives, whether you like it or not."
Same country that just passed some ridiculous legislation for vegetable rights, I shit you not. Now some people are being required to get sensitivity training so they don't diss the feelings of PLANTS. (I've lost the link but I'm sure you can find it if you care enough to look.)
Musta been a different reality. ;)
I'm not. I'm saying that the corp HMO system is already bad; why would we want the same system as run by the gov't, who per all prior evidence will make it even worse?? Bah, better to nuke the whole system and start over!!
We'd be better off with a return to primarily private medicine, at reasonable prices, without the insurance companies and HMOs getting rich by being the middlemen. Back then, even people who couldn't afford insurance could manage the very occasional doctor bill -- typically far less than the monthly insurance bill!!
Some systems have an urgent-care-only type of insurance, which I think makes more sense for most people, but only works IF there are private doctors *available* to see for the relatively inexpensive stuff.
Informant programs do several things:
They cause fear of your neighbour, who MIGHT turn you in for practically anything you do that's the least little bit out of line, or that he simply doesn't like.
This in turn makes you LESS likely to band together with your neighbour to protest an overbearing gov't.
They also tend to suffer from feature creep. Dog waste today, fullblown witch hunt tomorrow -- and so much easier for the gov't to get the desired witch hunt going if people are already in the habit of distrusting one another.
... so can the government.
Except the gov't spin would be more like "People wear tinfoil hats to cover up evil thoughts. Wouldn't want THAT in your neighbourhood, would you??"
It's not just British. And it tends to be a side effect of feeling like as a person you're helpless, but Nanny Will Fix (here represented by the cops, local council, or whatever Big Brothers apply). In farm country, where you're more likely to have to fend for yourself across the board, you're also more likely to speak to your neighbour about a problem, rather than reporting him.
Trouble is we've got all these black/white, on/off types here who can't see that reality is shades of grey and a very long sliding scale.
We feel our current gov't sucks because it's much worse than it used to be. It may still be better than most other gov'ts, but it's still worse than WE are used to. And we want it back at the top of the scale, not down here in the middle of the pack, even if that is better than being in the muck at the bottom.
HOAs often get created long after most of the people already own homes in that neighbourhood. And you seldom have any choice about "joining" -- some developer waves their magic money wand and the local city or neighbourhood council decrees it a done deal, or you're declared part of the "sphere of influence" of some community, and their HOA is extended to you whether you wanted it or not. That can include fees -- either pay up or they'll put a lien on your house.
These situations have become almost universal in high-growth areas, since new developments usually have all sorts of restrictive covenants, AND the developer has the bucks to bri^H^H^H encourage local councils to enact whatever rules he thinks will make his tract houses more salable.
The other thing that happens is that city folk move out to a rural area, then these yuppies (unhappy with how "nasty" those rural folks places are) form a neighbourhood council, and without anyone else's knowledge or consent, declare a very wide sphere of influence. Once this is done the county will usually back whatever rules the new council wants to put in place. This happened where I live -- our little rural village got some new yuppies in new McMansions, who then decided their "sphere of influence" ran 10 miles in every direction, including miles and miles of open desert AND the next little village 10 miles down the way. No one is happy about it (except the yuppies) but it was a done deal before anyone heard about it, and now we're stuck with it.
Furthermore, requiring specific activities is real borderline constitutionally... what if your HOA required that all children be home-schooled? (can't have them joining those school gangs and degrading our neighbourhood values!) How is that fair or legal? While I haven't seen a HOA get quite that drastic (yet), the principle is the same. Some already restrict what type of grass or flowers you can plant, and how many cars you can have on your property. That gets to be a real issue if you, the wife, and each of three kids all have jobs or school to go to, and no other way to get there, and your HOA limits you to 2 vehicles (which is the typical limit, when there is one).
Not only that, but you pay hundreds of dollars per month for the privilege, and often get very little in return.
My aunt just moved from a home where the HOA fee was $575/month. And it's an older, nothing-special, not-particularly-safe neighbourhood. What does the HOA fee pay for? No one seems to know.
My sister (who is a full partner in a large firm) was on the board for her local HOA, and damned if she could figure out where their $350/month fee was going either. That HOA takes in over $200k per MONTH in fees, and lays out about $100k/mo. for grounds care and trash pickup and such, but the rest of the money (over $1M/year worth) somehow wasn't there when they went to sue their builder for roofs that fell apart in less than 10 years, and everyone wound up having to pay $11,000 or more to help fix the townhouses' common roof.
The system we have in the U.S. used to be good when it was mainly doctors in private practice (now a rarity thanks to lawsuits) but became broken and inefficient when the medical industry was taken over by HMOs. HMOs are just socialized medicine as run by corporations. The government is MUCH more broken and less efficient than corporations. You've Been Warned.
I've watched it change over my lifetime... from being able to walk up to any private doctor's office and get an appointment that same day (or even immediately) and paying a reasonable amount out of your own pocket... to being required to have expensive, locked-in health insurance before the associated HMO will even see you, then having to wait weeks for an appointment... and then the co-pay is as much as the private doctor once charged for the whole thing, with no insurance involved at all.
Not only that, but if you're afraid your neighbours might turn you in, you're that much LESS likely to band together with said neighbours to fight government abuses. It engenders FEAR of your neighbours across the board, because you never know when one will betray you (or merely take a dislike to you and report you just to make your life miserable). So pretty soon you stop talking to them entirely.
So it's win-win for Big Brother, and lose-lose for everyone else.
One or another of the links I followed didn't seem to think much of Madison that way, which as you say doesn't follow, but it was the only connection I could see. Maybe it's the connection that's ineffectcual. ;)
Seriously, maybe it's just some parallel of philosophy that I just don't see. Of course I don't claim to be an expert on any of these guys, either.
But speaking of constitutionalist, how about this?! http://progunleaders.org/johnson.html
Unless it's a keyword for "ineffectual", which was the only connection I could make from it. [scratching head]
Just so long as you PLEASE don't break it again for us low-bandwidth-and-no-CSS users! Myself, I *can't* use Slashdot without this option.
(Works good enough right now, but has been messed up a few times in the past.)
Heh heh, good one ... and all too accurate :(
[goes off, reads] I'm not sure I see the distinction, other than as the direction from which it is viewed?
I'm completely croggled that Carter is considered Madisonian!!
Before I was merely ignorant; now I am confused. Is this progress? :)
I don't typically orient by landmarks. I orient by "feel" then check landmarks, or my internal map system, as confirmation. In any event, this isn't a landmark thing, and applied both in places I'd never been before, and when I went back there 2 years later. It's a sensation rather like water in the ears, but more subtle. Almost like mild vertigo. Your description of "being on the wrong side of the land between" sounds about right.
Also, when I drove from Montana to San Diego, I could feel it getting more and more "rotated" (always in the same direction) as I went south and west, starting about the middle of Utah -- by more than the changed angle wrt magnetic north, so I'm inclined to think both distance and the direction of the field itself are involved. Check out the charts at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_north !!
When I went to San Francisco the year before, I did not have this problem. Either not far enough south, or perhaps because the angle wrt the magnetic field was the same as in MT.
Looking at maps doesn't "turn me around", but I've always been a map freak, I think it's normal to carry both world and local maps in your head, and to be able to backtrack without thinking about it. I'm never lost, and I don't need a GPS either. :) Which is probably WHY I *noticed* this "turned around" sensation -- the earth-feel (for lack of a better word) no longer matched my internal map.
My, those are interesting numbers... Seems to me that's an incentive for the gov't to encourage high gas prices....
In California we get hit twice, since we also pay sales tax on the whole price of gas, INCLUDING the federal tax. Double taxation (tax on another tax) which to my understanding is technically not legal, but long since enshrined practice in CA regardless.
And the phone company can assess you as much as they want and call it "tax", so long as they send the mandated share to the gov't. Phone companies have a special dispensation to do that. Gov't gets the blame for the whole amount, and the phone company pockets the difference.
(This is oversimplified, but you get the idea...)
[laughing] Kinda like Rez's Quick Guide to the major political parties:
========
Democrat: Give us all your shovels, so we can dig those po'folks ditches, whether they need 'em or not.
Republican: Here's a shovel. Go dig your own damn ditch.
Libertarian: I ain't diggin' no damn ditch!
Green: You ain't diggin' no damn ditch!
Peace and Freedom: Hey man, spade me up a new patch for my pot.
American Independent: Covet not thy neighbour's shovel, and what is this 'ditch' of which thou speaks?
=========
So how would you distinguish Madisonian from Jeffersonian??
BTW (having lost track of that other thread, I'll reply here) apparently if a candidate is not *registered as a candidate* in California, write-in votes for him are not counted AT ALL. And I'm told Our Hero is not reg'd as a candidate here anymore. :(
The subject came up on Another Mailing List[tm] and that's the gist of the response I got.
He's a Tok'ra ;)
This is principally aimed at big-ticket purchases that require licensing, like cars and boats. When you license the vehicle, you're also required to declare where it was purchased, and if that was outside your home sales-tax jurisdiction, you then get dinged for that sales tax (even if you paid sales tax on it where you bought it). With cars, this even applies with USED vehicles, whereas sales tax is not collected on most other used items, unless you sell over -- I think the threshold is $500 worth per year.
I don't know about other states, but that's how it's done in California.
Definitely good advice. Remember the vintage car that was put into a buried and supposedly sealed time capsule, and dug up just a couple years ago? The car had suffered so much water damage that it was beyond restoring, in fact it was close to beyond recognition. Made me cry to see it. :(