An interesting aspect of this story is that America has an idiosyncratic approach toward firefighting vehicles that demands very large bespoke vehicles from a limited set of vendors [0] that are primarily used to bring a set of first responders to medical emergencies. [1] This philosophy carries on to other aspects of fire fighting like the very famous wooden ladders of San Francisco. [1]
Cost insensitive customers with bizarre business requirements, what could go wrong?
“Extremely predictable payments” - I don’t own a home, so I don’t know about this - I have heard mostly horror stories about HOA. Can they hike maintenance fees arbitrarily? Also, what about insurance? Last I read, at least in FL, insurance cost is out of control, is that still true?
Don’t buy a home in an HOA and avoid living in a place with extreme high risk of property destruction. Neither are requirements of owning a home.
HOA complaints typically are about control not really cost, and the terms are disclosed before purchase so not unpredictable at all, you are allowed to see the full financials and can see the financial health of the organization before committing. Insurance costs are directly correlated to risk, the costs are only as out of control as the risks (which are well known in Florida). E.g. if insurance expects to have to replace a roof every 5 years on average, and to replace a house every 30 years, expect to pay for 1/5th of a roof and 1/30th of a house in your insurance bill, on top of all the other risks.
It really depends where you live. Around here every home built since ~1970 has an HOA. The cities have demanded them, because they can push some of the work like re-paving streets onto the HOA as part of the founding documents.
A HOA on a house never made sense to me. There are no amenities they provide worth what you pay. Condos in are different story. You're using shared resources in a limited space. Condos in a bustling urban core are great. A condo in the middle of the suburbs makes no sense.
Real estate tax is also somewhat unpredictable year to year (except that it rarely goes down), and can be a large part of your monthly payment. We got hit with a 21% increase in taxes this year because the town voted to rebuild the high school and the main road.
Luckily, at least, we don't have an HOA. Well, actually, we technically do, because we have a shared driveway with three houses on it, and legally here shared driveways are required to have an HOA. But all three of us despise HOAs, so it doesn't have any money, rules, meetings, or do anything. It's just on paper only. We have informal meetings to sort it out when the driveway needs maintenance. After just a couple meetings we figured out that meeting first, alcohol second is the correct order.
As others said, try to avoid HOAs if you can. But if you can't (in my area it's hard to do), our realtor gave us good advice when we were in the process of buying our current home. The HOA bylaws are a legally binding document as to what the association can and can't do, so if you're going to purchase a home in an HOA neighborhood, read the bylaws. That will give you confidence as to whether some of the situations you mention can occur.
HOAs can be very tricky, the money comes to maintain some shared amenities. Usually it is not too bad, but in case of condos HOAs maintain much more and sometimes the board makes very questionable decisions and can end up short on cash when big things are required, and that can hike the payments a lot.
As for the insurance, the best advice is just to avoid high-risk areas like flooding zones.
HOAs can be a big variable cost, yes, especially in the case of underfunded condos associations with a lot of delayed maintenance. Insurance can vary a lot, but is usually a much smaller amount than your mortgage payment (though I only have experience with the PNW).
But yeah, for a single family home in a not-too-flood-prone area it'll be very predictable.
Wozniak has discussed his personal disdain for money and accumulating large amounts of wealth. He told Fortune magazine in 2017, "I didn't want to be near money, because it could corrupt your values ... I really didn't want to be in that super 'more than you could ever need' category."
Having heroes is always risky, but I'm willing to take the risk on Woz alone.
"I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good."
Woz isn't some kind of monk. He enjoys his tech toys that he can only afford because he's rich. He's just bad at managing his money and lost a lot of it through multiple divorces.
It's easy for us to judge from the outside. It's also entirely possible that the quote OP posted is true enough to the point that he didn't "lose" it through multiple divorces, because he didn't care about it.
How do we know he wouldn't be happy with whatever tech toys he could afford if his wealth was significantly less? We don't, but it's possible, particularly when you look at his actions relative to his words.
“If I don’t sell drugs, guns etc at the street corner, someone else will. Might as well be me, I’d like to make a few hundred Billion while I am at it”
Is this a good justification though? I get what you’re saying, but the same argument you’re making for social media can also be applied to everything else, isn’t it?
If I don’t do human cloning, someone else will. If I don’t make bio weapons, someone else will. And so on
My guess (and hope) is that next generations will find more meaning in physical labor, communal living etc, partly out of necessity (what young person can afford to buy even a small, simple home these days?) but mostly because they seem to understand that we've screwed the environment enough at this point and the novelty with things like social media is beginning to wear off. As much as kids are glued to their iPads, they also seem to understand that what we are doing to the environment is not sustainable and that unchecked capitalism is not as great as it is hyped to be.
We already see things like tiny house movement taking off (lots of young people even building these tiny homes themselves). As older farmers retire/die, now is a good time for younger folks to get into farming, even if it is too damn hard these days for small farmers.
I agree with your parent comment. People should have the option to go on their own terms. Maybe many people won’t have the courage (as you phrased it) to do it, but that shouldn’t stop the ones who do.
I recently learned of the term “medical divorce”. Elderly couples divorcing, so they’re not saddled with the medical bills if one of them passes away. How insanely cruel is this? Is allowing people to go out on their own terms worse than this?
I don’t know about “generally mandated” but if I am lucid enough to decide, I should be allowed to. It is more humane, safer, cleaner to do with medical professionals than jumping from a bridge.
Our choices are either improve healthcare, elder care so people spend their last years in dignity or give them other options. By now,
We have proven that we cannot or will not make healthcare, elder care affordable (it would be ideal to make it affordable). Which leaves us with what other options? Birth rates are falling almost across the world , we’ll have more and more older folks
It is easy to be ethically and morally responsible, after one becomes rich, after one is retired. Until then, it is enough to follow the law just enough to not get fined. Actually, even that is a tall ask these days - fines are just cost of doing business.
It sucks that it is this way, but society seems to have largely accepted it
Fine are the cost of doing business... FOR COMPANIES.
For individuals: arrest, jail, prison, and horrifically crippling fines are normal.
An individual kills 1 person, and its 15y to life. But if youre an 'insurance company' and make policies in abeyance of insurance and arbitrarily deny 30% of claims getting many killed (Luigi says hi), thats perfectly fine. Youre a business leader making lots of money.
You steal $100 from the till at $shitretailjob and company calls cops and has you arrested. BUT if they fraudulently change timesheets and steal $100 from you, wellllll thats a civil matter.
Or, a company made 1B dollars but spent $990M, they only owe taxes on 10M$. But if I make $100k and spent $90k, I still pay taxes on 100k, not 10K.
This country should be called the Corporate States of America. That fiction has more rights than I or any other non-billionaire average human will ever have.
China is definitely different in this particular aspect. The balance of powers in "state vs corporations" is completely different from the US. And China is seeing massive benefits from this particular aspect of its country, it's closely related to their ascension vs. the decline of the US in particular.
Before people turn to Reddit-style downvoting and flagging, this isn't a vouch for China as a country on the whole. It has plenty of other problems that certain Western countries don't have. I'm simply talking about the specific topic at hand.
Yea, when the communist party thinks an industry should change it changes in the way the communist party says. Of course it is often not without side-effects.
Can you enumerate some of these benefits? They famously arrested Jack Ma for not bending to the CCP enough. I don’t think that’s really a benefit (e.g. if the equivalent in the US was Democrats arresting any CEOa politically against them).
They're countless. Can you not think of any major issues as of 2026 directly caused by the enormous power that megacorporations hold in the US? I struggle to believe you can't. If you can, then it should be easy to see that at least some of them would not happen in China because of the opposite balance of power.
Just to give one example, look up the crackdown on Alibaba and platform monopolies. You also mentioned Jack Ma. The Ant Group IPO he was pushing, was likely to be a bad thing for most of Chinese society.
How did Netflix do making a business decision that defied the wishes of the Ellison family? With Trump 47 there are literally pages of this sort of stuff.
Other notable non-Trumpist example is Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest. He refused to comply with a request for phone records without a warrant. The reaction was a drop in Federal business and a prosecution for insider trading.
That was over 20 years ago? And there were half a dozen Qwest executives who were profiting from insider trading on inflated revenues that started in 1999, long before the NSA incident in 2001. I remember it clearly because I had the misfortune of being a shareholder in that dog.
I can call these hypocrisies to light. I do so on the off chance that we gain enough support to start reversing end-stage capitalism.
Im not going to list factoids of what rank we are or arent. Its honestly irrelevant. Im stuck here, since I have no familial claim of citizenship elsewhere.
So, yeah. I speak out here and in person, about these abuses.
Eventually, we'll do better. Takes time. Probably longer than I have alive.
> Companies committing fraud do get caught and the penalties are often larger than the fraud brought in.
The problem is, we don't send companies to prison for wrongdoing. It's always just a fine, so breaking the law boils down to a cost x risk / benefit analysis.
Why is it always a fine? Let's invent a prison for companies. Revoke the corporate charter, order it to cease operations, and freeze all trading of the company's shares for N years. Maybe that would be enough for corporate leadership, the board, and shareholders to take wrongdoing seriously.
But also, what if you have those ideas and thoughts from the beginning and during the entire time, yet also build your life on those systems you despise, then you use your "won" resources to fight against them, isn't that at least better than the alternatives?
This might help smaller nations fighting with nastier, bigger neighbors (imagine Estonia fighting Russia, for instance). But at the same time, some moderately funded terror groups can also make these, right? Or am I off base here?
When the history of this administration is written
I often think about how much we can trust history 20-30 years from now. It is hard to trust history from hundreds of years ago, either because it was written by victors or because there just isn't enough material in the first place. I suppose we have the opposite problem now (and in the future) - too much noise and junk, whole bunch of it generated by AI slop - where does one even start?
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