• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Mostly the neighbors who don’t pay their dues or needlessly hold up needed improvements.

    Our HOA board does a great job, they are volunteers who live in the neighborhood. Our dues used to be $100 a year, plus $150 if you wanted to use the pool. Then the pool needed to be replaced (it was 45 years old) and we didn’t have the money for it, so we changed the dues to $250 and everyone gets access to the pool. That still didn’t raise enough money, so they tried to get everyone to agree to a one-time assessment of $1000 but too many people complained. So they’ve now raised the dues to $350, likely going up to $450 soon.

    The good thing about the higher dues is we will now be able to afford a lawyer to go after the 10% of the homes that aren’t paying their dues. And maybe even force the people who are hoarding cars in their yards to have to move them.









  • Soul crushing.

    Worked at a place for 16 years, made many close friends there, helped the company grow from a $2M company into a $2B company. Then one day they decided that it looked like they might not be add profitable in the coming quarter so they needed to cut 20% of the company. I was my family’s sole provider and now wasn’t sure how we were going to survive. I did get a nice severance of 6 months pay, but only 3 months of COBRA coverage. I was very fortunate to find a better paying job a little over 3 months later. Financially it was a good thing for us, but mentally I’m pretty fucked up now. I’ve never had anxiety issues but now I’m on 2 different medications for it. I’m depressed. I hate my new job and coworkers. I have no joy in work. I know if I get laid off again that I won’t get nearly as good of a severance package. I realize that my lifestyle only exists as long as my employer chooses to keep me employed. I feel like I not only have no safety net, but if I fall I take my family with me. It sucks.



  • Hi, I also know my industry, with over a quarter century of experience in Fortune 500 companies. The old motto of IT used to be ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and then salespeople found out that fear is a great sales tool.

    When proper precautions are taken and a risk analysis is performed there is no reason that old operating systems and software can’t continue to be used in production environments. I’ve seen many more systems taken down from updates gone wrong than from running ‘unsupported’ software. Just because a system is old, doesn’t mean it is vulnerable, often the opposite is true.






  • The best raise you can get is by changing jobs. Businesses are not going to be loyal to you, there’s no benefit to being loyal to them - add either a customer or employee. Embrace and welcome change.

    When you get a pay raise immediately increase your 401k (or equivalent retirement fund) by at least 1%.

    Enjoy your 20s, they don’t last long but the person you are today is who you will feel like you are in 20 years. Don’t rush your life. There’s plenty of time to get married and have kids. You and your kids will benefit from you having an extra decade of experience before raising another human.