Archive for the ‘Uncomfortable Truths’ Category

Tragedy of the Commons: HOAs

Posted: June 4, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in local issues, local stuff, Uncomfortable Truths
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Homeowner Associations, or HOAs, are a sneaky way that fascism crept into our daily lives. HOAs are ubiquitus in most residential neighborhoods, and unless you buy an older home or build from scratch, its hard to escape them, since around 80% of new homes are built into an HOA.

The original idea behind an HOA seems to be a way for cities to dump the responsibility for maintaining small residential parks. Rather than have the city maintain it, an HOA would collect fees and do the dirty work. Even better, HOAs could enforce codes on everything from mulch color to weeds in your lawn, which would keep home values up as well as property taxes. From the government’s perspective, its a win-win.

For homeowners, its a total loss. HOAs have taken on a mind of their own, going so far as to foreclose on people’s homes and sell them at auction. We’re not talking just one or two homes. In Colorado, one HOA had filed 2,400 foreclosure cases against homeowners. Many of these followed a similar pattern: a homeowner gets fined for some stupud nonsense like weeds, and if they don’t pay up, the HOA tacks on legal fees and late fees. Once you reach into the thousands of dollars, it becomes almost impossible for a homeowner to pay it, so the HOA files a foreclosure case and attempts to kick the homeowner out and sell their house at auction.

Kicking someone out of their house for weeds in the front lawn and selling the house at auction. Read that sentence out loud and ask yourself how any person could stoop that low.

HOAs try to rip out perfectly good trees, beat people up for free speech, and even punish someone for having the gall to put out a dog treat dispenser. By far the worst problem is that the HOA tries to regulate your life while you’re in your own home. It’s bad enough dealing with morons at work, but at home? HOAs were one of the main reasons I built a custom home not in a community (which you can read about here).

HOAs don’t often get national media attention, but your HOA probably controls your well being a lot more than most national politics do (except for Biden-flation). These monstrosities need to be dismantled and destroyed. Some people are doing just that through legal means, like the Colorado legislature that is limiting fees and foreclosure cases. Many people are pushing back. When one HOA tried to stop a thin-blue-line flag, multiple neighbors began flying the same flag. As Stu Scheller likes to say “We can’t all be wrong.”

If you’re in an HOA now, I recommend getting onto the board and dismantling it on the inside. That’s what one of my neighbors has done. He has approved and expedited nearly every neighbor request for their property, making sure people can do whatever they want to their property. If you can’t do that, you should bring up HOA reform with your state representative, so that instead of debating what person to name the next highway after, they might actually make your life better. It’s a fight worth fighting, and unlike national politics, your voice can really make a difference.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. If you enjoyed this article, please consider donating to Da Tech Guy and purchasing one of the author’s books.

Reassessing presidential legacies: TR, FDR, and JFK

Posted: May 24, 2022 by chrisharper in politics, Uncomfortable Truths
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In my months-long deep dive into biographical treatises on U.S. presidents, I found several—Grover Cleveland, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight Eisenhower—had not gotten their historical due.

I also found several—Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy—whose overrated administrations failed more often than they succeeded. 

Overall, these three presidents greatly expanded the power of the presidency, which until Teddy’s White House had often been subservient to the Congress. Moreover, the trio made citizens far more dependent on the government for their livelihood—an issue that still creates myriad problems today. 

Although Teddy’s reputation has fallen lately because of his racist views, his legacy has other significant failings.

Gary Gerstle, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, said that Teddy’s economic legacy was a forebearer to the strategies of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

“If we brought him back, that’s exactly where he would fit on the political spectrum,” he said in 2019 on the 100th anniversary of Teddy’s death.

His presidency gave credibility to the progressive movement, lending the prestige of the White House to welfare legislation and government regulation. His creation of the Bull Moose Party in 1912 undermined the Republican Party, leading to the election of one of the worst presidents in history, Woodrow Wilson.

His cousin Franklin gets high marks for his efforts during World War II, albeit with some caveats. But FDR’s domestic policies created so much dependence on the federal government that his programs hamper many people even now.  

Sidney Milkis, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, summed up the downside of FDR’s reign. 

“Critics have questioned not only his policies and positions but also charged him with centralizing power in his own hands by controlling both the government and the Democratic Party. Many denounced his breaking the no-third-term tradition in 1940. Long after Roosevelt’s death, new lines of attack opened to criticize his policies regarding helping the Jews of Europe, incarcerating Japanese Americans on the West Coast, and opposing anti-lynching legislation,” Milkis wrote. Moreover, FDR’s capitulation at the Yalta Conference in 1945 led to the Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe for the next four decades. 

Many FDR supporters argue that he brought the country out of the Depression. But later analyses of his massive spending programs demonstrate that World War II finally created a sound economic footing for the country. 

William E. Leuchtenburg, professor emeritus of the University of North Carolina, wrote that little had changed from 1932 when FDR was first elected to deal with economic issues.

“[I]n the fall of 1937, industrial production fell by 33 percent, national income dropped by 12 percent, and industrial stock prices plummeted by 50 percent. Nearly 4 million people lost their jobs, and the total number of unemployed increased to 11.5 million. 

“World War II, not the New Deal, brought an end to the Great Depression. The war sparked the kind of job creation and massive public and private spending that finally lifted the United States out of its economic doldrums.”

The positive assessment of JFK’s presidency has puzzled me for some time. Simply put, he didn’t do much during his less than three years in office. In his book, Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth, my former colleague Fred Kempe excoriated Kennedy’s actions during the Bay of Pigs, his inept Vienna summit with Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev, and his dreadful response to the construction of the Berlin Wall. All these errors, Kempe argued, led Khrushchev to see the United States as weak and encouraged him to try to plant missiles on Cuban soil. Fortunately, JFK handled that showdown relatively well. See https://www.fredkempe.com/berlin-1961

JFK’s sexual antics went unreported by the media until long after his death—as did his many physical ailments and subsequent drug abuse hindered his judgment at times.

I think his legacy has been propped up by my generation’s seminal shared moment of remembering where we were on November 22, 1963. 

Walmart vs. The Navy

Posted: May 21, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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One of the great things about being in the Navy is the chance to interact with people from all over the United States, and even the world. It’s diversity in its truest form. I’ve met someone from every single state, almost every territory and plenty of immigrants from countries in every continent and heck, I’ve even met people that traveled to Antarctica.

I’m quite proud that I never wasted these opportunities to learn about the background of the Sailors around me. It’s how I learned about the real difficulties my African-American Sailors faced growing up, or the difficulties for Sailors from the backwoods portions of America. I particularly remember one Sailor’s response to my question “Why did you join the Navy?”

“Well Sir, it was either that or working at a gas station my whole life.”

For many people, the Navy is there chance to get out of a bad circumstance. Compared to most companies, the Navy is happy to pay big money to train someone with nothing but a high school degree and give them a decent paying job with good benefits. In fact, I’d say it was one of the only places that did this.

But that has changed.

Walmart is now paying truck drivers over $100K a year.

Lowes and Home Depot are paying for employees to be upskilled, without debt.

These companies and others have always had a path for people to excel. A friend of mine works in McDonalds Corporate Headquarters, but he got started as a teenager flipping burgers. The problem was not that there isn’t much opportunity, but that it wasn’t advertised all that well. Now that it is, that’s a good thing, because the more skilled our labor force, the better it is for everyone.

Except the Armed Services.

The military depends on a constant flow of young, somewhat educated young people (mostly men) to fill its ranks every year and replace the older, burned out service members that leave. The choice between the service or a life of gas station work is a real choice many Americans face every day. But if you can drive trucks for Walmart at $95K your first year, you’re making more then any non-nuclear Petty Officers in the Navy. Combined with not getting shot at in a war zone or deploying on a ship in such conditions it might make you turn to suicide, and it looks like a pretty good deal.

Even Business Insider is reporting on it now.

In the quest for manpower, my money is on Walmart, not the military.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency, because they’ll tell you everything is great while I tell you the truth. If you enjoyed this post, check out some of my books on Amazon, they make great gifts for your friends.

Firewood and Breast Milk

Posted: May 14, 2022 by navygrade36bureaucrat in culture, opinion/news, Uncomfortable Truths
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Because if I put in a real picture, well, you’d all call it click bait ;)

I sell firewood at my house. I cut down trees on my property (or cut up trees blown over by a storm), saw them into 16 inch pieces, split them with a hydraulic log splitter, and then dry them on a rack in the sun for almost a year. After that, I put them out in a nice, lighted stand at the end of my driveway. Most people pay me with cash, although quite a few are now paying me with Zelle. I give them more firewood then the 7-11 does for the same price, and everyone walks away happy.

Recently on the NextDoor App, some lady made the mistake of complaining that she couldn’t find any nice, split firewood for free. I and many others reminded her that properly split and dried firewood takes time and effort, and as such people like to be compensated for that time and effort. She scoffed at that notion.

I was going to ask if she stayed warm at night under a blanket in the form of the flag of the People’s Republic of China…but I decided against that.

Plenty of people want something for free. Americans are generous people, and while the pandemic drove down charitable donations, a majority of Americans still donate in some way. But donations are gifts, and you shouldn’t fault people for wanting compensation for their time and talent.

That brings us to breast milk. The expectation from quite a few people is that breast milk should be donated to a breast milk bank. That’s all well and good, but as I noted in my book (which you should absolutely read!), when my wife attempted to donate to our local bank, the number of rules and restrictions were outrageous. For example, if you take any supplement outside of prenatal vitamins, it precludes you from donating. I find it absurd that taking glucosamine sulfate means that you should dump perfectly good breast milk down the drain because the milk bank won’t take it.

Then there is the fact that breast milk donations get sold. At non-profit milk banks, this is touted as a way to cover freezers, employee pay and other expenses. Most milk banks sell breast milk at around five dollars an ounce.

To help defray the costs of screening donors and managing donated breast milk, nonprofit milk banks typically charge recipients a fee of about $5 per ounce of milk. “Although the milk is donated, there are expenses, such as milk processing, milk distribution, and buying of pasteurizers, freezers, and bottles,” Noble said

Healthline.com

Insurance coverage is hit or miss, and you’re stuck with the bill if your insurance says no.

Now, you can always buy formula…oh wait, not right now. Hence the increased interest in breast milk banks. And, hence the increased interest in purchasing breast milk through websites like Only The Breast (yup, that’s a real, non-pornographic website). Which has sparked lots of debate on whether people are justified to sell their breast milk.

To which I say, if you want to sell it, you’re 100% justified in doing so.

It is a pain to hook up to a breast pump, put everthing in a nice bag, freeze the milk and then store it. To make substantial milk, you’re eating more calories then normal, which costs more money. All this work, and yet some people think its unethical to pay people for their time and effort. The fake science studies people have even “questioned” the safety of purchasing breast milk, but can’t point to any significant cases where someone sold dangerous breast milk. While, on the contrary, there are plenty of cases of bad formula, but that hasn’t stopped hospitals from pushing it on mothers.

If I was a conspiracy theorist, linking this push of formula on mothers, and then a shortage of formula spiking the price which brings more money to formula companies, would be pretty easy. Did we create this crisis to further some other agenda? It doesn’t look good.

Selling breast milk undercuts milk banks and makes it easier to get milk locally. It compensates women for their time, effort and calories, and it encourages money to stay locally instead of fueling some big corporations that have every incentive to profit from formula shortages and breast milk donations that they can markup on their own.

Which is exactly why many interested people want you to believe its unethical. People that, just like my firewood example, don’t place any value on your time or effort.

Moms, if you’ve got extra milk, check out OnlyTheBreast, or talk in your mom groups about selling or donating your milk on your own terms. Don’t feel bad asking for some compensation, if nothing else for the time it took you to bag everything and stay hooked up to an uncomfortable machine. You could help solve the formula crisis, since its not like the US government is going to anytime soon.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. While you’re getting ready for Memorial Day, why don‘t you buy one of my books on Amazon and help me out?

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