
There was no meeting of the Master Association Board in December but here are my musings…
As the first page of our 2025 calendars is turned, we greet the New Year with the usual questions of what challenges we will face in the new year! There is a new regime in Washington with new (and old) plans to make our lives easier but that usually don’t! Once again Washington is looking at the daylight savings time issue BUT the President elect is looking to eliminate daylight savings time. Apparently, the northern states are concerned with the mental damage of changing the clocks twice each year. The southern states are in favor of daylight savings which provide additional outdoor recreation time. Perhaps we should consider having a permanent daylight savings zone in the southern states such as Florida, Texas, Arizona and Louisiana and allow the northern states to have their permanent cold, shorter days. We could easily shift the bottom tier of states one time zone to the west. Longer days south and shorter days north… sounds like a solution, doesn’t it?
A new Florida state law will require all HOA/COA neighborhoods to have a CPA fiscal statement at least biennially. Previously, our Master Association had elected to have a CPA statement, which by our policy was done every three years. The level of the CPA review (and the CPA fee) is dependent on the amount of the association’s annual revenues. Our preliminary estimate is that the aggregate CPA fees for the Grandezza neighborhoods will exceed $20,000. The Master Association is reviewing our billing procedures to minimize the neighborhood CPA charges. So much for the “help” from our state legislature.
Our son is a software engineer in Silicon Valley and is my favorite source of information about computers and software. During a recent holiday visit, we were discussing the “hot” software issue: Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the newest big-ticket item in the computer and stock markets. The various uses (especially for consumers) are simple programs such as “spell check,” self-publishing of books and gaming. In his business they are slowly adapting some aspects of AI but are troubled by the output unreliability. While some aspects of AI have a reliability of up to 95%, they still have 5% of errors. That sounds like a good ratio, but much effort is necessary to find the 5% that is wrong. An example of the error rate in consumer programs is the very useful (for me) “spell check.” It generally proposes several possible words. Only one of the possibles is correct and the rest are “errors” that the user must sort through. At the present time he believes that repetitive rote operations such as math problems calculating the correct rocket settings for a moon shot are the best usage now.
In the area of desktop publishing, he informed me that there are websites where you can download self-published novels (generated by AI) into the “cloud” where it sits at no charge, and anyone can access it! Apparently, the only successful self-published novels are the space novel “Gravity” and “50 Shades of Grey.” In the meantime, many billion bytes of data are floating in the “cloud” consuming so much electric power that the US power grid is reaching its capacity.
Over the holidays, I read an interesting book “Confronting the Presidents,” which is a group of short bios on each of our first 44 Presidents (through Obama). It concentrates on their childhoods and wives as well as the highlights of their accomplishments, or problems, if applicable, in and out of office. With about five to eight pages on each President it was an easy book to pick up and put down in our busy winter lives in Grandezza!
Hope you have a very happy and safe winter!