This thought provoking article appeared recently in the LA Times. It poses a question I have been thinking about for a long time. If the insurance companies are coming to government, hat in hand, for bailout money, do we really need them? Isn’t a one payer system the one logical alternative to the fractured, costly, badly managed system we now have?

I think its a real possibility. Please read LA Times article and respond in whatever form or on whatever channel you feel is most effective. I think this is something every American needs to weigh in on.

It’s been a few days since I last blogged. In those few days, I noticed how much my email inbox is clogged with invitations to one social networking site or another. You are probably with the general format of the invitation, “So-and-so want to you join him/her on SerialKillers.com”. The recent scourge of so-called social networking options is astounding.

One good thing has come out of this for me. It has made me take a hard look at my own social networking philosophy. Up until recently, I would answer nearly every invite in the affirmative. “Jirvan Nepal in Banglor would like to add you to his TagMeNow.com network.” Click the link, sign up for the new service, and Jirvan becomes part of my network. But who is he? Who cares. It’s the sort of mindless collecting that obsessive compulsives engage in when they are trying to satisfy an urge.

I now have over 7,000 LinkedIn contacts in my rolodex. Several thousand of them, I will probably never have the need or the urge to contact for either a social or business need. They’re just there. What’s worse, the 7,000-plus contacts are breeding. The people that engage in social compulsive behavior have spread to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Plus, they are flooding my inbox. When will it stop?

Well, for me it stops today. What a glorious way to waste time. Time that I don’ t have. Time that can be devoted to work, to other truly social activities.

One truly fortunate thing–more good luck than good management–is that I shifted a lot of my internet activities, including email, over to Google. Google Mail has an amazing mail filtering system.

The Google Spam filtering system is as accurate and effective as any spam management system I’ve ever used, and I’ve used more than a dozen over as many years. There is also an easy to use mail filtering system for diverting specific types of mail to a set of your own online folders, including a Trash folder. This Trash folder is smart too. It holds the Trash for 30 days before permanently deleting it. So, if I’ve been a little too zealous in filtering a particular email address to the Trash, I have a few days to review, and see if I truly want all my “sillypost.com” mail to really go there.

Great stuff. It’s allowed me to get back more than a few minutes every day. It saves me hundreds, if not thousands, of key clicks managing my email–which is still my primary online activity. And for the hundreds of social networking invitations I now get every week in my email, it provides a solution that save me time and gives me a little extra peace of mind.

In the meantime, I will try to develop a new practice of “just say no” to online invitations.  Eventually the madness will stop.

Following the defeat of the TLHOA board’s so-called amenities agreement, those folks on both sides of the debate are asking: So, now what?

The solutions will be participative not prescriptive. I’m only one voice, and I don’t claim to know how the perfect HOA works. I’ve sure as hell never lived in one. But here is my two cents:

Step 1. Take whatever steps necessary to increase home owner participation in HOA affairs. In the current political milieu, participation at over 50% (e.g. in the amenities vote) is encouraging, but not sufficient, I think, to declare that we’ve reached a tipping point. Idea: form block groups with elected block spokespersons with defined characteristics and duties. Hold annual facilitated “forums” to generate new ideas and arrive at consensus on HOA direction. GE, IBM and others operate this way to “percolate” ideas. There’s no reason we can’t use a similar methodology.

Step 2. Either enroll the current board in the process or recall them. They are not doing their job. The amenities proposal, had it passed, had serious flaws and included actions that are outside the scope of the board’s powers, as defined in the CC&Rs, bylaws, and State law. Idea: Continue to work with the TLGCC at viable solutions for their continued existence. They already have their to-do list. It contains more that “sell to the highest bidder”. They are not bereft of ideas. They just figured with the amenities deal they could take the past of least resistance.

Step 3. Make structural changes in the current HOA (CC&Rs, bylaws, R&Rs, etc.) to streamline governance and make effective use of current resources. The problems the HOA has did not crop up overnight, just as the problems the TLGCC has did not crop overnight. They are systemic problems. There are no quick fixes. There may be some “low hanging fruit” sorts of things we can fix collectively and quickly. But sustainable change will take more time and much more work.

Step 4. Rinse and repeat starting at Step 1.

There are lots of ideas. In this last debate, a core of 150 (or so voices) were raised in our 1300+ household community: We’re mad as hell, and we’re not taking it any more. The trick now is using all that energy and manpower to move forward, and make the changes that need to be made.