If 3D printing was as promising as this article makes it sound, then why can't I buy individual parts like custom 3D printed hoods? It's certainly more realistic to buy individual parts than 3d printing an "entire" car. It's just not anywhere close to being cost effective.
There's a fuel injection part for at least one of Boeing's jet engines that is now entirely 3D printed. It enabled them to save a rather ridiculous amount of work to produce the part in the traditional way - which involved multiple weld and grind operations to get the right shape.
But as was mentioned elsewhere, for most parts this is more expensive, starting with that most parts are designed for traditional manufacturing methods. Start designing parts that take advantage of the benefits of 3D printing technology and we're likely to see some interesting things. But meanwhile we've put a lot of development into the traditional means, so it's only on, oh, 1% or so of parts where 3D printing makes sense and the moment. Have costs drop in half again, get the print designs created, and it'll probably expand.
To use your hood as an example - they'd be one of the later things printed. Consider what a hood is - it's mostly a flat sheet of metal with some equipment attached. You can stamp a hood rather easily, in 1-2 steps. It's large in 2 dimensions and small in 1. They generally don't have fancy features worked in. Something like a grill might be a better comparison - often a complex shape, you can argue that different designs can make sense - right now people stick cardboard in between the grill and the radiator up here because it's so cold that you want to limit airflow. Down in Nevada you might want an extra open one in the summer. It's open to a lot of different designs for styling - car makers will often change out the grill for different 'makes' of a model - IE one for the GM version of the car, another for the Chevy, etc...
I'm surprised that there's not a market in refurbished cars.
There is, depending on how you define 'refurbished', but beyond a certain point it's just not worth it. You can get a brand spanking new car for about $13k. The labor to refurbish a car is, at least in the USA, Europe, and other high-cost areas, fairly expensive. The problem is that it requires a lot more labor. For example, automation and doing it during the assembly process means that you don't need to mask of a car in order to paint it anywhere near as much as you do for an aftermarket job.
By the time you do your listing of things to do, you're doubling the price of a used car, probably up past the value of a new car.
So, yes, these "immigrant" neighborhoods will grow because there are more immigrants coming in who need that support. Those immigrants will meet people, fall in love, have kids, and those kids will have more experience with the native culture than that of their parents. Give it a generation or two.
And then eventually the 'Chinatown' or Little Saigon is discovered and used by the rest of the population as a comfortable source of the 'exotic'. Which means that the kids, who are actually fully integrated, will play up the differences because now they're at least semi-wealthy business owners.
The big problem are these second and third generations because they are the radical ones. They haven't experienced their parents' homes and form their identity around idolizing the culture their parents' fled from.
That's for a minority though. The majority are better integrated. The problem you have is that the 'basement nerd' type is easy to radicalize.
By the 3rd generation they're generally losing the family's original language - the grand-kids being unable to speak to their grandparents happens fairly frequently in the USA, and the odds are even higher with one more generation.
Sure. That’s what welfare and publicly funded services are for.
Which I propose replacing with a BIG because I believe it would be more effective and efficient.
Worth considering is that these sorts of jobs are going to disappear completely - if they’re not already gone - in the very near future thanks to automation.
That's actually what happened, I think they ended up moving production to China about 20 years ago. There are other jobs out there, but they're generally niche.
Well, no, I’m applying it to some of the complexities of the real world.
The problem is that you're re-writing it, then responding to 'real world' issues in your re-write, without giving me the opportunity to chime in with my thoughts on your re-write. Ask for clarification.
Everyone who is unemployed will be dependent on the BIG, and most people in low-paying jobs will become dependent on it. Broadly speaking, anyone who is currently dependent on welfare payments of some sort, would be dependent on a BIG. Because - as you’ve said - ultimately your BIG is just a more streamlined and efficient version of the system already in place.
Correct. I'm willing to accept those on low-paying jobs being, at least partially, dependent upon the payment because of my principles - basically that working should be better than not working, and that generally means you have to wean people off welfare, not cut it off. While there are indeed those that would use it as a hammock, not a net, you tweak the amounts such that they're at an acceptable number.
On the other hand, which is better - completely dependent upon your employer for your income, or half and half?
People can’t just up and move. Moving is disruptive, expensive and time consuming, and the kind of people who will be dependent on a BIG will be the lower socio-economic groups who have basically no spare income or savings to start with. Cheaper areas also tend to have less employment, so you’re basically forcing people without jobs to relocate to somewhere with lower chances of finding a job. Ghettoisation of a kind.
Can't just up and move? Tell my whole bloody family that. Except for grandmother, we're all states away from where we first started. I've lived in 8 states and 5 countries.
Also, as more people move to the cheaper areas, they'll need services and such, which will increase the numbers of jobs available.
That’s before considering the impacts of forcibly uprooting people from their social support structures. Think about kids in schools. Think about people in similar situations to your mother (who might become disabled and unable to work through, say, an accident).
Dude, I lived that life. That being said, if your social support structures are that important, they can probably kick in some help. $500/month should be enough to cover the basics even in expensive areas even if you end up sleeping in the living room of your social support network for a bit.
This is a possible compromise, but it does sort of break the premise of a single payment.
True, but if a city/state wants to do it's own thing, it's allowed to do so.
Making it easier for people to move between jobs does not help people who don’t have jobs.
Then it acting as unemployment so they have time to seek a new job before losing their house or whatever does. Hell, it can also provide support while they go back into education if that's necessary.
I haven’t ignored them, I’ve refuted them.
You might have refuted them in your own mind, but you presented an inadequate case to me.
You are almost entirely focussed on people who already have work, and trying to make it easier for
I used the extreme example which disadvantaged me most in the context of your assertion of how expensive refrigerators and toilets would be.
Really? You consider a $60 builder grade toilet to be 'extreme example' disadvantaging YOU?
Look, we need to get off the fridges and toilets. My point was static install costs, which the above are merely examples of. A bathroom needs a static amount of stuff in it - toilet, sink, tub/shower, exhaust fan, towel bars, mirror, etc... It's equipment intensive compared to a living room or bedroom. Similar to a kitchen - stove, shelving, sink, fridge, another exhaust, etc...
These two areas cost more per square foot, and as you shrink an apartment but keep it 'full service', these areas take up proportionally more area.
I used a baseline of $1/sqft--a fairly high medium for low-income areas, where $0.60/sqft apartments frequently rent--in my basic estimates of cost, and padded it to $1.33 as a risk buffer.
I looked up the lowest cost apartments available in a median cost area. Sorting by the cheapest apartments and going by the first 25 results for phoenix, AZ, I figured out the rent/sqft, and charted that by the minimum rent(a lot of places will charge you more if you're considered a 'risk' like having bad credit or a bad rental history).
I then placed a trend line. My y is -.0006x + 1.25, where x is the sqft of the apartment.
Using that, a 228 sqft apartment should run about $1.12 per square foot, giving me a rent of $256/month. R^2 is.55, so it's a rough estimate. Exponential is a little more expensive at 228 sqft, but by only a couple bucks. R^2 is still only.56
So while I'm correct that smaller apartments trend more expensive per square foot on the cheap end, I was over-estimating the amount. Using a figure of ~$1.12 and padding to $1.50 should work. That would allow somebody to get into the cheapest of *currently available* apartments.
Bump it up from $300/month to $350/month, and it would work. Cheapest apartment in my town is $472/month. With the utilities, bump it up from ~$25 to $50-75.
If people look at that and say, "What? That doesn't look real!", that's because they don't know how to estimate--or, like you, they don't know how to think in general.
Ooh, burn... Seriously, insulting me doesn't work. The problem I'm having with your work is that I do know how to estimate. I've read up on how the DoD does it's calculations for BAH, looked at housing options in multiple areas of the country. Hell, I paid $15k for my first house. I know about cheap housing. But at the same time, I know that you can't expect 'everybody' to be able to get that kind of deal.
My estimation process is different than your's, true. My method is to look at the bottom end of the rental market in a median area, and try to figure out the trend.
If you want to assert, "There are costs which do not scale with the apartment; these will make up a significant portion of the price," then you have two ways to test this assertion.
Depends on your valuation of 'significant', I guess. I only stated that they would take up a larger proportion of the cost as you shrink the rest of the accomodation. You can really only make a bathroom so small, for example. Kitchens can really be shrunk if you're smart about it. Build it into one side of a studio, for example.
If you want to hide those prices, pick the *most* *expensive* construction estimates. Show those costs are a $2,000 load and the cost of construction is $200,000, and so those costs are tiny.
I think that $2k for an estimated load is too small. But, on the other hand, it's also not like I've been trying to say that you'd need to double the cost or something. My 'conservative' estimate is about $100/month over yours. I reached that figure
The simplest fix I can think of would be to put a more traditional thermostat in, as a sort of emergency cutoff.
The 'simplist' thermostat in my house is a mercury switch type with a bimetal spiral that bends. Too cold, the mercury completes a switch. Only needs two wires and no power to operate.
The modern version substitutes a magnet that 'sticks', preventing bounce as the heating system warms up. When warm enough, the magnet is pulled off.
The 'fix' for the nest and similar, I think, would be to simply have a cold cutoff somewhere in the range of 55-60F, which while cold for a house, isn't 'pipes freezing'.
SSDs have higher data density than HDDs, they just have lower data density per dollar.
How are you measuring density? Chip, packaging, platters, what?
Looking it up real quick, they have HD data density up past 1 Tbit per square inch. With a micro-sd card, you're looking at what, 256GB if you have 2 of them? I suppose you can stack them up more, but it seems pretty close to me.
They don't care. "Morrow, who is black, was taken to jail, where he pleaded with authorities to call his bank to see proof of his recent cash withdrawal. They declined."
As for buying a car - a bank statement is not evidence that you're intending to use the cash to buy a car. They'll say you're intending to use it to buy drugs.
So I go to court with my bank statement and get my money back. That's what courts are for.
“Don’t even bother getting a lawyer. The money always stays here.” - The officer that seized Morrow's money.
BTW, Morrow filed suit in 2008. He finally got his money back in 2013, of which he ended up only getting back $400 after paying most of the recovery towards attorney's fees. Mind you, I support his action because I think that departments shouldn't profit from this stuff. So I'd sue even if it was going to cost me more money.
Just follow the links. The stories are written there.
Where do you grab it from?
ATM withdrawal, generally. But if I wasn't an older white male(yes, they're racist), they wouldn't give a shit. Remember what I said: If you can't prove where it came from, it's from the sale of drugs, they seize it. If you can't prove where it's going, it's to BUY drugs, and they seize it.
Just sold a car? Obviously you sold it to buy drugs. They're seizing the money. Spend $3-5k in attorney fees to get it back.
How did they earn it? That entity, by law must keep records.
I repeat: THE COPS DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Try to go to court to get your $1k back, it's going to cost $5k in fees.
With their native Pesos? Or did they exchange their local currency, at a bank or money changer who is required by law to give a receipt for USD?
What the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about people who immigrated here years ago, often from places like China and Vietnam, who worked hard in the USA to earn USD in the first place.
I'm still struggling to see any scenario when a normal person would be affected by this, but I can see how a lot of dealers get caught out
Sorry, I can't find the bank deposit bag seizure - drowned out by the IRS seizing accounts for 'suspicious' deposit patterns. As for ordinary people, well, think of it as the latest version of setting up a speed trap for out of towners.
I'd argue that the purpose of 'money' is to facilitate trade, by making it easier for me to trade product X (that I made) for products A, B, C, by having a standardized widget of 'worth' that means that I can still get product A even if it's seller doesn't want my product X. It also helps if the currency is easily divided enough that if say, my product X is worth a year's amount of product A(which goes bad in 2 weeks), the trades are still 'fair'.
The purpose of government currency is to facilitate tax revenue.
The opposite assumption--the worst-case per-square-foot--is an assertion that those static costs are even *less* important. That is: I'm saying a *cheap* construction cost has all those static costs as roughly 5% of its build cost; if we go claiming the apartment has $200/sqft build costs, then those static costs are 2.4% of its build cost. That gives me an advantage by dismissing the case in which build is cheap, thus claiming that those costs are even less significant.
Except, of course, life isn't generally about the extremes. Far more will be located in the middle. Your using the cheapest construction costs quoted results in you almost certainly making an under-estimate as to the costs. Using the maximum costs would also be inaccurate, as that would be an apartment for visiting Saudi Sheiks and such.
Have you been thinking I've been arguing for the top end of the construction range? That might explain some of the disagreement.
My response is I'm not.
That is your perogative. I'll just point out that when people browse your sight and see your estimates that it weakens your argument because it makes it seem like you don't know what you're talking about.
Living with another person is not an acceptable solution. I moved *out* of my parents's house; if I had roommates, there would be corpses.
Then get a job or make other sacrifices. Use a service to help find acceptable roommates.
We can build 100sqft capsule apartments cheaper than this and drive the cost of living down further. Humans can get room mates as an elective. There is no *requirement* to base our economic success on the assumption that people do not universally have the option to live alone. No. Financial. Reason.?
At this point unless you're assembling them in a factory the cost is probably going to be higher than a slightly larger apartment due to the need to use custom sized appliances and such.
Lengthened the supposed pay-off length of the apartment build, then applied that to the other costs, which made the cost of appliances negligible. It's one of a few dozen pointless ways to do the amortization.
You're not supposed to unilaterally increase the pay-off length. That's an accounting 'trick'. You set that to a specific duration and keep it there so you're comparing the same thing. Besides, lengthening the pay-off means less profit, which means that most investers won't do it.
"Cost of captial" - meaningless word. I included the cost of the fixtures themselves; the cost of installation is included in the cost of initial construction.
Take a business economics course and it won't be meaningless anymore.
and installing a zone control baffel during an initial HVAC build costs... $0. It's a piece of ductwork. This piece happens to have a fancy valve in it.
It's normally included in construction costs, yes, but my point is that the construction costs are estimates on the basis of X number of installs per Y square feet. Go over that and cost per square foot goes up.
The control panel is an electronic control run to both your thermostat and your ductwork baffles. There will be a 3 foot length of wire going to this giant fork that comes from 1 big pipe and goes to 6 big pipes; it goes into a 6 inch rectangular plate that opens and shuts those valves.
See your next paragraph for this. Like I said, I have a boiler system. I have a 4 zone house.
Yes I know what I'm taling about. You've apparently just said, "lol what? $80 each? Bullshit! Those things cost $80 each!"
Actually, I completely missed your baffle line. Sorry, yeah, those figures are better.
Pretending I didn't just say what I just said does not make for a good argument.
He's arguing that the company would put trace amounts in so that the bulb burned out *faster*. Thing is, there's a difference between the occasional defective bulb and quality control to get the oxygen levels as low as possible.
That being said, there was enough competition and examination back in the day that a company that didn't produce bulbs that were at least close to specifications would be quickly found out and abandoned by customers.
LEDs and CFLs that are supposed to last 5-10 years but only last 1 are a bigger concern, because of the greater investment and the difficulty of warranty claims.
What was your "documented evidence?" How about this - the cop seizes your money anyways, and tells you to 'prove it in court'. They offer to settle for you getting half your money back.
You just named one of the frequent false positives. Buying a car - what sort of evidence might you have? How do you 'prove' that you're not lying?
Other reasons I've seen are immigrant families(notorious for distrusting banks) looking to buy a business or equipment.
The amounts seized can be as low as a couple hundred bucks - and I'm now an 'older' gentleman, I traditionally grab a couple hundred just because I remember a time when credit cards weren't always an option, and checks weren't accepted out of state. Take somebody who has bad credit or whatever, suddenly they're back on cash, and might have to carry even more.
They've even seized cash funds from employees doing a bank run, with money/receipts in the bank bag.
$0.05 is 20% increase on pistol ammo, less for a 223, 30-06 etc, but what is it for a 22? +200%.
It's also an 'ideal' proposal not to control criminals, but to help kill the enthusiest shooting scene.
Your typical criminal firearm user doesn't shoot much. When a single box of ammo will do them for a year, 5 cents a round doesn't mean jack.
For me and my 200 round range trips, that's getting significant. It's also doubling/tripling the cost of.22, as you mention, which is the favored 'practice' ammo, even today.
wouldnt it be easier to simple make that service tax free? Why complicate things with a deduction after the fact????
Think income tax, not sales tax. And yes, they made it 'tax free' because it's not reported as income for employees. Here's a trivia fact for you: If you're 'issued' a company car that you use for personal driving, it has to be reported on your W-2 and you will pay income tax on that privilege. This was caused by companies 'getting around' federal taxation by providing a huge portion of their employee compensation through 'benefits' instead of straight pay. Company car, company housing, free meals at the company cafeteria, etc... Since it's a non-reportable benefit, it doesn't get taxed when provided to employees.
It's made 'tax-free' for companies because it's still considered a standard expense, so like I said, they add it to the pile so it doesn't count as net profit(which is taxable; gross generally isn't) at the end of the year. Please note that since pretty much everything ends up in that pile anyways, treating it special would actually require more work.
Between the longer lives of CFL and LED bulbs, and the fact that modern rooms have gone from a single bulb hanging from the center of the room to multiple bulbs on the walls and a 3 or 4 bulb cluster in the center (wiping out the electricity savings from the more efficient bulbs), it is a long time since I kept a spare supply of bulbs.
On keeping bulbs on hand: I did say "back in the day", didn't I? I'm also an 'old fogey' at this point for this stuff. Additionally, if you have 'multiple bulbs on the walls' and a '3-4 bulb cluster' in the center, what the hell are you doing worrying about a single blown bulb?
I've never seen a 'modern' room with as much lighting as you mention. If anything, the 'problem' is that they aren't putting fixtures in the ceiling, so people have to use floor lamps and such.
Still, LEDs are about 10X as efficient as Incandescent. So you'd need 10 bulbs, each of the same light output, to match the energy use. At which point you're not actually meeting the same use case because you're looking at a room that would probably be painfully bright. So rather than putting in a couple 60-100 watt incandescent bulbs in, you can put, say, 4-5 40 watt equivalents in, and have the benefit that each individual bulb isn't blinding, and you have nice distributed light.
If my toilet light goes out (which is about the only room it makes a difference, since there is only one bulb there), I'll take one of the three ceiling lights from the bathroom until I get around to buying a new one.
Yep, grab a bulb from somewhere 'less used'.
The bathroom is also my most likely spot I'll grab a bulb from. I actually have a 5 light fixture in there - I put daylights in it; helps me wake up in the morning. For night use I have a different switch to the ceiling fan/light, which is a much dimmer(and warmer) light.
Look up "Civil Asset Forfeiture" and you'll see that local police departments have been 'teaming' up with the Feds for years to bypass local and state controls in order to seize money that they can funnel straight into their departments.
Don't normally respond to ACs, but the closest link I could think of is that the BATF is actually the BATFE today, they added in explosives a while ago.
One of the ingredients of your standard 'fertilizer bomb' is generally diesel, but most high-lipid sources would do.
That being said, it's the other half of the bomb formula that's actually hard to get, as opposed to pulling up to any fueling station with some yellow cans. Well, the color doesn't really matter, but yellow is the convention for diesel.
Still, as you say, this is an overreach by the ATF, and should have been done by the EPA in concert with local authorities.
I agree. Defund state parks, because Americans are currently too lazy to get out of the house.
I disagree. You consider shutting down a park due to lack of interest. There are plenty of parks that get sufficient visitors to justify their existence; Americans aren't that lazy.
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Toyota Hilux is the first one I thought of. The smaller trucks like the ford ranger.
If 3D printing was as promising as this article makes it sound, then why can't I buy individual parts like custom 3D printed hoods? It's certainly more realistic to buy individual parts than 3d printing an "entire" car. It's just not anywhere close to being cost effective.
There's a fuel injection part for at least one of Boeing's jet engines that is now entirely 3D printed. It enabled them to save a rather ridiculous amount of work to produce the part in the traditional way - which involved multiple weld and grind operations to get the right shape.
But as was mentioned elsewhere, for most parts this is more expensive, starting with that most parts are designed for traditional manufacturing methods. Start designing parts that take advantage of the benefits of 3D printing technology and we're likely to see some interesting things. But meanwhile we've put a lot of development into the traditional means, so it's only on, oh, 1% or so of parts where 3D printing makes sense and the moment. Have costs drop in half again, get the print designs created, and it'll probably expand.
To use your hood as an example - they'd be one of the later things printed. Consider what a hood is - it's mostly a flat sheet of metal with some equipment attached. You can stamp a hood rather easily, in 1-2 steps. It's large in 2 dimensions and small in 1. They generally don't have fancy features worked in. Something like a grill might be a better comparison - often a complex shape, you can argue that different designs can make sense - right now people stick cardboard in between the grill and the radiator up here because it's so cold that you want to limit airflow. Down in Nevada you might want an extra open one in the summer. It's open to a lot of different designs for styling - car makers will often change out the grill for different 'makes' of a model - IE one for the GM version of the car, another for the Chevy, etc...
I'm surprised that there's not a market in refurbished cars.
There is, depending on how you define 'refurbished', but beyond a certain point it's just not worth it. You can get a brand spanking new car for about $13k. The labor to refurbish a car is, at least in the USA, Europe, and other high-cost areas, fairly expensive. The problem is that it requires a lot more labor. For example, automation and doing it during the assembly process means that you don't need to mask of a car in order to paint it anywhere near as much as you do for an aftermarket job.
By the time you do your listing of things to do, you're doubling the price of a used car, probably up past the value of a new car.
So, yes, these "immigrant" neighborhoods will grow because there are more immigrants coming in who need that support. Those immigrants will meet people, fall in love, have kids, and those kids will have more experience with the native culture than that of their parents. Give it a generation or two.
And then eventually the 'Chinatown' or Little Saigon is discovered and used by the rest of the population as a comfortable source of the 'exotic'. Which means that the kids, who are actually fully integrated, will play up the differences because now they're at least semi-wealthy business owners.
The big problem are these second and third generations because they are the radical ones. They haven't experienced their parents' homes and form their identity around idolizing the culture their parents' fled from.
That's for a minority though. The majority are better integrated. The problem you have is that the 'basement nerd' type is easy to radicalize.
By the 3rd generation they're generally losing the family's original language - the grand-kids being unable to speak to their grandparents happens fairly frequently in the USA, and the odds are even higher with one more generation.
Sure. That’s what welfare and publicly funded services are for.
Which I propose replacing with a BIG because I believe it would be more effective and efficient.
Worth considering is that these sorts of jobs are going to disappear completely - if they’re not already gone - in the very near future thanks to automation.
That's actually what happened, I think they ended up moving production to China about 20 years ago. There are other jobs out there, but they're generally niche.
Well, no, I’m applying it to some of the complexities of the real world.
The problem is that you're re-writing it, then responding to 'real world' issues in your re-write, without giving me the opportunity to chime in with my thoughts on your re-write. Ask for clarification.
Everyone who is unemployed will be dependent on the BIG, and most people in low-paying jobs will become dependent on it. Broadly speaking, anyone who is currently dependent on welfare payments of some sort, would be dependent on a BIG. Because - as you’ve said - ultimately your BIG is just a more streamlined and efficient version of the system already in place.
Correct. I'm willing to accept those on low-paying jobs being, at least partially, dependent upon the payment because of my principles - basically that working should be better than not working, and that generally means you have to wean people off welfare, not cut it off. While there are indeed those that would use it as a hammock, not a net, you tweak the amounts such that they're at an acceptable number.
On the other hand, which is better - completely dependent upon your employer for your income, or half and half?
People can’t just up and move. Moving is disruptive, expensive and time consuming, and the kind of people who will be dependent on a BIG will be the lower socio-economic groups who have basically no spare income or savings to start with. Cheaper areas also tend to have less employment, so you’re basically forcing people without jobs to relocate to somewhere with lower chances of finding a job. Ghettoisation of a kind.
Can't just up and move? Tell my whole bloody family that. Except for grandmother, we're all states away from where we first started. I've lived in 8 states and 5 countries.
Also, as more people move to the cheaper areas, they'll need services and such, which will increase the numbers of jobs available.
That’s before considering the impacts of forcibly uprooting people from their social support structures. Think about kids in schools. Think about people in similar situations to your mother (who might become disabled and unable to work through, say, an accident).
Dude, I lived that life. That being said, if your social support structures are that important, they can probably kick in some help. $500/month should be enough to cover the basics even in expensive areas even if you end up sleeping in the living room of your social support network for a bit.
This is a possible compromise, but it does sort of break the premise of a single payment.
True, but if a city/state wants to do it's own thing, it's allowed to do so.
Making it easier for people to move between jobs does not help people who don’t have jobs.
Then it acting as unemployment so they have time to seek a new job before losing their house or whatever does. Hell, it can also provide support while they go back into education if that's necessary.
I haven’t ignored them, I’ve refuted them.
You might have refuted them in your own mind, but you presented an inadequate case to me.
You are almost entirely focussed on people who already have work, and trying to make it easier for
Wasn't aware of that, didn't see them when I checked really quick.
Them being 'really out there' would be a valid reason.
I used the extreme example which disadvantaged me most in the context of your assertion of how expensive refrigerators and toilets would be.
Really? You consider a $60 builder grade toilet to be 'extreme example' disadvantaging YOU?
Look, we need to get off the fridges and toilets. My point was static install costs, which the above are merely examples of. A bathroom needs a static amount of stuff in it - toilet, sink, tub/shower, exhaust fan, towel bars, mirror, etc... It's equipment intensive compared to a living room or bedroom. Similar to a kitchen - stove, shelving, sink, fridge, another exhaust, etc...
These two areas cost more per square foot, and as you shrink an apartment but keep it 'full service', these areas take up proportionally more area.
I used a baseline of $1/sqft--a fairly high medium for low-income areas, where $0.60/sqft apartments frequently rent--in my basic estimates of cost, and padded it to $1.33 as a risk buffer.
I looked up the lowest cost apartments available in a median cost area. Sorting by the cheapest apartments and going by the first 25 results for phoenix, AZ, I figured out the rent/sqft, and charted that by the minimum rent(a lot of places will charge you more if you're considered a 'risk' like having bad credit or a bad rental history).
I then placed a trend line. My y is -.0006x + 1.25, where x is the sqft of the apartment.
Using that, a 228 sqft apartment should run about $1.12 per square foot, giving me a rent of $256/month. R^2 is .55, so it's a rough estimate. Exponential is a little more expensive at 228 sqft, but by only a couple bucks. R^2 is still only .56
So while I'm correct that smaller apartments trend more expensive per square foot on the cheap end, I was over-estimating the amount. Using a figure of ~$1.12 and padding to $1.50 should work. That would allow somebody to get into the cheapest of *currently available* apartments.
Bump it up from $300/month to $350/month, and it would work. Cheapest apartment in my town is $472/month. With the utilities, bump it up from ~$25 to $50-75.
If people look at that and say, "What? That doesn't look real!", that's because they don't know how to estimate--or, like you, they don't know how to think in general.
Ooh, burn... Seriously, insulting me doesn't work. The problem I'm having with your work is that I do know how to estimate. I've read up on how the DoD does it's calculations for BAH, looked at housing options in multiple areas of the country. Hell, I paid $15k for my first house. I know about cheap housing. But at the same time, I know that you can't expect 'everybody' to be able to get that kind of deal.
My estimation process is different than your's, true. My method is to look at the bottom end of the rental market in a median area, and try to figure out the trend.
If you want to assert, "There are costs which do not scale with the apartment; these will make up a significant portion of the price," then you have two ways to test this assertion.
Depends on your valuation of 'significant', I guess. I only stated that they would take up a larger proportion of the cost as you shrink the rest of the accomodation. You can really only make a bathroom so small, for example. Kitchens can really be shrunk if you're smart about it. Build it into one side of a studio, for example.
If you want to hide those prices, pick the *most* *expensive* construction estimates. Show those costs are a $2,000 load and the cost of construction is $200,000, and so those costs are tiny.
I think that $2k for an estimated load is too small. But, on the other hand, it's also not like I've been trying to say that you'd need to double the cost or something. My 'conservative' estimate is about $100/month over yours. I reached that figure
The simplest fix I can think of would be to put a more traditional thermostat in, as a sort of emergency cutoff.
The 'simplist' thermostat in my house is a mercury switch type with a bimetal spiral that bends. Too cold, the mercury completes a switch. Only needs two wires and no power to operate.
The modern version substitutes a magnet that 'sticks', preventing bounce as the heating system warms up. When warm enough, the magnet is pulled off.
The 'fix' for the nest and similar, I think, would be to simply have a cold cutoff somewhere in the range of 55-60F, which while cold for a house, isn't 'pipes freezing'.
SSDs have higher data density than HDDs, they just have lower data density per dollar.
How are you measuring density? Chip, packaging, platters, what?
Looking it up real quick, they have HD data density up past 1 Tbit per square inch. With a micro-sd card, you're looking at what, 256GB if you have 2 of them? I suppose you can stack them up more, but it seems pretty close to me.
They'd have to amend that bit, perhaps to '30 days after...'
I'm getting a bit tired of how much governments are pushing to violate our privacy for what's, really, no additional security.
Bank statements, ie where I got the money from.
They don't care.
"Morrow, who is black, was taken to jail, where he pleaded with authorities to call his bank to see proof of his recent cash withdrawal. They declined."
As for buying a car - a bank statement is not evidence that you're intending to use the cash to buy a car. They'll say you're intending to use it to buy drugs.
So I go to court with my bank statement and get my money back. That's what courts are for.
“Don’t even bother getting a lawyer. The money always stays here.” - The officer that seized Morrow's money.
BTW, Morrow filed suit in 2008. He finally got his money back in 2013, of which he ended up only getting back $400 after paying most of the recovery towards attorney's fees. Mind you, I support his action because I think that departments shouldn't profit from this stuff. So I'd sue even if it was going to cost me more money.
Just follow the links. The stories are written there.
Where do you grab it from?
ATM withdrawal, generally. But if I wasn't an older white male(yes, they're racist), they wouldn't give a shit. Remember what I said: If you can't prove where it came from, it's from the sale of drugs, they seize it. If you can't prove where it's going, it's to BUY drugs, and they seize it.
Just sold a car? Obviously you sold it to buy drugs. They're seizing the money. Spend $3-5k in attorney fees to get it back.
How did they earn it? That entity, by law must keep records.
I repeat: THE COPS DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Try to go to court to get your $1k back, it's going to cost $5k in fees.
With their native Pesos? Or did they exchange their local currency, at a bank or money changer who is required by law to give a receipt for USD?
What the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about people who immigrated here years ago, often from places like China and Vietnam, who worked hard in the USA to earn USD in the first place.
I'm still struggling to see any scenario when a normal person would be affected by this, but I can see how a lot of dealers get caught out
Sorry, I can't find the bank deposit bag seizure - drowned out by the IRS seizing accounts for 'suspicious' deposit patterns. As for ordinary people, well, think of it as the latest version of setting up a speed trap for out of towners.
The purpose of money is to create tax revenue.
I'd argue that the purpose of 'money' is to facilitate trade, by making it easier for me to trade product X (that I made) for products A, B, C, by having a standardized widget of 'worth' that means that I can still get product A even if it's seller doesn't want my product X. It also helps if the currency is easily divided enough that if say, my product X is worth a year's amount of product A(which goes bad in 2 weeks), the trades are still 'fair'.
The purpose of government currency is to facilitate tax revenue.
The opposite assumption--the worst-case per-square-foot--is an assertion that those static costs are even *less* important. That is: I'm saying a *cheap* construction cost has all those static costs as roughly 5% of its build cost; if we go claiming the apartment has $200/sqft build costs, then those static costs are 2.4% of its build cost. That gives me an advantage by dismissing the case in which build is cheap, thus claiming that those costs are even less significant.
Except, of course, life isn't generally about the extremes. Far more will be located in the middle. Your using the cheapest construction costs quoted results in you almost certainly making an under-estimate as to the costs. Using the maximum costs would also be inaccurate, as that would be an apartment for visiting Saudi Sheiks and such.
Have you been thinking I've been arguing for the top end of the construction range? That might explain some of the disagreement.
My response is I'm not.
That is your perogative. I'll just point out that when people browse your sight and see your estimates that it weakens your argument because it makes it seem like you don't know what you're talking about.
Living with another person is not an acceptable solution. I moved *out* of my parents's house; if I had roommates, there would be corpses.
Then get a job or make other sacrifices. Use a service to help find acceptable roommates.
We can build 100sqft capsule apartments cheaper than this and drive the cost of living down further. Humans can get room mates as an elective. There is no *requirement* to base our economic success on the assumption that people do not universally have the option to live alone. No. Financial. Reason.?
At this point unless you're assembling them in a factory the cost is probably going to be higher than a slightly larger apartment due to the need to use custom sized appliances and such.
Lengthened the supposed pay-off length of the apartment build, then applied that to the other costs, which made the cost of appliances negligible. It's one of a few dozen pointless ways to do the amortization.
You're not supposed to unilaterally increase the pay-off length. That's an accounting 'trick'. You set that to a specific duration and keep it there so you're comparing the same thing. Besides, lengthening the pay-off means less profit, which means that most investers won't do it.
"Cost of captial" - meaningless word. I included the cost of the fixtures themselves; the cost of installation is included in the cost of initial construction.
Take a business economics course and it won't be meaningless anymore.
and installing a zone control baffel during an initial HVAC build costs... $0. It's a piece of ductwork. This piece happens to have a fancy valve in it.
It's normally included in construction costs, yes, but my point is that the construction costs are estimates on the basis of X number of installs per Y square feet. Go over that and cost per square foot goes up.
The control panel is an electronic control run to both your thermostat and your ductwork baffles. There will be a 3 foot length of wire going to this giant fork that comes from 1 big pipe and goes to 6 big pipes; it goes into a 6 inch rectangular plate that opens and shuts those valves.
See your next paragraph for this. Like I said, I have a boiler system. I have a 4 zone house.
Yes I know what I'm taling about. You've apparently just said, "lol what? $80 each? Bullshit! Those things cost $80 each!"
Actually, I completely missed your baffle line. Sorry, yeah, those figures are better.
Pretending I didn't just say what I just said does not make for a good argument.
No pretending, just distracted
He's arguing that the company would put trace amounts in so that the bulb burned out *faster*. Thing is, there's a difference between the occasional defective bulb and quality control to get the oxygen levels as low as possible.
That being said, there was enough competition and examination back in the day that a company that didn't produce bulbs that were at least close to specifications would be quickly found out and abandoned by customers.
LEDs and CFLs that are supposed to last 5-10 years but only last 1 are a bigger concern, because of the greater investment and the difficulty of warranty claims.
What was your "documented evidence?" How about this - the cop seizes your money anyways, and tells you to 'prove it in court'. They offer to settle for you getting half your money back.
You just named one of the frequent false positives. Buying a car - what sort of evidence might you have? How do you 'prove' that you're not lying?
Other reasons I've seen are immigrant families(notorious for distrusting banks) looking to buy a business or equipment.
The amounts seized can be as low as a couple hundred bucks - and I'm now an 'older' gentleman, I traditionally grab a couple hundred just because I remember a time when credit cards weren't always an option, and checks weren't accepted out of state. Take somebody who has bad credit or whatever, suddenly they're back on cash, and might have to carry even more.
They've even seized cash funds from employees doing a bank run, with money/receipts in the bank bag.
$0.05 is 20% increase on pistol ammo, less for a 223, 30-06 etc, but what is it for a 22? +200%.
It's also an 'ideal' proposal not to control criminals, but to help kill the enthusiest shooting scene.
Your typical criminal firearm user doesn't shoot much. When a single box of ammo will do them for a year, 5 cents a round doesn't mean jack.
For me and my 200 round range trips, that's getting significant. It's also doubling/tripling the cost of .22, as you mention, which is the favored 'practice' ammo, even today.
wouldnt it be easier to simple make that service tax free? Why complicate things with a deduction after the fact????
Think income tax, not sales tax. And yes, they made it 'tax free' because it's not reported as income for employees. Here's a trivia fact for you: If you're 'issued' a company car that you use for personal driving, it has to be reported on your W-2 and you will pay income tax on that privilege. This was caused by companies 'getting around' federal taxation by providing a huge portion of their employee compensation through 'benefits' instead of straight pay. Company car, company housing, free meals at the company cafeteria, etc... Since it's a non-reportable benefit, it doesn't get taxed when provided to employees.
It's made 'tax-free' for companies because it's still considered a standard expense, so like I said, they add it to the pile so it doesn't count as net profit(which is taxable; gross generally isn't) at the end of the year. Please note that since pretty much everything ends up in that pile anyways, treating it special would actually require more work.
Between the longer lives of CFL and LED bulbs, and the fact that modern rooms have gone from a single bulb hanging from the center of the room to multiple bulbs on the walls and a 3 or 4 bulb cluster in the center (wiping out the electricity savings from the more efficient bulbs), it is a long time since I kept a spare supply of bulbs.
On keeping bulbs on hand: I did say "back in the day", didn't I? I'm also an 'old fogey' at this point for this stuff. Additionally, if you have 'multiple bulbs on the walls' and a '3-4 bulb cluster' in the center, what the hell are you doing worrying about a single blown bulb?
I've never seen a 'modern' room with as much lighting as you mention. If anything, the 'problem' is that they aren't putting fixtures in the ceiling, so people have to use floor lamps and such.
Still, LEDs are about 10X as efficient as Incandescent. So you'd need 10 bulbs, each of the same light output, to match the energy use. At which point you're not actually meeting the same use case because you're looking at a room that would probably be painfully bright. So rather than putting in a couple 60-100 watt incandescent bulbs in, you can put, say, 4-5 40 watt equivalents in, and have the benefit that each individual bulb isn't blinding, and you have nice distributed light.
If my toilet light goes out (which is about the only room it makes a difference, since there is only one bulb there), I'll take one of the three ceiling lights from the bathroom until I get around to buying a new one.
Yep, grab a bulb from somewhere 'less used'.
The bathroom is also my most likely spot I'll grab a bulb from. I actually have a 5 light fixture in there - I put daylights in it; helps me wake up in the morning. For night use I have a different switch to the ceiling fan/light, which is a much dimmer(and warmer) light.
Look up "Civil Asset Forfeiture" and you'll see that local police departments have been 'teaming' up with the Feds for years to bypass local and state controls in order to seize money that they can funnel straight into their departments.
Add it to Ammonium Nitrate and you get ANFO, a different explosive.
Still, it's the Nitrates that get people's attention, you can buy diesel pretty much anywhere.
Don't normally respond to ACs, but the closest link I could think of is that the BATF is actually the BATFE today, they added in explosives a while ago.
One of the ingredients of your standard 'fertilizer bomb' is generally diesel, but most high-lipid sources would do.
That being said, it's the other half of the bomb formula that's actually hard to get, as opposed to pulling up to any fueling station with some yellow cans. Well, the color doesn't really matter, but yellow is the convention for diesel.
Still, as you say, this is an overreach by the ATF, and should have been done by the EPA in concert with local authorities.
This behavior is not the fault of the bureaucrats or politicians. It is learned behavior fully ingrained by years of conditioning from the voters.
Like I said, sacred cows.
I agree. Defund state parks, because Americans are currently too lazy to get out of the house.
I disagree. You consider shutting down a park due to lack of interest. There are plenty of parks that get sufficient visitors to justify their existence; Americans aren't that lazy.
Schools are funded by local school districts. State Parks are funded by the State government. Totally different revenue bases, so it's a poor example.
Not really, as most schools are actually funded by a mix of local property taxes, as well as state and federal funding.