Yes, a growing portion is going to be going toward equity, but if you had taken that down payment and invested it you'd get to see compounded interest work in your favor as well.
The problem with this logic is twofold: 1) you need to find an investment that would outperform real estate appreciation and (2) you need two sets of money: one to pay your rent with, and one to invest with. If you buy a house the money is paying for your housing at the same time it's appreciating. You repeated the mistake with your depreciation example.
And 10 years? Come on, within a year of purchasing my last house (haven't checked the value on this one), it had appreciated enough to cover all my closing costs. Within 5 years it appreciated enough so I could use the profits to make almost 40% downpayment on my current house. Normal rule-of-thumb is that closing costs will be covered by appreciation within 3-5 years of ownership.
Yes, not everyone is better off buying, but from what I've seen, most people who could afford a house would be better off doing so.
Is there any way, if the bank forecloses on the loan, that you could make a deal with the bank to assume the mortgage?
Not really, because there are already many people offering cash for it. There are so many people actively searching for foreclosure homes to purchase and either rent out or flip, they've got it down to a science: it's their primary means of income. No way are you going to find a foreclosed house before they do. Given a chance between a risky mortgage and cash in hand, most banks will take the cash.
nd thsu the entire supply of housing diminished thus keeping prices afloat or rising as new people to the market seek homes
Remember what country you're talking about, though. We have thousands of square miles of unused land to build on (or do you live in an overcrowded city?) Around these parts (Minneapolis metro area), there's so much new housing being built, the rental market is being hit pretty hard. Housing prices are rising fast, but only in some areas: I sold a house in a very desirable part of the city for about 80% profit after living there for 5 years, but once you leave city limits, it's easy to find affordable housing. I have a 30 minute commute and I could pay the mortgage for my 2000 sq ft home on wooded 1/2 acre with a job in a coffee shop!
Freelancers come and go. They might not be interested next time.
I've done some work on RentACoder for fun when the project was interesting and could be done easily in my spare time.
The parent is right. I'm in the US with a good job as a developer and I do freelancing as a way to get experience or just do different stuff than I do at work. Don't expect that the same person will be available the next time you need work done. It's different for someone who relies on it for a living (but I doubt any skilled programmer in the US could live on what RentACoder work pays), but for us doing it on the side, we might just not be in the mood next time.
When I was getting out of high school, I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I had the grades, etc to get in, but not citizenship (non-citizens must have permission from their country of citizenship, and are not given US commissions upon graduation). Even tried to get sponsored for immediate US citizenship by my Congressman: no dice!
Considered just going to OCS when I graduated college, but I couldn't cause I wasn't a citizen yet. By the time I got my citizenship a year later, I had lost interest:-)
Are you sure the officers you remember were not US citizens, or just not US-born?
So are you saying that there should be One True Way to enjoy coffee?
Dude, different people like different things. That's all it is. I love good wine to the point that I make a few gallons every year, but I'd still rather have a burger than lobster (yuck!).
Reading the patent below, I must wonder if those who give out patents get lost in the gobbely-gook of the descriptions
Somewhat OT, but I doubt it. We just got back a USPTO response to a patent we filed and my first impression was that the patent examiner was a really smart guy. It was obvious that he took the time to understand the complex software system we described well enough to be able to find previous examples of different parts of the system and show that our submission was a combination of several examples of prior art.
These guys deal with complex technical documents that were "enhanced" by lawyers every day, I doubt they get confused by it.
Not really. The same volume of coffee will take longer for exactly the reason you say: it's mostly water. Water's huge thermal capacity is one reason it's popular for fighting most types of fire: it soaks up the heat and cools the fire. Compare the specific heat of water to that of the other soup ingredients.
People don't buy these just to be green: they buy them because over the life of the unit they expect to save money.
Correct: they're mostly not trying to be green. Most users of solar electricity aren't doing it so they can get off the grid and switch to cheaper power; they generally don't have ready access to an electrical grid in the first place. So the benefit they get from solar energy has a much higher cost than someone who is on-grid and looking to save money over the long haul. If it costs $10,000 for the power company to pull a line 1 mile to your house and you expect to spend $600/year for power from them, then that $15,000 solar panel starts looking really good.
What I should have made clearer in the first place is that the price of the panels doesn't just represent the savings in monthly bills, it represents the *total* benefit to the user.
First, let me say that I appreciate receiving a coherent, well thought out response to my post. That's becoming all too rare here on/.
You're basically right. My suggestion is balancing odds, and I still think that odds are substantially that your username/pw won't be hacked, or captured by a "rogue" site. It's like losing my house key: if I lose it while fishing, I'll just get a new one (yes, my house has one key for all locks:-) because the small probability that the person who may have seen me drop them will follow me back to my truck and trail me home to see where I live is slight compared to the probability that they fell on the ground and no one was around or no one noticed. But if it fell out of my pocket along with my fishing license (which has my name/address), bet your ass I'm changing the locks. Still small odds of a break-in, but substantially larger than the former situation.
My reality is actually pretty close to what you recommended: I have unique usernames/passwords for the few sites I consider sensitive: bank, PayPal, Amazon, brokerage acct, email, and those are written down on paper filed near this very computer. The rest are either all the same, or stored in Mozilla's password manager and it would be just a slight inconvenience if I forgot them or they were hacked. So what if my Slashdot nick becomes "NoBulletsLeft" instead of "HeyLaughingBoy" and my UID goes up by a factor of 5?
Perhaps the inconsistency is the price of energy the PV factory pays and the price of energy a homeowner pays
No. There is no inconsistency: just a few people who know nothing about pricing a product. The amount of energy it cost to make is a vanishingly small consideration in the price it is sold for. It's sold for what the market will bear. So if it cost $50 of electricity to make, and will generate $45 in energy during its lifetime, there's no reason the company can't sell it for $5,000 if enough people will pay that so the corp. can make its income targets.
Price of a product is based on what benefit the purchaser is willing to pay for, not how much it cost the manufacturer to make.
And your average mugger is going to know that how, exactly? You have a piece of paper in your wallet with "xyzzy, ncc1701a" and he's supposed to deduce that it's a username and password?
The simple, obvious solution is just one *good* username and password for everything. The odds of that becoming compromised are much smaller than the odds of you forgetting/losing one of the multiple ones.
You say that even at $10k/unit, you'd sell only 10-50 licenses. Are those your numbers or the salespeoples'? Believe it or not, salespeople have *much* better knowledge of what can be sold, and how much it can be sold for, than you do!
Even so, if you sell 10 licenses at $10k each you've still made a *known* $100k, plus probably 20% more per year on a support contract. Open sourcing it for free advertising/word of mouth is an unknown quantity, and most companies with half a brain will go for the known over the unknown every time.
As someone else already said, the development costs are sunk, so forget about them. It's all about how much money you can bring in after it's been developed.
it is software that will be vitally useful to those in the right markets
You've just given another reason for selling it. You have already identified a market for the product. Giving it away at this point would be insane.
Personally I think your VP is doing the smart thing. Even if the software isn't eventually sold, at least he is seriously considering it. The business is there to make money, not make OSS look good.
But the only thing that matters is her definition, no? She's the one in the relationship. The successful relationship is one that provides what you want over the period of time that you want it to last. By that definition a one-night stand can be successful, as can a long marriage: you simply have to adjust your expectations.
betrays that you're self centred
You say that like it's a bad thing. Being self-centered is a very good thing. Problems only arise if the person forgets that there's a difference between merely being at the center of the circle and excluding others from it altogether. My four year-old son thinks the world revolves around him, but he will still share his cookie with me; my wife makes sure that she's happy with something she wants to do, then makes sure I'm OK with it. That's being self centered, but also taking other's feelings into consideration. If you can't take care of your own life first, don't expect someone else to do it for you, but do expect to become bitter, and feel cheated. That's how your post comes across.
Once you get into the latter years of college you can get an intership, and quit McDonald's
Or he might find that he likes the restaurant industry. One of my relatives started out at 19 working in fast food. Now at 38, he's a regional manager with a huge fast food franchisee (I was surprised to learn that there are corporations whose only business is buying and running McDonald's etc. franchises!) and operates a number of restaurants. He makes approximately 4x what I do and I'm a fairly well paid software engineer. He also has a 5-series BMW as his company car: not bad work if you can find it.
What's my point to the OP? Life changes people: as you do different jobs, you discover new aspects to yourself and come to realize that you want different things out of life. Take the opportunity to do something you might not otherwise have considered.
we're smart enough to see the rut we're stuck in, but we don't necessarily know how to get out.
There's no law saying you have to know everything: that's what experts are for. You consider yourself knowledgeable about computers? Go find someone knowledgeable in psychology and have *them* help you.
Life is much too short to try dealing with depression on your own.
we go on a one or two day hike once a month (another thing that's difficult in the US),
I pretty much agree with what you have to say, but that puzzled me; why do you think it's difficult to do? I have a wife and child and the only real thing keeping me from doing something like that is lack of interest.
, just made that way so once it breaks, you're fudged, and you have to buy a new one
It's a lot more likely that they're made that way because it's cheaper than using screws. Snapping two bits together or ultrasonically welding plastic with a robot is a lot cheaper than driving in five screws.
Why do you need sponsors exactly? If this is a commercial venture, then sell the software.
If it's not commercial, then it doesn't have to make money, so you can work on it in your spare time and I don't understand why you'd need funding for a hobby project. Sounds like nice work if you can get it!
If it really *is* a commercial venture, then I'd have to question your business model if you need external "sponsorship" before you can make any money at it.
As we are liberated from manual and repetitive tasks, we are given the gift of donating our talents to aesthetics and other intellectual and artistic pursuits
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I get sick of the "oh, what will we do when our hands are idle" whine around here when the subject of robots comes up. People, work is something you do so you can live well. Period. It shouldn't be the entire point of life itself. If I became independently wealthy tomorrow, the office would never see me again: I'd probably be carving music boxes out of solid blocks of cocobolo in Costa Rica or something.
As the respondent said, there are many interesting things to do that don't involve grunt labor. A robot can churn out functional wine glasses by the thousands for pennies each, but a glass artisan can make a one-of-a-kind set that will blow your mind (and your pocketbook:-) People will still want their walls painted, but due to the lower cost of living, getting a mural painted on the dining room wall may cost what two coats of satin-finish beige used to.
I, for one, welcome our new robot... No, wait. If we can just pull the plug/remove the fuel cell/pop the gas tank, it's kinda hard for them to be overlords. But I do welcome being free from the manual labor I don't want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this logic is twofold: 1) you need to find an investment that would outperform real estate appreciation and (2) you need two sets of money: one to pay your rent with, and one to invest with. If you buy a house the money is paying for your housing at the same time it's appreciating. You repeated the mistake with your depreciation example.
And 10 years? Come on, within a year of purchasing my last house (haven't checked the value on this one), it had appreciated enough to cover all my closing costs. Within 5 years it appreciated enough so I could use the profits to make almost 40% downpayment on my current house. Normal rule-of-thumb is that closing costs will be covered by appreciation within 3-5 years of ownership.
Yes, not everyone is better off buying, but from what I've seen, most people who could afford a house would be better off doing so.
Not really, because there are already many people offering cash for it. There are so many people actively searching for foreclosure homes to purchase and either rent out or flip, they've got it down to a science: it's their primary means of income. No way are you going to find a foreclosed house before they do. Given a chance between a risky mortgage and cash in hand, most banks will take the cash.
Remember what country you're talking about, though. We have thousands of square miles of unused land to build on (or do you live in an overcrowded city?) Around these parts (Minneapolis metro area), there's so much new housing being built, the rental market is being hit pretty hard.
Housing prices are rising fast, but only in some areas: I sold a house in a very desirable part of the city for about 80% profit after living there for 5 years, but once you leave city limits, it's easy to find affordable housing. I have a 30 minute commute and I could pay the mortgage for my 2000 sq ft home on wooded 1/2 acre with a job in a coffee shop!
I think you may have forgotten about the thousands of companies doing business behind an Apache webserver.
I can't expect you to know about me and my tiny part-time business, but even I turn a small profit using Open Source tools.
Because they can.
I've done some work on RentACoder for fun when the project was interesting and could be done easily in my spare time.
The parent is right. I'm in the US with a good job as a developer and I do freelancing as a way to get experience or just do different stuff than I do at work. Don't expect that the same person will be available the next time you need work done. It's different for someone who relies on it for a living (but I doubt any skilled programmer in the US could live on what RentACoder work pays), but for us doing it on the side, we might just not be in the mood next time.
I'm not confused: law must have changed.
:-)
When I was getting out of high school, I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. I had the grades, etc to get in, but not citizenship (non-citizens must have permission from their country of citizenship, and are not given US commissions upon graduation). Even tried to get sponsored for immediate US citizenship by my Congressman: no dice!
Considered just going to OCS when I graduated college, but I couldn't cause I wasn't a citizen yet. By the time I got my citizenship a year later, I had lost interest
Are you sure the officers you remember were not US citizens, or just not US-born?
So are you saying that there should be One True Way to enjoy coffee?
Dude, different people like different things. That's all it is. I love good wine to the point that I make a few gallons every year, but I'd still rather have a burger than lobster (yuck!).
And luckily for me, so did mine
And she gets instantly hot with just a suggestive look.
No, I don't know why I responded to this post
Somewhat OT, but I doubt it. We just got back a USPTO response to a patent we filed and my first impression was that the patent examiner was a really smart guy. It was obvious that he took the time to understand the complex software system we described well enough to be able to find previous examples of different parts of the system and show that our submission was a combination of several examples of prior art.
These guys deal with complex technical documents that were "enhanced" by lawyers every day, I doubt they get confused by it.
Not really. The same volume of coffee will take longer for exactly the reason you say: it's mostly water. Water's huge thermal capacity is one reason it's popular for fighting most types of fire: it soaks up the heat and cools the fire. Compare the specific heat of water to that of the other soup ingredients.
You don't have to be a citizen to enlist in the US armed forces, but you do in order to be an officer.
Correct: they're mostly not trying to be green. Most users of solar electricity aren't doing it so they can get off the grid and switch to cheaper power; they generally don't have ready access to an electrical grid in the first place. So the benefit they get from solar energy has a much higher cost than someone who is on-grid and looking to save money over the long haul.
If it costs $10,000 for the power company to pull a line 1 mile to your house and you expect to spend $600/year for power from them, then that $15,000 solar panel starts looking really good.
What I should have made clearer in the first place is that the price of the panels doesn't just represent the savings in monthly bills, it represents the *total* benefit to the user.
First, let me say that I appreciate receiving a coherent, well thought out response to my post. That's becoming all too rare here on /.
:-) because the small probability that the person who may have seen me drop them will follow me back to my truck and trail me home to see where I live is slight compared to the probability that they fell on the ground and no one was around or no one noticed.
You're basically right. My suggestion is balancing odds, and I still think that odds are substantially that your username/pw won't be hacked, or captured by a "rogue" site. It's like losing my house key: if I lose it while fishing, I'll just get a new one (yes, my house has one key for all locks
But if it fell out of my pocket along with my fishing license (which has my name/address), bet your ass I'm changing the locks. Still small odds of a break-in, but substantially larger than the former situation.
My reality is actually pretty close to what you recommended: I have unique usernames/passwords for the few sites I consider sensitive: bank, PayPal, Amazon, brokerage acct, email, and those are written down on paper filed near this very computer. The rest are either all the same, or stored in Mozilla's password manager and it would be just a slight inconvenience if I forgot them or they were hacked. So what if my Slashdot nick becomes "NoBulletsLeft" instead of "HeyLaughingBoy" and my UID goes up by a factor of 5?
No. There is no inconsistency: just a few people who know nothing about pricing a product. The amount of energy it cost to make is a vanishingly small consideration in the price it is sold for. It's sold for what the market will bear. So if it cost $50 of electricity to make, and will generate $45 in energy during its lifetime, there's no reason the company can't sell it for $5,000 if enough people will pay that so the corp. can make its income targets.
Price of a product is based on what benefit the purchaser is willing to pay for, not how much it cost the manufacturer to make.
And your average mugger is going to know that how, exactly? You have a piece of paper in your wallet with "xyzzy, ncc1701a" and he's supposed to deduce that it's a username and password?
The simple, obvious solution is just one *good* username and password for everything. The odds of that becoming compromised are much smaller than the odds of you forgetting/losing one of the multiple ones.
Even so, if you sell 10 licenses at $10k each you've still made a *known* $100k, plus probably 20% more per year on a support contract. Open sourcing it for free advertising/word of mouth is an unknown quantity, and most companies with half a brain will go for the known over the unknown every time.
As someone else already said, the development costs are sunk, so forget about them. It's all about how much money you can bring in after it's been developed.
You've just given another reason for selling it. You have already identified a market for the product. Giving it away at this point would be insane.
Personally I think your VP is doing the smart thing. Even if the software isn't eventually sold, at least he is seriously considering it. The business is there to make money, not make OSS look good.
Finally, someone gets it!
+5 Insightful
But the only thing that matters is her definition, no? She's the one in the relationship. The successful relationship is one that provides what you want over the period of time that you want it to last. By that definition a one-night stand can be successful, as can a long marriage: you simply have to adjust your expectations.
You say that like it's a bad thing. Being self-centered is a very good thing. Problems only arise if the person forgets that there's a difference between merely being at the center of the circle and excluding others from it altogether. My four year-old son thinks the world revolves around him, but he will still share his cookie with me; my wife makes sure that she's happy with something she wants to do, then makes sure I'm OK with it. That's being self centered, but also taking other's feelings into consideration.
If you can't take care of your own life first, don't expect someone else to do it for you, but do expect to become bitter, and feel cheated. That's how your post comes across.
Or he might find that he likes the restaurant industry. One of my relatives started out at 19 working in fast food. Now at 38, he's a regional manager with a huge fast food franchisee (I was surprised to learn that there are corporations whose only business is buying and running McDonald's etc. franchises!) and operates a number of restaurants. He makes approximately 4x what I do and I'm a fairly well paid software engineer. He also has a 5-series BMW as his company car: not bad work if you can find it.
What's my point to the OP? Life changes people: as you do different jobs, you discover new aspects to yourself and come to realize that you want different things out of life. Take the opportunity to do something you might not otherwise have considered.
There's no law saying you have to know everything: that's what experts are for. You consider yourself knowledgeable about computers? Go find someone knowledgeable in psychology and have *them* help you.
Life is much too short to try dealing with depression on your own.
I pretty much agree with what you have to say, but that puzzled me; why do you think it's difficult to do? I have a wife and child and the only real thing keeping me from doing something like that is lack of interest.
It's a lot more likely that they're made that way because it's cheaper than using screws. Snapping two bits together or ultrasonically welding plastic with a robot is a lot cheaper than driving in five screws.
Why do you need sponsors exactly? If this is a commercial venture, then sell the software.
If it's not commercial, then it doesn't have to make money, so you can work on it in your spare time and I don't understand why you'd need funding for a hobby project. Sounds like nice work if you can get it!
If it really *is* a commercial venture, then I'd have to question your business model if you need external "sponsorship" before you can make any money at it.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I get sick of the "oh, what will we do when our hands are idle" whine around here when the subject of robots comes up.
People, work is something you do so you can live well. Period. It shouldn't be the entire point of life itself. If I became independently wealthy tomorrow, the office would never see me again: I'd probably be carving music boxes out of solid blocks of cocobolo in Costa Rica or something.
As the respondent said, there are many interesting things to do that don't involve grunt labor. A robot can churn out functional wine glasses by the thousands for pennies each, but a glass artisan can make a one-of-a-kind set that will blow your mind (and your pocketbook
People will still want their walls painted, but due to the lower cost of living, getting a mural painted on the dining room wall may cost what two coats of satin-finish beige used to.
I, for one, welcome our new robot... No, wait. If we can just pull the plug/remove the fuel cell/pop the gas tank, it's kinda hard for them to be overlords. But I do welcome being free from the manual labor I don't want to do.