In the real world, you can drive coast to coast on Tesla's supercharger network. And if a Tesla is too rich for you, the Chevy Volt can be had for under $30k. Yes, that's a list price more than a Civic or an Accord, but you'll more than make that up in TCO. There are still a metric fuckton of charging stations. Sure, if you are planning to drive out in the badlands, you're not going to find a lot of charging stations. But if you're not, you're going to be fine.
If a Honda Civic is too expensive for you, than I guess an EV will be too expensive for you. Doesn't have anything to do with the power source, however. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with a lack of charge stations.
Well, you are seemingly a cantankerous old fucker who doesn't want anything. The rest of us want to do shit, so it doesn't really matter that you hate the world and progress. Keep shouting at clouds on the internet.
That's why my prediction is that Tesla, over the next decade or two, is going to make more selling batteries to other companies than they make selling their own cars. Batteries are way easier to make than cars. And they're pumping a lot of money into their gigafactories.
No practical way to recharge them today, in every neighborhood. However new apartments and condos which provide parking are already installing EV charge points to pull in new tenants. Look in any major city, and you'll find a lot of landlords competing for tenants by offering perks, and EV charging is one of the newer ones.
It won't be overnight, but EV charging is rapidly becoming more readily available. If you have to street park 100% of the time at home and at work, maybe an EV won't work for you. But a lot of parking garages are adding chargers, as are a lot of businesses. Even if you street park in front of your apartment, if your work or work parking deck has an EV charger, you still might be able to swing an EV.
Which most Americans go on what? Twice a year? So have one petrol vehicle for those trips. Or rent one.
The vast majority of your driving miles happen in increments of less than 50 miles a day, if you are an average American.
And yes, right now the amusement park might not have a charger. But there is 0 reason to believe that it's going to remain that way. An EV charge station is far, far cheaper and easier to install than a gas station. And since EVs take longer to refuel, it makes a giant pile of sense to install them places where people are already planning to spend a few hours. Slap a $10 EV parking fee on to the ticket, and you've just made $8 more if you're the amusement park. That will recoup the cost of the charge stations very, very quickly.
Likewise, maybe right now it's not feasible to drive 180 miles to drop johnny off at college, and immediately turn around and come home. But if you'd just stay for lunch, you can probably top off your EV enough to make it back without issue. There are never going to be less public facing EV charging stations than they are now, until we move beyond this method of charging. Every year that goes by more will be installed, and that means access is going to get easier and easier pretty much everywhere.
The larger difficulty is that quick charge stations are not available in all areas...
Yet.
In 1930 there wasn't a gas station on every corner yet either. As EVs become more and more popular, the gas station model of "they need fuel, so lets sell them shit while they're here" will be applied even more aggressively to EV drivers. Why? Because most likely EV drivers are going to spend more time refueling than petrol drivers. That means more chance to shake them down for some cash.
So put EV chargers in a restaurant, and make them free for diners. Build a mini golf course and ice cream stand at the exit, and include some charge stations. There's an entire industry waiting to be built around charge stations, just like the doughnut/coffee shop and convenience store industry built up around gas stations.
The one thing I'll never underestimate is how quickly an industry can pivot when a new income stream pops up, and an old one starts fading. If there are two bed and breakfast places in a small town, and one has an EV charger, about 100% of the EV business is going to stay at that one. Once EVs get to be even 10% of the vehicle makeup, we're going to see a giant uptick in support for EVs. Everyone who doesn't see this looming large is going to get hurt badly if they're not catering to EVs while their competitors are.
Honestly, over a 5-10 year period, even the expensive Teslas might be coming close to parity. The lack of necessarily maintenance is really, really insane. Never needing an oil change, new spark plugs and wires, exhaust work, never having a radiator issue, no transmission, etc., it all adds up pretty quickly.
Tesla lists these maintenance items:
Flush/replace brake fluid every two years Replace cabin air filter every 24,000 miles Replace battery coolant every four years Rotate tires every 5,000 miles
That's it.
Now pardon me while I schedule my $1500 exhaust replacement for my "much less expensive" Toyota....
Hacking Doom, Quake, and UT taught me to code. I wouldn't have hacked on them if I wasn't playing them.
Building levels for them gave me a way to visualize 3D environments that I later found out not a lot of people have. Not sure if it's cause and effect, but it definitely helped strengthen that skill.
Working on larger levels and mods taught me how to be a program manager, a skill which is enormously useful the older I get. Hacking on these taught me the value of documentation and code comments, especially as I began working with other like-minded individuals.
Doing all this taught me about emergent behavior in a way I could never have learned otherwise. Now I really understand how a system design can reinforce or depress user behavior, and I consider that when designing systems.
All that because I played games so much I couldn't help tinkering with them. I'd never had the drive to do any of that in my teens and early 20s if I hadn't been obsessed with the games. Hell, I wouldn't even have known that such things were possible. I bet a solid 50% of my success in life came from those games.
I assume everyone here knows about the silent BFG trick, right? You push the wall just as you start charging the BFG. The game only allows one noise from you at a time, so the grunt replaces the BFG noise, and then you strafe around the corner and unleash it. Everyone knows to run and hide when they hear the BFG winding up, so the first time you get nailed with a silent one it's a giant WTF.
I know this worked in Doom 2. Not sure about the original Doom. I don't know if I even remember that game with how much Doom 2 we played.
Even just giving the dimensions would be helpful. How god damn hard is that to figure out? Here is their fact sheet, which is a ton more helpful than the negative value the author added to this piece.
114 feet tall by 1614 feet wide by 3500 feet long. In convenient units, that's about ten stories tall, and a third of a mile wide by two thirds of a mile long. That I can picture. And it's fucking huge.
You made a very failed analogy. (It's idiotic to the extreme.)
One of the big things you're missing is the lower complexity of an electric plane. Maintenance costs for planes are huge. They are highly regulated, and the maintenance routines are very scripted. That's why plane travel is so damn safe.
Cutting out one of the more complex systems on a plane is going to be a huge cost savings. No liquid fuel means no pumps, no worries about weight distribution changing as the tanks empty, no filters, no injection nozzles to foul, no fuel lines, etc. No combustion means no radiators, minimal coolant needs, no oil changes, no exhaust worries, minimal air intake systems, etc.
All of this means way, way less overhead for maintenance and repairs, and very significant weight reductions. That all gets replaced with battery weight.
Yes, charging a battery takes longer than filling a tank, but it's definitely a problem you can either work around or engineer around. Swappable batteries would be one solution. Gateside fast charging would be another. Just rotating planes out to charge could possibly be another, given how much cost savings there will be between the fuel and fuel infrastructure, and mechanical simplicity. And as batteries get lighter and smaller, just adding more batteries solves some of the problem.
Is all this ready today? No. But it's actually feasible in the very near future, something we couldn't have said a decade ago.
A better analogy would be: That's literally like stating that an all-electric Volkswagen is competitive with Toyota Corolla.
No, they don't exist in large numbers yet, but the tech is there, and we have the proof of concept down. All that we need is the execution, and it doesn't look like there's anything really standing in the way of making it happen.
The problem is most of the jobs are in the coastal cities. So cheap prices in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska aren't all that helpful.
If all you think exists in the country are coastal cities and middle-of-nowhere Nebraska, you're speaking from a place of deep ignorance. Go explore a little bit. You'll be really surprised at what you find.
You are wrong about the job situation. Very, very wrong.
The break even point is only if the property that you buy costs less than the one you sold minus the transaction costs on both ends of the deal.
That's one of the dumber things I've heard in a long time.
That assumes that the property you're buying never changes value. But that flies in the face of reality. Yes, real estate isn't a liquid asset, but over time, it's almost always an investment that significantly increases in value. And while you can cherry pick times and places where this is not true, in general, it holds true.
If your plan is to hold onto real estate for such a short period of time that it doesn't increase in value and the transaction costs are a major component of the transaction, you're just speculating. That's not what 99.9% of people do, because it's risky and stupid.
There is nothing wrong with the house prices in the vast majority of the US. Housing is generally affordable and readily available. No, not in the coastal cities, but you can't generalize based on those.
I don't get why people feel trapped by family, friends, or circumstance to the extent that they are willing to live in places with shitty costs of living, essentially making no money. We live in a giant country with tons of interesting little cities and countless interesting jobs to do. You can live a very happy, prosperous life in a very large number of places in the US. No, you won't end up Unicorn-founder rich, but if that dream is keeping you in silicon valley, you're a dumbass to begin with.
Online news sucks specifically because it is excessively tailored for you.
That's a blanket statement that doesn't apply to everyone and in all situations. If you had said "corporate curated newsfeeds", you'd have pretty much nailed it.
I do mostly online news. But I do it with an RSS feed that pulls in a fairly diverse set of news websites, including local news. I've curated political, science, and tech news sections, and I've tried to do my due diligence and put a good bit of diversity in there, provided that the sites in question are actually generally factual and truthful.
What I find is that my RSS feed bears no resemblance to most curated newsfeeds out there.
Online news can be fine, if you break free from the algorithms, and build your own minimal, non-adaptive one. Mine is "reputation for quality journalism", subscribe by topic section, and that's about it. The RSS reader doesn't care if I click to read more. It just shows me my feed.
Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.
Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.
Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.
Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.
Huh. It's almost like twitter is one of the worst ways to communicate complicated things. Too bad there aren't any places on the internet where one can post long-form information and have a discussion about it. Guess we'll just have to break everything into 30 different tweets.
When did we used to have this? The 1920s? Because that hasn't been true for at least 30-40 years. Even without a human it would not be possible to launder money in most states in the US this way.
Real estate sales are generally public information and reported to the government. And that has nothing to do with a human doing an appraisal. All the appraisal does is help the bank ensure that the property is worth the amount they're lending for it. Since defaulting on your mortgage means that they own the property, they want to be sure that they'll be getting their money back.
We're not generally talking overall condition of the property. That's easy to work out from just looking at it. The inspection is to cover the buyer's ass to uncover anything that would cost them a ton of money that the property owner hasn't disclosed (knowingly or unknowingly) prior to sale.
The last place I bought the inspector spot checked the voltage at a number of outlets, the furnace & AC, appliances to make sure they worked, sinks and tubs to make sure the water came out and that they drained, did a visible structural inspection which found some rot in the outside deck, looked at the roof to make sure there weren't any obvious issues, opened windows to make sure the cranks worked, checked the foundation for cracks, looked at roof drainage to make sure water wouldn't come in when it rained, looked for asbestos and lead paint, etc.
A lot of those are not super obvious to someone not trained to look closely, and/or who doesn't have the tools to do it. But all could cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to repair. Knowing that ahead of time allows the buyer to negotiate with the seller to fix the issues, or provide a discounted purchase price intended to cover the cost of repairs.
That inspection was in a very competitive market, so I waived any counter-bid for anything that would cost in total less than $1000 to fix. That meant as long as they were pretty certain that nothing major was wrong, they were pretty much guaranteed a sale. But if something was majorly wrong, I'd be able to get them to fix it, so I wasn't buying something that would immediately cost me tens of thousands to repair.
At the house I bought before this one they hadn't shoveled during the winter, and an ice dam built up against an exterior door which forced water under the door into the house. Soaking in water like that all winter rotted out the bottom couple of feet of the door frame and the first couple of feet of subflooring. That was a case where we had them fix it before we moved in, because we didn't want to have to rip up the floor, fix the subfloor, rip out the bottom couple of feet of the door frame, and then put it all back together.
I think it's been clear to a majority of us that it's absolutely an illegal abuse of power. Unfortunately, it takes time for things to work their way through the courts. Looks like civil forfeiture is going to get significantly neutered in the very near future. That's going to result in a lot of clawback from police departments, I'd be guessing. Going to keep the lawyers busy for years.
A Nissan Leaf in particular? No. But cheap cars? definitely yes. Note Sergey Brin and Larry Page with Priuses and Balmer with a Ford Fusion Hybrid.
Rich people don't necessarily drive luxury cars, and I'm not sure that the Model 3 counts as luxury anyway. Lots of crappy SUVs cost the same or more as at least the base model, which is what they're finally starting to roll out. Sure, you can add on options to crank the price way up, but you can do that with most cars.
Antarctica has a summer population of around 1,000 and winter population of around 200.....But humans are not purely scientific.
No. And of those 1,000, a minority are scientists. Our Antarctica population is a small, specialized town with a couple of satellite outposts, and it requires almost all the jobs that a small town needs. Just more specialized, since it's so isolated.
Cooks, janitors, logistics and project management, pilots, fuel handlers, sanitation workers, heavy machine operators, construction workers and carpenters, scientific equipment maintenance, crane operators, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on and on.
Likewise if we went to Mars, the minority would be scientists, at the start and forever. And you need to build a colony that can support this diverse group of people. It's not going to be rich bastards who crave danger, at least at first. It's going to be someone who needs to figure out the sewage situation, and someone else who is really good with a backhoe. You can't have a remote colony without those people.
The scientists will come next, and far down the line we'll get the rich bastards who want a shot of adrenaline. They're not going to be super happy sharing a tiny space with Joe the sanitation worker. And Joe needs to be there first, and needs to be there always.
Slashdot Mirror
In the real world, you can drive coast to coast on Tesla's supercharger network. And if a Tesla is too rich for you, the Chevy Volt can be had for under $30k. Yes, that's a list price more than a Civic or an Accord, but you'll more than make that up in TCO. There are still a metric fuckton of charging stations. Sure, if you are planning to drive out in the badlands, you're not going to find a lot of charging stations. But if you're not, you're going to be fine.
If a Honda Civic is too expensive for you, than I guess an EV will be too expensive for you. Doesn't have anything to do with the power source, however. And it definitely doesn't have anything to do with a lack of charge stations.
You keep shouting at those clouds!
Well, you are seemingly a cantankerous old fucker who doesn't want anything. The rest of us want to do shit, so it doesn't really matter that you hate the world and progress. Keep shouting at clouds on the internet.
That's why my prediction is that Tesla, over the next decade or two, is going to make more selling batteries to other companies than they make selling their own cars. Batteries are way easier to make than cars. And they're pumping a lot of money into their gigafactories.
No practical way to recharge them today, in every neighborhood. However new apartments and condos which provide parking are already installing EV charge points to pull in new tenants. Look in any major city, and you'll find a lot of landlords competing for tenants by offering perks, and EV charging is one of the newer ones.
It won't be overnight, but EV charging is rapidly becoming more readily available. If you have to street park 100% of the time at home and at work, maybe an EV won't work for you. But a lot of parking garages are adding chargers, as are a lot of businesses. Even if you street park in front of your apartment, if your work or work parking deck has an EV charger, you still might be able to swing an EV.
Trips...Trips....trips...
Which most Americans go on what? Twice a year? So have one petrol vehicle for those trips. Or rent one.
The vast majority of your driving miles happen in increments of less than 50 miles a day, if you are an average American.
And yes, right now the amusement park might not have a charger. But there is 0 reason to believe that it's going to remain that way. An EV charge station is far, far cheaper and easier to install than a gas station. And since EVs take longer to refuel, it makes a giant pile of sense to install them places where people are already planning to spend a few hours. Slap a $10 EV parking fee on to the ticket, and you've just made $8 more if you're the amusement park. That will recoup the cost of the charge stations very, very quickly.
Likewise, maybe right now it's not feasible to drive 180 miles to drop johnny off at college, and immediately turn around and come home. But if you'd just stay for lunch, you can probably top off your EV enough to make it back without issue. There are never going to be less public facing EV charging stations than they are now, until we move beyond this method of charging. Every year that goes by more will be installed, and that means access is going to get easier and easier pretty much everywhere.
The larger difficulty is that quick charge stations are not available in all areas...
Yet.
In 1930 there wasn't a gas station on every corner yet either. As EVs become more and more popular, the gas station model of "they need fuel, so lets sell them shit while they're here" will be applied even more aggressively to EV drivers. Why? Because most likely EV drivers are going to spend more time refueling than petrol drivers. That means more chance to shake them down for some cash.
So put EV chargers in a restaurant, and make them free for diners. Build a mini golf course and ice cream stand at the exit, and include some charge stations. There's an entire industry waiting to be built around charge stations, just like the doughnut/coffee shop and convenience store industry built up around gas stations.
The one thing I'll never underestimate is how quickly an industry can pivot when a new income stream pops up, and an old one starts fading. If there are two bed and breakfast places in a small town, and one has an EV charger, about 100% of the EV business is going to stay at that one. Once EVs get to be even 10% of the vehicle makeup, we're going to see a giant uptick in support for EVs. Everyone who doesn't see this looming large is going to get hurt badly if they're not catering to EVs while their competitors are.
Honestly, over a 5-10 year period, even the expensive Teslas might be coming close to parity. The lack of necessarily maintenance is really, really insane. Never needing an oil change, new spark plugs and wires, exhaust work, never having a radiator issue, no transmission, etc., it all adds up pretty quickly.
Tesla lists these maintenance items:
Flush/replace brake fluid every two years
Replace cabin air filter every 24,000 miles
Replace battery coolant every four years
Rotate tires every 5,000 miles
That's it.
Now pardon me while I schedule my $1500 exhaust replacement for my "much less expensive" Toyota....
One could say that it's only 99% frivolous.
And one would be wrong.
Hacking Doom, Quake, and UT taught me to code. I wouldn't have hacked on them if I wasn't playing them.
Building levels for them gave me a way to visualize 3D environments that I later found out not a lot of people have. Not sure if it's cause and effect, but it definitely helped strengthen that skill.
Working on larger levels and mods taught me how to be a program manager, a skill which is enormously useful the older I get. Hacking on these taught me the value of documentation and code comments, especially as I began working with other like-minded individuals.
Doing all this taught me about emergent behavior in a way I could never have learned otherwise. Now I really understand how a system design can reinforce or depress user behavior, and I consider that when designing systems.
All that because I played games so much I couldn't help tinkering with them. I'd never had the drive to do any of that in my teens and early 20s if I hadn't been obsessed with the games. Hell, I wouldn't even have known that such things were possible. I bet a solid 50% of my success in life came from those games.
I assume everyone here knows about the silent BFG trick, right? You push the wall just as you start charging the BFG. The game only allows one noise from you at a time, so the grunt replaces the BFG noise, and then you strafe around the corner and unleash it. Everyone knows to run and hide when they hear the BFG winding up, so the first time you get nailed with a silent one it's a giant WTF.
I know this worked in Doom 2. Not sure about the original Doom. I don't know if I even remember that game with how much Doom 2 we played.
Even just giving the dimensions would be helpful. How god damn hard is that to figure out? Here is their fact sheet, which is a ton more helpful than the negative value the author added to this piece.
114 feet tall by 1614 feet wide by 3500 feet long. In convenient units, that's about ten stories tall, and a third of a mile wide by two thirds of a mile long. That I can picture. And it's fucking huge.
But why is this on /. again?
You made a very failed analogy. (It's idiotic to the extreme.)
One of the big things you're missing is the lower complexity of an electric plane. Maintenance costs for planes are huge. They are highly regulated, and the maintenance routines are very scripted. That's why plane travel is so damn safe.
Cutting out one of the more complex systems on a plane is going to be a huge cost savings. No liquid fuel means no pumps, no worries about weight distribution changing as the tanks empty, no filters, no injection nozzles to foul, no fuel lines, etc. No combustion means no radiators, minimal coolant needs, no oil changes, no exhaust worries, minimal air intake systems, etc.
All of this means way, way less overhead for maintenance and repairs, and very significant weight reductions. That all gets replaced with battery weight.
Yes, charging a battery takes longer than filling a tank, but it's definitely a problem you can either work around or engineer around. Swappable batteries would be one solution. Gateside fast charging would be another. Just rotating planes out to charge could possibly be another, given how much cost savings there will be between the fuel and fuel infrastructure, and mechanical simplicity. And as batteries get lighter and smaller, just adding more batteries solves some of the problem.
Is all this ready today? No. But it's actually feasible in the very near future, something we couldn't have said a decade ago.
A better analogy would be: That's literally like stating that an all-electric Volkswagen is competitive with Toyota Corolla.
No, they don't exist in large numbers yet, but the tech is there, and we have the proof of concept down. All that we need is the execution, and it doesn't look like there's anything really standing in the way of making it happen.
Sounds 100% like you could do Uber for the skies then. I mean, ignoring laws to turn a profit is Uber's core business plan.
The problem is most of the jobs are in the coastal cities. So cheap prices in middle-of-nowhere Nebraska aren't all that helpful.
If all you think exists in the country are coastal cities and middle-of-nowhere Nebraska, you're speaking from a place of deep ignorance. Go explore a little bit. You'll be really surprised at what you find.
You are wrong about the job situation. Very, very wrong.
The break even point is only if the property that you buy costs less than the one you sold minus the transaction costs on both ends of the deal.
That's one of the dumber things I've heard in a long time.
That assumes that the property you're buying never changes value. But that flies in the face of reality. Yes, real estate isn't a liquid asset, but over time, it's almost always an investment that significantly increases in value. And while you can cherry pick times and places where this is not true, in general, it holds true.
If your plan is to hold onto real estate for such a short period of time that it doesn't increase in value and the transaction costs are a major component of the transaction, you're just speculating. That's not what 99.9% of people do, because it's risky and stupid.
There is nothing wrong with the house prices in the vast majority of the US. Housing is generally affordable and readily available. No, not in the coastal cities, but you can't generalize based on those.
I don't get why people feel trapped by family, friends, or circumstance to the extent that they are willing to live in places with shitty costs of living, essentially making no money. We live in a giant country with tons of interesting little cities and countless interesting jobs to do. You can live a very happy, prosperous life in a very large number of places in the US. No, you won't end up Unicorn-founder rich, but if that dream is keeping you in silicon valley, you're a dumbass to begin with.
Noted. I'll try to move to use VCS.
Online news sucks specifically because it is excessively tailored for you.
That's a blanket statement that doesn't apply to everyone and in all situations. If you had said "corporate curated newsfeeds", you'd have pretty much nailed it.
I do mostly online news. But I do it with an RSS feed that pulls in a fairly diverse set of news websites, including local news. I've curated political, science, and tech news sections, and I've tried to do my due diligence and put a good bit of diversity in there, provided that the sites in question are actually generally factual and truthful.
What I find is that my RSS feed bears no resemblance to most curated newsfeeds out there.
Online news can be fine, if you break free from the algorithms, and build your own minimal, non-adaptive one. Mine is "reputation for quality journalism", subscribe by topic section, and that's about it. The RSS reader doesn't care if I click to read more. It just shows me my feed.
R with the Shiny package will get you close to something like SPSS and Tableau.
Excel lets you do far more dangerous macro programming that the others don't support. That's awesome for people who want to think that they're being more productive burying business logic in fragile, hidden macros than if they were to actually code it up correctly.
Pretty much what everyone "has" to have Excel for are things that could be done better, faster, and more robustly in something like Python or R with proper comments and a CVS. And which could thus be properly backed up.
Excel provides tools to half-ass this analysis work, and if you're a spreadsheet warrior to begin with, it's hard to resist that lure. A bit of googling later, and you've now got a nice cut-and-paste macro to do something. However, lacking any real exposure to proper programming, there's going to be no comments, no CVS, and the code that does this is hidden in a spreadsheet in such a way that a casual user may not even know it's there.
Let this nasty habit pick up steam, and a few years later you end up with someone dependent on fragile, unbacked-up Excel macros, and it all goes to shit when they leave or the spreadsheet gets corrupted. Or another version of Excel comes out. Or someone accidentally deletes the macro, or changes the structure of the spreadsheet.
posted a long tweet thread...
Huh. It's almost like twitter is one of the worst ways to communicate complicated things. Too bad there aren't any places on the internet where one can post long-form information and have a discussion about it. Guess we'll just have to break everything into 30 different tweets.
When did we used to have this? The 1920s? Because that hasn't been true for at least 30-40 years. Even without a human it would not be possible to launder money in most states in the US this way.
Real estate sales are generally public information and reported to the government. And that has nothing to do with a human doing an appraisal. All the appraisal does is help the bank ensure that the property is worth the amount they're lending for it. Since defaulting on your mortgage means that they own the property, they want to be sure that they'll be getting their money back.
We're not generally talking overall condition of the property. That's easy to work out from just looking at it. The inspection is to cover the buyer's ass to uncover anything that would cost them a ton of money that the property owner hasn't disclosed (knowingly or unknowingly) prior to sale.
The last place I bought the inspector spot checked the voltage at a number of outlets, the furnace & AC, appliances to make sure they worked, sinks and tubs to make sure the water came out and that they drained, did a visible structural inspection which found some rot in the outside deck, looked at the roof to make sure there weren't any obvious issues, opened windows to make sure the cranks worked, checked the foundation for cracks, looked at roof drainage to make sure water wouldn't come in when it rained, looked for asbestos and lead paint, etc.
A lot of those are not super obvious to someone not trained to look closely, and/or who doesn't have the tools to do it. But all could cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to repair. Knowing that ahead of time allows the buyer to negotiate with the seller to fix the issues, or provide a discounted purchase price intended to cover the cost of repairs.
That inspection was in a very competitive market, so I waived any counter-bid for anything that would cost in total less than $1000 to fix. That meant as long as they were pretty certain that nothing major was wrong, they were pretty much guaranteed a sale. But if something was majorly wrong, I'd be able to get them to fix it, so I wasn't buying something that would immediately cost me tens of thousands to repair.
At the house I bought before this one they hadn't shoveled during the winter, and an ice dam built up against an exterior door which forced water under the door into the house. Soaking in water like that all winter rotted out the bottom couple of feet of the door frame and the first couple of feet of subflooring. That was a case where we had them fix it before we moved in, because we didn't want to have to rip up the floor, fix the subfloor, rip out the bottom couple of feet of the door frame, and then put it all back together.
Look at civil forfeiture, too.
Yeah, look at it!
I think it's been clear to a majority of us that it's absolutely an illegal abuse of power. Unfortunately, it takes time for things to work their way through the courts. Looks like civil forfeiture is going to get significantly neutered in the very near future. That's going to result in a lot of clawback from police departments, I'd be guessing. Going to keep the lawyers busy for years.
A Nissan Leaf in particular? No. But cheap cars? definitely yes. Note Sergey Brin and Larry Page with Priuses and Balmer with a Ford Fusion Hybrid.
Rich people don't necessarily drive luxury cars, and I'm not sure that the Model 3 counts as luxury anyway. Lots of crappy SUVs cost the same or more as at least the base model, which is what they're finally starting to roll out. Sure, you can add on options to crank the price way up, but you can do that with most cars.
Antarctica has a summer population of around 1,000 and winter population of around 200.....But humans are not purely scientific.
No. And of those 1,000, a minority are scientists. Our Antarctica population is a small, specialized town with a couple of satellite outposts, and it requires almost all the jobs that a small town needs. Just more specialized, since it's so isolated.
Cooks, janitors, logistics and project management, pilots, fuel handlers, sanitation workers, heavy machine operators, construction workers and carpenters, scientific equipment maintenance, crane operators, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on and on.
Likewise if we went to Mars, the minority would be scientists, at the start and forever. And you need to build a colony that can support this diverse group of people. It's not going to be rich bastards who crave danger, at least at first. It's going to be someone who needs to figure out the sewage situation, and someone else who is really good with a backhoe. You can't have a remote colony without those people.
The scientists will come next, and far down the line we'll get the rich bastards who want a shot of adrenaline. They're not going to be super happy sharing a tiny space with Joe the sanitation worker. And Joe needs to be there first, and needs to be there always.