Comment Re:In the US. (Score 1) 904
It takes like 40 minutes to charge a Tesla 80% of the way. That's a stop-off at KFC to eat while you use the charger in the car park.
The Model S has a 320 mile range; my Mazda 3 ranges 260-315 miles on a full 12-gallon tank.
Not necessarily. I imagine additional engineering may come into play, but you can realistically charge trucks fairly quickly. Rather than a battery, you'd use a bank of batteries with a high-flow fan for thermal protection; you'd use a high amount of voltage to charge them the first 80%, which can pull that off in as little as half an hour.
With that kind of power draw, you may need kinetic storage. Roller coasters can't fire off from a standing start because they'd blow the power grid; some roller coasters spend a full minute or so accelerating a flywheel, and then connect it to a generator or direct mechanical drive to launch. A truck stop may provide high-speed charging likewise, driving a dynamo from a flywheel. From that standpoint, you'd recharge your truck while waiting for food, since a 20-30 minute rest stop to eat twice per day is all but unavoidable.
I look forward to a more wealthy economy in which people own a car and an alternate means--a motorcycle, for example, if not a bicycle or skilled use of public transit--so as to defray those costs. A low-end motorcycle, such as a Honda or Kawasaki 250cc (actually 249cc, to avoid regulations on 250cc+ bikes), provides excellent fuel economy for single-person transit.
Most people counter-argue with me here by pointing out that the average passenger carry of a motorcycle is 1.2, while a car can carry 5 people; I find this dishonest, since a great many cars carry one person driving to work alone. With carry capacity for light shopping--I've carried groceries on a bicycle, and have seen motorcycle panniers frequently--and 78% of commuters driving solo, the doubling of mpg and great reduction of maintenance costs (two wheels, bike itself costs $4000) is an excellent way to defray financial costs and extend the life of your expensive passenger vehicle.
Bicycles and public transit require more effort, carry more risk (bicycles particularly--at least a motorcycle can travel with traffic, and not simply in the same direction), and demand more time investment than a motorcycle. While I personally leverage these mode of transportation fine, I don't imagine most people could more smoothly transition to a motorcycle; an ebike sits somewhere between, with its 20-25mph limit.
I own a home, but don't own it as an investment. When I inevitably dispose of it, I won't make any sort of return on that home; in fact, homeownership will be a financial loss--possibly even a loss compared to renting, although it'll likely be some small gain. Homeownership gives me more temporal control over my finances, however: I've invested quite a lot of money into small returns, such that the amount of money I must spend month-to-month is lower.
If we could get an interest rate market around the 14% mark, homeownership would easily be an attractive option, since you could spend very little to clear your debt. At 2.5%, a home with a payment of $1180 requires an extra $500+/month to skip a payment in the very early months, and more as you get deeper into payments, with the total interest paid at around $26,000; at 14%, a home with a payment of $1180 comes to the same projected total cost at the end of a 30-year loan period, but allows you to skip early payments with as little as $18 additional payment. If you raise your payments by $150, that 30-year loan at 14% interest becomes a 15-year loan, saving you $162,000 in interest--more than six times the total interest cost of the same home in a 2.5% interest rate market where buyers can afford (and do pay) much higher sale prices.
In the end, a house's investment return is a gamble at best, and one that doesn't really work out unless general market interest rates are high when you buy and suddenly drop just before you sell, ratcheting the sale price of your house up extremely high. What we need most is financial education in the next high-interest-rate market, creating a cultural habit of 15- or, better, 10-year mortgages, where people reject the idea of banker fiefdom for 20-30 years. Even if your home is a complete write-off, hitting an age of 30 and realizing you suddenly have $1500-$2500 more to spend every month creates quite a different economic climate--both in your personal finances and in the wider market.
I'd make one hell of a banker, but I decided to go economist on that front. Bankers obviously want people to go for long, high-balanced loans; as an economist--as *the* economist, since I've developed a formal economic theory which unifies and correctly explains all current theory--I see the great value in accelerating and strengthening the wealth cycle. The mortgage market behaviors I've described don't really make banks (much) poorer--in fact, taking the full function of banks into account, they probably only reduce the proportion of bank income from consumer mortgages, and increase its income in business loans and other consumer loans--but they leave more residual wealth in the consumer's hand, creating market opportunities for businesses to sell more goods and services, thus creating demand for new labor.
Even automation would only cut production costs, having the same effect--unfortunately, at an excessively high rate, leading to a serious economic disruption that would require several decades to heal in exactly the same way--with an interesting difference in that you'd need much less new labor to produce new products, and so would produce a much greater volume of new products and services to capture that residual wealth, so long as dynamics of competition come into play (fortunately, competition can be outside market: does the consumer want your overpriced diamonds, or my overpriced cakes? Perhaps one of us--or both of us--must reduce our prices to come closer in line to our actual costs, slimming our profit margins while still retaining a healthy profit... no guarantees there, though).
I'm sure you can imagine why, while I want to protect the income of businesses and high-earners (meaning I'd like to minimize any new taxes), I'm also chiefly concerned with maximizing the wealth of consumers. Many of my economics policies proposals focus on reducing labor costs, increasing income security, and doing so with little expansion or, interestingly, a reduction of total taxes necessary to fund these new systems by replacing more-expensive but less-effective legacy systems. Such legacy systems were good for their time--our current welfare system, including social security old-age pensions, cost 1.5% of our country's total income in 1950, while my proposed system would have cost 120%-135% of the total income--but have slowly become ungainly, while new systems have become viable--that old welfare system now consumes 17.2% of our income, and my proposed system consumes only 17%. The greater reach of economics systems, however, don't preclude the personal benefits of a good head for finance.
pissing your money away every month to a landlord who does own the building and making a profit off of you is much better
You mean the bank?
I have been telling people as of late that interest rates need to go up to 11%-14%. People simply cannot afford a house at $3000/mo payments; more generally, a house isn't sold by a price tag, but by a monthly payment. People will pay a particular monthly payment, which is why the falling interest rates came with rapidly rising house prices: that $120,000 house that cost $1150/mo became a $350,000 house that cost $1150/mo.
In any loan, you have a balance to be paid every month, and a continuous compounding interest. That means you may start the month with a $300,000 balance and an $1150 payment, but you'll make your first payment on a balance of around $350,600--meaning your balance only comes down about $500. We tell the lay person there's a "principle" and "interest" payment, but that's sort of a defrauding view, as the simplification precludes a lot of interesting financial management.
Truth be told, your $300k house at an incredibly low interest rate (2.5% would be an $1185/mo payment) will command a $560 principle payment in the early months, and around $625 of interest. You can skip payments by paying those next months's principle, not payment in full: if you pay $5,600, you'll skip ten months's payment, and save $6,250 off the total cost. Most people can't find an extra $560/month, or $5,600 regularly.
At a price of $100k and a high interest rate (14% would be an $1185/mo payment), the situation changes. The total cost still comes to about $325k; however, your early principle payments are around $18. That means coming up with an additional $200 in that first month's payment skips around 10 payments, saving you $11,700 in total. Even scrounging up a few tens of dollars each month takes thousands off the final total--a $100/mo extra payment cuts over 12 years off the 30-year loan, and saves $162k, more than six times the *total* interest paid on a 2.5% interest loan.
Take that all into consideration, the effect of a high-interest-rate market in driving prices down means we only want the lowest interest rate we can get in the highest interest rate *market* we can manage to buy in: we want a 14% market, but we want to secure a 12.25% loan in that market, if we can. Most homeowners only process that they want a low rate, but not what market they want the rate in; they jump at low-rate markets, instead of shying away.
Remember the rich always had 5-10 year mortgages, up until FDR created the 30-year mortgage. Us poor and middle-class came into the market on lifelong bank slavery, never living in an age of general 10-year mortgages. What I describe above implies an easy route to get down to a 15-year mortgage, if the market rates are high, by putting little additional payment onto the home--an additional 8% payment to save 50% off the total purchase cost of the home. If we could spread the idea far enough, consumers may decide the extra is worth it; more importantly, consumers would become accustomed to 15 or even 10 year loans, and so consumers who *can't* afford the extra $150 (or, to get to 10 years, $400) would become wary of buying, driving prices downward.
In other words: a high-interest-rate market gives an opportunity to educate consumers to get 15-year loans. Widespread middle-class consumption of 15- and 10-year mortgages will drive middle class wealth sharply upwards, as people in their 20s enter their 30s suddenly free of that $1200 or $1500 or $2000 monthly payment--filthy motherfucking rich. Besides the broader economic effect, the public mind may react to this by assuming 30-year mortgages are untenable bullshit (especially when the costs of long-term, high-balance debt are understood), and so the poor may refuse to lock themselves into interminably-long loans, requiring a lowering of house prices to keep the housing market solvent.
A generation of sellers would suffer from their lost equity; further generations would notice absolutely no impact in that regard, only that they are much more wealthy after paying their houses off. This is the same, really, as normal fluctuations: increasing house prices make a seller rich, and then later the end of the chain of buyers makes up the balance as his house's value drops. On the other hand, living expense equity has a curious economic effect: if you can escape the mortgage in short order, it acts as a governor on wages. Wages (and salaries) must provide enough for that wage-class to purchase a house; however, since the term is, say, 10 years, the wage class has an enormous amount of free income 10 years into their career--homeowners hit age 30 and suddenly find themselves with twice as much spendable income.
I bought my house when the financial advantage was greater than renting; I'm uncertain about that advantage now, and may have been... immediately better off had I rented for $800/mo rather than taking a $500/mo 15-year mortgage. Nevertheless, I don't believe the extra $30,000 in costs over the first 5 years (nor the probable new roof at a cost of $5000-$8000 in the next 5 years) completely offsets my profitable positioning. I didn't make this purchase as a matter of raw cost minimization; I made it as a matter of leveraging my income stream to cut more recurring costs away. I'm willing to spend $5000 to save myself $4000 if that $4000 comes as a $120/mo reduction in expenses, which of course means $6000 for new heat pumps, $6000 for new insulation, $4000 for new windows, $1000 for masonry work, and so forth, to get sub-$100 monthly utility bills out of a $170-$380 monthly payment (depending on time of year) works for me: even though it's more than an 8 year ROI, the immediate effect is $250/mo less pressure on my accounts, meaning more free income, even though those accounts are badly bruised and battered.
In short: I spend an awful lot of money to immediately save myself financial risk. At the same time, I'm not such a fool as to line my house with expensive solar panels, since they bring their own financial risk.
What you describe seems more likely in hybridization than in GMO. At least in GMO we know what we're doing; in hybridization, we slap two things together and see what happens.
Crazee Edeee, his prices are INSANE!!!
