I assume this was a typo for 360%. Of course, calculating total return like that is a pretty horrible way to measure whether a long-term investment is worth it. A better way is this method:

But you messed it up somehow... by a LOT. The actual number is slightly under 4.4%. You can verify it like so: since you gain 4.4% compounded each year, calculate $37k * (1.044) * (1.044) ..., 30 times, for a total of $37k * (1.044^30), which is about $134k.

Still, 4.4% isn't bad. Good luck earning that on rolling CDs, even if you go with 5-year. It's also inflation-protected, since any decrease in dollar-value means nominal utility costs go up, which means you save "more" and your percentage nominal return goes up. I don't think it's quite good enough of a return to make it worth it, but it depends what your alternatives are for your money. If you have an outstanding loan/mortgage of more than that, and you don't think lots of inflation is coming, then you probably want to pay off the loan before investing in this. Paying off a loan is like making a risk-free compound-interest investment at whatever your loan rate is, whereas these solar panels have an uncertain return that depends on electricity rates, lifetime estimates, hell even climate change! Of course, inflation probably IS coming, in a big way, but that's a completely different story...

This all assumes a purely financial perspective. If you derive personal value from "living green," then you'd have to add that in. 4.4% is a bare minimum return.

Btw, other parts of your post are dead on. Taking out a mortgage to do improvements to your house like this is pretty much the ideal way to do it... you don't see much change in day-to-day cash flows, and even if you have to sell the house early, the presence of a solar panel setup will increase the value by (more than) enough to cover paying back the extra loan principal. And if you expect inflation, taking out a loan is ideal. You get to pay it back with future-dollars-that-are-worth-less.

Someone walking a couple blocks from a restaurant back to their car is not going to have their night vision. They won't see anyone moving around in the dark. Nor will they have much night vision for a while after they get in their car and start driving, which has an impact on the safety of pedestrians, and cyclists that don't have lights.

Dead on.

I've looked into OpenID multiple times before, and each time wandered around in a maze of terminology and things that didn't make any sense to me until I gave up.

I'm sure it's better overall than the current system of username/password pairs, but it's just not better enough. Pretty much any complaint about the current system can be solved in a way that doesn't depend on anyone else implementing or supporting it, and which is less complex than OpenID. If there were compelling enough advantages to using OpenID, I might have gone ahead and tried even though I didn't understand which parties were responsible for which parts of the authentication, or even how many parties were involved... but I just don't see the point, and it's not for lack of trying.

I'm no genius, and I not sure what group I would be speaking for if I said it was "accepted," but I have studied economics and I work with these issues as part of my job at a large insurance company. I do a lot of basic financial modeling, and work with the people in the investment and hedging areas that do the more advanced stuff. Regardless, you shouldn't take arguments like this at face value from anyone (especially on the internets), and I'd be glad to explain the reasoning behind my conclusion.

There's a couple different ways to define inflation, which does make this a bit (as you say) complicated. As a financial professional, I tend to think of the exchange rates as representing the relative prices of two currencies, and inflation of one currency as a decrease in that price, because that's the most consistent and tractable way to model uncertain future inflation and exchange rates. You're absolutely right that the presence of a free global market with minimal trade barriers (artificial or otherwise) is required for this to match the "cost-of-living" interpretation of inflation. If you measure inflation as the cost of goods for which there is such a market, such as widely-traded commodities like gold, then what I said should hold. If you define inflation as a CPI on an arbitrary basket of goods, some of which don't have such a market, well... that's what I meant about "not actually measuring inflation." Not in a consistent and useful way.

Not if you measure inflation based only on internationally traded commodities. If the Pound has lost value relative to the Dollar since then, then either it cannot buy as many commodities (inflation), or the Dollar can buy more (deflation), or both. Either way, it shouldn't matter what date you choose for the currency conversion, because the proper inflation adjustment will get you to the same place.

This is a bit confusing for people who are used to thinking of inflation only in terms of an arbitrary consumer price index. You might think that if you are making the same number of Pounds, and it buys the same number of CDs, what inflation has occurred? If your CPI basket consisted entirely of CDs, then indeed it would show 0% inflation. However, that's misleading, because you presumably spend money on many things which are ultimately driven by commodity prices and international free trade. Even if you don't, the suppliers of the CDs probably do, which means that even though you're still paying them the same for the CDs, they are feeling the true difference in price.

In other words, despite the stable salary and CD prices, I would say that the Pound really was worth more (relative to the Dollar) a few months ago, so your £X,000 salary and £X cost of CD were both "more" than they are now, even if the only thing you actually bought with your salary was CDs. You were still paying the opportunity cost by choosing CDs over whatever alternatives you had for that salary. Since then, you've received a pay cut (by being paid the same number of a less valuable currency), and certain goods (CDs) but not others (commodities) have also been discounted in the same way. If you still buy only CDs, you'll get the same number of them, but you won't be paying as large of an opportunity cost to do so, since your salary couldn't have bought you as many other goods. (Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, I've received a raise, but many goods like CDs have correspondingly gone up in price.)

This implicit price change can only happen if there are significant barriers to free international trade of the good in question, because otherwise someone could buy up CDs in one country, sell them in another, and convert the currency back to the original at a profit. In fact, this mechanism is exactly what makes the commodity prices a consistent measure. If the exchanges rates of the currencies didn't match up with their inflation (the amount of commodities they could buy), then people would do this trade until the values lined up again. That's how I can be so confident in the practical application of theory, as long as "inflation" is defined that way.

If you try to have a definition of inflation that relates your salary to your consumer prices of specific goods, then if any goods have higher barriers than others, you can simultaneously have "inflation" relative to some goods but not others. I find that to be a pretty useless way to think of value and inflation.

I've never heard of one or the other being preferred (most journalists probably don't even understand the difference), but you should get approximately the same result either way. Inflation of one currency more than another changes the exchange rate correspondingly. If you don't get the same result, then one of the measures you used for inflation is not actually measuring inflation in the way you want. (For example, the CPI as published by the BLS probably understates the true amount of currency inflation, for political reasons.)

Threatened by having what taken away? DRM doesn't do shit to keep an album off the file sharing networks, and anyone claiming otherwise is either deluding themselves or trying to sell a DRM solution to a content distributor. DRM only hurts legitimate buyers.

If former casual pirates are now spending money on DRM-free internet music, it's not because the DRM had made it harder for them to get free music.

Yeah, being able to kick out the kids that don't want to be there and disrupt the classroom means the other kids can focus better, are in a more academic-focused environment, and end up learning more. However, that's not the only reason private schools tend to give a better education. There's also the reverse effect: since any private market involves full choice on both sides of every interaction, families dissatisfied with a school can "kick the school out" by not sending their kids there. This is true even if the state is paying for 100% of tuition, as long as families still choose freely between schools that their child is accepted to.

There are two (general) ways a school can underperform:

1. It is underfunded for its needs, e.g. it teaches a lot more developmentally disabled children but only has the same budget as other schools
2. It is inefficient and ineffective, and students could get a similar education elsewhere for a lower cost (or a better education for the same cost)

The first case needs a mechanism to get increased funds. The second case needs to be discouraged, and if it doesn't change its ways, the students should go to a different school so they can get a better education. For private schools in each case, the solution is straightforward: the school can raise tuition and people will pay it if the education is worth it (case 1), and people will send their kids to other schools if theirs is overpriced and inefficient (case 2). The market naturally sorts these two schools out using the desire of parents to get an appropriate and effective education for their children.

For public schools, there is no such automatic mechanism. They must approximate it with central decision-making, but all the ways of doing that have problems. Test scores don't account for the different children at each school, how difficult they are to teach, and so on, which means schools in case 1 get inappropriately punished. Referendums take the preference of the majority and impose it on the rest, and even if they get a general budget increase to help schools in the 1st case, that'll also end up giving money to those in case 2.

There's no incentive to improve ineffective public schools in other ways or to replace them with something more effective, because all the customers are captive: children must attend, and taxpayers must pay. (Your point about children who don't want to be educated is good, and would fix half of this problem.) The only incentive is for elected officials to look like they care about the schools. Spending more on bad schools is a great way to do that, even if they are bad because of case 2 and should actually be de-funded and the management (or entire school) replaced.

That's the other half of why private schools are generally considered to be better: The bad ones are gone, or changed to be better.

Incidentally, to counter your anecdote about private vs. public school teachers: I had teachers for history, chemistry and physics in private high school that had PhDs in their fields and a very deep understanding of the topics. I had my share of incompetent teachers as well, but the administration didn't have to bow to their seniority when determining which classes they taught, so they weren't doing the important ones, or the ones where we had better-qualified teachers available.

We lose because we are not allowed to give those people jobs installing copper (or doing many other things). Even if we wanted to hire them, someone else would stop us: Many jobs like this are regulated by the government so that only licensed workers can do them, but even if not, these individuals presumably aren't part of a union and the unions do their best to try to prevent you from hiring non-union labor.

Also, you might run into minimum wage issues. If they are unskilled to the point that they couldn't easily get a license or join a union, their labor might only be worth $4 an hour to you until they get some experience. They might be happy doing a job legally for that much instead of stealing (which can be a higher "wage," but is riskier), but you aren't allowed to engage in this mutually agreeable exchange.

You have a good idea and I wish there were fewer barriers to it.

Thanks for posting this. I'd looked in the past for something to replicate this behavior, which was in the browser that first gave me the "tab epiphany" (it was an obscure shareware that I forget the name of, but inspired me to find another tabbed browser when my trial was up). I couldn't find a good extension to do it until now. This one seems to do exactly what I want. It even has the same "open all links in new tab" option that was the default in that shareware.

Tabs along the left/right side make so much more sense than along the top/bottom, for multiple reasons. In addition to the ones you mentioned, there's the fact that I always have plenty of horizontal room when reading web pages, and always have to scroll up/down. Space on the sides of the browser is currently wasted on most pages I go to, so I might as well put tabs there and free up a little vertical room. Now if someone will just make a similar modification to Konqueror...