Oh, I rent the second one. Because I have to, not because I want to. Couldn't sell it (even at 20% below purchase), had to move 2,000 miles away. Have up & down on renters who take care of it to varying degrees.

Want to buy it :-) Consider it a tax writeoff.

I looked into long life incandescent bulbs for my car since I hate replacing them (who has hands that dainty), then I just said fuck it and bought some LED ones as they last much longer than even the long life incandescent ones and are brighter than the regular incandescent ones.

I blame children. A couple of years ago mine discovered that if you flip the switch up and down fast you get a strobe effect. It sort of works with CFLs but it does end their life pretty quick. Previous to that I think I had replaced 1 CFL bulb in the bathroom in the previous 7 years. Also the quickest way for them to quit doing that is to make them pay for a new bulb and tell them they can do it some more but they get to keep buying bulbs.

I did once but that was like 12 years ago. I was troubleshooting an error with SQL Server and one Google link looked like it might be promising. What was shown in the little blob of text was the error code, and some description of it. So I clicked on it and found my self at a porn site. It just so happened the my boss walked by and asked what I was doing. I explained what happened and then hit the back button, showed her the link on Google that looked perfectly reasonable and then clicked it so show that this was inadvertent. That however has been the one and only time it has happened to me.

To quote you

this is why comparing cars to an investment is specious.

That was a wild ride. Not sure if I liked it.

Gotta go on it again.

Being the tenant vs the landlord is a vastly different arrangement.

And if you have $550k in cash, you're not worried about being a tenant vs buying your own house.

The proper question is 'how many zeros is enough'?

If 10^7 is good for 99% of applications, then it's good enough. And 10^15 is way overkill.

About 1/2 the energy of a .30-06 round. So likely closer to elephant with a bad case of explosive diarrhea but after consuming mostly Mexican food first.

Not buying that.

Most dealers would charge you for that, as a line item or an upsell.

Depends on the manufacturer.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Well, I've never considered cars as an investment as they only depreciate (with very rare exceptions). Financially, the best option for a car is to go as cheap as you can tolerate. i.e. I'm fine with a used Subaru, not sure I could live with a Yugo.

So to compare cars to any investment is specious at best.

I was just addressing the GP's comment on rent vs own vs invest.

Sounds about right. Having worked at a gas station while in highschool and college in the 90s the profit on a single gallon of gas was typically in the $0.00 to $0.03 range. It was all about the inside sales: pop, chips, overpriced milk, smokes, silly expensive 3.2 beer.

Considering that the ones in my city are all aluminum ones they are already valuable as scrap and no one seems to be stealing them I wouldn't worry too much.

As far as efficiency goes there doesn't look to be much difference at the moment between sodium vapor lights and LED lights. That said LED lights will probably become the clearly superior option in the future. As far as the solar panel I would suggest having it be large and have a reflective bottom (not shiny but brilliant white) so that the light that bounces back up to it will get reflected back down. This should help decrease the amount of light pollution and also make it so less light needs to be produced.