At the moment EVs are not as good as gas cars for long trips. Used to be the bottleneck was the car but now that's mostly fixed with the current and emerging crop of long-range fast charging EVs, and now the bottleneck is the charging network. Tesla's is the best but it's still not as ubiquitous and...

France went all in on nukes a few decades ago, which was a good geopolitical bet during a time when solar and wind weren't yet economically practical. And even today, nukes are great in the same way fossil fuels remain great: they have an absurdly high power to weight ratio. That's why both of them ...

Right, and that's true of all assets. But like the fundamental value of a stock is based on the value of its company, the fundamental value of a long-duration treasury bond is based the current interest rate compared to its coupon rate. And the future direction of "the current interest rate&quo...

AGG != TLT. Corporate bonds are affected by a lot more than interest rates and often behave in a very stock-like manner in their actual performance. There's a reason the PP focuses on long treasuries, and not medium duration bonds of all sectors.

Seems like pretty bad. I have two colleagues in the UK who say their energy bills have quadrupled recently. Quadrupled! A German colleague is kicking himself for replacing his oil boiler and tank with a new one a few years ago instead of the heat pumps I recommended at the time. Now he's looking int...

As an asset class on its own, long treasuries are uniquely terrible when interest rates are going up, which should be quite obvious. As part of a PP, you could still conceivably harvest some gains from them with tight rebalancing bands as they oscillate up and down within their general long-term tra...

I'm willing to put up with older, frozen software if it means I don't have to worry about updating everything other than once every 2 years. Bugs are always reported to Debian first, where they can deal with upstream if appropriate. Although more often I find I'm filing Debian bugs to have some ups...

You're welcome! Though... honestly I don't recommend Debian Stable for KDE. They freeze on old versions that are out of support by KDE, meaning they take on the burden of support themselves. And in my experience they are not currently resourced to handle it. I've become the primary bug triager for K...

PS: you still doing work for KDE? How's it going/how was it? Still doing it and it's going very well. KDE is entering a period of rapid growth, which can always be a bit uncomfortable as old ways of doing thing are challenged and resources are stretched thin, but I think the results have been very ...

I haven't used Macs in a while, but the last time I did, it went like this: 4. Go to file> save as in the app 5. In the open Finder window that shows the folder you want to save into, drag the proxy icon the titlebar into the Save dialog's main view 6. Done. This works in all document-based apps, to...

I think you're over-analyzing. :) What you end up with is never going to perfectly match your calculations and predictions. At a certain point you just have to take the plunge, if it's something you actually want to do. My take? - Get a 6 kW system for a bit of wiggle room (always build in wiggle ro...

I personally cannot buy into the long deflation arguments, if only because I think our politicians and central bankers would throw any amount of money they could at such a situation in order to keep prices moving upwards. Plus we do have a citizenry who (although they claim they hate higher prices)...

I already have a metal roof, but it required Tesla to send a contractor out here to tell me they don't install onto my type of roof. That kind of discouraged me from the whole thing. Is that just some lame Tesla policy and I should find a better solar contractor? I actually did have another solar c...

My house orientation is exactly opposite optimal. Rather than having the more desirable north / south roofs, I have east / west roofs. The west is slightly more tilted toward the south than the east but I'm going with the east because it has almost no shading while the west has some. Therefore a 6....

Atypical indeed! Very impressive. I used to aspire to that level of power frugality but had to throw in the towel after my kids were born. Our consumption is still very much below average, but not like what you're doing! With such a low level of consumption, I'm surprised that you're shopping for a ...

Upgrading to 200 amp service is something you would want to do if you plan to upgrade the rest of your gas appliances to electric in the future. An electric oven uses a 50 amp breaker, an electric water heater is 30, and so on. They add up, and the panel is sized for everything being on at once.

Such a defensive portfolio is probably effective at achieving its goals, at the cost of ease of access if you're really going to go all in on asset custodianship for your gold and cash. And of course this won't be free so the returns will be lower compared to more paper/liquid assets that expose you...

I Shrugged wrote: ↑Tue Aug 09, 2022 12:02 pm BTW according to Barton Biggs, I forget the name of his book, those two war loser stock markets actually preserved a fair amount of wealth assuming one held on into the post war years.

Yep, buy and hold if you're young or wealthy.

All house projects are investments of some sort, it just depends on how you look at them. Your new driveway wasn't a financial investment, right? You did it for the use value (old driveway was deteriorating) and potential value maintenance (not doing the project would lead to lower resale value). A ...

Exactly. I stick with 100% stocks because the kinds of historical calamities that wiped out stocks typically wiped out bonds and cash as well. It's hard to tell what gold would have done at the time, had it been a freely tradeable commodity without a fixed price, but I suspect it would have gone up ...

Jack Jones wrote: ↑Fri Aug 05, 2022 5:34 am In my mind, the 100% stock investor is putting all their money on the table w/ AA pre-flop. On average, they will end up ahead. However, some outcomes will be close to ruinous, e.g. Germany or Japan 1939-1948.

How well did bonds, cash, or gold do during those times?

4. I agree / disagree with you regarding this particular roofer. He is only 30 years old and has owned the business for only a year. But he's been in the business for 14 years. He said he had the option to buy the business he'd been working for but that would have required him to support all the bu...

I've been a super saver / super frugal all my life that making this solar investment is not going to affect my lifestyle in any way. If it's not going to make your life better why go through the hassle? This is a good question to ask. On its own, owning a solar PV array doesn't make your life bette...

You're welcome! I'm glad it was a thought-provoking argument. From the "evolutionary stress" perspective, I think it's important to keep in mind that humans aren't solitary predators; a key part of our power as a species is our capacity for social organization, and communities evolve too. ...

Thoughtful post. And "hey!" waves hand . Your comment above is the only part that eats at me. And probably because I just want better than that. I think that that prescription ( work on our civility and tolerance ) is probably the best approach in a community of average folks. A community...