That's very sad to hear. I've been to Lagos and I always have wished I could have visited longer. As an American I found it an absolutely fascinating place.
I'm happy (?) you found it fascinating, but only because you were visiting. If you had to live in Lagos for, say, 1 year, your opinion would change drastically and you'd be eager to leave.
In many ways it seemed to be a very chaotic place, where money makes the rules, and most people get by however they can, some in the direst of circumstances. I can understand not wanting to live there long-term. But it's also a city of over 10 million people, so I can only image there's so much more to it. I'm just genuinely glad I had the opportunity to visit, because it made real to me the place and the people that I would otherwise only hear about on the news.
The old, poster-sized machinist's tooling chart on the wall in our shop has a great quote at the bottom: "Nobody will remember how long it took to do the job, but they will remember how well you did it."
Okay, somebody help me out here. Maybe I'm missing something, but the basic equation is that you as tenant are paying the landlords costs plus their profit. How can renting ever be cheaper than buying?
In some housing markets, if you were to buy a home (using a mortgage, with current interest rates) and immediately rent it out at market rate, you’d be losing tons of money. The price-rent ratio varies dramatically from city to city and even between different types of properties.
Because you, as someone who is buying a $500k house with 20% down in 2025, are going to have much higher costs than your landlord, who bought it for $100k in 1995 and has already paid it off.
Bake in the fact that many rented houses today were either purchased or refinanced with the historic-low interest rates of ~2021, and there is really just a time difference between someone with pre-existing capital to invest years ago that you didn't have.
That’s not true at all. Rent is determined by demand and supply—not by a landlord’s costs. Plenty of landlords operate at a loss; rent just helps make the loss more manageable.
Eg. when you live in a premium apartment. For even moderately nice houses 20 years of rent would pay a third of the home's value at the start of the renting period. And rent will never increase as much as the property value, no taxes and maintenance. It's much cheaper AND simpler, especially if you are unsure how long you stay.
Rents go up but the landlords costs stay static. A lot of small landlords start out at something close to break even from a cash flow perspective. At this point the landlords “profit” is the appreciation.
That said the cash flow gets better over time as rents increase.
I suppose depends on the ownership structure of housing stock. If it is mostly repaid mortgages, eg. inherited housing or investment stock, then the rental need not be tied to mortgage costs, but rather investment yield, which may be lower.
No, but the landlord has those too. Or at least, some landlords have them.
So, you have the landlord having mortgage costs, maintenance costs, insurance costs, and still wanting a profit. And you have the homeowner, having mortgage costs, maintenance costs, insurance costs, but getting to keep what would have been the landlord's profit.
1. Many small landlords are not very financially sophisticated and won't factor in all costs when setting rent prices. For example, maintenance costs are often treated as one-time events ("the water heater broke") and not something to build into the cost of owning the home. I have relatives like this, and they generally view the appreciation on the property as their profit.
2. It's not uncommon for "landlords" to be renting out part of the house they're still living in. In these cases the rent can be somewhat arbitrarily related to the cost of the mortgage.
3. More sophisticated landlords often still have to compete with rents set by (1) and (2). At least in some markets.
"Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find that programmers cannot write in English."
It's meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there is a certain truth to it. Most human languages fail at being precise in their expression and interpretation. If you can exactly define what you want in English, you probably could have saved yourself the time and written it in a machine-interpretable language.
I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just feel wasteful to me.
I had to go search my bookshelf for this one:
"There has been an increasing awareness among engineers of the last two decades that machines can perform a useful purpose in many applications, even though their characteristics do not conform to the orthodox standards of goodness. The main objective of the engineer is to make money -- to exploit economically the physical properties of materials. Economic considerations, however, do not stop at the first cost of an article, nor at the running cost, but extend to everything connected with that article in the situation in which it is to be used."
Eric R. Laithwaite, Induction Machines for special purposes
>I don't know why it rankles me to think that generated power should be fed into a dump load just to make the storage owners extra money. Even though it's inefficient at the system level, it shouldn't be harmful releasing energy that would have been eventually dissipated as heat anyways. And yet it still just feel wasteful to me.
This is one of those efficient market things where you need to manage the market in order that wasteful things happen sometimes... but that waste is an opportunity.
If you and your competitor are both in the business of dumping energy into heat, you're going to compete with each other for access to that money.
Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_ money with that energy and find something quickly scalable with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy besides just flowing through a resistor.
Negative prices are a sign of an inefficient market or just the lag time between a changing landscape of resources and someone to utilize them.
If there's a free resource someone's going to figure out how to use it, just let it hang out for a while and the problem fixes itself.
Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.
> Then one of you is going to try to find a way to make _more_ money with that energy and find something quickly scalable with not-too-high idle overhead costs to do with that energy besides just flowing through a resistor.
Yes, exactly.
Which reminds me of the occasional story about how one native group or another was so in tune with nature, because they used every part of the (insert important animal here).
Modern economies obviously use all parts of the animal, for exactly the reason you outline.
> Especially with solar energy, this is just going to be a thing. There's a certain balance where overprovisioning is cheaper than storage and so you just do that. Then you wait for industry (or consumers) to figure out how to take advantage of the intermittent cheap energy.
Yes, though you also need to make sure that regulations don't get in the way. Or at least not too badly.
One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
>One example I can think of is forcing utilities to charge people by net-metering, forcing the utility to implicitly pay the same price for electricity as they charge. We don't do that for eg used car salesmen.
A large proportion of the cost of consumer electricity is distribution built in to the per kWh cost. Their buy price needs to be lower than their sell price. I think most people would be surprised by how much of the cost of their electricity is incurred between the power plant and their home.
My shallow understanding is that utilities and grid operators need to manage the supply/load ratio carefully to keep the grid's operating frequency in a very narrow band, centered around 50 or 60 Hertz. If supply outstrips demand, and assuming supply can't react [quickly enough], the operating frequency starts to rise as all the rotating masses connected to the grid gain momentum from the additional power. If the operating frequency increases too much outside of design parameters that could end badly.
So one solution is to incite demand (with negative rates) for folks to ramp up their use of electricity (into e.g., a dump load resistor bank), bringing demand back in line with supply, and bringing the operating frequency back under control.
I hate the waste, agreed. But it would be irresponsible of the operator to bank that extra supply energy into the momentum of spinning things owned by the consumers just so they could pull it out later by intentionally under-supplying. E.g., an aquarium's big water pumps designed to spin only so fast or produce so much pressure might not like being operated at 110% the rated speed at random times of the day.
The grid connected thermostats, where the energy provider has (some amount of) control over when you heat/cool your house are pretty unpopular (I know people who have had their AC turned off during heat waves and were not very pleased). But this seems like an application of that that people would like? And most people would probably even be happy with just dramatically reduced/free heating/cooling and not actually needing to get paid. And of course it has the added benefit of actually using the energy in a useful manner, rather than just wasting it.
I suspect you can make these things work, but it's not 'free': organising a bunch of retail customers and dealing with them takes a lot of effort.
> (I know people who have had their AC turned off during heat waves and were not very pleased)
I suspect they probably agreed to pretty harsh control in the name of cheaper electricity, but actually were only willing to tolerate relatively small amounts of loadshedding. I wonder whether better contracts can help align expectations here in the future. Eg allow the electricity company to set your aircon's thermostat up to 3K warmer (or something like that), but not turn it off completely?
Why should they? They have bulk licensing deals with PC OEMs and large organizations. They've already got the big money. J. Random Hacker building a PC isn't even a rounding error to them.
Quite right in fact limited weak copyright protection helps retain marketshare that might be lost otherwise especially when that weak protection in fact costs little real revenue.
It looks even smarter from the MS side when you think of all the threat intel that they gather from pirated Windows installs that can be used as a baseline to compare legit installs against.
My twin always tells me (when I'm expressing sadness): "You need something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to."
It usually helps.
When I need more words to chew over, I re-read ViolentAcres' incredible post "Most People are Sad for a Reason" [1]. Thanks for my annual reminder.
>“I learned that I wasn’t sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad because my life sucked ... you should be wary of the Doctor who tells you a pill is a fix for your broken mind. The way I see it, you have a lot of reasons to be sad right now. So if that’s what you’re feeling, that seems about right to me.” —linked author's grandmother
Blood work came back normal, so doesn't seem to physiological.
I have tried exercise, it helps with moods but not really with executive function. I have taken it one step at a time for so long, can't do it anymore unless i can see some hope of solving this. This is no way to live
It's not just simply economic. I'd say it's more like there are many groups of people who do not feel represented by their government. Some of these groups are quite opposed to each other. Add to that politics and media that have become intentionally divisive and you get a society where everybody is mad about or scared of something.
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