One feature I decided was a requirement is holding me up. I really want pogo pins on the sides of the keyboards, so that they magnetically attach and the left will charge the right.
How do you charge the left and the right since they require separate cables?
The problem there would be your breaker. I am not an electrition but I can tell you that when I tried adding a heated MAU to my house, I had to switch to a 120v washer/dryer because my electric panel did not have space for another 208v line.
(Note, my building is actually 3 phase 208 volt not 240volt so I don't have 240 volt plugs but 208volt plugs)
Not a criticism, but a question. Did you consider adding a subpanel? If you're running a new circuit I assume there was already some drywall patching to be done, seems like it would have been more cost effective and removed future headaches to just give yourself more breaker space.
A lot is going to depend on labor rates for your local electricians, but that costing more than $500 where I am would be outrageous. I do my own electrical, but even I paid a licensed electrician to come handle installing a new panel since I did not have an outdoor service disconnect and didn't feel like fighting with the utility company over de-energizing and re-energizing my service. Ended up needing a lot more done, but the whole thing cost me $2500 to get a new service drop, outdoor meter main, and wiring run to the old panel (in the bedroom on the other side of the main) and the new panel (in the old furnace closed that's now my electrical / network room).
But really, doing a subpanel yourself to expand breaker capacity is a really simple project - most people if so inclined could do it themselves. Anywhere from $100-200 for the panel itself depending on how many spaces you feel like adding, up to $80 for a large enough breaker to feed it, and some tens of dollars for SER cable.
Agreed - I’ve ended up installing 4 (inspected) ones over the years myself, and one I paid an electrician for (they also had to upgrade the main service feed).
IMO, what usually drives up the price is the ancillary stuff - opening up a wall (and re-finishing it) because there isn’t enough physical space, or adding extra main panel capacity/service capacity because the main feed is insufficient, or having to run heavier than expected wiring because the only available space gets really hot (poorly ventilated attic space), or having to run surface conduit due to a specific challenge with framing.
Then add in labor (where I was in a high cost of labor area), and it can get expensive quick.
An actual surface mount subpanel and appropriate wires/breakers is usually only a couple hundred bucks total like you note.
This is why being in low interest debt is so amazing. Take two people with the exact same job tracks, same appartments, family, interests, etc...
But give one of them $2,000,000 in mortgage debt at 3.0% interest on 3 properties that are rented out, and don't have the other have anything.
In 15 years, those properties will be worth 2-3x as much, and the debt will still be 2,000,000. This is what happened to boomers even though they don't realize it. Its not that houses are some amazing investment, its that no one will give you 7figure loans at 3% interest to buy stocks with money you don't have, but they will do it for a property.
I don’t think the 2-3x as much in 15 years time is likely to be true. When interest rates start out low there is much less scope for appreciation than when they start out high. So if you buy when mortgage rates are at 3% you can’t expect the big gains you get when mortgage rates fall.
My personal rule of thumb is that rents remain fairly stable as a proportion of earnings under balanced supply and prices are then a function of rents / mortgage rates.
Over the past 15 years median household income has gone from $50k to $80k while mortgage rates more than halved from 6.5% in 2006 to 3.1% in 2021. Most of that 2-3x increase is from the fall in rates.
> My personal rule of thumb is that rents remain fairly stable as a proportion of earnings
This is the problem, because supply is artificially constrains if wages double (through efficiencies), rents increase to soak up the extra productivity.
That did happen to Boomers, but I wouldn't assume it will happen again. Over a long enough time period housing values must approximately track inflation, because there is an upper threshold of income percentage (certainly below 100%) people can afford to spend on housing. Currently, mortgage rates are about 2x what inflation has been over decades historically. Boomers mostly made money with regulatory capture- landowners were able to politically block housing construction during a time of increasing population, causing a short term anomaly where people were paying steadily increasingly high percentages of income on housing. Both that regulatory capture, and the population growth are disappearing now.
When I run the numbers where I live based on current market rates buying a home is predicted to be a big money loser over time vs renting and investing the difference. Renting lets you buy into housing with the prices and tax rates of when the owners bought them decades ago.
Buying still has a ton of tax advantages and gives people access to an incredible amount of leverage that they wouldn't be able to get otherwise.
For what it's worth, I don't disagree with you, and I think renting makes more sense than buying right now for the first time in decades, but it's just by a hair.
It depends on when and where: All real estate investment is a bet on a specific location, and properties don't maintain themselves: In general, the land appreciates, while the house on top of it loses value.
If you bought a house 15 years ago large parts of north St Louis, chances are you lost money, even without accounting for said home maintenance. They one I live in didn't go up 50% in 15 years. A lot of commercial investments? Ravaged.
So while it's true that it's possible to leverage yourself more in real estate, and that said leverage is even tax advantaged, assuming that the line will go up faster than anything else in a risk-adjusted way is a very risky position to take.
> In 15 years, those properties will be worth 2-3x as much
You're extrapolating the last 15 years onto the next 15 years. The last 15 years came on the heels of a historic decline in real estate prices that occurred just prior to that period (2008-2010).
>This is what happened to boomers even though they don't realize it. Its not that houses are some amazing investment, its that no one will give you 7figure loans at 3% interest to buy stocks with money you don't have, but they will do it for a property.
Interest rates from 1971-1998 were higher than they are today[1].
It kind of happened to boomers, but it's wrong in a number of ways.
1. Interest rates were in the teens when they bought their houses. However they may have only paid $50k for a house in the 80s.
2. Most only bought their own house and didn't have many other investments. My parents for example had an investment property in the 90s, but were an exception.
3. House values have gone up because building regulations and zoning have become so onerous that supply hasn't kept up with demand. I believe this will continue and house prices will continue to beat inflation in many jurisdictions.
I have come to absolutely detest online shopping. I have to return so much stuff, live with so many things that I don't actually love, generate sooooo much trash, and spend hours on hours researching everything because I can't hold it in my hand.
Then I walk into REI and ask them if I can try on a size 9 wide of a running shoe. They tell me they don't have it, so I ask them if they have any wide... they don't have a single wide shoe. Then I ask what they have and they say "Ohh we have 200 of the exact same shoe in the exact same size in stock"
And then I go order 5 different 9-wide shoes on amazon and return 4....
Have you shopped at Nordstroms and do you have money? Here's how Nordstroms won me over back when I was in a better economic class than I am today:
My daughter had a speech impediment and other issues that caused her to not feel great about herself. Little girls can be scarily mean and self organize pecking orders of meanness in some way based on self confidence which my daughter didn't have. The women at Nordstroms made her feel like a princess and made her feel good about/have confidence in herself in a way that overruled the meanness from the girls in her class (sorry small town little miss, the fancy ladies at Nordstroms in the nearest big city overruled your opinions).
Nordies then every season called and let my wife know when new things came in, and held back items in my daughter's size and the next up for her to come try on, and then would just go get them when we came in. No 'oh we don't have that size'. When they know you daughters taste and name, have brought smiles to her face, and made her confident when running into other kids from her school when out and about where before she would want to run away, well, it makes you a customer for life (or until your life falls apart and finances no longer work).
Shopping therapy probably isn't the healthiest mentally, but Nordstroms was way cheaper than what we were already spending on speech therapy a year and 1000% better for my daughters opinion of herself. I would (and did) pay anything for that. Again, maybe not healthy and it wasn't intentional (we just went in originally to get her something fancy to wear on our fancy Christmas night out to dinner and The Nutcracker) but it was shockingly life changing for my little girl. I'll add that this endorsement of (probably gross) classist/capitalism consumer therapy is brought to you by someone raised by hippie parents in Santa Cruz.
You cannot go there and get bad service in my experience. Other department stores you will have to wait around, or go hunting for a sales associate who is likely so overwhelmed they can't really help you anyway.
Nordstroms keeps enough people around that you can frequently have what amounts to personal shopper service. Of course, you pay for it, but there are clearly consumers that are happy to pay that premium (myself included.
aside: I dated a girl who was missing one foot, and Nordstroms was rather famous in the amputee community for giving 50% discounts. Pretty slick PR move really.
> I have to return so much stuff, live with so many things that I don't actually love, generate sooooo much trash, and spend hours on hours researching everything because I can't hold it in my hand.
I hate the research part, especially Amazon hasn't improved their system since the late 2000s. I'm sure lots of great improvements on the logistics and business-development side, but the store feels like hobby project and "we couldn't make filtering work, so whatever".
But on the trash part: you generate visible trash. But if you frame it slightly differently: the mall you'd go to needs to be built and heated and fully staffed, and thousands of cars need to drive there etc etc, and that consumes a lot of resources. It's just not visible, and with online-shopping it is. But I'm pretty sure online-shopping is more efficient even if you have to return 4 out of 5 shoes.
> I hate the research part, especially Amazon hasn't improved their system since the late 2000s.
Pretty sure it's regressed. I think there used to be a bunch more filters you could do based on a product category that I think went away as they added more products.
Real annoying when you want like a 4 GB memory card and it splits up your input of "4 GB" into "4", "GB" and then shows you everything with a "4" or a "GB" in it...
> Real annoying when you want like a 4 GB memory card and it splits up your input of "4 GB" into "4", "GB" and then shows you everything with a "4" or a "GB" in it...
I'm still not convinced it's not a social experiment to find out just how much it will take to make users give up and go away.
Or the size filter on clothes. Great, I can filter by size to only see pants that'll fit me. Wow, nice selection, let's open this one. Ohh... it has that size in general but it isn't available. I've come this to just writing a scraper, getting all the data and then filtering it properly just so I can buy some pants.
> the mall you'd go to needs to be built and heated and fully staffed, and thousands of cars need to drive there etc etc
And that isn't the case with the logistics for fulfilment centers and storage scattered all over the place? Just not visible to you, but as per your example times 4, which wouldn't be the case if you get something that fits at the first try.
> I have to return so much stuff, live with so many things that I don't actually love, … and spend hours on hours researching everything because I can't hold it in my hand.
i’ve basically stopped shopping online for these exact reasons. including my entire Christmas shopping list, all bought in actual stores.
- the amount of time researching what i was buying online was beyond ridiculous
- the colors or size or material was just plain wrong or misleading more than it was correct
- after all of the research, i would still end up returning so much of it.
over the past year i just save all that time and frustration and just go to the store, hold the thing, and buy it. done. so much easier.
i can’t stress how much i detest the dishonesty and misleading garbage of online stores.
I understand this in part is an issue with the fashion industry. AFAIK you might order 100 green S, 100 red M and you get 150 blue L and 50 red M (simplified example). Haven't done anything related to this in over ten years though. Things might have gotten better and depend on your scale/leverage.
Your personal experience not withstanding: Nordstroms most recent financial statements indicates that they pulled in ~$150mm on $15b in sales for the past few years. That seems like a pretty healthy business to me.
Yes, but the nearby stores that stock them might only carry the popular sizes and models. New Balance does offer some locations with complete shoe fittings and unique size ordering, but their closest location may be hours away. Sometimes a trip to the website is the only option, but it's tough to fit a shoe on a foot in a virtual setting. :)
I have worked for a few defense contractors in my time. There is significantly more diversity outside of defense than inside defense.
I had a team of 14 with 2 women and 1 non-white male.
I had a team of 10 with 0 women and 0 non-white male.
I had a team of 20 with 1 women and 0 non-white male.
Looking at it another way, thats 40 successful white male hires, and 4 successful non-white male hires.
if only having access to 91% of jobs instead of 100% is the reason you can't get hired....
edit: To clarify, as a software developer of 10+ years both in defense and faang, I have never once had a team where there was less than 50% white men.
I found the plugin did not prompt the model often enough. I would finish writing aline, and go to a new line and sit there waiting to see what the AI thought would be next, only to realize continue wasn't prompting...
BYD can build cars in Mexico, they already build buses in SoCal, that’s not an issue. The question is if tariffs are going to apply just to final assembly and will they be easy to avoid by assembling elsewhere.
Which is not always a bad idea, having a local supply and innovation of something can be rather important, local money is less "Gone" than foreign money, think of how healthy small towns are when all of the shops are local vs when they are not.
The problem comes when there is no realistic local competition. If you don't make something locally at all, an import tariff is just a stupid tax.
The problem here is that apple only provides Metal as the graphics driver. This solution instead creates a native Vulkan driver which has solutions to hardware<->vulkan incompatibilities built in at the driver level.
Proton and Alyssa's solution use Vulkan on Linux as their native graphics API.
Regardless, you have to provide a translation layer so that Windows games written to call DirectX APis use the native graphics layer of the platform you are running on.
Unless you happen to be emulating a Windows game written to use Vulkan instead of DirectX, Vulkan really doesn't matter at all on the Mac.
If you do want to emulate one of the rare Vulkan based Windows games on a Mac, the MoltenVK translation layer handles that.
One feature I decided was a requirement is holding me up. I really want pogo pins on the sides of the keyboards, so that they magnetically attach and the left will charge the right.
How do you charge the left and the right since they require separate cables?