And don't get hung up on this example. There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum.
Yes, there are countless cases of it actually making sense to have a spare bedroom. But that's beside the point. My point was that for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense.
For example: my parents have a truck, a van, and an SUV. Do they need all of those vehicles? No. Do they get used all the time? Yes: my parents are both avid gardeners, they generously lend their vehicles to those who happen to need a truck or a van for the day, and I have several younger siblings who occupy them the rest of the time.
And even if they didn't, I could well see my dad still owning a truck purely for the convenience of being able to drive to the local garden center and pick up a load of mulch on a whim - even if in practice that happened twice a year.
Emotions are strange things.
And for a lot of people it does. so what's your point. People will figure out what makes them feel good. They do not need help in this department
Perhaps you really do make use of a guest bedroom often enough it’s worth spending 10’s of thousands on. But isn’t the case everywhere. Perhaps you’re wasting money on excessive car insurance etc across a lifetime of choice it adds up to a massive drag.
In terms of EV’s people are spending more time driving to stations because they picture the once a year vacation driving taking 1 hour longer rather than the wasted 5 minutes 48 weeks a year which costs them 4.
In the end I’m just describing a common mistake, not suggesting you specifically should buy an EV or whatever.
Nope. I prefer to do what I want. And want is the criteria and hence optimal by definition. What others might think about it does not matter at all.
If you could accurately predict what would make you happy, and decide based on that, it would be optimal.
You don't.
My point is that there is a cognitive bias towards overweighting the allocation of resources toward low-frequency events.
As I pointed out upthread, low frequency is not the same as low probability.
It might not make sense to upfront allocate resources for a low probability event, but it certainly could make sense for a high probability event even if it was low frequency ... like a spare bedroom, or a dining room, or a car with good range.
The probability of using those things are 1 i.e. guaranteed.
My spare bedroom has a futon couch but I actually use the space for various other things most of the time. Most people may have space that’s underutilized much of the time but that doesn’t mean it’s sealed off until they have an overnight guest or a large dinner part. Things aren’t that binary.
When provisioning servers, do you average your throughput and get enough capacity for that average?
Of course not, that would be assinine. You need to be able to serve 24 hours a day, even - especially - during your edge cases. Follow your advice and explain to the CEO that since Black Friday is a "low frequency event," it's fine that your site was down during that one day.
A better argument is that you should choose things, including houses and cars, based on edge cases since that is where meaningful differentiation occurs. If I take one road trip each quarter and my car is unable to handle it, then I bought the wrong car.
- Up front planning
- A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live.
- The pub to have a room that it rents out. Again, not the common case even in London, let alone in the US.
- Your potential guests to be OK with being at a pub.
- Potentially childcare. If you have to have your party away from your house, you can't put your kids to bed and return to your guests, you have to go home. That part, if you will pardon my French, really fucking sucks.
Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. And don't discount the planning that went into obtaining your own party room in the first place.
> A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live.
Don't get hung up on the 'pub' part. It can be a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you.
It can even be another room in your house. Move some furniture around, put in some speakers, BAM, party room.
It really doesn't. I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so. Most of my neighbours are the same.
> a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you.
- Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different.
- Drinking in public parks is not typically permitted, nor is street drinking.
- Arcades and bowling alleys are out in the burbs and require driving to.
What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure.
I don't care whether you like that or not - I'm not the one who was getting "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
We’re all well aware now that you don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself and your fancy desires.
I bet you’re real fun at your awful house parties.
Twat.
Keep in mind this cost is compared to an extra or bigger room in your house. You can throw many restaurant parties for the money you'd spend on a larger house. (Invest the difference and the restaurant parties are effectively free)
I don't really understand what people are imagining here though - it's not like "entertaining space" is some gilded-age ballroom for most people making this choice, and the price difference matters if and only if there is an otherwise comparable house you can buy that meets your other constraints.
Also I don't think it always makes sense to get a smaller house. We got a smaller house and I kind of regret it now, since housing prices and mortgage rates have shot up so much it's now so much harder to upgrade (and the house we got was intended to be a starter home), and also we'd get so much more if we sold a larger house today than our house now.
For example, let's assume prices went up about 50% on average in the past five years for the sake of easy math (not too far from how much my home actually did go up after a reappraisal last year). Buy a house at $300k and it goes up 50% means you can sell it for $450k and make $150k out of it. But buy a $500k home and it goes up 50%, means you can sell it at $750k and made $250k out of it. Granted you're making higher payments that whole time as well but not as much as it went up.
That math doesn't make as much sense now, with prices starting to dip a bit and high mortgage rates muting demand somewhat, however.
You are also discounting the costs you have already sunk into throwing your own parties ("I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so.")
> What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure.
Good, I'm happy that you know what you want and are pleased. But I didn't say it was impossible to derive value from that.
> "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
More frustrated with the way some people try to fulfill those preferences, and that every time I bring it up people get so defensive.
I also think you underestimate how often many people (especially in more social cultures) socialise. It could be literally 100's of times per year.
I'm not going to go to the room you rented at a local business, bring a six pack of interesting beers to try together, bring my baby that my friends have been so excited to meet and play with, etc. My friends who like weed aren't going to show up. Not to mention holidays, the hardest time to rent public spaces and the most likely time for friends to gather...
Sure. “Hi, I know it’s closing time, but can I rent your party space for my friends and I to drink our own alcohol in starting in 15 minutes time” is not exactly the kind of call a landlord would be particularly receptive to.
I think we’re done here.
The party you're describing doesn't sound like it needs a dining room.
My point is, climate change is an extremely big threat that we simply don't have much room for these affordances. 2024 is the year to make personal sacrifices to switch to EVs because that's how urgent the situation is.
There are far better targets to reducing the amount of oil and gas burned, ones that are more uniform and less varied them peoples lives not to mention moving people to transit and commuter rail is better then evs anyways
¹ https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result.
We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things.
I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive).
My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)
I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa.
I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
Owning something means taking on the liabilities of storage, maintenance, and depreciation. Renting allows you to only pay for the parts of those liabilities commensurate with your time of usage. Therefore if your time of usage of something is small, there are relatively more gains in reducing your share of these liabilities in this way.
Conversely, owning confers the benefit of reducing the friction involved in each individual use of something. So it stands to reason that the more useages, the more benefits owning confers.
> I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
I agree that they are different. But the attitude I am arguing against is that of 'if I don't own this thing, these experiences will never happen'. In other words, people seem to be completely discounting the substitute experiences. In reality, there are other places to go besides one's house, and even at one's house there are other things to do besides eating dinner, and even if one wants to eat dinner at one's house, it is not that different whether you eat it at the kitchen table, on a fold-out table in a game room, or in a bona fide dining room.
To the second point, what a dining room offers is social intimacy and formality at once. This is something a kitchen table does not do (formality, think a White House dinner), and a restaurant cannot do either (intimacy, think traditional cultural celebrations at home such as Chinese New Year entailing many social rituals and practices). A dining room has the fundamentally distinct property of being a setting for both. That's the actual source of disagreement which is why there were so many objections by other commenters given your continued insistence that "it's not that different".
I think this depends on what you value. I've never seen a party room available for rent that was better than a home, personally. The fanciest party room you can rent may look fancier, and if that's the important thing to you, then that's a great solution. Others, however, may place greater value on what you give up when you rent: convenience, intimacy, fewer restrictions on what you can do, etc.
That's what renting is for. You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little.
> My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way.
Fine, but I don't think it's this important to most people who have a spare bedroom, they just don't think about it.
> that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies.
Mine too, doesn't mean I need a pickup. But anyways if it's one of your favorite hobbies and you do it every weekend, that's not what I was talking about.