If you want a small house and flying around to vacations, you can do it without looking down on who decides for another trade-off.
If you:
1. Like cooking.
2. Are good at cooking.
Imagine lecturing people about saving the planet while defending going out to eat in restaurants or ordering all your meals.
There are many ways to life your life and thankfully in the modern day, you can live your entire life without cooking anything involved yet getting all the necessary nutrients plus enjoying delicious food.
It's just more expensive, so you need to afford it.
I'm intentionally skipping all the other soapboxing in the rest of the comment.
If we look at the full chains of:
- Equipment distribution (production and delivery of large domestic kitchen appliances)
- Energy distribution (residential delivery of electricity/gas needed to power kitchen appliances, and water)
- Space required in each home for a reasonably kitted out kitchen (more space to heat in winter, more materials used in building)
- Ingredients and materials distribution (including the production and packaging of intermediate food products made from raw products, since everyone's cooking with canned things, packaged things, cured meats, pastes, pasteurized things, grains, ...)
The restaurants, fast-food chains and ready-meal prep companies are able to operate on economies of scale that are vastly more efficient than the individualistic, nuclear-family domestic "you must cook home-made meals for your family, friends and guests" culture.
We've made eating out seem either:
- Decadent (cost)
- Unhealthy (take-out and fast-food)
But neither of those things need to be true.
The problem with scale is the storage aspect - preservatives we use to reduce spoilage etc., which arguably affect the healthiness of the food. "Just-in-time" distribution works well until it doesn't (see: COVID).
But I'd argue that the individual household probably spoils more ingredients than industrial production does - that just isn't evident; everyone has their little compost heaps or things go to landfill. Old ingredients go mouldy at the backs of cupboards, just as things run out their shelf life in supermarkets.
Maybe the raw-food vegans and paleo bros are on to something...
It has nothing to do with the food, nothing at all, it has to do with intimacy and care. THIS is where I live and I invite you here, I take care of you because I care about you, THIS is food that I made for YOU, I'm sharing a part of my life, this is how I cook because I like it or because that's what my family usually eats or because I tried something new.
Maybe it's because I'm. Mediterranean and it's part of the culture but the idea that you invite someone to eat and it being about the food is oh god so depressing to me. It's like gifting someone a poem and caring about how good the poem is.
Yes, I think it's cultural. In at least parts of the Mediterranean (Italy), people say "they live to eat".
If I'm having people over, it's about sharing stuff, not necessarily food. Discussions, jokes, games, activities, etc.
Food is... secondary, frankly.
Right. So the act of cooking actually doesn't have much to do with it! Arguably, you are tying the act of making food to "intimacy and care" in a way that makes it feel to me like there's this big social pressure to feed people! There are a myriad of other ways to look after your humans.
Order some food, it doesn't even need to be from fancy restaurants. Low-end to cheap catering and delivery services (so not Uber Eats or such). You can prepare some appetizers at home if you really want some home made food.
Depending on where you order the food... people might not even realize you didn't cook it.
Honestly one of the most saddening comments I've read.
You can feed your people because you enjoy it, me and my tribe of outliers can chill in other ways :)
FWIW: It's not like I'd ever let anyone go hungry!! Just that in my mind there's a big discrepancy between "fully preparing a home-cooked meal for several hours". If you're privileged to have the time, space, energy and knowledge to lovingly prepare big feasts for people, more power to you. Me and my cold-hearted mates will be content with, oftentimes, shoving some chips in the oven or frying a bag of frozen nasi goreng, or getting cheap takeaway to go with our beers ;)
That’s however a joke that home food is better. There are great home meals, and there are bad restaurants, sure. But the top is obviously restaurants. And not even just because they really know what they do, but it’s even way more difficult to get those kind of ingredients what they use. One time, one of my friends from one of the best restaurants from my home country (Hungary) left some beef loin from his restaurant in my fridge as gratitude. I made the best steak from it, that I’ve ever made. It didn’t matter how expensive meat I bought, or in which expensive meat shop. I tried different techniques, but no. I couldn’t reproduce it. Simply that kind of loin is not accessible for common people there.
I think this whole thread is depressing because it suggests you need a bunch of shit to be happy and have good relationships. But if you have good friends and relationships often you don't need all that shit. If you need a pickup once a year you probably have a friend you can borrow it from. Even better you can invite that friend to help you with the thing you need it for and help them with something else when they need it.
And for the "dining room just for parties" argument from above: it is actually possible to invite your neighbours, your friends, your colleagues, ... to dinner more than once a year. I almost never had people turn down such an invitation.
No single restaurant. But in a city like mine, there are countless restaurants that offer meals I have neither the knowledge nor equipment to prepare.
It may not be 100,000 ingredients… but neither are the shops I'd buy the ingredients from.
We also like to sit an eat together "just because", so like you point out, a dining room can be used day-to-day, not just for parties (though it's also great for those).
Of course it's possible.
But that kind of thinking is often the problem. Plan based on what you'll actually do.
But you should try to increase your accuracy about what you will want when making big decisions. We all should.
Many on Hacker News have some sort of ambition. To create a startup, a side business, an open source project or have a hobby, be more knowledgeable or become better programmer. In theory that can happen having a home office and extra space in the garage. In reality it often doesn't because making any greater strides often requires coming together with others forming connections, exchanging information and sharing resource.
Yes, I can learn to cook for example Chinese food. But that isn't the same as having a good food industry with restaurants, entertainment, staff, importers and whatever else that actually enable a numbers of different experiences for many people.
Eventually many tend to realize that it isn't that great. But then they often end up blaming the government, the taxes, major cities, lack of investment or support, or anything other than the reality that they didn't invest in their local community neither through taxes for services or with their own income. But instead there are millions of dollars standing around in things like more expensive cars.
It isn't like I don't understand why someone would want those thing. I just don't think many who do want those things understand that to have a decent career many of their kids are going to have move somewhere where there are good education, successful companies, major airports or other resources. And then, while they get some use of their guest room, won't see them much overall.
I would like to have a personal garage workshop space. I can think about all the things I would build. I would like to be a person that builds things. But in reality, if I had it, I'd probably still be just sitting browsing Hacker News. It's just way easier than to actually get up and start doing something.
I've realized something similar with sports. I could go running any time, but I don't. I could buy some equipment that I rarely use. But if I sign up for some scheduled weekly team sport, and some friends are also going, it's much easier to keep the routine happening. Or if I do some sport together with my spouse.
The same happens with music. I could play and train on my own, and I do some. But it's really with a band and a commitment to an upcoming performance or upcoming recording session that I start more purposefully doing stuff, both on my own and in the rehearsals.
Computers, content and social networks and the pandemic have provided us opportunities to do cool stuff online and share with and learn from others, but I think we have atrophied some physical social aspects there. We need more electronics clubs or garage meetups or whatever method to do something as a group and share the motivation burden or get a bit of help etc.
It is when we do something with others that it gets better than average and the result in the form of being enjoyable or interesting is more than the effort of doing it. If we already don't have a lot of time, energy and motivation running isn't giving us enough to make it worth it. And often we don't because of other things or boredom.
I personally hate to see the millions of dollars wasted on restaurant-cooked food, most of which is not good for you and a lot of it not even good. We would all be better off environmentally, socially, and financially if we returned to the earlier status quo of people cooking most of their own food. "Local communities" still thrived when there were 10% the restaurants there are today. In fact, they were much stronger. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the rare night out as a luxury. But the idea that not eating at restaurants enough is the source of some kind of decline is exactly backwards. Your insight that about the criticality of local connections is critical is true, but it has nothing to do with the number of local restaurants, and they have if anything hindered it rather than helped it. Inviting people over for dinner is an activity that has declined precipitously and forms much deeper connections than going out to eat and patronizing someone's (often vanity) business.
You haven't eaten at a 2 or 3 star restaurant then. They use ingredients you don't have access too, using techniques you can't use at home and pair them with wines or juices you haven't heard about.
However good you think your home cooking is (I think I'm a fairly good cook), you don't come to the knees of a chef with such a restaurant.
Yes, they are not cheap. But neither is buying a bigger house.
And if it's about getting together, who cooked the food doesn't matter. Or even get together without food, that works too.
... and I still want to host people at my house and cook for them?
Fine dining for you may be a strictly superior replacement to home cooking (or alternatively: home cooking is what you do when you cannot have fine dining instead) - but many of us don't see it that way. They are complementary.
Yeah, my cooking isn't Thomas Keller... but that's not actually what it's about? In the same way I'm not Chris Nolan but yet I want to take video at family events?
And if I can say so: seeing fine dining as a strictly superior replacement of home cooking is a regretful way to view the world.
What these “unnecessary extras” or in the contrary “smaller footprint” give is the increased freedom of choice for that particular individual’s situation.
There is no free lunch - every benefit comes with its set of drawbacks. Extra rooms need furnishing and taking care of, cars need maintenance and parking etc.
Different people put different multipliers for each of them.
And this is fine, by the standards of a modern western society.
If I invite people, I do it for the people, if I go out to eat I do it for the food. I don't see why this regrettable just because you think it is.
The 3 star restaurants get old very fast. too expensive, way too long to eat. Very pretentious. As I got older I came to value home cooking many times higher than any restaurant that NYC can offer.
I highly suggest people try these places to understand what is possible with food, but don't value them any higher.
And that's fair enough, but I find the tyranny of "it works for me so you're doing it wrong" very real. In many areas, but in particular with electric car range discussions.
One could also talk about the tyranny of people living their freedom of personal choice to the maximum.
"My solution works for me but will never scale to work for the entire humanity as we're simply too many on this planet for that and also totally screws the environment for future generations, but hey, it works for me!"
Right now people have an issue with the edge cases of EV range. That doesn't mean they wouldn't ever replace their ICE car with an EV if the range story were better (meaning the range of the vehicle itself as well as the charging story).
I'm in a similar situation. My motorbike does, most of the year, ~50 km trips to go see my parents for the weekend (I take the metro or a bicycle for my commute needs). It could be electric, no problem.
But several weeks a year, sometimes on end, I'll go ride in the mountains where current electrical motorbikes would be useless. It's way cheaper for me to own my current motorbike (which I own outright) than to sell it and rent for my trips in addition to buying an electric one. If an electric motorbike could have the same range as mine and the charging infrastructure in the back roads were useful, I could see myself riding around on an electric bike.
It would be debatable whether buying a new motorbike when mine is still in perfect working condition would actually be better for the environment, but I'd say that's another question.
EV range concerns have an obvious solution: build more EV fast charging stations and guarantee cross-compatibility. Standardize the billing system (the EU strategy of "figure it out or we'll do it for you" would be a good one to pull on the automakers here).
The solution is not ever going to be another round of people posting caustic hot takes on social media trying to shame people.
As an aside, range is not a problem with new EV's with 500-600 km range as long as the charging network is good. There was a lot of talk about range anxiety in the early days when cars had 150-300 km range and charging stations were rare. These days with charging stations on every gas station, mall, ferry port, grocery store, random parking lots and what not long drives are no longer a problem as long as you plan a little bit and don't drive through hundreds of kilometers of no mans land without charging up first.
Then there is all the routes that just don't have chargers, so you are limited to only the common roads.
Until EV gets way better range, I think plug in hybrids make way more sense.
And only two of them are close enough I'd consider it a day trip.
That said:
> Until EV gets way better range, I think plug in hybrids make way more sense.
I absolutely agree. 90% of the environmental benefit with much faster roll-out.
500km is a short drive for some, when you can only fast charge to 80% and cars get far less range in the cold. 500km becomes 400km at 80%, you have to start hunting at 70km range, and at 140km/hr that's just over 2 hours of driving.
(Speed reduces range too)
But as I said in another comment, this will self fix. Charging time will come down, range will extend.
When you can fast charge a car to true 600km range, even at 140km/hr at -20C, with the heater running, and in under 10 minutes, I'd say we're there.
Maybe by 2028? I think?
But yes, this will solve itself. Each year charging becomes faster, each year travel distance longer, it will auto solve.
One thing people overlook, is many places have blackouts! If tomorrow, every person switched to electric cars, it would be disaster.
So as people switch, we'll have to build more capacity into the grid. Not just production, but substations, and transfer lines too.
And this will happen.
The reality of grid upgrades is unless we make the problem worse, it won't get better.
TBH, that is mostly a communication problem. Tesla already does much better than most non-EV types realize. A shocking number of people think road trips require literal multi-hour charging stops. "I heard from this Tesla owner that he only charges overnight... I'd have to stop at a hotel every 200 miles!" sigh
Consumer education is still important.
Outside of a Tesla... road tripping EVs in the US is often not fun.
They don't say it's superior. Multiple things can be true at once. People often like to cook at home. It's all cozy. It also is a way to save money. People with smaller house have more disposable income, to splurge more liberally on luxuries, feel less constrained in their choice to go out. All those things are true. I think the main message is that people needlessly make conventional choices (e.g. big house, big car), and these choices then drive their decision making after the fact. They're reminding us that stuff (the actual tangible inanimate things) have a tendency to start to own you, rather than the other way around.
I suspect most of the people replying to these EV threads are Americans living in extremely car-centric suburbia, where the nearest shop is 15km away. In this situation the only convenient way is to host dinner parties, have a small gym, have a guest room, and be able to do your hobbies in the garden.
Still, these replies show how spoiled, individualistic and entitled people are.
Are you living in a cave? Do you have children? Do you own a car? Do you fly anywhere? Are you sure your house has no glass walls before you throw rocks?
I didn't throw a rock, I pointed out a flaw. And it is safe for my wellbeing to do so without being perfect, because I'm aware of my own.
There is no flaw or entitlement doing whatever makes you happy. And there's nothing individualistic about not liking public transport (if you have access to it).
People living in rural America have to drive a lot farther than suburbanites.
Also, note that people who prefer to not own a car can choose to live in places with good public transit (mostly big cities like Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Boston, Philidelphia, etc.).
Fair enough, but that list doesn't include the third places the parent commenter was referring to: a choice of restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, etc.
All of that is included in the "etc." part.
A 15 minute city is therefore somewhere all of these facilities are a bit under a mile away.
Most places in the US are probably two- or three-hour-cities — which is still nothing to the average EV’s range.
> The 15-minute city (FMC or 15mC[2][3][4][5][6][7]) is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city.
Roughly 20mph on an electric bike, in 15mn I believe you do roughly 5 miles?
But yes, for all the suburbs I've lived in I've had the choice of dozens+ of restaurants, a few grocers, various stores, office parks, and more within 5mi. There's definitely places where this isn't true but it's not like all suburbs take two miles to leave the pure houses neighborhood.
No one claimed that the average suburban "Main St" is going to compare to high-density urban planning, but that suburban shopping options generally offer choices for most daily shopping needs within a reasonable (1-8km) distance independent from the city hub they're next to.
You did. Dense cities are struggling to implement the 15mn trip to any amenities. Yet you are claiming that everything is in a range of 8km from the average house in an American suburb, that roughly 15mn on an e-bike.
>> a choice of restaurants, bars, cafés, hotels, etc.
> All of that is included in the "etc." part.
Now who's moving the goal post?
> Yet you are claiming that everything is in a range of 8km
No one said "everything", but "most shopping options". You don't seem actually interested on having an honest conversation rather than pushing a distorted view of American suburbs of which you don't seem to have any 1st hand experience.
Just because you don’t like how they do it doesn’t mean that they don’t do it.
Then why are people using cars so much if everything is at a walking distance?
I would love to be able to bike there safely. Wouldn't even take much longer than driving.
For example, one time I stayed at the The Cupertino Hotel in CA and tried walking to One Infinite Loop, a junction which every sufficiently old iOS user will be familiar with because it's what Apple used to use as the icon for their Maps app before they relocated their HQ to the flying saucer campus. The junction looks like this, and was an awful experience as a pedestrian:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3350322,-122.0325183,3a,75y,...
This is of course highly situational and varies by location. NYC, despite its reputation, was a lot less scary to walk around.
And once all (or let's say most) vehicles are self driving and powered by sustainable energy, things will be overwhelmingly better on all those dimensions.
Meantime, you could adopt some driving-analog version of the following approach, but don't expect most of us to do so:
"The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards - and even then I have my doubts." --Spaf
This is only true for one of them and self-driving is still a long ways off. A self-driving EV still produces a lot of pollution (more than half of the CO2 is during manufacturing, and tire dust isn’t improved), costs a lot, and requires significant amounts of space to store and operate.
Nobody is saying there aren’t utility benefits but we shouldn’t continue massively subsidizing something while ignoring all of the problems. That’s why your analogy is nonsensical: spaf and the rest of the community didn’t say “perfect security is impossible, guess we shouldn’t do anything until AGI solves it for us!” and go to the bar.
Nope.
In term of general health, on average people will still lower their life expectancy every time they use a self driving vehicle instead of riding your bicycle or walking for the same short trip.
Plus the horror in term of land management and the general effect it has on psych.
And that car can haul groceries, etc. much better than a bike or hands can. I have a grocery store well within walking distance of me (on safe-ish sidewalks even), but I only walk when I only have a few things to pick up because otherwise I'm trying to haul 50lb of fragile and bulky stuff back half a mile to my house by hand (I also tend to go there mostly while I'm already out doing other things, so the marginal additional mileage is nearly zero). Yes, I could take the approach of going to the grocery store every day, but I flat out don't have the time for that (or the weather for that!). Or I could take the approach of buying a much nicer bike with more hauling capacity, but I already have a car (and do enough with it that there's no reasonable way to go without one) so I'm not going to spend $2k on a bike that would only reduce my mileage by 100 miles a year. Heck...just the savings from fixing things DIY covers the cost of my car in a typical year (I have an old house!), not to mention the car rental fees I'd incur for trips pretty much anywhere outside of a 5-10 mile radius.
But to your point, this is also highly situational. If I were in an apartment in NYC, that's a completely different situation than being in a house in a small-size city (honestly, my city in the US even has public transport that nearly rivals comparable cities in Europe...but they key there is comparing to comparable cities in Europe...where everyone still has cars because to go anywhere outside of a small radius, they need a car).
I just wanted to point out that this is missed on a lot of people. City planners in suburbs have come a long way, at least in DFW they have. I live in Oak Cliff which is about 3 miles S/SW of downtown Dallas. The northern suburbs of DFW such as Frisco are not the traditional boring/bland bedroom communities that get associated with suburbs. Well, there is that element but there are many good jobs, good restaurants/entertainment, and other amenities traditionally associated with city centers in the suburbs these days.
I suggest spending some times in a growing a suburb with an open mind. If you're a city person it's not likely to amaze you but it's not that bad either.
Trying to have a decent life, to live how you like is being spoiled, individualistic and entitled? Who are you to say such things to people?
If you're actively arguing against better alternatives for the collectivity, yes, it is.
You're also missing the point about how much it pollutes to make one car battery. There was a YT video a while back and you break even pollution wise at about 60-70k miles - basically your fancy electric car is pre-polluted. The only advantage over a gas car is the feel good sentiment.
The main point about climate change and everything is that you can't play ostrich and if you don't see happening it means you're gonna be ok. If the US pollutes too much (for example's sake) and the ice shelf at the North pole melts, you're gonna feel it all over the world because the water will rise equally.
"If the US pollutes too much", droughts and other rare-ish weather events in South America, Africa and South Asia will displace more people and lead to more instability. That's a much more tangible threat in our lifetimes...
The other advantage is environmental responsibility.
The pre-pollution you speak of is a myth, because after one year of use the total pollution crosses over in favor of the electric car. Even if the electricity is sourced from the worst source, coal burning, the net result is still a win for electric because electric drive trains use energy so much more efficiently than gas.
Though am not familiar with how much less pollution is generated by creating an ICE vehicle.
Democracy doesn’t come from surveys.
I agree with you on the supply chain of EVs... in particular if we're talking about electric cars which are extremely wasteful compared to smaller vehicles and public transit.
Housing might be a long term ponzi but we'll see I guess :-). As long as they keep devaluing currency it is not a bad bet. Especially in a metro area.
Property taxes are worse than capital gains in that the whole value of the property is taxed each year, compounding, rather than the increase in value when sold.
Not everyone has a five star restaurant down the street.
And I am a good cook, when the example above was given I was thinking it would have to be dinner somewhere like Chez Panisse for a party of 10. And even then it wouldn't be the same as a party at home--maybe SV tech people don't value this, but most cultures still value the social connection of cooking for ourselves.
ROFL no fancy restaurant will let me suspend a friend off the ceiling. Honestly most won’t be happy with board games.
Also, a home cooked meal is better - not because of the quality, but _because it’s home cooked_. And fyi cooking is a communal activity. The friends are in the kitchen then move with me to dining.
Not to mention I’m a solitary weirdo and I host people at least twice a month. Same with the last two generations of my family. The only time it was as bad as you describe (and “once per two years” is really bad) was when I was cripplingly depressed.
Edit: also, having a spare bedroom and a living room big enough to host even a dozen is hardly maxing out anything.
And you’re exaggerating the cost too. Two ovens? Seriously have you seen a Polish Christmas dinner? Dozen people, dozen meals, one stove/oven combo. It’s normal stuff done by normal people with small flats.
I like your idea of parties :3 Shibari?
Funnily enough I have had parties outside with such aspects, there are actually venues that specialise in such things. Friends regular rent them out. Usually combined with finger food only though.
That may be plausible for uncorrelated birthday events, but what about stuff like Thanksgiving?
Suddenly the usual third-party hosting capacity just isn't available anymore, and you can't simply merge the houses of all participants.
No thanks rent seeker.
I feel bad for you
That’s great until it’s like, Christmas or Thanksgiving or New Years, and everyone else in town also wants to host a party.
Ultimately people do things they enjoy. People enjoy different things.
I love hosting groups of people at home. Yes, it's hard work, but it's satisfying. The meal planning, excitement of preparing the house, cooking, having a big party at home - I enjoy almost all of it.
Having a party at a restaurant is a totally different set of activities - it needs longer term organisation to book a date, work out exact numbers, maybe pay a deposit. When the meal's over, everyone goes home. Doing it with kids is much harder. There's a different set of societal expectations over payment (people are much less comfortable being paid for in a restaurant than eating food you've provided).
These are different sets of activities. Some people enjoy doing one set more. That's OK. From my point of view - I'm finally in the position in the last few years where I can host large parties at home, and I'm really happy about it. To me it's worth the cost.
The same problem happens with car sharing: If you have the car in your driveway, using it is trivial. If you add booking a rental/shared car, going to the station, checking it for damage, ... a quick trip turns into a major chore.
And even if it may be overall cheaper to rent as needed than owning the "overkill" solution the whole time, it won't be much cheaper, because renting is ridiculously expensive. Short time rentals and car sharing around here are typically $50-100 per day and/or not that expensive per time but $0.50 per km which makes it prohibitive for longer trips. You can get an OK used car for a couple thousand and it will cost you way less than that in maintenance.
Self-delivering self-driving cars could alleviate at least the hassle (since you'd be able to reserve a fungible car from a citywide pool, for pickup and return at your door), although the cost aspect will likely remain.
Everyone who's ever worked on a website knows the value of being above the fold, the value of reducing a single click in a checkout, etc.
I lived car-free for many years, and while I had carshares easily available to me and went through the high-friction bits already (had the apps downloaded, accounts signed up, license verified, everything ready to actually rent) - I rarely did it (in fact I did it exactly twice in about 10 years!)
I sympathize with the argument here - having 4,000 lb steel boxes rolling around with a single person in them and no cargo is terribly wasteful, but a lot of the alternatives suggested assume a physics-experiment-like smooth frictionless surface that doesn't actually exist IRL.
Second, I think you're framing it as {truck + self pickup} vs {no vehicle + delivered}, but I think the more likely comparison is {truck + self pickup} vs {sedan + delivered}. Nobody's going to get a truck as their only vehicle that they'll literally only use a few times a year. They'll be choosing between truck and sedan as their daily driver (or truck as second vehicle). In the replacement case in particular (truck vs sedan) the friction delta is very small.
If you own the vehicle and it breaks you have to fix it - but most of the time it isn't broken. You need to pay insurance, but that comes in a regular bill, and so is easy to budget. In return for this you get a vehicle ready to use when you want to.
If you don't own the vehicle and need one there is a lot more friction: you need to figure out where to get a vehicle. More than once I've gone to get one and found they were sold out and so I couldn't rent when I needed one. More than once I've gone to get one and discovered the fine print didn't let me use it for what I wanted.
Open the app. Oh no, the car that's near my apartment isn't available when I need it. Ok what else is around? Ehhh the BMW is pretty expensive and unnecessary. Ah here's a Honda... but it's a 25 minute walk away.
Ok so I have to walk 25 minutes just to start the car. Then I can go where I want to - but if I bring anything back I'll have to find street parking in front of my apartment building to unload. Then I have to bring the car back to its spot, and then walk another 25 minutes back home.
Oh and don't forget to gas it up, because unlike owning a car, with a carshare more often than not you have to gas it up on the way back to avoid a penalty. You roll your eyes slightly at not just having to drop by the gas station but literally paying for the rental time to do it. But it's fine, whatever.
Like, I get that lots of people find this to be fine (I did, for over a decade!) - but it's anything but low-friction.
Traditional rentals are even worse - unlike carshares their pickup/dropoff locations are nowhere near you, so now you have to think about an Uber!
(US-centric view.)
If you live in a major urban center, sure. Paying hundreds of dollars a month for a parking spot would quickly convince me that car ownership was a bad idea. Otherwise, at least in the US, cities spread out to make room for the habits of their inhabitants. There's going to be easy parking where you live because that's what all of your neighbors want.
Of course, I agree that you should just have the deliveries... but I'm not seeing this as an argument why. The costs are not great enough.
Parking is similar. I can fit a small 2-door car into x% more parking spots in a city than a larger truck. So you can spend x% more of your time looking for parking spots. Maybe you're still looking for a spot when the car owner has already completed the errand.
As someone else mentioned, this friction is amortized over time so for some the psychological cost is lower, but for those who understand the principle of opportunity cost, it is a very real and tangible cost of ownership.
Now, if you’re in the 20% of truck buyers who really need them those are necessary costs but most people are buying them as a lifestyle accessory.
There’s also a fairly large group of people who live in urban settings who think they need all of that but are paying more than the cost of renting on the few times they actually do. Those people have been very good to the manufacturers’ profit margins but unfortunately all of the extra pollution and lowered safety affects their neighbors as well.
This is the real reason the SUV has eaten everything, because the so-called "crossover SUVs" and other small ones are just fancy hatchbacks, and a car with a square butt will always be more useful than a similar sized car with a trunk.
Physics, to a first order approx, doesn't care about the car mass, btw. It does care about A*Cd*v^3 though. Especially the v. A lot of problems depends on that v.
While I agree with the rest of your comment, this sounds several years out of date.
[1] https://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=2014%20prius
[2] https://boston.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=2010%20prius
Did you buy your Prius at the beginning of the pandemic? There was a brief period when cars got super cheap (no one was buying anything, sellers were desperate) followed by one where they got very expensive (manufacturing was blocked on missing parts, more people were trying to buy used since they couldn't buy new).
I used to drive so rarely car sharing would have saved me several thousand per year and been less of a hassle because I could skip annual inspections, gas stabilization, etc. Driving weekly and owning a car is probably worth it but drive quarterly and it’s a hassle.
Also, in restaurants there is usually less to do - you either sit and eat/drink, or stand. Home parties have more activities - people can cook their own food, browse books, play with other things. They also last longer, and in the end it can be just a few last people chilling on a couch discussing life and stuff in general - can't have that in a restaurant.
(also, nice to find another party organiser!)
In the case of many of these things there's an early outlay of a lot of money to then pretend the incremental costs is negligible where something with less actual costs might be a lot more enjoyable but is harder to disguise.
It’s also cozier and you don’t feel pressure of having to get going after a couple of hours —any kids can find things to do around the house, be it gaming, TV, running, going off to a corner, whatever. Adults can group into convos of interest, etc.
If people are worried about food quality (rarely is food the focus, but if it were that can be catered).
When you buy a house there is an implied level of investment/saving as a by product of the fact that bricks and mortar in many countries are seen as a good store of value.
When you spend money in a restaurant it’s just gone, there is no chance of your annual meal/get together being counted towards your savings if/when you need to rustle up some extra cash.
There’s also the fact that it is almost always cheaper to host a meal at home opposed to paying for an entire group of friends/family to dine out.
it means that all old people end up living with too much space, and young families with too little space.
Looking back, it seems like a lot of places looked a lot like this for a long time. It is fairly recent that we see people swapping every 4-7 years, at surprisingly high cost.
This effect was so substantial that from 1950 to 1960 the population of most major cities actually declined [1], in spite of a rapidly booming population!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_populous_cities_i...
Today, the sprawl has reached a point where commuting into the city is no longer an option.
That's why the old method no longer works.
We need to add density in the population centres where there are opportunities and jobs.
Not force young families to choose between a good job and a house.
And IMO this is all a much more reasonable thing to aim for. Density can only take you so far. There are hard limitations and it comes with lots of nasty stuff. I think the only reason things are taking as long as they are to naturally go this direction is because of the hyper-centralization of businesses and seemingly endless low interest rates, making companies with billion dollar valuations quite trite. And at that scale, the long-term cost impact of real estate in an ultra-premium location versus in the middle of nowhere is a rounding error. But monopoly money economics will end, probably sooner rather than later - and it may well end up solving this problem, alongside a slew of others.
[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23113/reno/population
(It's actually still happening, but people dismiss where it is happening as "suburbs" but if you live in a "suburb" that is 60 miles from "the city" and basically never go to the city, it's really it's own thing.)
The earlier comment isn't a critique on what people enjoy. It's a critique on people's inability to estimate how changes affect their enjoyment, instead making things into an inflexible checklist.
People keep taking everything personally when it comes to personal anecdotes when this is about mere majorities. Gatekeeping is not the intent. It's to speak of a broader group that has an impulse to want a thing, but many in that group will be served fine with alternatives. And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Especially for gardening supplies, delivery has no real downsides, it's a straight money calculation.
No, no. They are simply saying 'cater for the edge cases'. No more, no less. We know what you are saying.
They're just saying that you're ignoring nuance to their detriment (true), and therefore you are not trustworthy in decision making (true).
No, we are not prepared to let you make decisions for us ("But many in that group will be served fine with alternatives"). No, that's precisely the problem - Centralised planning thinks that the alternatives are fine, and they are often not. Similar to Google not having a phone number to unblock locked accounts.
>And wanting something doesn't mean you thought it through.
Sure. We will assume that this is charitable / general statement (if it weren't: It is this attitude that makes one unqualified to make decisions. They think they know better, and assume that the other person does not.)
Besides for all the decisions society foists upon you, of course, including what kind of cars are legal to purchase.
I'm not an absolutist anarchist, and I don't think that undermines my points (given an adult conversation where nuance and context is discussed).
We don't need absolutism across the board here (the "if you legislate against personal atomic bombs, you must be in favour of legislating against people having a 2mm knife blade!" whataboutism fallacy)
You're making a jump here that is not at all warranted.
Many literally means many.
Not in the sense that they will get lucky, but in the sense that different people have different edge cases.
They're not trying to tell people what their needs are, it's that different people truly do have different needs.
A bunch of people are arguing that their purchases have to cater for needs that they don't actually have. Trying to argue them down is not trying to say nobody has those needs, it's that too many people are thinking about a problem for 5 seconds, not considering alternatives, and claiming to have needs, when the actual number is a lot smaller.
It's not about specific people being told they're wrong. It's statistical. We can count how many people are doing X or Y and it's not most people. People get aspirational about the future and make claims that are wrong. Or they consider a lack of an "expected" feature to be far more impactful than it actually is. It's not uncharitable to say this about statistical aggregates, it's a fact.
If I am a guest, I would rather use the guest room than a hotel room paid for by my host. The latter feels like I am free-riding, the first doesn't - even though the cost for a guest room is much bigger, it's already committed to.
Also, staying at somebody's place is a very different experience than staying in the hotel down the road.
With the hotel, you will leave at a reasonable time in the evening. With the guest room, you may end up staying up all night.
If I buy a trailer I never needed, it does increase the chances of me using a trailer on a given occasion.
It does not, however, mean that I used a trailer any less than I wanted to before, and if I hadn't sunk that cost I'd have more money for more useful things. In your case, inviting for parties or going to restaurants more often and having more luxurious ones.
If you want to see your friends, don't buy stuff and hope they'll come use it. Invite them.
> If I am a guest, I would rather use the guest room than a hotel room paid for by my host.
If it's just one guest, they can sleep on the couch. Don't need spare bedrooms for that.
> With the hotel, you will leave at a reasonable time in the evening. With the guest room, you may end up staying up all night.
Not really. Leave late, stay up all night, whatever. The only thing they might care for is the checkout time if the hotel is expensive.
This works until your friends start getting married, start having back problems, or just want a little privacy while they sleep.
And if they have back pain they can't sleep on just any mattress either, as it might be the wrong hardness for them. And you might have another friend staying over so now you need two guest bedrooms for them both to have privacy, and both of which need fancy specific mattresses, ah and what if it's one of those couples that don't sleep in the same bed so...
Having an entirely unused room to cater to a very specific situation in which someone has to sleep in your house but also wants a hotel experience with a particular choice of mattress is a waste of effort. Guest bedroom by themselves is quite an American luxury thing. They're not at all a thing in Scandinavia unless you live in a mansion, and even then it would be weird waste of rooms to make spare bedrooms. Friends sleep on couches or fold-out beds if they need to sleep over.
Then you should not have a guest room. or a good excuse!
I have the former, but the person clearly indicated that a couch would be insufficient to address back pains, in which case it sounds like they expect a copy of the master bedroom.
Yes, this is extremely common. All of my in-laws would go in this category, more or less. I might spend the night at their house, but it would be awkward to wake up with them in the room. Many friends who have moved far away and I don't see them regularly any more would also qualify.
> And if they have back pain they can't sleep on just any mattress either
There is an enormous population that exists between "can't sleep comfortably on a couch" and "needs some specific kind of mattress."
> an entirely unused room
Space isn't at a premium where I live, a whole unused room is no big deal. Plus if I have a another child there is a room ready for them.
That's the source of a lot of guest rooms, they are rooms for future/past children. My own guest room is also an office when there aren't guests.
But then we've also deviated from the discussion of acquiring things with the intend to perfectly cover an edge-cases. On-topic, that would be like getting a long-range car because you drive the 1000 km constantly rather than for trips, and later lose the need and only use the extra range for leisure.
> There is an enormous population that exists between "can't sleep comfortably on a couch" and "needs some specific kind of mattress."
I'm actually not sure there are many people in that group. I don't think there's far between a decent couch and an "eh" mattress, closing the gap of people that cannot sleep on one but can sleep on the other. A decent futon or fold-out bed also goes a long way, and to theorize a bit I expect those that would not be able to have acceptable sleep on such would not sleep well outside their own home and bed regardless.
Either way, futons or fold-out beds are quite reasonable propositions comfort-wise and I sure wouldn't consider providing more for friends and family that needs to sporadically stay over at my home.
I'm sure this is a cultural thing but I and seemingly everyone around me finds guest bedrooms to be an insanely wasteful concept.
But in specific, goddamn there's so many differences between hosting a dinner party at home vs at a restaurant, or getting someone to visit and putting them up in a room vs a hotel.
Totes agree about trucks tho.
Same with landscaping and other hobbies. The joy they bring you cannot be replaced by getting it done by someone else.
And I think the cost of having a truck versus a sedan is marginal, especially in the US where the roads are wider and parking spaces can accommodate trucks without any issues.
Just because an alternative exists now, does not mean it will in the future and also does not mean it is equivalent.
>Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead.
Congrats on choices that make you happy. Other people do have cars though, which enable your lifestyle and your landscapers probably do not have an electric or a car manufactured in the last 15years.
You just can't. You can deceive yourself all you want and skip all life events this way, but ultimately spending money cannot be substituted by not spending money and if attempted will cast long shadows onto your life if it going to exist at all. It's an ultimate bean counting, going over a same bag that never grows.
> A small inconvenience to pay to save
This thinking is literally penny wise and pound foolish. Taken me way too long to realize.
Maybe we can skip it all and send them a gift card from Uber Eats?
If you think eating at a fancy restaurant is a substitute for being surround by family while you cook a huge dinner in a large, cozy home then I feel bad for you.
>I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution.
I bet if we looked at your life, "car" and "house" are compromises you are willing to make, "edge cases", but there are other things in there that you are not.
Can I ask why you are so concerned about policing how other people want to spend their time and money?
I have a huge house but live in a low CoL area where it costs the same as a condo in a high CoL place.
I drive a big passenger van but live in a small town where I can walk to the grocery store, gym, and library.
So you can mitigate in more ways than your suggesting.
I find it staggering that you would feel those are the same experiences. I feel there's a difference in what you consider to be a party and what people consider to be a party.
Its spontaneity and freedom to do what you want when you want. Same goes for the OP story about EV's. The mental freedom of being able to drive across the country any time someone chooses is liberating vs. only being able to go 200 miles and having to plan out charging stations and wattages/volts/whatever.
Perpetual home price increases leads buyers into an "investing mindset". I don't particularly like it, but it is an easy one to fall into. This is doubly true since realtors make their money by encouraging it.
You obviously shouldn’t pay to cover every edge case, but if you can it’s worth paying for the ones you value.
I know there are significant cultural differences at stake here but if your party with family/friends at a restaurant only takes two hours, you're doing it wrong.
That just not true. Restaurant quality has plummeted and it's easy to out cook them. Go to your average fancy wedding and the food is mediocre (this summer I went to a wedding in Canada's fanciest hotel. Same "fancy" fare you get anywhere else).
By the time your guests arrive, if you're spending your time in the kitchen instead of entertaining, you've messed up.
Also, you're telling OP how to live his life. You'd hate it if someone told you how to live yours.
"And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays."
The carbon cost of vacations is not zero. Close the ducts to the extra room and maintaining it is essentially free.
But again, you're telling OP how to live. You do your vacations with friends, I'll invite my in-laws to stay with me for a year.
"Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead."
And the detritus afterwards? Since I don't have a truck Ive been slowly cleaning my yard one green bin a week at a time since moving in two years ago. With a pickup I could have finished in two weekends.
Your travel is not environmentally sound at all. Sure, a plane gets 100 mpgp, if its full, but the distances are massive and its way worse overall.
But that's your life, you can choose to do that if you want. I care too much for the environment to air travel much (and, as a "third culture kid" -yuck- I actually do have friends and family scattered through out the world).
"My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why."
You don't have to understand. Ppl like to bitch. They would have even if their choices were different. That is a message of basically all religions throughout time - be content with your now.
And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays.
Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead.
My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why.