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I already got a heat pump water heater and I love it! I'm totally in the market for a heat pump heater to replace our Heater/AC. the primary concern are three things: up front cost, and electricity costs for heating and 3) performance. the last quote I got was about 11K, so that's pretty steep. and on top of that heat pumps don't perform well for heating: it has to be on most of the time and will struggle to increase temps.

i think it has to do with the vast oversupply of labor (at least for white collar jobs). employers generally pick people with degrees of people without because there's just too many candidates.

but he's back to where he started in the beginning. I didn't sound like there was any more self actualization, after he went back.

I ran the numbers average wages/big mac index. And it was showing a decrease in cost untill about 2000 but ever since then the cost of the big mac index has increased in the US, relative to average wages. Not that we should be eating big macs, but it's supposed to take a variety of inputs into account.

I don't think food has gotten that much cheaper in the last 50 years. Don't believe the fake CPI. Just take the average hourly earnings and divide it by something like the big mac index or a basket of food commodities.

And yet, over 80% of the cost of food is the bringing it to market cost: everything from transportation, to permitting to marketing, etc. what you pay the farmer is just a small fraction.

I think what's needed is a revolution in where food is produced and cheaper ways of bringing food to market.

cost controls are a form of rationing and a good one, at least for the field of healthcare.

i'm just wondering how Meta will fair IF the metaverse doesn't take off the way they expect. I mean it's such a big bet. Google has made many bets in the past and some worked but most did not.

well, it's not the root cause. there's many reasons why healthcare is way too expensive in america. the fact is that employers pay a huge sum for healthcare in the US and this makes up a sizable portion of your compensation. if you earn 50K and the health insurance for your family costs 20K per year, that's pretty big.

the solution of course is to get those healthcare premiums lowered: that's going to require some kind of rationing.

I would say consumers should organize, and target a few of the biggest companies supporting this bill and boycott their products until the bill gets changed. If nobody buys another iphone for 6 months, I don't think they'll have any choice but to get the bill undone. right?

i for one, hope that the AI will mostly stick to analyzing the content, rather than search intent because Google has had a history of misreading my search intent, quite frequently.

It's not useless at all. There are countries where the average workers earn 5 times less (even PPP adjusted) than our minimum wage and they don't rack up vast amounts of credit card debt, car loans, etc.

We first need to start changing our values to be more financially conservative. Once that happens and voters start making these values apparent to politicians, they can take actions that will help reduce costs for citizens.

Failure of financial literacy is not because eduction has a lack of funding. The subject isn't even being taught, at least not when I was in school.

Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.

Well, that explains why our water is so high in nitrates. I've been looking into our local water supply. Out of the over 200 contaminants, the one that exceeds the EWG's limit by the most margin is nitrates which is said to come from fertilizer run off.

Excellent point.

Humanity has made all of our basic needs (shelter, food, water, land) inaccessible without lots of money. And, so we're forced into being slaves of govt and capitalism for most of our lives to earn a living. It's just something we have to accept. The material standard of living (as far shelter goes) has been dropping for the last 50 or even 200 years now, so people need to work harder and harder to reach basic needs.

There's no end to it until you've got more than enough investible assets to cover your future rent. and since there's no real such thing as land/house ownership, it makes that even harder.

If AI can create the perfect executive summary, then why not?

A good executive summary is better than just lead sentences.

I hate the fact that i'm forced to buy appliances with these circuits and nonsense apps in them. I dont need my appliance to be "smart". I just need it to do what I want it to do. a washer should just wash, and it should work for a really long time without breaking down.

There seems to be a knee jerk reaction to react negatively to anyone who doesn't read the article or doesn't read it in depth.

i don't think the comment about TL;DR OR asking chatgpt is completely out of line. I could see businesses being built on top of chatgpt to create summaries of articles on the internet. This is a pretty big use case.

Sometimes, people want a more efficient way to read articles, rather than actually reading them. If a service could be created that summarizes the main point of an article, I think there's value (and a potential business) in it. You might even be able to ask chatgpt or a service on top ofit, "has this article any new conclusions about the state of Mh370?" without actually reading the article.

As the over supply of labor increases more and more, you're going to see more and more incompetent highering practices. This is a natural outcome of just too much talent chasing too few jobs.

I would focus on companies that actually need talent. The big incorrect assumption people have is that if they see positions open then it means they need talent. this is incorrect, most especially for positions that have been open for a long time: that's a big red flag. If a position has been open for more than 6 months, they obviously don't need anyone to fill that role and so have no incentive to learn how to higher the talent needed for that role.

I mean sure: the fundamentals all point to deflation: the aging population, the increasing debt and technology are all deflationary.

But, in this day and age where the fed has sooo much power, it doesn't matter. see below.

>> If you want an exciting doomer story to believe in, try deflation.

The Govt and the fed are both on the same page, in this regard: they will almost NEVER allow a deflationary spiral to happen. If you watch a lot of financial news from people who read the fed and intrepret what they're signalling, you'll find there is widespread agreement on this (especially as of the 2018 powell put).

In the history of countless countries and currencies from all over the world, all the outgoing empires and countries end up defaulting on their currencies in the end game. See Ray Dalio's latest book, he's got a great explanation on this.

You bring up an excellent point about the T-bond rate. If everyone already knows the endgame, then why hasn't the bond market priced it in yet? Shouldn't everyone be dumping T-bonds en mass? Are they slowly? these are the questions I'm trying to get answered. Part of it is because the fed was already buying up a bunch of t-bonds, hence a sort of partial yield curve control. other participants, must not be ready to give up on bonds yet, especially the institutional investors who are looking at more short term gains rather than long term. You can still make money on bonds in the short run betting on interest rate fluctuations.

>> you can choose to go bankrupt or you can choose to pay it.

There's another option. One that's far more politically favorable: You simply take out more and more debt, until finally the whole world sells US treasuries. at that point the fed prints unlimited amount of money to buy up all that debt. And when the US pays interest on that debt, it just pays it to the federal reserve which then sends it back to the US. This is the end game, we're looking at. And the result implies inflation and LOTS of it. that's what I mean when I say, they will default on the currency.

His point is, the material standard of living is low as ever or even lower. This surprises people, but the bare necesities of the lowest level of maslow's heirarchy of needs are now more expensive than they have been in a long time.

Just look at the cost of shelter. Housing costs sooo much more than it did 50 years ago or even 200 years ago. During the time of Henry david thoreau, an average house cost 800 days of unskilled labor wages (meaning 800$, the average unskilled worker made 1$ per day). Today, it's over 5000 days of unskilled labor wages when you take into account property taxes. the difference in shelter cost is so enormous, that back then 1830s, mortgages were often just 10 years. And thoreau thought even that was too much.

the point is everyone wants more govt spending, not necessarily handouts. Voters want larger government spending.

I have a theory. The last 100 years has seen govt spending as percent of gdp increase to ever greater levels. People are expecting more and more handouts and no one wants to pay for it. Without the ability to pay for it via taxes, the govt will eventually have to default on it's currency and thus real returns on fixed income/bonds will have to become increasingly negative.

Their article already shows a slight widening between bonds/equities post 1950. My theorey is that for the next 100 years, we'll see a much larger widening between the returns of bonds and equities as more and more governments default on their currency. Thoughts?

EDIT: the article I referenced was the one the other poster mentioned: https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533....

Also, equity returns should in the long term be equal to Producivity per capita + population growth + inflation + dividends. And If you look at each of those for the last 100 years and the next 100 years for the US, you'll see a pattern. Pop growth down to 0.4 from 1.3. Per capita growth down several percent in the last 20 years vs the 100 years before that and with current PEs where they are, dividends are down to 1.3% from a historical 4.5%. Translation: Future equity returns will be much much closer to inflation than they have been in the past.

just be very careful with how you respond to questions from a therapist. they're "legally" required to report certain things. You have to know, what you're allowed to say and what you're not, if you don't want govt institutions getting involved.

i suspect a lot of the super high PEs we're seeing has to do with the tendency to prefer capital gains over dividends, due to regulations incentivizing this.

Sooner or later, every investor learns it's so much better to not try to beat the market. Trying to beat the market results in failure for the vast majority of investors: even some of the most informed ones. I would go with the SPY or VTI.

I know nothing and This is NOT financial advice.

Nature's food is the thing our bodies adapted to for millions of years. It is the gold standard of what is considered food, it is the grading rubric.

when I first started learning about, I was not aware of all the intricacies of food: all the minerals, and vitamins and flavanols, fiber and countless other things that make up "real food". I think people tend to simplify food into just a few small variables (like protein and vitamin C) and think that's all there is to it. And it's nowhere near that simple. No matter how much I dig, there's more and more things to understand about a given food. Asking industry to produce better food than nature is like saying, I want to score higher on this test than the grading rubric. It just doesn't make sense.

I think the future should be making normal natural healthy foods accessible to more people. Why don't we have apple trees, fruit trees and citrus trees in every park and next to every sidewalk? this shouldn't be hard thing to accomplish.

There are more acres than people, even in CA. But, you're certainly not free to build on it.

By all means, where is it?