kemitche

An important thing to consider is not just average return, but risk factors, and worst case scenarios.

If you buy a home instead of investing, you've got a locked in, controlled rate for your housing expenses. (Yes, there's some variability with property tax and insurance). In difficult times, you can still plan very carefully around your housing costs and wait for better times.

If you rent and invest, your housing costs can be highly variable and uncontrollable over time. Your investments may not cover increases in housing costs.

A critical factor is that housing is more or less a _required_ cost of existence - just like feeding oneself. It is not something where one can necessarily "invest in other areas" instead. There are extreme cases (living out of an RV or in a tent on the side of the road), but for the most part those extremes are not representative of how someone wants to live. One can only downsize so much, and downsizing your housing investment comes with very real changes to quality of life (storage space, commute time, access to grocery stores, etc).

Here's a few dozen use cases based on my own use of smart home devices:

- Hands are full or dirty while cooking. Voice activation is more convenient. True for not just timers, but every other aspect - music playing, controlling home devices like lights, watching something on YouTube, etc.

- The above also applies to any case where my hands can't readily access my phone, such as wanting to listen/change music when showering.

- As the other commenter said, sometimes the timer needs to be "room-specific" rather than on my phone (which stays with me)

- The device has a decent speaker, so makes a convenient Spotify device. The voice activation is sufficient, though I can also control the device via Spotify on my phone if there's occasional blips.

- Combined with smart light switches, I have convenient control over various aspects of lighting in my home

- Combined with Chromecast / Google TV, it provides voice activated access to pause/play/change what I'm watching.

- Basic internet queries, such as how long it will take to drive somewhere or when a certain place will close, work well also.

None of these use cases _individually_ is so amazing I'd spend $100+, but the combined total value is great for me.

The companies on top provide end user customer support, varied pricing models ("unlimited" data vs pay by the GB, etc), and so on. It allows the common carrier to focus solely on the network hardware.

If it takes 1 hour of effort to save 5%:

- Doing 1 hour of effort to save 5% on your $20 lunch is foolhardy for most people. $1/hr is well below US minimum wage. - Doing 1 hour of effort to save 5% on your $50k car is wise. $2500/hr is well above what most people are making at work.

It's not about whether the $2500 affects my ability to buy the car. It's about whether the time it takes me to save that 5% ends up being worthwhile to me given the actual amount saved.

The question is really "given the person-hours it takes to apply the savings, and the real value of the savings, is the savings worth the person-hours spent?"

Nine times out of ten, I've got more valuable problems to solve than a theoretical future change of our vendor/stack for telemetry. I'll gladly borrow from my future self's time if it means I can focus on something more important right now.

The article contradicts your exhibit A: "Additionally, women, who naturally produce much less testosterone, reported an increase in sex drive, when given testosterone supplements."

Agreed, but in this particular case the blog writer was running private servers, rather than being Valve. They had no control over payment processing etc.

At the time of the events in the blog, CS:GO was NOT free, and yet there were still cheaters that apparently had access to 80+ accounts.

NYT has had click to cancel for a few years at this point. Were they later than they should be? Yes. Are they bad now? No.

What makes you say that? In my experience, the spam button works fantastically. There is a gym of some kind that has me on their mailing list, refuses to honor unsubscribe, and sends me probably 2-6 emails a month. They've been doing this for years, but Google correctly gets every single one into spam because I marked one (several?) as spam years ago.

Most, if not all, political junk email also ends up in my spam folder after judicious use of the spam button a few years ago.

"Stick to a calorie budget" is the HARD part, and it's the thing that drugs like Ozempic help people with.

People aren't obese just because they can't figure out how to count to 1500.

So, eras of food scarcity?

Minimum thresholds, and exceptions for less liquid assets (private equity) - ideally, again, coupled with thresholds.

The same way we have exceptions like CA Prop 13 for increasing property taxes.

These problems aren't impossible to solve. It's wild how people will find any tiny excuse to give up on making a change to try and make tax code more fair. If there are edge cases that a blanked change to the code makes worse, that's NOT a reason to just throw our hands up and say "whelp, can't make changes" - it just means we need to add a bit more nuance.

Why would there need to be a carve out for home/auto loans?

1. No one really borrows against the value of their (paid off) car. 2. Property taxes already, generally, are against the assessed value of the home, so it's already happening for that case. There are some minimal exceptions, like CA Prop 13, of course, but generally speaking, if I want to take out a second mortgage or something, my home's value is already appropriately "stepped up."