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The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.
Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.
So, how long before Cloudflare buys Mozilla or Brave (or builds it own)? Feels like they would be a better long term home than Mozilla surviving off an annual stipend from Google.
On #2, the role tax deductibility of interest plays is often overlooked IMHO. The mortgage interest tax deduction (and all deductions of interest) are a massive subsidy to relatively wealthy members of society and which serves to encourage the use of debt to increase the nominal value of assets more generally, not just property.
The way out is a gradual reduction in the amount of. Interest allowed to be entered (e.g., 1-2% reduction per year) to avoid spooking markets.
Would this apply to businesses too, or just individuals? If businesses are not allowed to deduct interest expenses, that going to strongly constrain how much they will be willing to invest.
And if business ARE allowed to deduct interest expenses, but individuals not, then rich people will just have their company own their house, and rent it from themselves (or some similar adaptation).
In particular, for real estate, if loans become more expensive, fewer people will want to build housing, making the market even more constrained. (Now, I do see reasons for making lending more expensive, but that would be for financial stability reasons, not housing.)
To "solve" housing, I think the main approach should be to encourage the supply side. Make it easier and cheaper to build, and harder for local communities to enforce their NIMBY inclinations.
Within reason, though, because if take to the other extreme, you may end up with an oversupply of housing in many areas, which can lead to slums forming.
Yes, for the reason you describe, it would also apply to businesses. It would likely help smooth out some of the market excesses and temper some of the irrational exuberance known to occur. A lot of “investment” is done by zombie companies buying their own stock or floating from one low interest loan to another to fund operations while deducting interest expenses along the way.
Yes, there could be a hit to overall investment, and it could be argued to set a lower bound of allowing deductions for up to 50% of interest paid or something.
I believe the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ("TCJA") of 2017 raised the standard deduction so much that there's not nearly as much tax benefit to carrying a mortgage.
Standard deduction for singles 2022 was ~$13k. For itemizing, you are able to deduct $750k federally. At 5% interest, that's $37.5k, and now you can itemize SALT for $10k, and some others like registration. We'll call it $48k deduction. (CA you can deduct even more) That's an extra $35k deduction, at typical 40% marginal tax rates, that saves an individual $14k/yr in their bank account, almost $1.2k a month.
Yes, the benefit is less for married, because standard deduction becomes $26k so marginal deduction is an extra $22k, $9k/yr in the bank, $750/mth.
Agree. Remote work during pandemic has shown companies they don’t need legions of mid- and low-tier white collar workers onshore.
You can hire top tier college educated talent in the Philippines for $30K/yr. They work US hours and are hard working. A friend runs his entire US operations for a $5M/yr revenue company with just one other US-based employee.
Yes, both can be true; one would expect that to happen over time until supply meets demand. It will do to service/clerical jobs what 90s-10s globalization did to manufacturing.
Yes, I wondered the same. What were the cultural and people problems encountered last time? Were Americans not educated/skilled enough to operate the fab? Did they not want to work the hours necessary to reach required yield thresholds?
I hope this gets extended into a class about radio frequency communication. Everything here applies to all the wireless gadgets ubiquitous in our modern society, yet many haven’t the foggiest idea how antennas, carrier waves, and modulation combine to beam the Internet everywhere.
What we (the unmanicured masses) crave most is a clear blueprint for reconstructing the new Internet once our consumerism-based, debt-aggregation system inevitably comes to a screeching halt, complete with a spectacularly bloody and sparkling implosion.
I lack the proper academic terminology to even understand the field enough to discern what exactly it is that I don’t know that I don’t know, and personally my time “wasting time learning things on my own for seemingly no reason other than wanting to know” has recently been cut short, and I am left aching for someone to emerge from this chaos and hopefully be receptive to these messages/instructions/explanations before they are pulled from beneath us.
The lack of nuance here is troubling and commits the fallacy that birds are a homogeneous population where one bird killed by wind turbines = one bird killed by a domestic cat.
From the paper's abstract: "The treatment had the largest effect on reduction of raptor fatalities; no white-tailed eagle carcasses were recorded after painting. Applying contrast painting to the rotor blades significantly reduced the collision risk for a range of birds."
A cursory Internet search reveals that raptors (and bats) are particularly vulnerable to wind turbines[0], and many raptor populations have been threatened for a long time due to a variety of threats and biology (they take longer to reproduce and recover).
And if one were to describe all the threats to birds listed here, they are basically iterations under the "loss of habitat" super-category.
Yes, power lines are also a big threat to raptor and other threatened avian populations, but wind turbines (and the power lines they use) are still being built, so reducing avian deaths from both sources seems worth researching and implementing. Especially when the parent article notes how little it would cost to paint the blades during manufacture (vs. post-installation).
The wonderful warmth of incandescent (depending on your color temp prefs) with no wasted IR energy in the form of heat. What’s funny is that your mind will perceive it as hot because we’ve been conditioned to expect it from light at that color temp.
Reasonable price, too, but more expensive than bulbs from the big box store. For something that lasts 10-18 years, it’s worth it to me.