iamjdg

I'm just commenting based on my experience. I lived in Germany for 2 years and knowing traffic cameras were there made me a safer driver, taking less chances. Now being back at home in Canada, I noticed how my behaviour has changed knowing there was less probability I would be caught.

Have you ever driven in Italy? I have, and in my opinion that experience was bordering chaos. A small difference in how traffic laws are enforced makes a huge difference in how drivers behave.

Using as an example a simple tool which saves money and is effective in detering drivers from taking more risk to make a point about big issues of freedom and liberty is wasteful and not very effective.

While he is a legal expert and I am not, I think he is missing the point. If everyone ran red lights there would be chaos and public safety would be at risk. Traffic cameras are a deterrent that save municipalities lots of money not having to employ officers to act as deterrents. But a deterrent has to have a real consequence (people pay fines and other people hear about this) to work. He is using a small technicality to make a point about a huge issue of liberty which wastes tax payer money and will put the public at greater risk, cannot he do this through another means?

Germany, socialist, free university, free healthcare, no oil. The us could easily afford such things, it is just a matter of priorities. This article is short sighted and uninformed.

If you live in Canada

https://www.highinterestsavings.ca/chart/

These people who sold their Bay Area homes and moved somewhere else to pay cash for a house seem to gloss over the fact that they were able to do this because they struggled in the Bay Area for so many years and became real estate wealthy. They won't see this kind of real estate wealth growth in their new communities.

ha, this article is basically preaching the ways of mr money mustache, but in a high brow way.

It was satire.

300k is peanuts, you don't try to catch up with 300k. Car companies spend billions on research every year. The car companies are farther along in autonomous driving than most people know. Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen, has done extensive development for years. 300k to a university is a press grabber and maybe focused on a specific, very difficult problem they all face which does not inhibit adoption of the technology. They don't want to spend the resources on it now so they might as well take a small bet to see if some academics can figure It out.

I just checked both sites, they are both up, the fake codemonkey site and the real kmsurvival.com.

neither show up on the first 3 google pages for "km survival" or "kmsurvival". I have to google kmsurvival.com to get you to come up on the first google page. you have some seo to do. good news is the fake site never came up on any of the searches above.

it does sound like a good start up idea. if you can crack the internet rewards system that satisfies both buyers and seller, you would be really onto something.

it fits with peter thiels philosophy from zero to one: what is nobody else doing?" "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

by my math we could get to a 55% savings rate, but we would have to really cut out somethings we enjoy.

damn you beat me on savings rate...please tell me you don't have kids so I at least have an excuse.

Its a mixed bag, not as good as san francisco. lots of small outfits. ea is here. microsoft started an outpost here.

i respect your opinion. i agree it is tough to make a business for writer and artist these days. same goes for game programmers, wow talk about a march to the pricing bottom.

but why fight what the market wants with paywalls?

for me it's the "nickel and dime" thing, not just simply paying for quality product. i can't stand it. i want to pay for everything once, in an indirect way, that is almost unnoticeable to me.

have you ever driven in switzerland and italy? you enter switzerland and you pay 40 euros to use their roads and you sort of hate switzerland for it. then you enter italy and you don't pay anything and then all of the sudden you start hitting pay gates every so often and you end up paying double what you did in switzerland.

i fear for where these paywalls will take the internet in the future...i want something more like driving in switzerland than in italy

But y does not get smaller. Only expected interest on y gets smaller. y is the same (actually a little larger because money today is worth more than money tomorrow) and in the governments pocket. If the government was smart they would put the y in their pocket to use to offset the risk of x.

If the answer to the question is yes, then is the net present value of the remaining interest payments greater than the present value of the loan payout they just received? It is, but not by a huge amount. If I was the government is be happy to get all this cash from loans paid off early and I would use it to make more money (loan it out again to something more lucrative, mitigate the risks of likely to default student loans).

i guess I need to clarify a question first: when the private company refinances the loan, do they pay the government the current principle?

Why is this a problem? Presumably when the private lender refinances the loan, they pay the balance to the government? So yeah the government is losing all these future interest payments but are they not getting the principle back today? Couldn't they use that principle to offset the risk of default from lower income people with student loans?

yeah good catch, i didn't think about it, that data would be gold.

i still think they would make more money renting them to the 100 hour customer, bringing them back, then selling them to the 1000 hour customer at a reduced priced because it is used and only a 900 hour pump.

thanks. yes you are right. it is market segmentation. you move more units for a lower weighted average margin. just seems silly your actually modify the product to make it fail early just because someone paid less for it. i get it for software, you leave features off or put them on and charge less or more. but for an actual physical product, you are playing with operating hours as a feature, just seems new to me. if i was to do it, i would put some money into picking cheaper parts for the lower lifetime pump. then i could perhaps build it for $7 and get more margin for these sales. but i guess it depends on how much money you put into integrating cheaper parts. but even making it fail early by programming cost some money.

regarding savings rate, i do believe it is the only thing that matters, not how much you make, when it comes to obtaining financial freedom.

sure there are extremes, one should be making a multiple above the poverty line. but if you assume this is the case, then how much you make can either be translated into earlier financial freedom through an increased savings rate or "nicer things".

here is an ouput of my simple retirement calculator:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8k8RO7VeaIbc0JlUExLZmktSkE...

thanks, but really just timing, i am not any smarter than the next person. financial i do hope my equity continues to rise, but i do worry about the negative effects on our neighborhoods and society.

sure. i bought 10 years ago. i would say the value of my house has climbed 262%.

if i sold my house today and found a place to rent for the same housing costs, we would only have to work 4.5 years before "retiring" (work by choice, earn enough interest to cover expenses) compared to the 10 to 13.5 years I mentioned above.

but i don't want to sell right now to "retire" earlier. my kids are still young and in school and we love our place. We can walk and bike almost everywhere. My current job is still interesting. If things change (jobs, health, etc.) then maybe I would sell and move.

My housing costs are low in Vancouver because I bought several years ago before prices were too crazy. So my starting mortgage was much lower than it would be for a first time home buyer today. I also made accelerated payments on my mortgage.

So timing and a bit of luck. I could not afford to enter the Vancouver housing market today.

When they speak about the percent income required to own a house in Vancouver, they only speak about first time home buyers entering the market today. The housing costs for current owners who have been in the market for some time (like me) or current owners selling and buying are not as high because their starting mortgages were much lower and they have lots of equity for a down payment.

But I do sometimes feel the pain of people trying to enter the market or renters. For example, I’ve had a couple great job offers in the SF bay area in the last few years, but I turned them down because the cost of renting would have eaten away more than the salary increase. I was not willing to sell my house in Vancouver to remedy this (i.e. have a big down payment for a house there).

oh retire has many meanings. i should say work by choice. not worry so much about salary, try new fields/areas, etc. we are still 13.5 years away from work by choice, 10 years if my wife goes back to work. not sure, if there is interesting work i would stay in vancouver.

mrfusion as in General Fusion? Or Andrea Rossi ecat?

I live in Vancouver Canada, married with 2 kids. We own our house.

We save 48% of our take home pay, so spend 52%. We live the extreme early retire lifestyle, not for everyone. Some extreme early retire people would laugh at our savings rate (only 48%!).

The breakdown of the 52% spend is

- 27% goes to housing (mortgage, property taxes, house insurance)

- 5% goes to fixed costs (car insurance, life insurance, internet, cell phones, utilities, Skype phone, Netflix, VPN service, etc.)

- 20% goes to variable costs (groceries, gasoline, supplies like toilet paper, light bulbs, entertainment like restaurants, bars, movies, sport league fees, etc.).

I know variable costs are big, but we only loosely keep track of this. We control it by only allowing ourselves so much spend cash per month for these variable things and we stick to it, if we get low, we don’t do it or we have a serious discussion. We’ve tried to lower it more, but this seems the right level for our lifestyle.

I know I know, we own a house in Vancouver. Hey, we bought fixer upper years ago and got lucky with the market. I don’t count house equity in our extreme retirement plan, as far as I am concerned, it will be icing on top of the cake. Our only debt is mortgage (student loans paid off, 1 car that we paid cash for).

So they are basically renting their pumps? When the pumps fail, they must get them back and resell them to another customer. Else the economics would not make sense. Unless they send less to build a shorter life pump, but my impression was no, they program it to fail after a certain number of operating hours.

i'm om with such a choice as long as you don't go into debt to do it.

"a bit of debt but not too much"...this is relative, thousands is probably ok, tens of thousands or more not ok.

the whole reason to save most of your income is so you can have free time to do with what you please (work more, travel, start up, nothing). the investment part is only so you can earn a respectable interest (8% to 10% vs 1% to 2% in a savings account) for you to live off of.

ha. you can have a more lavish (wasteful) lifestyle and still only live off 20% of your income, you just have to increase your net income...then 20% represents a bigger slush fund.