Morgan

CPI is totally fudged. They've made so many changes on how they calculate it over the years. It needs to stay within a certain range to make the politicians happy. I wouldn't be surprised if it gets modified over the next 1-3 years to put inflation back in 2% range.

We have Sams club and two slices of pizza and a drink for $2.50 deal, but as designed, I usually spend a small fortune in there on other mildly unnecessary stuff.

Yea we have the store CC's with the 5% discounts. It helps of course, but I still want cheaper prices (and to complain! lol) I agree on the food savings; not really worth it unless the coupons come to me with no work. I use them though.

7%? That is definitely not what I’m seeing. Everything I buy is up at least 15-20%. Building, HVAC supplies, tools, etc are up 35-100%. As we all know lumber went up 300%, but now it’s probably only up 100%. Oh joy. Even Egg McMuffins are up 35% in my area. A Subway footlong is up 60%. (Don’t judge my eating habits too much lol) From my perspective there has been a 20% decrease in quality of life. It seems like with all the shipping delays and shortages, we will have another year of substantial price increases.

I agree. The incentives are all wrong in these kinds of investment vehicles. The managers get paid to do deals, and the more and bigger deals they do the more they get paid no matter the outcome. What crap. The manager should only get paid when the investors get paid, whether it’s from the FCFs or from property sales.

Thanks!

God, that is just plain stupid business. Always support the customer. Sometimes you don’t get to eat because you’re too busy. And always take the money if a customer offers it! Jeez.

Thanks! Will watch on my commute.

Jeez. Maybe I should start managing other people’s money.

Caution is good, but how do you even keep a business open with performance like that? Wow.

Didn’t they just start this program? Already it’s going south. Jeez.

I just took a look at the plans and that looks nicer than the dorm and other places I lived in during university. I understand the need of adding more beds densely, and the rooms are small and basically only for sleeping. Once you wake up, you're in the community areas with what looks like quite a bit of natural light. I think it looks ok. One or two years in there wouldn't be there worst at all. It has elevators and AC!

If my memory is correct, his pre-Buffett investments were primarily in real estate. I guess he wants to go back to his early days. Nothing wrong with that, but no windows is crazy. At my dorm in university, I believe we had three toilets and three showers for 8-10 guys. It wasn’t an issue at all. Having only one toilet might have created issues. Particularly if it broke down. We didn’t have AC on the fourth floor either.

@Brett I’m interested and just PM’d you!

Woah that sounds cool!

Basically sounds like WFH will be a competitive disadvantage for creative companies to a certain extent. Companies that only require data entry for example, don’t need to have an employees randomly meeting and interacting. WFH may be a competitive advantage in these cases. In Creativity, Inc, it talks about building the new cafeteria for Pixar and Steve Jobs required that it be set up so all employees would be in the same area and thus more likely to share different kinds of info, just like this study suggests.

Amen. America is the land of opportunity like no other. Work, work, work and it’s likely you’ll succeeded.

Those programs were put in place because the average American is financially illiterate and financially irresponsible. Almost no one who receives a large one time sum makes good decisions with it. Let alone over their entire lifetime to fund retirement. While these programs certainly have problems, they may be the least bad way to avoid the elderly living in the streets. Agreed on hospital costs. No one even knows the price of anything. It’s totally stupid. If I were rich enough, I’d start a hospital with all the prices for everything listed on the wall and let the customers pick if they thought an extra scan was worth it or not. Prices for all surgeries and kinds of little stuff you never think of. Transparency is crucial for competition. I’d need some way to ban lawsuits but also incentivize good patient outcomes. I’m not sure if it’s possible to ban lawsuits other than forcing arbitration. Anyways, just my two cents lol

This is so awesome! Another amazing feat by SpaceX!

Thank you for sharing this. I read the executive summary and hope to read more in the coming days. It’s quite informative.

Thank you for sharing your thread. I missed it earlier. I’m not sure if the VAR costs are included in the analysis I provided, but it is something I need to research further. I believe, but could be wrong, the cost of batteries are dropping significantly and is making utility scale energy storage economical, or close to it. Storage is necessary to transition to solar and wind, and that is being solved. My understanding is as renewables with storage are implemented, carbon based energies will be turned off balancing the load on the grid.

Think about all the motors needed to move tens of thousands of panels reliably everyday. Electric motors are fairly cheap, but they add up. That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if in some locations the one axis tracking builds provide a better ROI despite the higher build cost.

Based on what I’ve read, utility scale solar farms are about 65% cheaper to build per watt than residential systems. See photo below. Underutilized roof space is a good option, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it on purely a cost basis at this point. This doesn’t take having some back up power for your home into consideration. Some people are willing to pay for that. @JRM do you have any reports on the limited supply of minerals needed to make panels and batteries? I’ve read about recycling old batteries (presumably panels can be recycled too) and they can reuse 95% of the original battery I think. Obviously the supply chain to do this is still being developed, but even if all batteries are recycled, 5% of the new batteries will need newly mined material. Minerals for 5% of the global battery supply is a lot of minerals. Anyways, I agree there are obstacles, but there certainly can be solutions. Not to mention new battery chemistries, or different chemistries used in different scenarios. It won’t all be lithium-ion.

Yes you’re correct, at least for dense areas. As the world becomes more urbanized (I think 2 billion more people are expected to move to cities by 2050), well located land for solar farms will become more scarce. In rural areas, I’m not sure if that’s true though. I wonder if there will be lots of smaller-ish scale solar farms dotted around everywhere for rural populations? Another aspect is the power loss from long distance power transmission. Another variable for analysis for site selection. I don’t know enough to make any determination about this, but I assume it’s something that needs to be considered.

True. The value of the land on the solar farm would likely have gone up. The old mounts in the ground, wiring, etc will be reusable. Take the old panels off and install the new ones. Same with new batteries. Do you think land in good locations for connecting to the grid will become more rare? The cost of infrastructure to add more transmission lines is probably fairly expensive, so being well located will probably become more valuable over time. I'm not sure if here will be so much density for solar that it actually impacts the value in this way. What do you think?