18 ms·

The edge cases are the important cases though. Those parties I throw are the highlight of my year. My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn'

by mvdtnz 3y ago

The edge cases are the important cases though. Those parties I throw are the highlight of my year. My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah I have a desk job but that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies. I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring.

seanmcdirmid 3y ago
We were wondering if we could drive to glacier national park in our BMW i4. There doesn’t seem to be any charging infrastructure outside Kalispell, so we are better off flying and renting an ICE car (Yellowstone or Grand Canyon doesn’t seem very possible yet either). Same with driving up to Alaska ATM, which maybe might be possible in 5 years but is impossible today unless you leverage slower charging at RV parks. They are unfortunate sacrifices, they definitely do matter.
- FredPret 3y ago
  > Glacier National Park That’s a fantastic drive by the way. Pack a camera!
- dboreham 3y ago
  I live in Livingston MT which is the closest proper town to Yellowstone. We have a two-bay charger at Clarke and Main. I've only seen it used once though.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Ya, the issue for Yellowstone is mostly when you are in the park. You need to head out to charge, but maybe the math works out better than glaciers where the town with charging is farther away, and the roads in the park more vast.
- ryanjshaw 3y ago
  These guys [1] took an iX3 to the Kruger Park in South Africa and back with careful planning. They managed to do 100km of self-driving game viewing thru the remote park per day for 4 days without issues. They recharged out of their accomodation while they weren't out driving. We don't even have electricity 24 hours/day here due to our ongoing generation crisis, so I'm surprised you wouldn't be able to do something similar in the USA or are those two parks just really that remote? Or is it the 120V AC that's the issue? [1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/504858-i-drove-an-electric-bmw-to-kruger-and-back-consider-me-converted.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/504858-i-drove-an-el...
  - quickthrowman 3y ago
    120V 15A circuit is 1.4kW. If charging time is linear, that BMW battery would take 52 hours to charge from 0-100%.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      You can get L2 charging at many RV parks. It isn’t what I would consider very practical though.
    - Rebelgecko 3y ago
      Most RV parks have 40-50 amps available, which makes overnight charging more practical
      - xxs 3y ago
        It's unlikely they will be able to supply that much current if there are many participants.
        _ea1k 3y ago
        Yeah, they'd need to add EVSEs with load sharing. Fortunately, that'd be cost effective if there were many customers clamoring for it.
    - 3y ago
- bruce511 3y ago
  Honest question - can you rent a car for the trip? Whole my kids were growing up we had a big people-mover vehicle. They grew up, we stopped using it, send I sold it. Recently I had a group visit and we wanted to see the sights. I simply rented (a much more modern and nicer) people mover for a week. Renting local, away from the airport, was really cheap. My daily drive is negligible. For road trips I'll just rent a car. I can also rent a truck if I need to carry stuff, or something with a towbar to drag stuff. Being "cheap " 350 days a year leaves a big budget for renting the edge case.
  - Arainach 3y ago
    Except that an EV isn't cheap. Buying a $50-60K EV over a $30K IC does the opposite of leave budget to spend $1000 on a road trip rental.
    - aydyn 3y ago
      Then dont buy a 50-60K EV? buy one thats 30K or less?
      - bogota 3y ago
        Why not buy one under 10k? How about 5k?
        aydyn 3y ago
        How about a million k.
        bdcravens 3y ago
        The average new car transaction in the US is $48k. I do suspect we'll start to see lower priced EVs in the used market in coming years however.
        LtWorf 3y ago
        Or not… what's the point when spent batteries give you very little range, and replacing them costs more than the entire vehicle?
- mavhc 3y ago
  Wants to see a glacier, takes a plane and then burns gasoline to get there.
lukas099 3y ago
> Those parties I throw are the highlight of my year. That's what renting is for. You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little. > My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. Fine, but I don't think it's this important to most people who have a spare bedroom, they just don't think about it. > that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies. Mine too, doesn't mean I need a pickup. But anyways if it's one of your favorite hobbies and you do it every weekend, that's not what I was talking about.
- ryanklee 3y ago
  Those solutions are totally inadequate with regard to intangible values. It's as if you simply dismissed the emotional weight of GP's very real point, which is that the edge cases are singular and important. A rented room regardless of how nice is not a substitute for hosting friends and family at ones home. And don't get hung up on this example. There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    How is renting a room in a local pub inadequate? I did it for my wedding reception and it was, pardon my french, a fucking blast.
    - jen20 3y ago
      It requires: - Up front planning - A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live. - The pub to have a room that it rents out. Again, not the common case even in London, let alone in the US. - Your potential guests to be OK with being at a pub. - Potentially childcare. If you have to have your party away from your house, you can't put your kids to bed and return to your guests, you have to go home. That part, if you will pardon my French, really fucking sucks.
      - 3y ago
brokensegue 3y ago
if you do it once a year (or whatever) you can just rent a truck and come out ahead
- wharvle 3y ago
  Delivery is a thing and the price tag may sting but it’d take a shitload of it to pay the price difference between a truck and a sedan. Plus the cost of worse gas mileage, pricier insurance, higher property taxes, and so on.
FpUser 3y ago
>"I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day." This is exactly how I feel
petre 3y ago
Well, you do have a genuine need for a truck of you're doing landscaping work every second weekend. You could use a tow behind cart as well, at least that's what most people do in Europe. I got a compact crossover to carry my bike. It has the same size of an engine and emissions as my previous car (a sports mini), just the space inside is bigger, one can carry four people without getting crowded and it doesn't look funny with a tow hitch on. Most sensible people drive these kind of cars in the US as well, I saw a lot of Subaru crossovers.
lukas099 3y ago
Totally agree that the edge cases are important. But people spend too much on owning equipment for them that would make more sense to rent. Take the dining room example. A quick search says it costs ~$20,000 to build a dining room, so let's say a house with one costs $10,000 more than a house without. So by foregoing a dining room, one now has an extra 10k that they can spend however they want. But that DOESN'T mean that they can't spend it on throwing parties! I'm pretty sure that even spread over many years, 10k dollars can produce a lot of fun times.
- Affric 3y ago
  Yeah but I can live with a gross car covered in shit that children drop and I get the convenience of a car whenever I want. I never have to pay some peak season pricing. Owning things means you get to be your own master. That is worth different things to different people. I know couples without kids who only rent cars but that number goes way down for people who have kids.
  - makk 3y ago
    > Owning things means you get to be your own master. Tell that to fixed income folks who are priced out of the houses they own due to property tax increases.
    - cableshaft 3y ago
      That's pretty much unique to homes (well, real estate in general), and that's because there's pretty much no way to own the land your house is on, at least in the US (maybe there's some really rural parts where it's possible, not sure). Can't really think of anything else I own that has anything equivalent to a property tax.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Where I live I do have excise tax on my car but that’s pretty small potatoes—maybe a couple hundred dollars a year. Also registration, inspection.
Affric 3y ago
> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Well said. And I think that you cut to the heart of what the electric vehicle advocates are doing wrong. They are telling us the only times we actually enjoy being in the car and travelling are the ones we should give up. I don’t use a car in the city. An electric car can’t yet take me home in 2 days without perfect conditions and a tailored root.
- mrjin 3y ago
  As an ordinary driver, I cannot care less whether a car is electric or not. All I want is *A* car can cover all most if not all my needs around transport. Obviously those electric car advocate took what we *want* as what we *need*.
  - eecc 3y ago
    Oh those duplicitous monsters! Unlike those sincere marketing folks that spend their lives manipulating the multitudes over what their needs and wants are!
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree and am also going to bring another thing up that ICE cars have but EVs don't regarding range: Peace of mind. When we're driving an ICE car, we simply don't care about the range. We don't think about it; it's not a concern. That peace of mind is fucking priceless, especially if one's life is already busy with far more pressing concerns. In an EV we have to constantly keep an eye on that battery level, on that Miles Remaining counter. We have to micromanage the A/C and other things that consume power. That is mentally draining, and for what? It's something we don't have to care about in an ICE car. I drove an EV, I constantly worried about the range. Range was constantly on my mind, even when I wasn't driving the fucking thing. It was mentally fucking exhausting. Sincerely: No thanks. I'll happily pay the $50~70 bucks at the gas station to fill up my car in a few minutes and be at peace. It easily beats paying almost nothing charging overnight and then worrying if I can come back home when I start another day.
jnsaff2 3y ago
Aaand the rational actor theory on which large part of economics is based just flew out of the window.
i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
Same, but this can be solved with better public transportation. I thankfully live in a place where trains are decent
neodndndn 3y ago
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neodndndn 3y ago
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Joeri 3y ago
But instead of spending the money on a house big enough to host those dinner parties, you could host them at a fancy restaurant, with better food and the ability to spend the entire evening with the guests instead of in the kitchen. And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays. Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead. My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  There is another thing at play with maxing out on your house, which is that in many places it is a damn investment (unfortunately) and the primary residence usually has tax-free gains, and things like being not means tested for certain benefits. So maxing out on the house can perversely let you do that travel a few years down the road. It's not great, but that's the system. Housing might be a long term ponzi but we'll see I guess :-). As long as they keep devaluing currency it is not a bad bet. Especially in a metro area.
  - votepaunchy 3y ago
    > the primary residence usually has tax-free gains Property taxes are worse than capital gains in that the whole value of the property is taxed each year, compounding, rather than the increase in value when sold.
- rich_sasha 3y ago
  > My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution And that's fair enough, but I find the tyranny of "it works for me so you're doing it wrong" very real. In many areas, but in particular with electric car range discussions.
vidarh 3y ago
That's your choice, and it's fine, and I'm not going to criticise it, but just suggest that sometimes (not always, and depends on what you consider "better") it's possible to cater for both the day to day case and those edge cases better if you make your starting choices more around your day to day needs. E.g. maybe your parents staying specifically in your house is too important for you to give up, but for those whose actual need might well be to want to spent holiday time or the occasional long weekend etc. with family or friends, many places you can finance a lot of trips and big fancy AirBnbs for all of you together for the savings from a smaller mortgage. For some it might similarly be even more of a highlight to throw the parties in a lavish rented location or fancy restaurant (but again: it might not be; if part of your enjoyment is to host at your home, that's your choice). Depending on how frequently you need that truck, you might be better of renting/signing up to a car-sharing service. Sometimes people genuinely want to be able to handle the very specific edge case and that's fine. But often people also just haven't considered the cost of buying for the edge cases vs. the cost of renting on occasion and what it might allow. I wouldn't want to suggest you shouldn't make decisions that takes your edge cases into account, but I find to me at least that there are often alternative ways of addressing edge cases than people's "defaults".
- WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  > but for those whose actual need might well be to want to And the authority for the people to decide their “actual” needs should be who exactly?
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I took great care to multiple times make clear that the choice is yours, that your needs might not be suited for this, and that whatever works for you is fine. Exactly what made you think I was implying the person to decide what works for you should be anyone but you?
    - lukas099 3y ago
      It is crazy how hard people try to read straw men into what other people say sometimes.
bornelsewhere 3y ago
> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Surprised nobody mentioned externalities yet. Carbon tax, and then you can take a more wholistic view when planning your life. By the way, landscaping as a hobby does not automatically imply trucks, not outside US at least. Unless you actually do it often and need to transport large loads—then yeah, go for it. You’re part of a small minority that might actually need a truck.
coldtea 3y ago
>I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. How about living it as if those things are more important to you that the way they are achieved? You can see your friends and throw parties without a dining room - set a table in the living room or set up a meeting in some place. Or go see your parents more often at their place, and when they come, spend more time with them and do stuff wherever they stay at. Or do the landscaping work without a pickup truck, like millions of people managed. An insistance on the rare edge cases is not about "refusing to average an entire life style down to the median day". It's acquiscing to the median day, and then using the edge cases as if they mean you haven't.
- moooo99 3y ago
  > It's not about "refusing to average an entire life style down to the median day". It's acquiscing to the median day, and then using the edge cases as if they mean you haven't. Thank you for this, this seems like the most rational take. I went through the more extreme version of this debate myself, I don’t own a car anymore and despite what everybody told me, I haven’t lost any flexibility at all. Between financing the vehicle, gasoline, insurance, vehicle tax and maintenance I save about 4800€/yr. I can do about 360 days of the year without a car. I can rent a car best fitted for the occasion and still save tons of money. I used a van for when I got stuff from ikea, I had a sedan for a road trip and a compact EV for when we had a city trip. With this being a no brainer I’d argue I gained flexibility and improved my not so median days. The same thing can be said about just switching to a BEV. The BEV will, for the vast majority of people, be an improvement for their median day. You can charge at home, you have less maintenance hassle and the range will be perfectly fine for your median day. At the same time it won’t hinder your above median days not significantly. You can plan out your trips with a little more breaks and you’ll be fine, at the same time, with the money you saved on ToC you can also just rent out a nice ICE for the extra ordinary occasions.
  - matsemann 3y ago
    Yeah, I've managed 8+ years in my city without owning a car, and still did lots of things with a car. Just had to change my mindset about costs. Like, paying €50 to rent from a carshare outside the apartment to go skiing for 2-3 hours felt really expensive in the beginning. But then I realized, that with the money saved from not owning a car, I could actually probably do this twice a week during winter season and still come out far ahead. It's just that when you buy a car, you don't see the price tag on each trip.
palmfacehn 3y ago
Put it another way divorced from the politicized issues. Airbags are for an edge case. Backup parachutes are for an edge case. Having a "rainy day fund", rather than going all-in on more profitable long term investments is for edge cases.
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olabyne 3y ago
it's not. The edge cases are something we are allowing ourselves because of fossil-fuel abundance.
lukas099 3y ago
Let's say you're into fly fishing, so instead of a dining room you have a room for making lures, which you do every day. You can still have those parties and utilize that room; in fact, that room will look a lot more interesting, have more to talk about, probably be cozier because it actually gets used so its layout will have been refined through real-world testing. And you can still fold out a dining room table if you really need to.
- asdfaoeu 3y ago
  I mean in practice that's what most people's dinning rooms are. I of course know some exceptions but they have more money than sense.
Kiro 3y ago
Most depressing comment I've read on HN in a long time.
bborud 3y ago
I think you are making an important point: it is easy to think that the value to you of having a car with loading capacity or a dining room for parties can be calculated from the utilization alone. Right now my car has broken down. I don't actually use it that much since I commute to work on my bicycle. But as it is broken down I realize that those "corner cases" actually occur much more frequently that I had thought. For instance, this week I've needed it twice. Next week I need to take a trip where I could either drive myself to the airport, allowing me to sleep in for another hour or so, or I can use public transport. If I use public transport I will be home much later so a social engagement I was planning to take part in has to go. Sure, I don't use my car that often anymore since I try to ride my bike when possible. Even in winter. But that's not really how I use my car these days. As for houses: they're a lot more complicated than I thought. You don't actually know how you are going to use a house and whether it will "work" before you move in. It took us years to figure out what a couple of the rooms would be used for. During covid the room at the top of the house, which was kind of a second living room up until then, became my wife's office. And it works great for that.
arghwhat 3y ago
Quite the contrary - the edge-cases are not important here. Not because they do not matter, but because trying to address them this way leads to worse results. Instead of having a giant living room with chairs and table space for 30-50 people, you can temporarily set up something on a lawn, in a park, or rent a dedicated space. Instead of having a pickup truck to carry a heavy thing once, rent a van that one time or have a trailer hitch on a smaller car (for the confused Americans, in EU even the smallest cars have or can be had with trailer hitches for small utility trailers from 750 to 3500kg). Instead of having a car with a 1000 km range and 10 minute refuel when you only drive 30km a day, rent a nicer car for those trips or take a train/airplane. Don't optimize for edge-cases - you get better and cheaper results by optimizing for the median and doing something else for edge-cases. Think of it like trying to do everything with a swiss knife vs. using a few good dedicated tools, renting those you rarely use.
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kbos87 3y ago
This perspective leaves me with little hope for the future of the environment. Nobody is willing to give a single inch when it comes to their comfort, convenience, or self image, externalities be damned.
gnufied 3y ago
>hose parties I throw are the highlight of my year. My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. There is a silver lining in smaller houses. They tend to be in denser neighborhoods and hence has some benefits in raising kids. There is no need to setup play dates, they can literally hear each other screaming and come out to play. In my bigger house neighborhood, I see very few kids just playing casually outside and hence we have to setup play dates. Yes now I have place for table tennis table that I always wanted but I have to call my friends over because bigger house in my case also is bit more further in suburbs. So big house might be great for parties and hosting guests but i probably traded away closeness to my existing friends for myself and kids both. I just made my median day more boring than before.
jjav 3y ago
> I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. I like how you summarize it with this line, I think there's a lot of truth in that. Sure, we could only own that which we need daily to get to work and be a good worker bee, but that's depressing.
whitepaint 3y ago
> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Maybe that's the biggest problem and your current solutions are inadequate?

by mvdtnz 3y ago

seanmcdirmid 3y ago

We were wondering if we could drive to glacier national park in our BMW i4. There doesn’t seem to be any charging infrastructure outside Kalispell, so we are better off flying and renting an ICE car (Yellowstone or Grand Canyon doesn’t seem very possible yet either). Same with driving up to Alaska ATM, which maybe might be possible in 5 years but is impossible today unless you leverage slower charging at RV parks. They are unfortunate sacrifices, they definitely do matter.

FredPret 3y ago
> Glacier National Park That’s a fantastic drive by the way. Pack a camera!
dboreham 3y ago
I live in Livingston MT which is the closest proper town to Yellowstone. We have a two-bay charger at Clarke and Main. I've only seen it used once though.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  Ya, the issue for Yellowstone is mostly when you are in the park. You need to head out to charge, but maybe the math works out better than glaciers where the town with charging is farther away, and the roads in the park more vast.
ryanjshaw 3y ago
These guys [1] took an iX3 to the Kruger Park in South Africa and back with careful planning. They managed to do 100km of self-driving game viewing thru the remote park per day for 4 days without issues. They recharged out of their accomodation while they weren't out driving. We don't even have electricity 24 hours/day here due to our ongoing generation crisis, so I'm surprised you wouldn't be able to do something similar in the USA or are those two parks just really that remote? Or is it the 120V AC that's the issue? [1] https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/504858-i-drove-an-electric-bmw-to-kruger-and-back-consider-me-converted.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/504858-i-drove-an-el...
- quickthrowman 3y ago
  120V 15A circuit is 1.4kW. If charging time is linear, that BMW battery would take 52 hours to charge from 0-100%.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    You can get L2 charging at many RV parks. It isn’t what I would consider very practical though.
  - Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Most RV parks have 40-50 amps available, which makes overnight charging more practical
    - xxs 3y ago
      It's unlikely they will be able to supply that much current if there are many participants.
      - _ea1k 3y ago
        Yeah, they'd need to add EVSEs with load sharing. Fortunately, that'd be cost effective if there were many customers clamoring for it.
  - 3y ago
bruce511 3y ago
Honest question - can you rent a car for the trip? Whole my kids were growing up we had a big people-mover vehicle. They grew up, we stopped using it, send I sold it. Recently I had a group visit and we wanted to see the sights. I simply rented (a much more modern and nicer) people mover for a week. Renting local, away from the airport, was really cheap. My daily drive is negligible. For road trips I'll just rent a car. I can also rent a truck if I need to carry stuff, or something with a towbar to drag stuff. Being "cheap " 350 days a year leaves a big budget for renting the edge case.
- Arainach 3y ago
  Except that an EV isn't cheap. Buying a $50-60K EV over a $30K IC does the opposite of leave budget to spend $1000 on a road trip rental.
  - aydyn 3y ago
    Then dont buy a 50-60K EV? buy one thats 30K or less?
    - bogota 3y ago
      Why not buy one under 10k? How about 5k?
      - aydyn 3y ago
        How about a million k.
      - bdcravens 3y ago
        The average new car transaction in the US is $48k. I do suspect we'll start to see lower priced EVs in the used market in coming years however.
        LtWorf 3y ago
        Or not… what's the point when spent batteries give you very little range, and replacing them costs more than the entire vehicle?
mavhc 3y ago
Wants to see a glacier, takes a plane and then burns gasoline to get there.

lukas099 3y ago

> Those parties I throw are the highlight of my year. That's what renting is for. You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little. > My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. Fine, but I don't think it's this important to most people who have a spare bedroom, they just don't think about it. > that landscaping work I do in my weekend is one of my favourite hobbies. Mine too, doesn't mean I need a pickup. But anyways if it's one of your favorite hobbies and you do it every weekend, that's not what I was talking about.

ryanklee 3y ago
Those solutions are totally inadequate with regard to intangible values. It's as if you simply dismissed the emotional weight of GP's very real point, which is that the edge cases are singular and important. A rented room regardless of how nice is not a substitute for hosting friends and family at ones home. And don't get hung up on this example. There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum.
- lukas099 3y ago
  How is renting a room in a local pub inadequate? I did it for my wedding reception and it was, pardon my french, a fucking blast.
  - jen20 3y ago
    It requires: - Up front planning - A pub to exist nearby. While I as a presumably fellow Brit would not buy a house without being able to walk to multiple pubs, that is not the common case in the US where I actually live. - The pub to have a room that it rents out. Again, not the common case even in London, let alone in the US. - Your potential guests to be OK with being at a pub. - Potentially childcare. If you have to have your party away from your house, you can't put your kids to bed and return to your guests, you have to go home. That part, if you will pardon my French, really fucking sucks.
    - 3y ago

brokensegue 3y ago

if you do it once a year (or whatever) you can just rent a truck and come out ahead

wharvle 3y ago
Delivery is a thing and the price tag may sting but it’d take a shitload of it to pay the price difference between a truck and a sedan. Plus the cost of worse gas mileage, pricier insurance, higher property taxes, and so on.

FpUser 3y ago

>"I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day." This is exactly how I feel

petre 3y ago

Well, you do have a genuine need for a truck of you're doing landscaping work every second weekend. You could use a tow behind cart as well, at least that's what most people do in Europe. I got a compact crossover to carry my bike. It has the same size of an engine and emissions as my previous car (a sports mini), just the space inside is bigger, one can carry four people without getting crowded and it doesn't look funny with a tow hitch on. Most sensible people drive these kind of cars in the US as well, I saw a lot of Subaru crossovers.

lukas099 3y ago

Totally agree that the edge cases are important. But people spend too much on owning equipment for them that would make more sense to rent. Take the dining room example. A quick search says it costs ~$20,000 to build a dining room, so let's say a house with one costs $10,000 more than a house without. So by foregoing a dining room, one now has an extra 10k that they can spend however they want. But that DOESN'T mean that they can't spend it on throwing parties! I'm pretty sure that even spread over many years, 10k dollars can produce a lot of fun times.

Affric 3y ago
Yeah but I can live with a gross car covered in shit that children drop and I get the convenience of a car whenever I want. I never have to pay some peak season pricing. Owning things means you get to be your own master. That is worth different things to different people. I know couples without kids who only rent cars but that number goes way down for people who have kids.
- makk 3y ago
  > Owning things means you get to be your own master. Tell that to fixed income folks who are priced out of the houses they own due to property tax increases.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    That's pretty much unique to homes (well, real estate in general), and that's because there's pretty much no way to own the land your house is on, at least in the US (maybe there's some really rural parts where it's possible, not sure). Can't really think of anything else I own that has anything equivalent to a property tax.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Where I live I do have excise tax on my car but that’s pretty small potatoes—maybe a couple hundred dollars a year. Also registration, inspection.

Affric 3y ago

> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Well said. And I think that you cut to the heart of what the electric vehicle advocates are doing wrong. They are telling us the only times we actually enjoy being in the car and travelling are the ones we should give up. I don’t use a car in the city. An electric car can’t yet take me home in 2 days without perfect conditions and a tailored root.

mrjin 3y ago
As an ordinary driver, I cannot care less whether a car is electric or not. All I want is *A* car can cover all most if not all my needs around transport. Obviously those electric car advocate took what we *want* as what we *need*.
- eecc 3y ago
  Oh those duplicitous monsters! Unlike those sincere marketing folks that spend their lives manipulating the multitudes over what their needs and wants are!
Dalewyn 3y ago
I wholeheartedly agree and am also going to bring another thing up that ICE cars have but EVs don't regarding range: Peace of mind. When we're driving an ICE car, we simply don't care about the range. We don't think about it; it's not a concern. That peace of mind is fucking priceless, especially if one's life is already busy with far more pressing concerns. In an EV we have to constantly keep an eye on that battery level, on that Miles Remaining counter. We have to micromanage the A/C and other things that consume power. That is mentally draining, and for what? It's something we don't have to care about in an ICE car. I drove an EV, I constantly worried about the range. Range was constantly on my mind, even when I wasn't driving the fucking thing. It was mentally fucking exhausting. Sincerely: No thanks. I'll happily pay the $50~70 bucks at the gas station to fill up my car in a few minutes and be at peace. It easily beats paying almost nothing charging overnight and then worrying if I can come back home when I start another day.

jnsaff2 3y ago

Aaand the rational actor theory on which large part of economics is based just flew out of the window.

i_am_a_peasant 3y ago

Same, but this can be solved with better public transportation. I thankfully live in a place where trains are decent

neodndndn 3y ago

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neodndndn 3y ago

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Joeri 3y ago

But instead of spending the money on a house big enough to host those dinner parties, you could host them at a fancy restaurant, with better food and the ability to spend the entire evening with the guests instead of in the kitchen. And for hosting occasional guests an extra bedroom, plenty of solutions exist for creating temporary sleeping space in the living room, while leaving your own bedroom to the guests. A small inconvenience to pay to save out a whole bedroom to pay for and maintain. There’s also the option of going on vacation together, which can be a really fun way to spend the holidays. Plenty of landscaping places will deliver to the home, much more convenient, and cheaper overall when you can downsize your vehicle of choice. I ended up making life choices that let me not have a car at all, and I spend that money on traveling instead. My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution. I see so many people maxing out their house and car within their budget, and then talking about but never doing things they really want to, like that far away vacation, or that expensive hobby. I never quite understand why.

quickthrower2 3y ago
There is another thing at play with maxing out on your house, which is that in many places it is a damn investment (unfortunately) and the primary residence usually has tax-free gains, and things like being not means tested for certain benefits. So maxing out on the house can perversely let you do that travel a few years down the road. It's not great, but that's the system. Housing might be a long term ponzi but we'll see I guess :-). As long as they keep devaluing currency it is not a bad bet. Especially in a metro area.
- votepaunchy 3y ago
  > the primary residence usually has tax-free gains Property taxes are worse than capital gains in that the whole value of the property is taxed each year, compounding, rather than the increase in value when sold.
rich_sasha 3y ago
> My point is: I find life to be more comfortable when treating edge cases like edge cases, and finding an appropriate solution And that's fair enough, but I find the tyranny of "it works for me so you're doing it wrong" very real. In many areas, but in particular with electric car range discussions.

vidarh 3y ago

That's your choice, and it's fine, and I'm not going to criticise it, but just suggest that sometimes (not always, and depends on what you consider "better") it's possible to cater for both the day to day case and those edge cases better if you make your starting choices more around your day to day needs. E.g. maybe your parents staying specifically in your house is too important for you to give up, but for those whose actual need might well be to want to spent holiday time or the occasional long weekend etc. with family or friends, many places you can finance a lot of trips and big fancy AirBnbs for all of you together for the savings from a smaller mortgage. For some it might similarly be even more of a highlight to throw the parties in a lavish rented location or fancy restaurant (but again: it might not be; if part of your enjoyment is to host at your home, that's your choice). Depending on how frequently you need that truck, you might be better of renting/signing up to a car-sharing service. Sometimes people genuinely want to be able to handle the very specific edge case and that's fine. But often people also just haven't considered the cost of buying for the edge cases vs. the cost of renting on occasion and what it might allow. I wouldn't want to suggest you shouldn't make decisions that takes your edge cases into account, but I find to me at least that there are often alternative ways of addressing edge cases than people's "defaults".

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
> but for those whose actual need might well be to want to And the authority for the people to decide their “actual” needs should be who exactly?
- vidarh 3y ago
  I took great care to multiple times make clear that the choice is yours, that your needs might not be suited for this, and that whatever works for you is fine. Exactly what made you think I was implying the person to decide what works for you should be anyone but you?
  - lukas099 3y ago
    It is crazy how hard people try to read straw men into what other people say sometimes.

bornelsewhere 3y ago

> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Surprised nobody mentioned externalities yet. Carbon tax, and then you can take a more wholistic view when planning your life. By the way, landscaping as a hobby does not automatically imply trucks, not outside US at least. Unless you actually do it often and need to transport large loads—then yeah, go for it. You’re part of a small minority that might actually need a truck.

coldtea 3y ago

>I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. How about living it as if those things are more important to you that the way they are achieved? You can see your friends and throw parties without a dining room - set a table in the living room or set up a meeting in some place. Or go see your parents more often at their place, and when they come, spend more time with them and do stuff wherever they stay at. Or do the landscaping work without a pickup truck, like millions of people managed. An insistance on the rare edge cases is not about "refusing to average an entire life style down to the median day". It's acquiscing to the median day, and then using the edge cases as if they mean you haven't.

moooo99 3y ago
> It's not about "refusing to average an entire life style down to the median day". It's acquiscing to the median day, and then using the edge cases as if they mean you haven't. Thank you for this, this seems like the most rational take. I went through the more extreme version of this debate myself, I don’t own a car anymore and despite what everybody told me, I haven’t lost any flexibility at all. Between financing the vehicle, gasoline, insurance, vehicle tax and maintenance I save about 4800€/yr. I can do about 360 days of the year without a car. I can rent a car best fitted for the occasion and still save tons of money. I used a van for when I got stuff from ikea, I had a sedan for a road trip and a compact EV for when we had a city trip. With this being a no brainer I’d argue I gained flexibility and improved my not so median days. The same thing can be said about just switching to a BEV. The BEV will, for the vast majority of people, be an improvement for their median day. You can charge at home, you have less maintenance hassle and the range will be perfectly fine for your median day. At the same time it won’t hinder your above median days not significantly. You can plan out your trips with a little more breaks and you’ll be fine, at the same time, with the money you saved on ToC you can also just rent out a nice ICE for the extra ordinary occasions.
- matsemann 3y ago
  Yeah, I've managed 8+ years in my city without owning a car, and still did lots of things with a car. Just had to change my mindset about costs. Like, paying €50 to rent from a carshare outside the apartment to go skiing for 2-3 hours felt really expensive in the beginning. But then I realized, that with the money saved from not owning a car, I could actually probably do this twice a week during winter season and still come out far ahead. It's just that when you buy a car, you don't see the price tag on each trip.

palmfacehn 3y ago

Put it another way divorced from the politicized issues. Airbags are for an edge case. Backup parachutes are for an edge case. Having a "rainy day fund", rather than going all-in on more profitable long term investments is for edge cases.

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olabyne 3y ago

it's not. The edge cases are something we are allowing ourselves because of fossil-fuel abundance.

lukas099 3y ago

Let's say you're into fly fishing, so instead of a dining room you have a room for making lures, which you do every day. You can still have those parties and utilize that room; in fact, that room will look a lot more interesting, have more to talk about, probably be cozier because it actually gets used so its layout will have been refined through real-world testing. And you can still fold out a dining room table if you really need to.

asdfaoeu 3y ago
I mean in practice that's what most people's dinning rooms are. I of course know some exceptions but they have more money than sense.

Kiro 3y ago

Most depressing comment I've read on HN in a long time.

bborud 3y ago

I think you are making an important point: it is easy to think that the value to you of having a car with loading capacity or a dining room for parties can be calculated from the utilization alone. Right now my car has broken down. I don't actually use it that much since I commute to work on my bicycle. But as it is broken down I realize that those "corner cases" actually occur much more frequently that I had thought. For instance, this week I've needed it twice. Next week I need to take a trip where I could either drive myself to the airport, allowing me to sleep in for another hour or so, or I can use public transport. If I use public transport I will be home much later so a social engagement I was planning to take part in has to go. Sure, I don't use my car that often anymore since I try to ride my bike when possible. Even in winter. But that's not really how I use my car these days. As for houses: they're a lot more complicated than I thought. You don't actually know how you are going to use a house and whether it will "work" before you move in. It took us years to figure out what a couple of the rooms would be used for. During covid the room at the top of the house, which was kind of a second living room up until then, became my wife's office. And it works great for that.

arghwhat 3y ago

Quite the contrary - the edge-cases are not important here. Not because they do not matter, but because trying to address them this way leads to worse results. Instead of having a giant living room with chairs and table space for 30-50 people, you can temporarily set up something on a lawn, in a park, or rent a dedicated space. Instead of having a pickup truck to carry a heavy thing once, rent a van that one time or have a trailer hitch on a smaller car (for the confused Americans, in EU even the smallest cars have or can be had with trailer hitches for small utility trailers from 750 to 3500kg). Instead of having a car with a 1000 km range and 10 minute refuel when you only drive 30km a day, rent a nicer car for those trips or take a train/airplane. Don't optimize for edge-cases - you get better and cheaper results by optimizing for the median and doing something else for edge-cases. Think of it like trying to do everything with a swiss knife vs. using a few good dedicated tools, renting those you rarely use.

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kbos87 3y ago

This perspective leaves me with little hope for the future of the environment. Nobody is willing to give a single inch when it comes to their comfort, convenience, or self image, externalities be damned.

gnufied 3y ago

>hose parties I throw are the highlight of my year. My parents staying here with me is important to me, I wouldn't have it any other way. There is a silver lining in smaller houses. They tend to be in denser neighborhoods and hence has some benefits in raising kids. There is no need to setup play dates, they can literally hear each other screaming and come out to play. In my bigger house neighborhood, I see very few kids just playing casually outside and hence we have to setup play dates. Yes now I have place for table tennis table that I always wanted but I have to call my friends over because bigger house in my case also is bit more further in suburbs. So big house might be great for parties and hosting guests but i probably traded away closeness to my existing friends for myself and kids both. I just made my median day more boring than before.

jjav 3y ago

> I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. I like how you summarize it with this line, I think there's a lot of truth in that. Sure, we could only own that which we need daily to get to work and be a good worker bee, but that's depressing.

whitepaint 3y ago

> I refuse to live my life as if these things aren't important to me. I refuse to average my entire life style down to my median day. My median day is boring. Maybe that's the biggest problem and your current solutions are inadequate?