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> 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

> 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.
    - lukas099 3y ago
      > Up front planning Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. And don't discount the planning that went into obtaining your own party room in the first place. > 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. Don't get hung up on the 'pub' part. It can be a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you. It can even be another room in your house. Move some furniture around, put in some speakers, BAM, party room.
      - jen20 3y ago
        > Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. It really doesn't. I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so. Most of my neighbours are the same. > a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you. - Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different. - Drinking in public parks is not typically permitted, nor is street drinking. - Arcades and bowling alleys are out in the burbs and require driving to. What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure. I don't care whether you like that or not - I'm not the one who was getting "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
        viraptor 3y ago
        > Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different. Keep in mind this cost is compared to an extra or bigger room in your house. You can throw many restaurant parties for the money you'd spend on a larger house. (Invest the difference and the restaurant parties are effectively free)
        jen20 3y ago
        Sure, you could. I don't really understand what people are imagining here though - it's not like "entertaining space" is some gilded-age ballroom for most people making this choice, and the price difference matters if and only if there is an otherwise comparable house you can buy that meets your other constraints.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - gambiting 3y ago
    I think it's one of those things that if you don't get it, you don't get it(and that's fine). There is an emotional element to hosting your guests in your own home - if you don't feel that way then well, there's no need to argue about it, no one is right or wrong here.
- lukas099 3y ago
  > There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum. Yes, there are countless cases of it actually making sense to have a spare bedroom. But that's beside the point. My point was that for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    >"for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense." And for a lot of people it does. so what's your point. People will figure out what makes them feel good. They do not need help in this department
    - lukas099 3y ago
      > so what's your point. My point is that there is a cognitive bias towards overweighting the allocation of resources toward low-frequency events.
      - FpUser 3y ago
        You do not really know how low the frequency is for a particular person and how important those events are. I think you are making baseless guesses.
        lukas099 3y ago
        Some of these are family, friends I know very well, and even myself in the past. So I have some reliable information.
        closewith 3y ago
        I honestly wonder how your friends and family feel about this attitude. Do you think they share it?
        3y ago
- kccqzy 3y ago
  Okay. Then how should we measure the emotional value of seeing and smelling gasoline? Experiencing the nostalgia of pumping gasoline just like the good old days of yore? Can you see the problem here? People ascribe emotional value to all sorts of things that may be financially unwise or environmentally damaging. You waste your money I don't care; but we all have one earth to protect. My point is, climate change is an extremely big threat that we simply don't have much room for these affordances. 2024 is the year to make personal sacrifices to switch to EVs because that's how urgent the situation is.
  - junofan 3y ago
    The carbon comes from the ground. The car’s just the delivery mechanism. Why not phase out fossil fuel production à la the Montreal Protocol? If somebody somewhere someday can make money burning oil, they will. Buying an electric car isn’t going to keep carbon in the ground by itself.
    - 20after4 3y ago
      And, as long as there are wars to be fought, the military is happy to burn the fuel by the millions of gallons per day.
    - pineaux 3y ago
      Finally! Someone who says it the way I see it. I believe the personal-responsibility-as-a-framework (PRAAF) for solving pollution problems is a joke. I genuinely believe that big petrochemical companies and other stakeholders pushed this story to be able to d business as usual for as long as possible. I know it's true for the "plastics recycling" narrative. Which is and has always been a joke¹ and the petrochemical companies know this. We should not strofe about whether range anxiety is a real problem or not. We should unite to keep oil companies responsible for destroying the climate. They are the ones that made sure every little town in america had a fuel station, thus creating demand, they lobbied against electric cars, they downplayed climate change. We should not wave our finger at other individuals who's contribution to climate change is negligible. We should unite with people who have range anxiety and fix these problems. Force Exxon Mobile/BP/Shell to install fast chargers in every town where there is a fuel station. Force them to install fast chargers all over the country as a start of the reparations for destroying the climate. ¹ https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
pardoned_turkey 3y ago
It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. All you need is a 3 x 3 x 8 ft sleeping pod, a waste chute, and a dispenser of protein slurry. Almost everything else is there to accommodate the odd whimsical desire. Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result. We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.
- lukas099 3y ago
  A lot of people are misunderstanding my point. It's not that intangibles don't matter or that people shouldn't spend money on their preferences. Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things. I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive). My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)
  - calf 3y ago
    It's not obvious that buying the frequent item and renting the infrequent item is the reasonable thing to for all situations and contexts. I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa. I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.
JohnFen 3y ago
> You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little. I think this depends on what you value. I've never seen a party room available for rent that was better than a home, personally. The fanciest party room you can rent may look fancier, and if that's the important thing to you, then that's a great solution. Others, however, may place greater value on what you give up when you rent: convenience, intimacy, fewer restrictions on what you can do, etc.

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.
  - lukas099 3y ago
    > Up front planning Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. And don't discount the planning that went into obtaining your own party room in the first place. > 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. Don't get hung up on the 'pub' part. It can be a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you. It can even be another room in your house. Move some furniture around, put in some speakers, BAM, party room.
    - jen20 3y ago
      > Hosting your own party has a lot more planning. It really doesn't. I have a backstock of beer and wine and cheese and a subscription to Apple Music, I can literally do it with 15 minutes notice, and have had plenty of practice at doing so. Most of my neighbours are the same. > a restaurant, public park, street (block party), arcade, bowling alley, or whatever is fun and convenient for you. - Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different. - Drinking in public parks is not typically permitted, nor is street drinking. - Arcades and bowling alleys are out in the burbs and require driving to. What is fun and convenient for me is to have parties at my house, in the entertaining space space that does not require manual labour to reconfigure. I don't care whether you like that or not - I'm not the one who was getting "kind of annoyed" by the preferences of others.
      - viraptor 3y ago
        > Restaurants do not like large groups showing up without reservations, and the cost is wildly different. Keep in mind this cost is compared to an extra or bigger room in your house. You can throw many restaurant parties for the money you'd spend on a larger house. (Invest the difference and the restaurant parties are effectively free)
        jen20 3y ago
        Sure, you could. I don't really understand what people are imagining here though - it's not like "entertaining space" is some gilded-age ballroom for most people making this choice, and the price difference matters if and only if there is an otherwise comparable house you can buy that meets your other constraints.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- gambiting 3y ago
  I think it's one of those things that if you don't get it, you don't get it(and that's fine). There is an emotional element to hosting your guests in your own home - if you don't feel that way then well, there's no need to argue about it, no one is right or wrong here.
lukas099 3y ago
> There are endless examples of the same sort and that pose the exact same conundrum. Yes, there are countless cases of it actually making sense to have a spare bedroom. But that's beside the point. My point was that for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense.
- FpUser 3y ago
  >"for a lot of people it is a decision that they take instinctually, but does not really make sense." And for a lot of people it does. so what's your point. People will figure out what makes them feel good. They do not need help in this department
  - lukas099 3y ago
    > so what's your point. My point is that there is a cognitive bias towards overweighting the allocation of resources toward low-frequency events.
    - FpUser 3y ago
      You do not really know how low the frequency is for a particular person and how important those events are. I think you are making baseless guesses.
      - lukas099 3y ago
        Some of these are family, friends I know very well, and even myself in the past. So I have some reliable information.
        closewith 3y ago
        I honestly wonder how your friends and family feel about this attitude. Do you think they share it?
        3y ago
kccqzy 3y ago
Okay. Then how should we measure the emotional value of seeing and smelling gasoline? Experiencing the nostalgia of pumping gasoline just like the good old days of yore? Can you see the problem here? People ascribe emotional value to all sorts of things that may be financially unwise or environmentally damaging. You waste your money I don't care; but we all have one earth to protect. My point is, climate change is an extremely big threat that we simply don't have much room for these affordances. 2024 is the year to make personal sacrifices to switch to EVs because that's how urgent the situation is.
- junofan 3y ago
  The carbon comes from the ground. The car’s just the delivery mechanism. Why not phase out fossil fuel production à la the Montreal Protocol? If somebody somewhere someday can make money burning oil, they will. Buying an electric car isn’t going to keep carbon in the ground by itself.
  - 20after4 3y ago
    And, as long as there are wars to be fought, the military is happy to burn the fuel by the millions of gallons per day.
  - pineaux 3y ago
    Finally! Someone who says it the way I see it. I believe the personal-responsibility-as-a-framework (PRAAF) for solving pollution problems is a joke. I genuinely believe that big petrochemical companies and other stakeholders pushed this story to be able to d business as usual for as long as possible. I know it's true for the "plastics recycling" narrative. Which is and has always been a joke¹ and the petrochemical companies know this. We should not strofe about whether range anxiety is a real problem or not. We should unite to keep oil companies responsible for destroying the climate. They are the ones that made sure every little town in america had a fuel station, thus creating demand, they lobbied against electric cars, they downplayed climate change. We should not wave our finger at other individuals who's contribution to climate change is negligible. We should unite with people who have range anxiety and fix these problems. Force Exxon Mobile/BP/Shell to install fast chargers in every town where there is a fuel station. Force them to install fast chargers all over the country as a start of the reparations for destroying the climate. ¹ https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

pardoned_turkey 3y ago

It's easy to get hung up on specific examples you can't connect with, but our entire lifestyles are centered around preferences, not needs - and I'm sure it's also true for you. All you need is a 3 x 3 x 8 ft sleeping pod, a waste chute, and a dispenser of protein slurry. Almost everything else is there to accommodate the odd whimsical desire. Do you really need an oven? Most techies don't cook all that often, and it can be cheaper to order take out. More efficient due to the economies of scale, too! Do you really need a smart phone? Do you really need a gaming PC? There's always some other, more barebones way of achieving the same result. We tend to have a lot of tolerance for what we think enriches or streamlines our lives, but little patience for the same in others. It's also true for politics, where we're always eager to regulate other professions or lifestyles, but not our own.

lukas099 3y ago
A lot of people are misunderstanding my point. It's not that intangibles don't matter or that people shouldn't spend money on their preferences. Trust me; I spent $2,000 on a bicycle recently. Not a sports bike or mountain bike or anything. Just a bike for getting around town. Am I under some illusion that I needed to spend 2k on a transportation bike? Of course not. But it's something that I use every single day and derive great joy from using, so I prioritize having a nice one. So I am no stranger to spending money on optional things. I also enjoy mountain biking, but I only really do it when I'm with my dad which is like 2 times a year. So instead of buying a mountain bike, I rent them. And I rent nice ones (nicer than I would buy, man those things get expensive). My point is that there is a bias toward ownership of certain conventional things that don't get used very often, and are easy to obtain temporarily. (And of course every example I used had people responding, "I have that and use it all the time!", which is also missing the point.)
- calf 3y ago
  It's not obvious that buying the frequent item and renting the infrequent item is the reasonable thing to for all situations and contexts. I don't see a complete argument where doing so is strictly more rational than doing the polar opposite, i.e. hypothetically, renting the frequent item and vice versa. I also think the frequent vs infrequent products are not equivalent in the first place. A dining room is just not the same as a restaurant setting, so a rational trade-off must account for that inequivalence. So far, you have assumed that a home dining room party and a restaurant room party are equivalent social experiences. They probably aren't.

JohnFen 3y ago

> You can rent a better party room than your dining room for very little. I think this depends on what you value. I've never seen a party room available for rent that was better than a home, personally. The fanciest party room you can rent may look fancier, and if that's the important thing to you, then that's a great solution. Others, however, may place greater value on what you give up when you rent: convenience, intimacy, fewer restrictions on what you can do, etc.