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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2023

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  • Not US-based, German, but residential prices go crazy here as well.

    For me it was the best decision to buy a house. For two reasons: you surf on the asset inflation as well. Moving to a new house last year wasn’t that pricey as I only had to borrow the difference old vs new bigger house.

    Second reason is psychology: I don’t know somebody who has stocks in their account in same height as a house price. Paying mortgage forces you to save money. Having a (low) 6-digit stock account, feels being rich and money flows out into buying things.










  • True point.

    My IT setup to get control of my daughter’s not-yet-rocketed-addiction is: screentime from Apple (that can be circumvented), seperated wifi for teens with on/off times (still they can use mobile network), blocked ip‘s for insta & tiktok at router level (still not all IPs in there), and a hacker-style tool called Firewalla to monitor and control their traffic with porn, youth filter-block ability (also in the router, but not sure how well this works at eg youtube)

    For this setup you need some steps beyond standard IT knowhow. And still it’s only 95%. Some day they find how to get through the little holes.

    Oh, this effort for 3-4 hrs screen time a day including podcasts and whatsapp.

    Next step will be to separate devices. She wants a new phone for birthday. Then we put Spotify for the podcasts on the old phone and block everything else. The new phone for the rest with even more reduced screen time.








  • Don’t think labor costs is a big factor. Car production is the sector that is most automated. Just think of this endless bands of hanging cars with robot arms working on it. Tesla even topped this.

    It’s mainly the unwillingness to design and sell cheap cars due to less profits. In Germany we had electric cars for 20k€ or even combustion cars under 15k€. But they stopped building it. Although it was sold out in weeks.

    In my region there was a Startup by the Aachen University RWTH (which is an elite university in Germany) bulding small EVs for around 20k€. They simply bought all parts from suppliers and just assembled it. And engineered and designed it first. Unionized and still competitive. Unfortunately, they didn’t fly.

    EV building is rather simple. The software is key. And this is the missing part at car makers capabilities.

    I second your thoughts on trade war. However, I guess it will be much simpler with high taxes, high quality regulations, and may be less support by car workshops. We will see…