On Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:40:29 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2@digitalmars.com> wrote:

> On 6/11/2013 6:54 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> My profit on my first condo, which I bought in '99 and sold in '05 was 150% of
>> the *purchase price*.  Minus the 6% commission :)  Although, it was only 3%
>> because a family friend who is a real estate agent did not charge me her half.
>> And I only had about 5% equity of the purchase price invested when I sold.
>
> Consider that you rode the real estate boom using leverage. But that lever works both ways, as many found out to their horror a few years later. You can lose a lot more than 100% of your investment when you lever.

Absolutely.  But you can continue to live in an underwater-mortgage house if you can pay for it.  The problem is when you buy a house that is beyond your means.  Which a lot of people did.

> I've ridden a couple booms successfully, too. I made the mistake of thinking that was business acumen. It wasn't, as I got a very rude comeuppance on the back slope of the boom.

I don't have enough history yet, but so far, my real estate moves have been adequate, maybe a bit fortunate.  It helps to have a friend in the business :)  I certainly don't profess to be a professional real-estate investor.  But I believe if I had chosen to rent, my current state would be VASTLY different than it is now now, and that wasn't exactly because of a bolt of lightning, it was an educated choice.

It also helps not to live on the west coast, where house prices can be outrageous.

> I live in the land of the Microsoft zillionaires. It's fun talking to them about their wealth. Most of them realize that they're worth $20m because lightning struck them, and behave prudently. A few delude themselves into thinking they are wealthy because they are business geniuses, and wind up getting reset to zero. Microsoft stock has been flat for 13 years now, and it isn't going to happen again to them.
>
> I don't mean to discourage anyone from shooting for the stars in building their investments, I just want to point out that owning a home is far from the sure path to wealth it is too often presented as. As always, caveat emptor.

Home ownership for *living* in, is not for wealth.  It's for living.  You compare it to renting.  How much more/less does it cost to own vs. rent, and you have to consider the mortgage tax deduction, the property tax deduction, the equity you build, etc.  It's not just a direct comparison of payments.  This is all I'm trying to say.  It can cost more to live in a house payment-wise, but you can be better off financially.  It all depends on how much more or less it is.  And the variables are tremendously varied across the country and even between two adjacent towns.

Home ownership for *investment* is a completely different ballgame.  There, you're comparing it to *not investing*, which costs you nothing :)

-Steve

On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 20:02:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/11/2013 12:21 PM, John Colvin wrote:
>> On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 18:47:35 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 6/11/2013 8:28 AM, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>>> It is great stuff, solar power is almost free money if you can wait 20 years for
>>>> it.
>>>
>>> Yeah, but you'll have to replace it before 20 years!
>>
>> Source? There's not much that wears out in a photovoltaic AFAIK. The associated
>> electrical components may break however, especially on some of the more complex
>> setups.
>
> Don't have a source, I read it long ago. Note that none of the advertisements, brochures, etc., mention expected life of the PVs.

That's not correct. Almost all manufacturers provide a 20 or 30 year warranty.
Warranty periods have been slowing increasing as the industry has gained field experience.


> I do know that the life of any semiconductor is measured as the integral of the heat it experiences. Heat causes the doping to migrate, and when it migrates far enough the part fails.

That's true for certain kinds of dopants (it's particularly true if you have copper involved), but dopant migration is not an issue for any commercial solar modules that I know of. (The situation may be different for exotic technologies). This is because solar cells are very simple devices, they're just enormous diodes.

Virtually all solar module failures in the field are caused by mechanical issues (bad solder joints, cracks, delamination), not by semiconductor degradation.


> PV panels can get pretty hot in direct sunlight.

They do. Still not as hot as a CPU though!

> Heating/cooling cycling will also cause cracking.

Most of these problems were solved in the 80's.

We were continuously doing accelerated lifetime testing of our own modules and ones from various manufacturers. Temperature cycling, humidity freeze, hail impact testing (that's fun), wind load testing (that's really fun), etc.
For some silicon modules you can get oxygen-boron complexes induced by UV, which causes a slow reduction in power, but our modules survived 200 years equivalent UVB exposure with no degradation whatsoever.


> Circuit boards, inverters, etc., also fail, and you'd need some assurance you can get replacement parts for 20 years.

That one is definitely true. Even worse is batteries for off-grid systems, batteries have a very short lifetime.

On 6/11/13 11:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> I just want to point out that owning a home
> is far from the sure path to wealth it is too often presented as. As
> always, caveat emptor.

I'd say it's historically about as risky as owning stocks. The main difference is that the house has a utility value - you can't live in a stock.

Andrei

On 06/11/2013 09:33 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1g47df/dconf_2013_metaprogramming_in_the_real_world_by/
> 
> Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861237
> 
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_Programming/status/344431490257526785
> 
> Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dlang.org/posts/655271701153181
> 
> Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pmwKRYrfEyY
> 
> Please drive discussions on the social channels, they help D a lot.
> 
> 
> Andrei


Great talk!!!

Can't wait for faster CTFE, the new orange serialization library would benefit from it.

--jm

On 6/12/2013 1:04 AM, Don wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 20:02:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Note that none of the advertisements,
>> brochures, etc., mention expected life of the PVs.
>
> That's not correct. Almost all manufacturers provide a 20 or 30 year warranty.
> Warranty periods have been slowing increasing as the industry has gained field
> experience.

Warranty is not the same as expected life, MTBF, etc.

Anyhow, thanks for weighing in with a great post!

On 06/11/2013 08:59 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> On Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:36:11 -0400, Jesse Phillips
> <Jesse.K.Phillips+D@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, 11 June 2013 at 21:55:48 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
>>> ...and if you sell it, unless you own multiple houses, you're now
>>> homeless. And housing prices are up, so getting a new house will
>>> erase the gains you got from selling the old house! So I don't think
>>> raising property values makes me wealthier at all.
>>
>> But when housing cost goes up the government can take more from you on
>> anything based on your "wealth." Just because you can't pay because
>> your wealth is all chewed up in material things like a house, who cares!
>
> In the US at least, only home sales (or transfers of ownership, like
> inheritance) are taxed. As long as you live there, they will not (and I
> believe they cannot) tax you based on the "current value."
>
> Property taxes are different, and you will be paying those no matter how
> you live (rent or own).
>
> And you are allowed to transfer equity from your current home into a new
> home tax free, even if you gained, up to a certain amount. I think there
> are limitations on how many times you can do this...
>
> The tax system is definitely set up to favor the homeowner, not the renter.
>
> -Steve
That's a state-by-state decision.  As to whether it's fair...I could make a case against either side.

On 6/12/2013 5:58 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 6/11/13 11:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> I just want to point out that owning a home
>> is far from the sure path to wealth it is too often presented as. As
>> always, caveat emptor.
>
> I'd say it's historically about as risky as owning stocks. The main difference
> is that the house has a utility value - you can't live in a stock.

When you're comparing ownership to renting, the utility issue is moot.


Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> But you can continue to live in an underwater-mortgage house if you can pay for it.

Yes, but we are talking about the financial difference between owning vs renting.

> it was an educated choice.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but the proof of that is if you can repeat the success consistently.

For example, a lot of CEOs have made fortunes for their companies by backing the right horse. Sometimes, people dismiss them as just lucky, being in the right place at the right time and guessing the right direction. But some CEOs repeatedly make the right choices, and that cannot be dismissed as luck. Examples: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

I also know a guy who sold everything at the 2000 peak and the 2007 peak. He tells me it was obvious, but I don't know anyone else who did both, although I know many who did one or the other.

On 06/11/2013 02:33 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Reddit:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1g47df/dconf_2013_metaprogramming_in_the_real_world_by/
>
>
> Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861237
>
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_Programming/status/344431490257526785
>
> Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dlang.org/posts/655271701153181
>
> Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pmwKRYrfEyY
>
> Please drive discussions on the social channels, they help D a lot.
>
>
> Andrei

Nice talk.

I'd like to relativize the statement about JITing CTFE though.
This is feasible, even given issues such as global local variables. [1]

I have a byte code interpreter for most of CTFE. I have been unexpectedly busy lately, but hope to get my D frontend out the door in a more or less respectable state soon.


[1] Given that I understand the term correctly. Is this what you meant?:

int foo(int x){
  immutable globalLocal1 = 1;
  int globalLocal2 = x;
  int foo(bool first){return first?globalLocal1:globalLocal2;}
  enum y = foo(true);
  return foo(false)+y;
}
static assert(foo(2)==3);

On 2013-06-11 14:33, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> Reddit:
> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1g47df/dconf_2013_metaprogramming_in_the_real_world_by/
>
>
> Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861237
>
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_Programming/status/344431490257526785
>
> Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dlang.org/posts/655271701153181
>
> Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pmwKRYrfEyY
>
> Please drive discussions on the social channels, they help D a lot.

I really don't understand the problem with IDE. He mentions that he's not interested in any autocompletion, refactoring or anything like that. Basically just syntax highlighting. Most code editors support D these days. I also can't believe that just because an editor has support for D syntax highlighting will introduce more bugs. So is he saying that all editors are bad and crash?

I mostly use TextMate (Mac OS X only) when coding D. Having support for D certainly doesn't make it crash more. There are one or two problems with TextMate but that has nothing to do with D and are easily avoidable. It has crashed once or twice for me but not that many times that it's worth bring up like this.

Sublime Text is also a good text editor, available on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows. It's fast and stable as far as I'm aware.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Thursday, 13 June 2013 at 06:58:22 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-06-11 14:33, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> Reddit:
>> http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1g47df/dconf_2013_metaprogramming_in_the_real_world_by/
>>
>>
>> Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5861237
>>
>> Twitter: https://twitter.com/D_Programming/status/344431490257526785
>>
>> Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dlang.org/posts/655271701153181
>>
>> Youtube: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pmwKRYrfEyY
>>
>> Please drive discussions on the social channels, they help D a lot.
>
> I really don't understand the problem with IDE. He mentions that he's not interested in any autocompletion, refactoring or anything like that.

Actually not. I'm just opposed to any work on them right now. The point is that all of those things are COMPLETELY WORTHLESS if the IDE crashes. It's not just "a bug". It's an absolute showstopper, and I'm begging the community to do something about it.
Fix the crashes, and then we can talk.