Post #1636: Countertop water filtration.

 

This is my overview of simple (no-plumbing) water filtration systems currently on the market.  As with many of my posts, I’m writing this up to make sure I understand the topic.  I doubt anyone will read the detail.

To cut to the chase, after 20 years, we’re abandoning our standard Brita water filter in favor of the upgraded version, the Brita Elite.  The new Brita filter fits the old pitchers, but appears to do a much better job at filtration.

This, while I continue to look over our options for a more sophisticated filtration system.

In brief:

Continue reading Post #1636: Countertop water filtration.

Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.

 

I’m old, fat, and have a tough time handling respiratory infections. I haven’t had COVID so far, and I really don’t want to catch it. 

Prevalence of COVID-19 is now about 10 times higher than the first time my wife and I returned to the gym (Post #1163).  But (arguably) lower than when we returned to the gym a second time (Post #1421).  At some level, the risk of going to the gym or not cuts both ways.  It’s a question of what else is going to kill me if I don’t manage to get my heart rate up on a regular basis.  So back to the gym it is.

The bottom line is that I’m going to wear a mask.  No matter how unfashionable that has become.

Not because I’m stubborn, but because I bothered to calculate the odds.  And the decision to go back to the gym, three times a week, will almost certainly expose me to an individual with an active COVID infection, over the course of the year.  Not to mention flu.  Exposure isn’t infection, but still, this is likely going to be the riskiest thing I do in the near term. Continue reading Post #1630: Reluctantly returning to the gym in the era of endemic COVID.

Post #1624: 80 MPG?

 

Not quite.  But I think I’m finally figuring out how to drive my wife’s Prius Prime.

Above is the gas mileage on my wife’s Prius Prime, after a round trip from Vienna VA to Harper’s Ferry WV.  This is all after resetting the odometer once the battery was depleted.  So it’s straight-up gas mileage.

This trip contained a short section of high-speed driving, but was mostly hilly primary and secondary roads in western Virginia and West Virginia.  And I think I finally understand how I’m getting such great mileage.

The Prius Prime loves hilly roads.  It is an excellent car for a particular style of pulse-and-glide driving.

Continue reading Post #1624: 80 MPG?

Post #1617: When will the tear-down boom end, the sequel.

 

It hasn’t been possible to buy a small house in Vienna, VA for at least a decade now.   Every small house that goes up for sale is purchased by developers, who then proceed to tear it down and build the largest house that will fit onto that lot.

This sustained destruction of middle-class housing, replacing it with lot-filling McMansions, is what I have termed “the tear-down boom”.

I have written about the various implications of the tear-down boom.  Among other things, this continual replacement of small houses with gigantic houses means that:

  • Post #519.  Town revenues from residential real estate have been pushed materially higher by the resulting increase in the price of the houses.
  • Post #308.  There’s a tremendous mis-match between the stock of houses in the Town of Vienna, and the houses available for sale.  Middle-class people can live here — if they already own a house — but they can’t move here, because all the middle-class houses are replaced with McMansions before being re-sold.  As a result, increasingly, Vienna is a town for the wealthy, not the middle class, something I termed the “Mcleanification” of Vienna.

And yet, some of the economics of the tear-down boom just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, simply as way to generate housing stock.  People really don’t need 10,000 square foot houses, and everything I read about the next Gen X and later is that they have no interest in buying such gigantic pieces of real estate.  Seemed like a classic case of “sell it to whom?”.

The best explanation I could give for the tear-down boom is that it was the result of two toxic Federal economic policies.  These were the huge tax advantages to home ownership, including both tax sheltering of current income and tax-exemption of any capital gains, and near-zero real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates.   In 1997, the Federal government eliminated capital gains on housing.  (With some limits.)  That was on top of the tax sheltering that housing provides via income-tax deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes.  Then, in 2008, the Fed dropped inflation-adjusted interest rates to zero or below, following the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Between those two policies — the tax advantages and the free money — it became ludicrously cheap to finance the purchase of a mega-home.  And that mega-home was a highly-leveraged investment that was, ultimately, better than tax-free.

But trees don’t grow to the sky.  Back in 2019, I asked “When will the tear-down boom end?”  That was Post #217.

Even then, the market was showing some oddities.  Oddity #1 is that these mega-homes were appreciating less rapidly than adjacent lower-priced homes.  Oddity #2 is that the changes in tax law in 2018 made it much more expensive to own homes costing over about $850,000.  Here’s the analysis of just how much more expensive it became to carry the cost of a $1.4M house after the 2018 changes in Federal tax law:

Not only did it suddenly cost a lot more to carry that $1.4M house, almost all of the additional cost came from the housing value just in excess of $850,000.  Basically, the law reduced the size of what I would term the “tax efficient” house, that is, the house that earns you the maximum tax breaks as a percent of cost.

As a result, in 2019, I looked at that and said, isn’t this going to put the brakes on the tear-down boom? 

And so far, the answer is no.  Just casually driving around town, these still seems to be a tear-down on pretty much every block.

So far.


Today’s mortgage interest rates.

In this last section, all I want to do is assess the impact of the rise in mortgage interest rates.  Literally, dig up the spreadsheet above, and replace the then-current 4% mortgage interest rate with the current 7% (or so) rate.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.

Redoing the analysis, I find that the carrying cost of a $1.4M (small) McMansion in Vienna is now about 50% higher then it was back in 2018.  And 86% higher than it was in 2017, before they changed Federal tax law to reduce the tax advantages of owning an expensive home.

So, to be clear:  Those houses are still big money-makers for the owners, as housing prices have risen steeply in the past year.  That said, if home prices merely stabilize, new McMansions will have after-tax carrying costs in today’s environment that are 86% higher than they were in 2017.

My belief is that this plausibly is going to put a damper on tear-downs in Vienna.

I’ve been wrong about that before.

But I believe it strongly enough that I spent last week painting the front of my house.   That’s a real change for me, because I had simply stopped doing any maintenance on my house that didn’t directly affect occupant health and safety.  I figured, why bother to keep the place up, when they’re just going to tear it down when I eventually move?

I was letting the house deteriorate, peeling paint and all.  But now I have about a decade’s worth of deferred basic maintenance to do. Because in today’s environment, it’s no longer a given, I think, that this house will be torn down when I leave it.

Post #1381: SNOVID-19.

I can’t help but smile when I hear the term “snow day”.  It’s a conditioned reflex, the result of having gone to school in the South.

But now there’s a new perspective on that old joy.  After a couple of years of complaining about hanging around the house and not doing much because of COVID, I now find that hanging around the house and not doing much because of snow is totally different.  It’s unironically fun.

Thus proving that mental attitude is all in your head.


It’s a snow day here in Fairfax County, VA

This is God’s way of shouting at us “Do Not Go Back to School”!  (That’s per a a friend of my wife’s, a schoolteacher who isn’t much looking forward to in-person classes with Omicron).

People from northern climates laugh at the degree of disruption a little snow causes in the South.  But, having seen it from both sides — grew up and live in Virginia, but spent several long, cold winters in Chicago — I can tell you that snow in the South is just a completely different beast from snow in the North.

It’s slipperier.  And that’s a fact.

Wintry mix is our favored form of precipitation this time of year.  It’s a random combination of snow, sleet, ice pellets, freezing rain, and rain.  The weather forecasters aren’t quite sure what will be hitting the ground at any particular moment.  The only thing they agree on is that whatever it is, you can slip on it.

(My wife often said that Baskin-Robbins should offer a flavor of  ice cream by this name.  It would come pre-marketed because everyone in this area hears that term all season long.)

We get wintry mix so often in this area because the temperature is typically just about freezing when it snows. Might get snow, might get rain.  You never know until it gets here and makes up its mind.

This morning, it’s 30 F with high humidity.  And so, we’re actually getting just snow.  It melts as it hits, then piles up, and as a result, we end up with a thin layer of slush everywhere, covered with snow.  That will be freezing to ice in random areas throughout the day, and will freeze uniformly tonight.  Tomorrow morning, anywhere that hasn’t been shoveled and salted will have a uniform coating of snow-over-ice.

Let me contrast this with a typical Chicago snowfall.  Typically, it’s 20F or so, everything is already frozen solid, and 4″ of powdery dry snow comes down.  It doesn’t melt.  It doesn’t stick to anything.  People sweep off their sidewalks and life moves on.

Having driven on roads in both areas, I’d trade their coefficient of friction for our coefficient of friction any day.

Finally, hills.  Midwesterners in general don’t have to cope with them.  For sure, they just plain don’t have them in Chicago.  Around here, though, they are a fact of life.  And once you find yourself sliding downhill, on the frozen slush hidden under the snow, there really isn’t much you can do about it.

Bottom line, I’m leaving the car in the garage today.  And the power has gone out now.  So I will just enjoy sitting around the house doing nothing.  For a change

 

 

 

Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

 

With the onset of cold weather, I’m now waiting to see what this year’s crop of nuts is going to look like.  I am of course referring to events of two days ago, here in Virginia.  I’m hoping that our newly elected leadership will be in the mold of traditional (that is, rational) Virginia Republicans.  But ever since the last Republican administration here, which I will describe briefly below, that assumption of rationality has been questionable.

Anyway, this started off as a post on gardening, but quickly morphed into a post on politics.

Let me start with the interesting fact that you probably haven’t realized, first.  And then get into it.


Continue reading Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

Post #1265: Missing cute young white women with unusual names.

 

This post has no relation to anything else on this website.  I’m just conveying something my wife noticed years ago, that still appears to be one of the iron rules of news coverage.  I think it says something about how the news functions in modern America.

In order to attract national press coverage, it’s not enough that a person go missing.  People go missing all the time.

Not enough that the person be a woman.  (Or female minor).  Plenty of women and girls go missing.

It’s not even enough that the missing person is an attractive young white woman (or cute little kid).  Which, you will eventually notice, characterizes every one that dominates national news.

Before you hop on my case, let me note that she is far from the only person to have picked up on this.  Nationally-recognized media experts have said (almost) the same thing, as in this recent New York Times article.  And similar commentary elsewhere.  I believe the coined phrase is Missing White Woman Syndrome.

But this is as far as mainstream media critics will take it.  Plenty of serious people have characterized this repeating phenomenon as MCYWW (missing cute young white women) stories.  Or equivalent.

But, in fact, few recognize the final requirement, which is that the MCYWW must have an unusual name.  It’s never Anne Smith, Mary Murphy, Liz Russo, Emma Garcia, and so on.  It has to be something weird enough to be “sticky”, or the story doesn’t get any traction.

And so, the reality of it is not that these are MCYWW stories.  They are MCYWWWWN ( … with weird names) stories.  Without the unusual name, it might get local coverage, but it never snowballs enough to get national coverage.

This isn’t to make light of the death of the person who most recently was in the national news.  It’s to highlight that there’s a strong element of “National Enquirer” in U.S. national news now.  I have no need to know about this poor woman who was apparently murdered by her boyfriend.  And neither do you.  But this story — told over and over — is just sticky enough, once you add a memorable name, that it manages to make national news.

I am completely unable to prove this, looking retrospectively.  We all know the name of the current MCYWWWWN, but that that name rapidly fades from memory.  Without that, I’m unable to separate the last few such national sensations from those who received merely local news coverage.

But looking forward, be on the lookout.  When the next MCYWW story hits, look for the WWN part.  I’ll bet you it’s there.  As a result, you’re seeing that story only because of some fundamental aspect of what Americans do and don’t recall when they read the news.  Without the unusual name, the story just doesn’t stick, and it never gets national press coverage.

Post #1199: This one simple hack eliminates 99% of disinformation!

I have a simple, humble request to make of our mainstream media:  If you must have comments on your stories, please randomize the order in which comments are shown.  Or, if not, do anything other than show the first-written comments first.

I was looking at a perfectly reasonable story about the current COVID-19 outbreak in Florida today, on what turned out to be the ABC News website.

And immediately following the story, in the comments section, were four pieces of what was clearly professionally-written disinformation.  Clearly working from a common pool of talking points.  Tightly written so as to hit as many hot-button issues as possible.  Obviously designed to deflect attention from the current situation in Florida, and by inference, the Republican governor of Florida.

I can only assume that whatever organization that is responsible for those comments has bots that look for newly-published on-topic articles.  They then strive to be first in line with comments.

And as a result, everyone who reads the actual news article and bothers to look at the comments is also reading that disinformation.  Lies and misdirection clearly aimed at nullifying the actual news coverage.

And so, ABC News ended up lending its entire new apparatus the forces of disinformation.  For free. 

This is really stupid, and needs to be stopped.  We have enough problems without allowing the purveyors of nonsense to piggyback on legitimate news sources.  For free.

At the minimum, if comments were shown in some random order, that would prevent organizations from hawking news articles and placing their previously-composed disinformation pieces first in the comments section.  Such a policy would not only dull the high impact of that disinformation currently has, it would reduce the incentives to publish those professionally-written comments in the first place.

Anyway, I’m just pointing this out.  My observation is that a policy of showing comments in the order written is just asking for your platform to be used by the aggressively for-profit disinformation industry.

Even if you can’t get rid of them entirely, you can certainly structure your website so as not to encourage them.  And to make it more expensive for them to keep their taking points in front of your viewer’s eyes.

In in that context, the last thing you want to do is let whoever gets first crack at the comments to get the most prominent spot in the comments.  And yet, that’s what ABC News appears to be doing.  You’re letting the enemies of information use your resources, for free.  And no matter how you slice it, that’s just plain stupid.

Post #1024: I just got my first smart phone, and I’m beginning to understand what’s wrong with America.

Sometimes there is value in being an outsider.

I’ve just gotten my first smart phone.  I guess I’m only a decade and a half late to the party.

But as a result of my tardiness, I am now deeply weirded out by things that I assume all Americans now simply take for granted. Continue reading Post #1024: I just got my first smart phone, and I’m beginning to understand what’s wrong with America.

Post #1020: PriUPS

This post is prompted by a recent article on Texans using their hybrid vehicles as electrical generators.  This being Texas, of course the vehicle in question is a pickup truck, in particular, the Ford F150 hybrid pickup.

And so, in 2021, Texan F150 hybrid owners are finding out what Prius owners have known since at least 2005:  A hybrid car makes an excellent backup generator.  In this post, I’ll lay out the simplest approach to using your Prius (or similar full hybrid) as an emergency generator. Continue reading Post #1020: PriUPS