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[smjjames]

Even if you get an electric car or hybrid with a loan, wouldn't the pay off point be cumulative because you're still using an electric car or hybrid? Sure you might not get there with that specific car, but over time and cumulatively you'll get there?

McTraveller has a point with climate change in that you may be aware of someplace flooding halfway around the world, but you wouldn't know precisely how it affects you, until it does affect you.

[Reelya]

Even if you get an electric car or hybrid with a loan, wouldn't the pay off point be cumulative because you're still using an electric car or hybrid? Sure you might not get there with that specific car, but over time and cumulatively you'll get there?

McTraveller has a point with climate change in that you may be aware of someplace flooding halfway around the world, but you wouldn't know precisely how it affects you, until it does affect you.

9 years later, I linked an article about it. And that didn't include any math for several other issues:

- opportunity cost on the extra $7700 up-front (interest payments or investment interest)
- depreciation on the car etc
- higher insurance premiums

So you're looking at a true pay-off point around 10-12 years I'm guessing. On top of that, the people in the market for a new car at any point are disproportionately the people who buy cars more often, so they are the ones who won't benefit from a saving 12 years from now.

Also, banking on break-even point 12 years later is economically risky behaviour (what if that model is superceded or obselete and you can't get parts). That needs to come down to less than 5 years so that people who are risk-adverse can reasonably decide to get one.

Your point about "cumulative payoff point" isn't a coherent point. The point is, that if you have choice of Car A or Car B then it needs to have a pay-off point before the point where you are going to replace that car. Depreciation also needs to be factored in, to guess at how much trade-in value it will have. Then you can treat ownership of the car as a single, combined choice over product lifespan for e.g. the car you buy in 2017.

However, when you go to decide again on a new car in 2025, there's no such thing as "cumulative" benefit of having merely owned an electric car previously. There is only whether you saved money, or you did not. And if you sold your electric car and got a new one before the break-even point, you lost money on the deal by definition. That's what "break even point" means.

[smjjames]

I didn't know what the payoff point was supposed to be on, which would probably explain the incoherency of it, and looking back at it, the post does sound rather confused. Though yeah, electric cars haven't reached the tipping point where just about everybody would be comfortable with the cost/benefit. Not to mention there are things that have to be done like the infrastructure (powerstations and all that) for purely electric cars before they become viable en masse.

[Reelya]

A "break-even point" or "payoff point" is the point in time at which a choice with a higher up-front cost, becomes cost-neutral compared to a choice with a lower up-front cost. After that point, you start saving money. Do you get this part? I feel like i'm spoon-feeding some pretty basic stuff here.

And the problem with "cumulative" effect of switching is that in some few years you will probably get another car and the type of car you get then is another decision point which is unrelated to the type you get now, so you don't in fact gain a long-term advantage beyond the lifespan of any one car.

But ... you did write "electric car" in that context so I'm not sure how you could be confused about what the topic was. Clearly the "break even point of getting an electric car" means "vs getting a petrol car". That isn't something that should need to be pointed out over and over to have a conversation about this stuff. It's fairly basic common sense.

[smjjames]

A "break-even point" or "payoff point" is the point in time at which a choice with a higher up-front cost, becomes cost-neutral compared to a choice with a lower up-front cost. After that point, you start saving money. Do you get this part? I feel like i'm spoon-feeding some pretty basic stuff here.

I do and did get the concept of payoff point, I just thought maybe it was gas or carbon dioxide or something, I wasn't thinking of payoff/break even as far as car loans. Basically I wasn't thinking of the same payoff point you were, or wasn't really paying attention, which is likely.

[smjjames]

A "break-even point" or "payoff point" is the point in time at which a choice with a higher up-front cost, becomes cost-neutral compared to a choice with a lower up-front cost. After that point, you start saving money. Do you get this part? I feel like i'm spoon-feeding some pretty basic stuff here.

And the problem with "cumulative" effect of switching is that in some few years you will probably get another car and the type of car you get then is another decision point which is unrelated to the type you get now, so you don't in fact gain a long-term advantage beyond the lifespan of any one car.

But ... you did write "electric car" in that context so I'm not sure how you could be confused about what the topic was. Clearly the "break even point of getting an electric car" means "vs getting a petrol car". That isn't something that should need to be pointed out over and over to have a conversation about this stuff. It's fairly basic common sense.

Not sure where my mix up was then, I'm gonna go with not paying attention, or maybe over analyzing it where it didn't need to be.

[Reelya]

Heh btw I've been playing around with the planck units and have realized that you could in fact make a really neat system where all the base units area really close to US Imperial units, that would do away with a lot of annoying constants.

e.g.

- the planck mass is 2.17647051*10^-8 kg. If you multiply that by 2*10⁷ you get 0.435294102 kg. Call that a ^ppound, it would be 96% of a US pound. The planck mass in that measurement system is then exactly 5.00x10^{-8 p}pounds.

- the planck length is 1.61622938*10^-35 metres. Multiply that by 5*10³⁷ and you get 0.323245876 metres, call that a ^pfoot. 6% different to an imperial foot. Planck length would be exactly 2.00*10^{-38 p}feet.

- the planck time is 5.3911613*10^-44 seconds, multiply that by 2*10⁴³ and you get 1.07823226 seconds. Call that a ^psecond. The planck time would be exactly 5.00*10^{-44 p}seconds by definition.

So those units are all pretty cool, because they're close enough to imperial units, however they could in fact work like SI units, and all the planck values are expressed as clean powers of 10 with only a factor of 2 or 5 ever needed.

However, the really cool thing is what happens when you express universal constants in these units:

- "c" the speed of light is exactly 10^{9 p}feet / ^psecond, by definition.

- "G" the gravitational constant is exactly 10^{-9 p}feet³⋅^ppound⁻¹⋅^psecond⁻².

And so on, for basically all derived physical constants. Becaise most of the physics constants are now nice a clean numbers, multiplying or dividing by them would only involve adding or subtracting exponents, for the most part, making all physics calculations more efficient and more accurate.

So it would be just nice and awesome and give units that are practically-sized for everyday use while also massively simplifying scientific equations and removing rounding errors. Sadly, getting people to switch would probably be impossible. However, the main sticking point is the second, which would become less important in a post-Earth spacefaring future than would accurate computation and scientific education.

[McTraveller]

But then we would not have the joy of being able to design systems that involve slug-feet.

[Reelya]

No, you still get to do that. In fact, you get an extra way to do it. ^pslug would be a system the same as the slug system, except defining everything based on unit ^pvalues, instead of unit Imperial values. That's an extra slug system, not less.

[syvarris]

I hate to be the one to say this, but all of you deserve this argument.

Gotta say, that whole argument was a massive and utterly pointless circle of repetition, but this post made reading it worthwhile.  Half tempted to sig it, just for how appropriate it was.

[Egan_BW]

syv is saying an argument is pointless? Holy crap.

[Reelya]

The whole thing left me pretty baffled actually. I presented one pretty simple example, and had it torn to shreds based on idk what. It certainly wasn't ever challenged on any basis tha had anything to do with what the problem was as intended.

It was repetitive from my point because i was just reiterating the same thing I always said and kept being deliberately mis-interpreted.

I'm not sure what the whole objective was from the other POV at all. However I have one suspicion - and that's because wierd has advanced libertarian ideas a number of times and is totally not ok with collectivist things like welfare. And the tragedy of the commons / prisoner's dilemma examples that I gave show how a collection of individually self-interested actors, at every point making "rational" economic choices (maximizing their own finances) can in fact harm themselves if they don't go for cooperative action i.e. "collectivism". So the existence of these sorts of contradictions in simple economic systems that involve multiple people is in fact a big slap in the face for the idea of "individually rational actors" in a "free market" always leading to the best outcomes for everyone: actually in very simple and fairly realistic systems it can be shown that nobody ends up better off if they all try and get the most for themselves. As soon as you assume even the most basic amount of externalities those free-market theories completely fall over.

That's the only sane reason I can think of for someone strongly wanting to derail the discussion away from considering the actual economic puzzle  that was presented into an argument against non-existing puzzles.

[smjjames]

And then I jumped in halfway, then my logic started following a similar track as weird, though with different objections. Though I latched onto a different objection than he did and then I tried to figure out what was being argued about and saw the same mathematical contradiction that wierd was seeing, or something.

Joining in halfway without reading where it started didn't help with understanding it, so, I started from the point of not knowing the start of it.

[Reelya]

sure that's why I hadn't mentioned you right then, people who jump into a discussing halfway get benefit of the doubt of not knowing the full context and should not be assumed to have any bigger claims that they're making over the specific posts they're making

I've done the same myself (jump into the middle of something - on your Ameripol thread incidentally), and I know how you can be unfairly labeled as supporting some bigger narrative because you join an ongoing discussion and only object to some specific point that was made. If someone jumps in halfway to a long discussion, never assume they've read further than a page or so back. This is a public service announcement to help everyone get along.

That's also the reason I sometimes repeat the original post if this he-said-she-said stuff has gone on too long. After a while people start to paraphrase you so you do need to ground that back in what was actually said.

but to be totally honest that "moh-nee? What is this moh-nee thing you speak of?" stuff is bullshit. this is not rocket science it's third-grade level verbal maths problems. cmon now. If a math problem says something costs $3 a month then only some alien who doesn't know what money is (or what a month is) should have a problem computing the output of the math problem. You don't start going on about how it "doesn't compute" and go "how is the $3 paid?!? Is it by credit card? I don't understand the problem!". That's just deliberately autistic-level bullshit. It's economic theory - how the money leaves your pocket is abstract and has no relevance whatsover to the answer to the question. Suffice to say, you're down $3 - it doesn't make any difference where it went. I hope none of you people are studying to be the next generation of economists.

[syvarris]

I eagerly await the return of Wierd.  Which will win?  Bold shouting, or CAPSLOCK SHOUTING?  The answer, next time on Tech News: Thunderdome Edition!