>Save your money people

But not in a pension or 401k since it didn't work for those two? It's tricky in our society without a safety net.

For younger people I'm not sure what to invest in. I think for them, the stock market and general economic stuff is fairly likely to collapse before they retire. So, when I was younger, I took money out of a IRA to buy a multifamily house to live in/invest. As you can imagine, that has worked well, but I don't think buying at today's prices would.

So like many things what worked for older people isn't necessarily going to work for younger ones. I'd suggest investing in things people need like housing, food, energy.

In 2021, the most recent full year of data, the NHTSA estimates 42,915 people were killed in car crashes in the US, that's 118 per day! https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-traffic-fatalities

Yes this is it. The shit was a visible indication of the problem. Cars didn't solve the problem, they hid it, moved it elsewhere, out of site. Which means we are less likely to solve it.

And that is put to use moving the vehicle. The occupants and cargo are a tiny percentage of the weight of the vehicle. The efficiency of moving people and cargo in vehicles is only around 1-3%!

The West River was the Waustastigut River!

Right! Do people think I'm promoting fossil fuels? I'm saying the amount of energy is so high, it is shocking and we should use not waste them in vehicles that are 1-3% efficient. We should use them more carefully, only for things that need very high energy density.

Trying to avoid getting into a conservative vs progressive fight, I just introduced the scale comparison, which I assume people didn't know, and said it's out of proportion:

>sprawling economy that is out of scale with nature and human evolution.
>
>...
>
>out of whack with the world's resources.
>
>...
>
>allowed us to casually go well beyond natural and renewable.

I thought that if I had said "stop driving novelty-sized vanity trucks because it's selfish and wasteful," or "stop driving and flying so much" we'd get into the normal fights about climate change: personal action vs corporations and the government, and VT's impact vs China's, etc.

I wanted to add a perspective to those conversations in the future, and to people complaining about the cost of energy, that it's objectively cheap. People only compare it to what the price used to be, which may not be a meaningful comparison, and to the price of other fuels. That is what this post is doing, by saying we pay much less than manual labor. That allows us to do too much. So the main point was that sense of scale. Even our everyday lives are out of scale. Out of scale with what the earth can provide. To me that inspires climate action.

But I did think the post was too long and probably making too many different points. Without the context that I think that what humans did for tens or hundreds of thousands of years, without ruining the world, should be a point of comparison. Not that we should return to that lifestyle but it gives us the scale that keeps things in balance.

Yes, certain applications need very high energy density.

As someone who identifies as an SUV, I'm not surprised you think math using cited inputs is a rant.

You could look at it this way. It would be a mess to use horses for the amount of transportation we do today. The way we do it today doesn't have less impact than doing it with horses would, but our way hides the impact. Hides it in places like "Cancer Alley" where oil refining and other factories cause the cancer rate to be 50x higher than normal. Hides it in climate change.

Hides it in deaths and injuries from crashes, in which we often blame the victim, and view as unavoidable. Hides it in obesity and the other health problems related to our lack of exercise. Using cars for all trips is related to several of the top causes of death in the US. I'm not saying we should walk everywhere instead (or ride horses) but some walking is helpful. Part of why Europeans are healthier is because they walk a few blocks to and from transit daily, whereas we only walk a few steps to get into and out our cars.

What? It's true the post is not specific to Vermont, but as a state that drives more than average, and where policies to reduce fossil fuels are controversial, it seems relevant.

>Are you from 100 years ago and trying to sell me on the promise of this new mechanical horse?

No.

>Trying to convince me that a gallon of gas could beat me up?

Not my intent, but yes it could.

> Is there some inside joke on this sub I'm not getting?

Not that I know of.

>What's happening?

Humans are destroying the world. I'm trying to provide different points of comparison than the usual debate.

Hi, the numbers are heating degree days from degreedays.net. Heating degree days are the number of degrees below the base temp, 65F in this case, times the length of time. They are meant to indicate how much heating is needed over a season or other time period. In a non-sense example, if it were 55F for 24 hours straight, that would be 10 heating degree days. My rows are monthly sums of those heating degree days. Since this year has fewer heating degree days, it shows that it's warmer than the past five years.

The National Weather Service also publishes heating degree days as part of their 30-year "climate normals." That's what weather people mean when they say it's warmer, cooler, rainier, windier, or whatever "than normal." They are comparing to the average for the past 3 complete decades. When they did the last update in 2021, they pointed out the many ways it showed warming: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-and-1991-2020-us-climate-normals

https://preview.redd.it/j0mc0004a2ia1.png?width=620&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=8011013d3609bc6c8237fb6e5c168867867fe965

Just yesterday I looked up this data. Well not February, but the months that we have full data for. I'm using heating degree days which measure both "how cold" and "for how long?" Average temperature should have somewhat similar results. But neither are anything like using max or min, like someone did in a poorly informed LTE to Seven Days about the news that Burlington winters have warmed faster than any other place in the US that has a good airport weather station.

Anyway, here are the heating degree days (base 65F) by month for this winter, the average of the last five winters (which were already influenced by climate change) and the percent difference.

https://preview.redd.it/6muv29wlmuha1.png?width=441&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=4df8274f2b03fb2b4aaa5c4c410e85189827eea8

More interesting than I expected!

That over simplified "law" would only be true is housing were a commodity and everyone had access to all the market info. Then if we built a noticeable oversupply of housing, prices would fall.

Housing is not really a commodity and we are building mostly for the high end of the market. A small study was done after several new projects were built in my Burlington ONE neighborhood and the average rent in the area went up, not down! Basically the new apartments came in with significantly higher rent and advertised how fancy they were. Other apartments increased their rental price to be near, but significantly lower than the new ones. The cost of new construction is so much higher than the cost of an apartment in an older building that is paid off, that there's plenty of room for new construction to pull up rent prices.

Burlington has added around 1000 new apartments in the past several years, and the increase in rent has sped up. I think part of the problem is that it would require maybe 10x as much new construction to make a noticeable oversupply, and the market would build an oversupply if it can help it. So we have to have policies on existing buildings, like restricting short term rentals like Burlington did, increasing the tax preference for owner-occupied, etc.

What has changed over the past few years when the cost of housing was increasing was not an increase in population or decrease in supply as that simple economic idea would suggest. It was a change in who owns housing and their profit expectations. The tripling of the share of single family homes that are owned by investors was likely a big cause.

That site was a wetland and even the solar racking had to make special accommodation of that. The fact that housing couldn't be built there wasn't because of NIMBY.

New apartments are Section 8? Which ones? In Burlington, the new affordable housing I'm aware of is only what is required by the City's inclusionary zoning when market rate housing is built.

We could allow more, but people love to say NIMBY is the problem. In this case, how did people blocking new construction make more people homeless?

Those people were housed somewhere that they aren't any more. They weren't housed in housing that wasn't built. Converting apartments to AirBNBs or jacking the rent because fewer apartments are available is a more likely cause of this increase.

That people have no other options and that rent can be so high can be blamed on NIMBY, but I don't believe building more will help without other changes. Why wouldn't owners of new housing change high rent and make some AirBNBs too? More money for owners but no change for people who need lower cost housing.

I mostly agree with you, but I was thinking about how we are clinging to a dying industry when I read this: https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/some-lawmakers-say-vermont-should-consider-a-milk-price-premium-to-help-struggling-dairy-farmers/Content?oid=37393636

I think the rate of sequestration is close. We assumed young forests sequestered more because they are growing faster, but studies have shown mature forests may actually sequester more carbon. Using made up numbers to demonstrate how that could be: if a young forest has 10 tons of carbon mass and is growing at 20% a year, it's adding 2 tons a year. A mature forest might have 10 times more mass and grow at 1/10th the rate, that would be 100 tons, growing at 2%, which would be 2 tons a year. I think the reality is that they are close enough that we can't generalize.

It's not just tree age:

>Old growth forests can be defined as forested ecosystems which have developed somewhat independently over a long time, usually at least several centuries. https://vtcommunityforestry.org/news/events/old-growth-forests

That long because old growth forests are characterized by a lot of fallen trees that create habitat and openings for different types trees to grow. So these are much older than the forests we see around most of Vermont that have trees that are mostly similar size and only a few downed ones.

With that title, I thought you were asking about county differences, like coming from a place where county governments have power. In that case, I'd say it doesn't matter, counties have almost no power here.

But a market prediction? Everyone buying now must think it will at least hold. Many more people want to buy. Supply/demand supports these prices. We're just starting to see some slackening, some price reductions. But after 2008, Vermont's housing prices mostly paused instead of decreased.

I think it needs to come down but won't without significant intervention. The share of single family homes owned by investors has tripled in VT, while rising less in other states. The proliferation of short term rentals takes away from our housing supply. Vermont has one of the highest shares of unoccupied homes. According to the Census, in 2021, there were almost 65,000 of these housing units that are used for profit or vacation instead of housing! People talk about construction, but that takes a long time and even if we were doing it faster it would take decades to build as many units are we already have sitting on the sidelines. We need to stop the conversion of existing housing into investments, and use policy to compel many of those to switch back into owner occupied or long term rental.

We already have one way to do this with the homestead property tax differentiation. Clearly short term rentals make enough money to overcome their higher taxes. We could simply increase the tax differential until we see enough of those short term and unoccupied units being switched to long term occupancy.

Oh that makes more sense. I was thinking on-road since the comment is about getting it from a gas station, but yeah some have off-road tanks.

It's crazy that diesel, which has road taxes on it, is cheaper now than fuel oil, which doesn't.

About 1/3 of our electricity comes from Hydro Quebec. The connection is only about 250 MW while our peak demand is closer to 1,000 MW.

Our natural gas does come from Canada. That's why it's only in the NW corner of the state and recently expanded south instead of only in the SE corner and expanding north.

For any electricity not provided by long term contracts or local renewables, it would be come from the New England grid, which is mostly gas power plants connected to the US gas grid, so that's how we could be affected by the gas market. But our utilities buy little market power so the effect is muted.