Power is out, but not me!

Bought my first house in 1966 at 5 1/4%. About a year later, a friend was going to buy a house at 6% and his uncle warned him to wait until the rates go back down. He would have waited until about 2002.

Except for a million or so Beetles:

I think you're correct on that part. BYD already is THE major player in the Latin America EV market.

He has a pretty accurate take on the US version. Your state made it official.

That's particularly important if you're an executive sitting on a bundle of stocks and options. How many billions that were supposed to stimulate the economy went into buyback schemes that were completely non-productive in the real world.

Passive "sonar" is a hydrophone. Active sonar is sonar. By definition.

My first house is up 20X, my second is up 8-10X. Seems like a pretty good investments to me. Someday, I might sell them.

After property taxes, insurance and maintenance costs, I've never felt I gained anything...and that was before bidenflation.

Ah! Buying and strategically selling investment homes is a completely different scenario. Most people cannot afford either the money, qualify for the credit, or afford the risks of doing that. My comments addressed the most common scenario: selling their principal residence and moving to a new principal residence.

In the end, Karl Marx had a lot of wisdom about wealth, even before capitalism became the dominant economic model in most western countries.

Depends on situation. Rent goes on forever and increases over time. Ownership get cheaper once mortgage is paid off and the payment is usually fixed for years. I'm retired and live in a paid off house. If I was renting, same place would be costing me at least an additional $1700 each month.

Do I profit from the increased value over the years? I could if I took a reverse mortgage but otherwise, my kids will split the profit.

That's sad.

Zillow thinks the value of my house has nearly doubled in 24 years, but that's probably an underestimate since they don't know everything that we've done to the place.

On the intangibles, I can take pride in the projects we've accomplished. We've always treated home maintenance and improvement as a hobby we can do together.

The house is paid off and the property taxes are less than the average rent around here. It's all gravy from here on out.

Renters pay property tax. Renters pay maintenance. It's baked into the amount the landlord charges.

Renters should have insurance.

When I sold my first house to buy another larger one I did not feel that I gained anything but I did live ther for free. The house sold for about 4 times what I paid fo it. Had I paid rent I would not have had the ability to move to a larger house.

I had renters insurance that covered my items in the apartment that I rented for 3 years after I moved out of my parents home and before I bought a house.

You're responding to a troll (devnull is a unix term for what is effectively a black hole).

Inflation, of course, is mostly due to factors outside of the control of any president, and lags the causes by six to 12 months.

In this case, it was primarily driven by 1) Shipping difficulties during the pandemic, which are still resolving 2) The impact of the illegal russian invasion of Ukraine on worldwide petroleum production decreases and the subsequent effect on petroleum prices.

Yes, passive can be explaned like an underwater microphone. Active sonar sends signals to see if bounces back from anything.

Bridges over water use active sonar to map the seabed but it's in a narrow down pointing pattern, not splattered out everywhere.

Active sonar can be tracked, passive can't.

Yup, that's what I said.

Active is an antenna transmitting energy.

Correct.

Exactly.

Then they try to say they 'rattle a lot', but that's a datapoint well studied all over the world and it's not a problem.

True, but you still seem to be ignoring the opportunity cost of not benefiting from the investment yield you could have earned and would continue to earn by investing all the $$$ you've sunk into that property for many years. I've made the same choice as you but only because I'm extremely fortunate to have the luxury of 2 life long, inflation-corrected pensions plus a sufficient nest egg to be able to afford forgoing the additional income that the equity in my condo could earn.

In my situation, I would probably save money by renting as opposed to what I do now (paying a substantial HOA monthly fee and owning my condo free and clear and sinking my full equity in this condo rather than investing it). However, it's worth it to me not to worry about a developer purchasing the building in order to tear it down or convert it to something else and having to move. Also, I'm sure that I would experience much greater turn-over of occupants in adjacent units and have much less influence over how my building is managed and kept in repair if it was a rental compared to my current circumstances.

Everyone's needs, preferences, resources, philosophy of money management, and tolerance for risk are different.

These days, many people use the term capitalism to include everything**, as a synonym at times for free enterprise. You seem not to be doing that and limiting it to large examples of capital formation, steel mills, flour mills. But if you include small examples, for example, to be a blacksmith one had to gather enough capital to buy a forge and an anvil, or to be a wagon or ship builder, he had to have a saw and other tools and a supply of wood. To make cloth, one had to gather enough capital to buy or build a loom. To make pottery 9000 years ago, 9000, don't they have to have a kiln? Hasn't capitalism been the standard for 1000's of years before Marx?