I'm curious about the small business loans. I'm from Europe and the animations suggests for a $9000 loan a total repayment of $10305. Let's assume you make $5000 in revenue per month and they use 10% as a repayment cut per transaction. That would yield a 20 month long repayment schedule. The "interest" would be roughly 7% annually. In today's world, isn't that greedy? In today's world, Warren Buffet can issue a 0% coupon bond[1]. I'm just perplexed. Especially since it's Square and not Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan.
According to the St Louis Fed, the average interest rate for Small Businesses was about 3.5 - 5% [2]. For me this sounds like an incredibly bad deal.
7% is a low interest rate for an unsecured small business loan.
I'm not 100% sure what the FRED chart you cited means by "Effective Loan Rate for Small Business Administration" but those are most likely collateralized.
You have to add profit margin and default risk on top. 7% for a business that you have lots of information about is still pretty bad though. It should be 4% all inclusive. You're right about one thing. The flat fee for the loan actually ends up obscuring the complexity. It's difficult to compare the square loan conditions to conventional ones.
Somehow I found the article missing the solution, the organisation argues that "placemaking" [1] helps. They also argue that "Will this public project generate enough tax revenue to sustain its maintenance over multiple life cycles? Try asking that -- you will be amazed." is the question to successful public projects. But, I don't know if that holds true universally.
The strange thing is that people don’t normally ask the question. It’s just assumed that all infrastructure generates positive economic returns, which is far from true.
You asked “where’s the solution.” This post is one bit of a large volume of Strong Towns material, and this series is only meant to explain one particular problem cities face.
Author here, I just had to get some thoughts out and complain how bad these portable air conditioners are.
I just don't understand why the appliances space attracts so little innovation or startups. Even though they are at least 400€ a piece and could generate lots of revenue on mass.
On Friday I listened to the newest Macrovoices episode with Philip Verleger [1] where they argued that America has far too few engineering students to even create a green energy revolution in America. The expertise was transferred primarily to software engineering jobs.
Dr. Verleger apparently was one of the key players in created the oil futures markets, so he probably knows a thing about this space.
Yep, now it's much better, 1200 W/h sounds like "normal" for a small portable unit.
About the channeling of the hot air inside:
>The other day I modified my air conditioner to channel the hot outside heat right back at the compressor to heat up the outside air instead of the cooler inside heat. Compared to last year, I don't really see a difference. Last year I didn't have this system and couldn't get below 22C/72F either. So I probably wasted my time optimizing my air conditioner.
Having the conditioner be fed continuously the hotter air should be less efficient.
A house (normally) is not air tight if you suck air out of a room, pumping it outside, the same amount of air will re-enter the room by all the leaks of windows, doors, etc. (if this was not the case, think of bathrooms without windows with an aerator, people don't die in those bathrooms because of the vacuum).
Let's say that your portable conditioner can treat a given amount of air (let us assume 1 m3/min) and that temperature lowering is linear (it isn't) i.e. that unit can lower the temperature 20° C.
If the room you have the thingy installed is 3x4 mt and 3 mt high, it contains 36 m3 of air.
If the air was treated "sequentially" (i.e. imagine a square pipe 1m x 1m 36 m long) it would take 36 minutes to lower the whole amount from 40° C to 20° C at full power.
In the meantime (assuming that your house has a minimum of insulation from the outside) there will be only a partial re-heating of the air, so that each of the 36 m3 of air (still imagine the sequential treating) is at a slightly different temperature, 1st m3 will be (say) at almost the same outside temperature, but still lower, 35° C, last one (the one just treated) will be at 20 °C.
Now, if you re-enter the "loop", that 1st cubic meter temperature can be lowered to 15 ° C, so the loop is a "virtuous one".
In reality, if you expel the hot air from a room, the same amount of hot air will re-enter the room from the leaks, what you are doing is using the volume of the room to act as a cache of sorts, i.e. the air that enters (at 40 ° C) will be "diluted" and in theory that will contribute only to 40/36=1,11 degrees warmer air.
BUT, and here is the nice part, the hotter air will go towards the ceiling, and since you are not 3 m tall, you will be living in the cooler 2/3 of the room, and the air that the conditioner treats will be cooler (assuming the unit is on the floor and not suspended), and as such it can be made even more cool with less energy.
Yes, I realized that too, therefore I put the machine on the desk to suck in the air of the middle of the room instead of the coldest air on the bottom of the room.
But how come the room doesn't get colder overall? Is it sized too small? My apartment here is about 36m2 with 2.7m tall rooms. The unit has 14000BTU which is one of the largest portable air conditioner that you can get. Even if I were to close the doors to the other rooms, it would only be able to cool the room by 1 degree during the day (8 hour span). In the night it does its job well by lowering the temperature to the outside temperature but it won't go beneath it.
But, I wouldn't judge too early. The university clearly caters to an audience which is voting with their borrowed/hard earned money to pay their tuitions [1]. It's not like your are forced to study there. If nothing else, other education providers will grow with the influx of new money.
Meanwhile, Google's and Facebook's market caps are near all time highs. The invisible hand dictates that the impact may very well be insignificant for those two.
I once wrote about how you can achieve something similar with uBlock Origin: https://schleiss.io/fixing-twitter-design-with-extension The post was from 2018 so I don't know if the css classes are still valid, also I messed up the images after an update, but I hope you get the gist.
Galileo didn't have it easy either. The more push back, the more likely you'll write history. Even it means you have to face the inquisition or whatever name it has at the time...
Galileo didn't have it easy he was tortured. Current day academics do have it easy at least in the democratic countries. They might face criticism but not torture.
Reminds me of a recent incident where a right-wing politician compared having to wear a Covid-mask to the Holocaust.
[1] https://www.vogelwarte.ch/de/voegel/voegel-der-schweiz/