Absolutely, it is essential to always run the numbers. I was once offered a sizable rebate if I accepted a non-0% car loan, but no rebate if I paid cash or had my own financing. Since their loan had no early-repayment penalty – and I demanded this in writing – I accepted their loan and paid it off upon the first statement.
My suspicion is that that sort of offer was to boost the commissions earned by the loan brokers, rather than to move cars. Or maybe both. Who knows.
0% interest offers show up fairly frequently in the USA, often as general-purpose credit cards, or for car or furniture payments, in addition to the many buy-now-pay-later services that allow financing almost anything. However, the motives for offering 0% are slightly different for each of these products.
But answering the question directly, a 0% offer is beneficial if you were already going to make the purchase and would finance it. Cheap credit makes it easy to overspend, since the payments will be “tomorrow’s problem”. For people who can afford to pay for something in full, it might still be beneficial to finance with 0% just to conserve cash on hand. But the tradeoff is having to service the debt with regular payments; missing one payment can cause the debt to resume at an exorbitant rate. It takes a decent amount of financial discipline to make a 0% offer work in your favor.
Going back to why 0% offers even exist, I’ll use furniture and cars as they’re the historic examples. Furniture is expensive, whether it’s a sectional sofa or a queen-size bed with frame and storage. There’s also a sizable markup for furniture, and competition between furniture stores is strong. Thus, to help entice people to buy furniture, sellers will offer 0%, outsourced to a loan company, with the loan subsidized by some of the profit margins.
For cars, the equation is slightly different. Sure, cars are an order of magnitude more expensive, but that also means the opportunity cost for dealers to offer 0% is correspondingly larger. Instead, 0% financing for cars is almost always subsidized by the manufacturer, not the dealers. This is a financial and business strategy that allows a car company to create more sales in a given quarter, if perhaps they need to meet certain year-end targets but are reluctant to reduce their list prices.
0% car loans induce more sales fairly quickly, but will draw on the company coffers in the years to come, because the loan company still wants their cut to be paid by someone. Consumers will usually benefit from these offers, as it’s rare for people to buy a new car outright.
It’s my opinion that if a car company has to subsidize loans to move their product, that’s a tacit admission that their product is wrongly priced or the competition is better. I would take this into consideration, although it wouldn’t necessarily carry the day when considering a purchase. After all, car payment interest is not insignificant.
Agreed. When I was fresh out of university, my first job had me debugging embedded firmware for a device which had both a PowerPC processor as well as an ARM coprocessor. I remember many evenings staring at disassembled instructions in objdump, as well as getting good at endian conversions. This PPC processor was in big-endian and the ARM was little-endian, which is typical for those processor families. We did briefly consider synthesizing one of them to match the other’s endianness, but this was deemed to be even more confusing haha
It never ceases to amaze me how prolific PowerPC/PowerISA was (still is?) in the embedded space
A quick “rule” is to see how old the word/concept is. “plaintiff” would have existed almost as long as the English legal system came into being, or probably even older to the court of Assizes pre-12th century.
Whereas firefighter as a profession might have only become a word after the establishment of fire departments by insurance companies, which I think might have been a 19th century development.
This entire series by Cathode Ray Dude is a wonderful dive into the world of PC boot sequence, for the folks interested in a touch of embedded architecture. His delivery is also on-point, given the complexity and obscurity of the topics.
From this video alone (41:15):
The way this worked was: they installed Xen hypervisor on your PC, put Hyperspace in a VM and Windows in another. Now, you either know what a VM is – and I don’t need to explain why this is terrifying – or you don’t and I need to make you understand so you never independently invent this.
And (43:59):
This is just a bad idea, ok? Virtualization belongs in data centers. Putting some poor bastard’s whole OS in a VM is a prank. It’s some Truman Show shit. It’s disassembling the coach’s car and putting it back together inside the gym. It’s not remotely worth the trouble and it probably didn’t work.
There was a ton of hairbrained theories floating around, but nobody had any definitive explanation.
Well I was new to the company and fresh out of college, so I was tasked with figuring this one out.
This checks out lol
Knowing very little about USB audio processing, but having cut my teeth in college on 8-bit 8051 processors, I knew what kind of functions tended to be slow.
I often wonder if this deep level understanding of embedded software/firmware design is still the norm in university instruction. My suspicion has been that focus moved to making use of ever-increasing SoC performance and capabilities, in the pursuit of making it Just Work™ but also proving Wirth’s Law in the process via badly optimized code.
This was an excellent read, btw.
Point taken. I’ve edited the title to include both measurements in inches.
It’s the curse of being engineering-minded in the USA. Much of homegym stuff here is in US customary units, but competition-inspired weightlifting equipment and anything engineering-related is in metric/SI.
Best I can do is to start with the original units (for search engine indexing), provide the conversion for people using the opposing unit system, and then try to do my work consistently within just one unit system.
When it comes to what insurance does or doesn’t cover, the best answer will come from the text of the policy itself. This is, unfortunately, very dry reading and most people – although instructed to keep a copy handy – don’t have the full text nearby. That said, because of the regulated nature of insurance in the USA, standardized forms of policies exist, and homeowner policies are no exception.
The common homeowner policies are numbered HO-1 to HO-8. HO-1 only pays out only for the ten listened “perils”, and is thus the most barren policy available. Not all HO-1 policies are verbatim identical, but the gist usually matches.
We can look at this sample text from a random HO-1 (issued by American Family Insurance). Page 5 shows that “fire or lightning” is covered, so that’s a good start.
On page 6, we find the exceptions to the coverage, so if any of these apply, the policy will not pay out. Nothing in Part A would seem to apply to a DIY LED project, unless you tell me your LEDs are radioactive. Part B also doesn’t apply, unless you’re somehow perpetuating a fraud using LEDs.
Part C reads like it could apply, because it mentions “construction”, “design, workmanship or specification”, and “maintenance”, but this section only applies to the dwelling and so refers to those things which are permanently affixed to the house. That would include things like ceiling fans and light fixtures, but wouldn’t include stuff that is attached to the walls using thumbtacks or 3M Command strips. It even says that:
However, we do cover any resulting loss to property described in Coverage A - Dwelling and Dwelling Extension not excluded or excepted in this policy.
This clause basically means the exceptions on Page 6 should be interpreted narrowly, not broadly.
The point is, in the entire policy, there isn’t a clause that requires listed equipment, and remember that this is the most bare bones policy commonly available. If such a requirement did exist, then building your own PC wouldn’t be possible, since the standards bodies do not test individual computer parts – except the PSU, because that plugs into the mains.
If a fire that damages the house does occur, the most probable causes would be due to: 1) an unlisted power supply or power brick feeding the ESP32 or the LEDs, or 2) no current limiting (eg a fuse) to cut out the power supply. Other failures like a shorted LED are unlikely to actually cause a house fire, and the insurance companies and UL know this; they’re more focused on preventing arc-faults that contribute to an estimated 50% of electrical house fires every year.
Good design and clean installation on your part, and using properly listed low-voltage power supplies, will mitigate the major fire risks, leaving just software bugs and lighting snafus for you to deal with.
As a matter of completeness, if there is an unlikely fire, be it from an LED project or from a candle falling over, the insurance company will still pay. But big or small, the claim will be recorded in the CLUE database along with the payout amount. This often reflects negatively on homeowners, so future rate increases may occur. But that varies by state. In any case, though, the insurance policy has still done its job: cover a non-intentional loss.
I would nevertheless advise you to have a look at what sort of homeowner policy your dwelling is covered under. Everything beyond HO-1 is nicer, and some even include limited claim forgiveness of some kind (for a price). Also consider talking to your insurance agent, who should be able to help interpret how the policy applies.
If a citation is going to point to any of the Stack Exchange Q&A pages, it is extremely important to specifically cite the exact post or answer, since – not dissimilar to Wikipedia – the quality, consistency, and biases of Stack Exchange answers is paramount for evaluating the information presented, especially factual data to be fed into an infographic.
I personally am intrigued at these $800 economy, ten-hour flights, as well as a total omission of freight cargo in the underbelly. As presented, this flight has 180 passengers and runs for ten hours. This would suggest it’s not a common narrow-body, either the Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, as even their largest available configurations can’t fit 180 people in a 2 class setup, let alone a 3 class setup. It could possibly be the Airbus A321, though.
My point is that if it’s a widebody aircraft or the A321, not hauling cargo would be some staggering malfeasance for a commercial revenue airliner. But I can’t follow-up on any of these queries, since the sources aren’t properly cited.