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I grew up in a family that owned a few houses. Besides the house we lived in my dad saw owning a few rental properties as good investments. The reality turned out to be a lot more work than I ever expected. I remember spending whole summers and free weekends painting or fixing various issues on the houses.

Fast forward to the 2000’s and I saw others try the same thing. Then many of them moved to simply buying and flipping. Why? Because actually owning homes is expensive and not ‘passive’ at all. It can, as I learned as a kid, become a major investment of your time and energy.

I found this article to be pretty much spot-on to what I saw us go through.

1. Managing properties takes a lot of work. Everything from finding tenants, to keeping the buildings maintained (including emergency repairs), to dealing with bad tenants and damage. I learned this in spades. You’re now a home owner for not just your house but ALL the houses. This means each new house adds an entire house’s maintenance to your weekend task list.
2. What makes a good house might not make a good rental. You need to be aware of what makes a good rental return (the 1% rule – the monthly rent should be 1% of the purchase price of the home or greater) and whether markets can support that.
3. Rental properties in popular vacation spots doesn’t mean you’ll actually want to live there full-time. A lot of people buy a vacation home in a popular vacation spot with the idea of moving there later. But they often forget to ask themselves if that is where they really want to live full time. The Oregon coast is a great example. It’s absolutely gorgeous in the summer but rainy and isolated in the winter. Medical services and social activities are extremely limited.
4. Real estate investing can actually distract you from your real financial goals. If your goal is really to retire early or give something to your kids, there might be better ways to get there.
5. Real estate investing requires a lot of professional help. You can’t manage all the legal and professional repairs you’ll need to do yourself. You’re going to need to find and pay for good help.

Anyone who’s done any OpenGL graphics is familiar with the ubiquitous Utah teapot. It’s been a staple in everything from OpenGL to Pixar movies to countless other shows.

As the story goes, Martin Newell needed a simple mathematical model of a familiar object. His wife suggested modelling their tea set since they were sitting down for tea at the time. He sketched the teapot free-hand using graph paper and a pencil. Following that, he went back to the computer laboratory and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube system, again by hand.

The teapot shape contained a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time: it was round, contained saddle points, had a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, could project a shadow on itself, and could be displayed accurately without a surface texture.

The good news is that that now you can own your own. The original teapot was made by the German company Friesland. Apparently they were not aware of how famous their teapot had become, but restarted production – even giving it the ‘Utah’ name.

If you want to own your own Friesland Teekanne 1,4l Weiß Utah Teapot – just go to their website and order one today! The original teapot was the white 1.4L model – but other sizes and colors are available.

Update Jan 2024:

A great tragedy. It appears the Friesland factory that made the teapots was destroyed in a major fire.

On June 29, 2023, decades of German porcelain history and tradition were destroyed during a major fire on our company premises. For this reason, we are unfortunately unable to supply you with any of our old series pieces. It was simply: EVERYTHING was destroyed .

However, we are looking forward optimistically and are doing everything we can to build a new factory at the old Varel location. Parts of our popular series Jeverland white, Ecco and La Belle as well as the Walküre series Alta and NYNY are already partially available again.

I sent them an email and asked if they would have the teapots back in stock. There is no eta on when it, or any of their legacy series, will ever come back. Here was their response:

From: Service | Frieslandversand.de 
Date: Jan 5, 2024, 12:43 AM

Dear Mr. Fife,

[Until now] we don`t know when this year we are able
to deliver the teapots. Until now we don`t have a production
here after the great fire in June and we are making test at other sites
in Germany for the production of these articles.

With kind regards

The team of Friesland-Porzellan

Links:

• https://frieslandversand.de/teekanne-1-4l-weiss-utah-teapot
• https://friesland-porzellan.de/utah-teekanne
• https://friesland-porzellan.de/produkte/information

The new nVidia 4000 series cards are out – and at least part of the hyperbole about them is true. Jensen declares Moore’s law is dead to justify the high prices (it certainly couldn’t be because they’ve not kept up with new chiplet design that both AMD and Intel use to reduce power, heat, and cost). They have gigantic heat sinks that means they require at least 3.15 slots (bigger ones require 4 full slots) and have power requirements that are melting power cables.

But nVidia is late to the game. Meet the king of 90’s graphics! The BitchinFast 3D 2000! There’s even a great video review of this fictional monster along with a Bungholiomarks test run. I give this guy full credit for taking this card to the max.

It even came with a great advertisement that touted it’s amazing Bungholio marks scores.

Cassie the robot is no Usain Bolt, but did established a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meters by a bipedal robot. The historic time of 24.73 seconds was achieved by starting from a standing position and returning to that position after the sprint with no falls. Though staying in your lane was apparently optional.

Cassie was invented at the Oregon State University College of Engineering and produced by Agility Robotics. This achievement was accomplished through robot learning and almost a year of simulation, condensed down to a matter of weeks.