SpokeSwap

For your viewing pleasure this Sunday…

Runway Show

• Joan Rivers shoots a zinger take a sip
• Unnecessary cleavage take a sip
• Suit instead of a tux take a sip
• DIY Dress take a shot/beer
• George Clooney take a shot/beer

Awards Show

• Musical intro take a sip
• Joke with no laugh take a sip
• Someone thanks God in their speech take a sip
• Pixar wins take a shot/beer
• Visibly intoxicated presenter take a shot/beer
• Tear-jerker video montage take a shot/beer
• Daniel Day Lewis doesn’t win Best Actor take a shot/beer

Tired of CBS, ESPN, and all those Madison Ave. fat cats earning all the bucks from the Super Bowl? Get in on the action by renting out your projector to your peers on SpokeSwap. It’s fully insured, and takes on 60 seconds to list your item. http://spokeswap.com/guestItem

Gimmicks are all around us, designed to lure us into making purchases that we would never make if the true cost were advertised. For example, I am constantly receiving advertisements for internet at the bargain price of only $15 per month. When I first received the flyer, I happened to be looking for an internet provider for my new apartment. I found out that the $15 price was only valid when bundled with home telephone service or a cable subscription. Of course, the total cost of this bundle would be much more than $15 and I have no need for a landline phone or for cable. The company lured me in with the $15 teaser, but the true price turned out to be several times that much.

Scenarios like this are common in the rental business as well. If you search for “projector rental” in San Francisco, you get an ad offering to rent you a projector for $58. When I first saw that ad, I was pretty surprised and decided to click on the link. Well it turns out the projector would need to be shipped to me, and the shipping would take 4 business days at an additional cost of $25. O yea - and then I would have to ship it back. If I wanted to receive the projector in 2 days the shipping cost would be $53 for a grand total of $111. 

This might still seem like a bargain compared to a local shop, but in reality there are quite a few things that could go wrong and jeopardize my event. Imagine the projector doesn’t arrive in time due to weather delays, or gets damaged during shipping. If I were making an important presentation or inviting friends over for a movie, I wouldn’t risk it. 

Making an effective presentation, especially in a business setting, is a more complicated enterprise than it seems. A business presentation usually isn’t as captivating as a film that includes your favorite actors, spicy romances and a riveting storyline. In contrast, the content is usually rather dry, with lots of numbers and technical terminology. 

When contemplating the format of a business presentation, most people start out by putting together a slide deck. That’s a great start, especially if one has a good command of graphics and layout. Indeed, a picture can be worth a thousands words and can elicit a response more powerful than text alone. A video can be ever more powerful and persuasive to the viewer. If the slide deck is simply printed out and distributed, some people would simply toss it, and the possibility of any kind of video would be ruled out.

There is an answer to this, however. A live presentation projected on a large screen would allow the presenter to interact with the content of the deck, explaining the intricacies of the slides and captivating the attention of the audience. The presentation would come to life, bringing together empirical data with the personality and conviction of the presenter. The presenter could show videos, and motion within the slides. The colors would be vivid, and the images compelling!

What is the cost of this transformation?  It’s actually less than you think. For example - if you go to spokeswap.com and search for audio/video equipment in San Francisco, you can rent a projector for only $75, including screen! Now that’s a pretty small investment compared with the benefits of an effective presentation that closes a sale, persuades investors or wins praise for a job well done.

As I ease into my late 20s, I am seeing more and more signs of my friends and acquaintances contemplate marriage. Last month I attended the wedding of my first close friend to tie the knot. Needless to say, the wedding was amazing and the reception rivaled a night out in Vegas. 

Few people know much about weddings other than the fact that they’re very expensive, usually costing over $30k. So that got me thinking - what are the major components that drive up the price? Well, you need to rent a venue, hire a caterer, and probably sponsor at least 1 open bar if you want the wedding to be respectable. There is also one other significant cost - all of the tables, chairs, table cloths, dishes, glasses, silverware, napkins and other items that you typically don’t think twice about. Turns out this stuff is all pretty expensive to rent. One modest table setting can cost over $100 once you factor in insurance, taxes and transportation. Suppose you have a 150-person wedding. That’s $1500.

That got me thinking. There must be other places to get this stuff at a more reasonable cost. My mother’s best friend owns a medium sized restaurant in Sacramento. She has plenty of tables, chairs, table cloths, napking, etc. She also has 2 vans to transport all the stuff. I know for a fact she would rent out her stuff for quite a bit less than $1500. The only barrier is a marketplace to connect my mom’s friend with all of the people getting married.

Most people in the world make money by working. It’s pretty simple economics - most people trade their labor in exchange for money. Some people work by the hour, others work for a monthly salary. Either way - the income that is earned in this way is constrained by the amount time one has.

If you own something that you can rent out, then you can overcome this income constraint. I happen to own a couple of movie projectors that I bought used for a few hundred dollars. I use one of the projectors to watch TV in my living room and the other one sits in my coat closet.

Last weekend I went out of town to visit my family, and my buddy Beto posted the projectors on SpokeSwap. As luck would have it, both of the projectors were rented out for 2 days. Beto rented them each out for $75 per day. He made $300 and honestly didn’t do a whole lot. He just had to be home to hand off the projectors to the renters. Beto supplemented his income pretty significantly without giving up a whole lot of time or labor.

I should have asked him for a cut of the profit.

Everyone loves boat. I just chose the title that I did so that it would be more provocative and would hopefully attract more readers. Boats are appealing because they can be the basis of memorable experiences with your buddies. That’s precisely what happened 2 weeks ago.

A friend invited me and five other people to cruise around Folsom Lake, near Sacramento. The boat was pretty quick, and had enough space for everyone to sit comfortably. We took turns driving it around the lake, and tied an inner tube to the back so that we could tow people behind. We had some delicious sandwiches for lunch, as well as blueberries, strawberries, cookies, chips, and sweet Heineken beers. We got some great pictures, and some solid tans.

I had the opportunity to drive the boat for quite a while, and when I came home I decided to do some research on the cost of such a boat. It turned out you can buy a decent motorboat that seats 6 or 7 people for under $5,000 - not bad right?….but then there are ownership costs. It turns out registration in California costs $29 on even years, and $49 on odd years (http://www.dmv.ca.gov/vr/fees/vessels.htm). Indoor storage costs about $119 per month (http://www.rivercityrvstorage.com/rates.html). If you assume that the boat depreciates at a rate of 10% per year, and you take the boat out 4 times a year, then each of those trips are costing you (($5,000*10%)+($119*12)+.5*($29+$49))/4 = $491.75. That of course doesn’t include the cost of fuel, or the cost of a truck to haul that boat around. 

On the other hand, you can pay $300 to rent a comparable late model boat right at the lake - including fuel. You don’t need a truck, and you don’t need to worry about maintenance, repairs, etc. Seems like an obvious choice. Boating can be an amazing experience, but owning a boat is a completely different matter.

In the last post, we reviewed the quick economics of my ride to work in San Francisco. Now we’re going to learn why biking really takes the cake as a commute option: it takes a whole lot less time and is much more consistent than commuting by either car or bus. Let’s quickly review our assumptions:

Less Commute Time > More Commute Time

Where > is better and < is worse

Next, let’s assess the appropriate equation for our three transit options:

Time (Car) < Time (Bus) < Time (Biking)

Here, the computations are even easier than for cost. For the car, Google Maps tells us that it will take us 11 minutes for a one-way journey (map). But wait, it’s not that easy. In the Mission, parking is not too bad, so I usually can find something two blocks away from my apartment (map). That adds on 5 minutes to my journey. At the office parking is not as easy. With the same parking structure mentioned in my last post, my walking journey is about 6 minutes from my office (map). Also, let’s be real, it’s SF. There’s traffic. We will be generous and add only 10 minutes for rush hour traffic. Then I will probably spend about five minutes every day circling for parking in my neighborhood. That makes for a one way journey of 32 minutes or 69 minutes every day when commuting with a car.

Without getting too much into how much SF has a s**tty public transit system, let’s just say that time and consistency is probably the biggest reason for not liking the bus and train system here. Google tells us that the journey is 27 minutes (map). That’s when the bus is on time. Let’s be nice and call it 30 minutes each way or 60 minutes every day by bus (the standard deviation on this mean time would be out of control, by the way).

Now for the amazing bicycle (and why biking in SF really shines). 22 minutes each way. Really. And it’s extremely consistent which is a very welcome change from driving and busing. So, no matter what, it will take me 44 minutes every day when on my bike. No parking hassle. Beautiful. Let’s review the our timing:

• Time (car) = 64 minutes a day
• Time (bus) = 60 minutes a day
• Time (bike) = 44 minutes a day

And yet again, we have a winner! Cheap and convenient. What more could the modern commuter ask for?

Public transportation is often touted as the solution to many of the word’s problems. This includes global warming, smog, traffic jams, road wear and probably a bunch of others. In principal, I’m in favor of public transportation. I like the idea of getting where I need to go quickly and not having to worry about parking, gas prices, flat tires, pollution and the the likes. Cars are a burden, and have high ownership costs. Even a clunker needs to be maintained, insured and parked somewhere when not in use.

Unfortunately public transportation can be less appealing in practice than it is in principal. I will start with an anecdote about riding the #9 bus in San Francisco last Monday. My friend Beto I had an appointment near the intersection of Van Ness and Market around 7pm and I needed to get home to the Mission afterwards. I was rather far from the nearest BART station so I decided to take the #9 bus, which was departing shortly and took a convenient route. Beto had his bike so he just rode it to my apartment.

When I boarded the #9 bus on Van Ness and 11th, I was overcome with an odor like none other that I had ever experienced. It appeared that a group of vagrants had occupied the front of the bus - which happened to be the only part with room to stand. At the first stop after the intersection where I boarded, an older woman embarked and demanded that someone in the front give up their seat because she was (supposedly) disabled. When nobody complied, she began insulting the other passengers with hateful and racially charged comments.

When I finally reached my stop, I felt a tremendous sense of relief and freedom. I walked to my apartment, and immediately washed my hands (twice). Beto had already been home for quite a while when I arrived. 

So what’s the point of this story? The point is that Beto got home faster, and had a more enjoyable time riding his bike to my apartment. Not to mention - he got a bit of exercise in the process. Even if the cost of riding a bike (maintenance, calories, etc.) was the same as the cost of public transportation, I think the right choice is abundantly clear.

To learn more about the #9 bus….

http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/crime/2012/03/san-francisco-bus-fight-erupts-gunfire

Today I’d like to take a slightly more analytical approach to this blog by going through a very basic equation that drives a great deal of decisions in our lives:

More Money In My Pocket > Less Money In My Pocket

Where > is better and < is worse

Specifically, I want to show, how in my situation, this equation is borne out by the following:

Cost (Car) < Cost (Bus) < Cost (Biking)

First, the facts: I am 27 years old, and currently a resident of San Francisco, CA. I live in the Mission District at 20th and Florida (map) and work in SoMa at 2nd and Mission (map). The distance between the two is approximately 2.7 miles (map), making a round trip distance every day of 5.4 miles.

In a car, I pay $100 every year for a neighborhood parking permit (policy side note: the city needs to drastically raise this price in order to meet its goal of increasing the population while decreasing the number of cars; but that’s just the economist in me talking). I then average about 18 miles per gallon of city driving in my Honda Civic. Gas is about $3.90 in the city. Let’s assume that there is .20 cents a mile in maintenance cost and I go to work every week day for a year. I pay just over $100 a month for full insurance on my car. Finally, parking at the lot at I-80 and 2nd street costs $250 a month. That makes ($100 ($3.90/18*5.4*255)+(5.4*255*$.2)+(100*12)+(250*12)) = $4873.70 per year which is $406.15 per month. Ouch! No wonder Americans are driving less these days.

The bus is much better by comparison. You could pay out of pocket for $2 each way, making the journey $4 every day for a monthly cost of $88 per month or $1,056 per year. But at that rate you’re more likely to buy the monthly pass at $74 or $888 per year. Not bad, except you have to deal with the s**t show that is the SF muni.

Finally, biking is free! Okay, not entirely. Let’s assume there is an ongoing maintenance cost of about 7 cents a mile. Also, we need calories to power those legs! So it takes my 200 pound frame about 140 calories (source) to go 2.4 miles each way. At an average cost of $1 per 100 calories (source), it costs me $2.8 every day in food to pedal to work (2nd policy side note: that’s about the same cost in gas to drive my car, and if I only ate non-processed, unsubsidized fruits and vegetables, it would cost more to fuel my legs than my car). Add up maintenance and food ($.07*5.4*255)+($2.8*255), and that makes a yearly cost $810.39 and a monthly cost of $67.53 to bike to work. Bad ass.

So let’s review my annual costs for commuting:

• Cost (car) = $4873.70
• Cost (bus) = $888.00
• Cost (bike) = $810.39

Pretty clear decision. Later this week, we will review my favorite part about bicycle economics in San Francisco: what we found with cost is reflected in commute times as well.