Car design trends that I wish would go away

 Here are some car design trends that have seem to have taken over the auto industry that I wish would go away.

• Use of piano black in the interior.  These show fingerprints and dust very prominently and are also prone to being scratched and showing those scratches.  Use matte black or wood instead.
• Use of shiny chrome in the interior.  This reflects light and in some situations can be downright uncomfortable for the driver.  Use brushed aluminum instead.
• Ever larger wheels.  16" or 17" wheels on a sedan of any size should be good enough.  On an SUV 18" or 19" should be the most needed.  Larger wheels have tires with smaller sidewalls and make the ride uncomfortable especially given the pothole-ridden roads we have nowadays.  Bigger wheels and tires weigh more (lower mpg and slower acceleration), and they cost more to replace.  It's insane that we now have cars with 18" or 19" wheels and SUVs with 20" to 22" wheels. 
• Excessive use of screens and touchscreens.  It's OK to have one small one for navigation and infotainment, but why put things like climate control in there?  Why have a complicated digital dash controlled by complicated steering wheel controls when a simple one will get the job done?  Would really appreciate physical controls for the climate control.  Most of these screens have flicker, sometimes excessive flicker.
• Uncomfortable seats with poor padding.  Many newer cars seem to have extra firm seats with worse seat comfort than the corresponding previous generation.  It almost mandates using a separate seat cushion to get adequate comfort during long drives.
• Use of run flat tires.  These are noisier to begin with and get even noisier and harder as they age.  This makes them very uncomfortable especially on bad roads.  They are also heavier so getting rid of the spare doesn't save much weight, if any once you have all the extra weight of run flat tires. Finally, they are more expensive to replace and it greatly reduces the number of choices available.  I really wish they'd stick with regular tires and a compact or full size spare.
• White LED headlights.  The color temperature of most headlights nowadays is too high and will tend to cause fatigue and lead of difficulty falling asleep after one has been driving at night.  A warmer color temperature that matches regular halogen headlights would be better.
• Plastic trim around wheel wells. For some reason car makers decided to stop painting these and expose black plastic which fades and looks horrible over time.

Dealing with ID theft

Things to do to minimize any damage if your identity is stolen.

• Freeze credit bureaus.
• Equifax
• Experian
• TransUnion
• Innovis 
• Lexis Nexis (https://consumer.risk.lexisnexis.com/freeze)
• Chex Systems (for bank account opening)
• Early Warning System
• Clarity Services
• NCTUE (for utilities)
• SSA
• mySSA account to secure SSN with SSA (needs ID.me or Login.gov ID)
• Account with local state unemployment office
• Report stolen SSN to IRS and get PIN (needs ID.me)
• File a report with identitytheft.gov
• File a report with local police department

Here is a thread on reddit summarizing all the actions that need to be taken.

VW ID.4 test drive

I test drove a Model Y a while ago and liked it. I had been to a dealership to check out the Mach-E but didn't get a chance to test drive one. I've read a lot of negative reviews for the Mach-E (very low ground clearance comparable to a Mustang GT, only one key fob, complicated cooling system likely to cause problems as the car ages, etc.). I had seen a lot of good press for the ID.4 and had been wanting to try it. The nearest dealer is 25-30 min away in heavy traffic so I really needed to set some time aside to go in for a test drive. I finally made it in last weekend.

The demo car the dealer had was a RWD Pro S with Gradient Package (20" wheels).  Here are my thoughts on the car and also some comparisons to my 2019 Acura RDX and the Tesla Model Y.

Things I liked:

• Ride quality. Soaks up road imperfections really well. Better than RDX for sure and also better than the Model Y I test drove.
• The steering feel is great. The RDX steering has a bit more of an artificial feel to it especially when making low speed turns.
• The seat padding and overall seat comfort was excellent. I want to say I liked the seat padding better than the RDX's.
• The exterior and interior design. Simple, tasteful and functional.  
• I like the normal door handles better than the fancy-but-likely-to-pinch-if-not-careful handles that Tesla uses on the Model 3 and Y.  (Tesla uses different handles on the S & X.)
• The quality of materials is about as expected for this class.
• It drives like a normal car unlike the Tesla which uses very aggressive regenerative braking.
• The visibility is excellent, unlike both the RDX and the Model Y.

Things I didn't like:

• Road noise is pretty bad. I didn't even take it on the highway and I found it quite noisy even at 50 mph. It felt noisier than the RDX, and the RDX does a pretty bad job when it comes to noise.
• The range of seat height adjustment is a tad less than I would like. Because of back issues, I prefer to sit as high up as possible.
• The center armrest has a split design which felt kind of cheap.
• The location of the wireless charger is such that you'd have trouble seeing the phone's display when it's there.  Model Y really shines in this regard.
• I would have liked an opaque shade for the panoramic glass roof.  The Model Y doesn't have a shade.  The ID.4 has one, but it's a sort of fine mesh type of material and so it's not 100% opaque. I also don't think the glass that VW uses does as good a job at rejecting heat as the Model Y.  It was pretty nippy outside and yet I could feel a lot of heat through the glass and shade.
• There are some weird design quirks like no dedicated buttons for the rear windows--they use the same buttons for fronts and rears with a selector, difficult to decipher controls, etc.

I didn't really push the car in terms of acceleration. And I didn't play with the infotainment at all (the infotainment is a low priority item for me).

Overall, I was quite impressed with the ride quality. I thought it soaked up road imperfections much better than the Model Y and also much better than the RDX on 19" wheels. The dealership is surrounded by really bad roads and both on the drive in and out I could tell my RDX did much worse.   However, I still don't think I liked it enough to want to get one.  If it came down to a choice between the Model Y and the ID.4, I think I'd pick the Model Y.

Peak technology

I am of the opinion that we have reached the peak of technology that benefits people at large.  From here on out almost all technological developments will be in the area of mass surveillance--monitoring driving, consumption habits, health, etc.  I'm not sure how this information will be misused, but misused it will be.

Technology is continuing to be abused in many ways.  AI is imperfect and will adversely impact the lives of those that are incorrectly classified as false positives in whatever the AI program is looking for.  This is likely to cause a lot of pain for those people.

PWM, temporal dithering and headaches with newer Apple displays

iPhones

Most new smartphones use a display technology called OLED.  These displays use a technology called PWM (pulse width modulation) for dimming the display.  This creates a flicker, which while not perceptible to the eye, can cause all kinds of symptoms -- headaches, nausea, etc.  Every time I have tried the newer iPhones with OLED displays in the store, I find I immediately feel eyestrain.  This has kept me from buying one of them and I have stuck to an iPhone with the older display technology called LCD.

If you have had issues with newer phones, you might be sensitive as well.  This article sums up the problem nicely.

PWM may not be the whole issue.  There's also scrolling speeds, addressed to some extent by ProMotion in some newer iPhones, and also temporal dithering.  More on temporal dithering below.

MacBooks

With newer MacBooks, a small, but not insignificant, number of users, including myself, have experienced really bad headaches when using them.  A few things that I did to try and mitigate the problem included turning off true tone, turning off auto brightness, and turning off dimming when running on battery.  None of these helped.

Digging deeper, I discovered that there's a feature called temporal dithering that Apple implements in order to render a larger number of colors than the display is natively capable of.  Unfortunately there is no way to turn this off using native controls in macOS.

In some of the forums, it was suggested that SwitchResX is an app that can be used to disable temporal dithering by setting the display to render millions of colors rather than billions of colors which is the default.

Another useful tool for checking various aspects of displays such as pixel inversion is the Lagom LCD monitor test pages.  Testing side by side with a Dell XPS, the M1 MacBook Air showed noticeably more flicker.

Finally, Iris is another tool attempts to get around PWM with laptops by using an app to control brightness and filtering colors in a way that makes the display experience easy on the eyes.

References

• Exclusive: Ultra-bright displays are destroying our eyes, but the OnePlus 12 gets it right
• TÜV Rheinland Intelligent Eye Care certification
• Disabling dithering on Apple silicon Macs using Stillcolor.
• Flicker Sense -- Issues with flicker in LED lights and displays and how to report them

Planning for retirement

 Placeholder for useful links for retirement planning.

• State-by-state guide to tax burden on retirees

Some thoughts on ZIRP/NIRP

ZIRP stands for zero interest rate policy.  NIRP stands for negative interest rate policy.  As governments and corporations are awash in debt, ZIRP and NIRP appear to have been embraced whole-heartedly by central banks.

As the federal reserve started to lower its benchmark interest rate back towards zero (it is zero as of this writing), I started to think about what this means for fixed-income investments if they decide to go from ZIRP to NIRP.

In some of the online forum discussions, folks said a drop of 0.5% in interest, e.g. from +0.25% to -0.25% is the same as, e.g., a drop from +0.5% to 0%.  To show that this is not really accurate, I presented the following example.

Lets say to have $x to invest at an interest rate of r% for a length of time t.  Then as t goes to infinity:

• if r > 0, then the balance, x goes to infinity.
• if r = 0, then the balance stays exactly the same at x.
• if r < 0, then the balance x goes to 0.

In other words, with a negative interest rate, one's balance starts reducing over time and eventually goes to zero.  I hope we (the US) don't get to NIRP, but with the economy the way it is, there's no telling.  Japan and the EU have been in NIRP for a while now.  Large corporations have benefited from this.  LVMH for example had an offering of negative yielding bonds to finance its purchase of Tiffany & Co.--a case of investors actually paying LVMH to borrow their money!

The downsides of ZIRP and NIRP

Some of the down sides of ZIRP and NIRP are:

1. It penalizes savers and those that depend on interest for fixed income.
2. It causes people with money to speculate on assets such as stocks and real-estate. 
3. It causes real-estate prices to rise so houses are out of reach of the middle class without taking on excessive debt and becoming house poor.  This also means that any extended dip in house prices and employment can stress banks as their loans go bad.  This is what happened during the housing crisis.
4. It forces pension funds to speculate in stocks in order to meet their obligations.  This means that any extended dip in stocks will cause a number of these pension funds to become insolvent, putting their ability to pay out pensions at a risk.
5. It leads to rampant financial engineering by companies where they take on long term debt to buy back their own stock enriching their stockholders and executives.
6. It exacerbates wealth inequality in society since people that are wealthy to begin with (e.g. private equity, hedge funds, large businesses) have access to cheap money that retail investors and small businesses do not.

#3 and #4 pretty much mean that once ZIRP/NIRP are used by the central bank, the entire economy becomes dependent on frequent and larger interventions by the central banks.  At some point in time (I think we are already there now) the central banks own the entire market and there is no more real price discovery.

Proponents of ZIRP/NIRP argue that the pros outweigh the cons.

How to invest in a ZIRP/NIRP environment?

This is hard question to answer and I'm not really qualified to do it, but here are some of my thoughts.

Simple investment in savings and CDs are not likely to yield much.  I'm not a big fan of "yield chasing" where you open an account with an online bank only to have them reduce their rates a few months later.  Typical yields in a ZIRP environments are close to zero, lower than 0.1%.  That amounts to an annual return of less than $1000 on each $100,000 invested.  And then there's typically taxes that need to be paid even on those measly returns!

I don't like the idea of being forced to invest in stocks especially since there's an ethical dilemma where I don't want to support the kinds of financial activity that is destroying people's lives.  I know stocks will go up (don't fight the fed, as they say), but still.

Gold is an option, but one has to be careful of the pitfalls of investing in various types of gold and the possibility of price manipulation.

Treasury products such as I Bonds and EE Bonds are a possibility but you have to create and manage an account with treasurydirect.gov and some folks have reported less than desirable experiences when needing any kind of customer support.  The products also aren't as liquid--minimum holding period, interest penalty if cashed within a certain time period, etc., and there are annual limits on the amount that an individual can buy each calendar year -- $10K of each as of this writing.

If I figure something out, I will update this post.

In the meantime, this is what the chair of federal reserve thinks savers should do.  It just amazes me that the chair of the federal reserve and many politicians equate a 401(k) with risk assets.  It doesn't have to be that way.  Most 401(k)'s offer a stable value fund or money market fund as an investment option.  Those 401(k) savers are not benefitting from the federal reserve's policies.

Update 06/27/2020

The fed made a statement saying they will keep rates near zero until at least 2022.