The difference between consumption and investment?

I want a nice shelter, not a 3 bedroom house I don't need or want on the off chance I'll sell at a profit some day. I'm not interested in that.

> Lets flip this around...if two people came to Palo Alto in 2009 with a $2 million fund, one doing a starup and the other buying a home...the one doing a startup would have a 90% chance of failure with a 0.1% chance of tripling their money...the other who purchased a home would have had a 99% chance of at least doubling their money, and a 100% chance of making at least a 25% gain. Who is the smart one?

I could give a similar example of literally any class of assets.

Investing is not arithmetic. These things aren't baked in like Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics. Corelations can look solid for decades and then totally disappear.

I can tell you for free though, that my generation and the ones behind it cannot afford your houses.

I don't live in a city, everybody around me already uses private means to obtain water, sewerage, waste disposal and even power and I'll be doing the same.

Not every solution has to be scalable. In fact the majority are not.