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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: October 31st, 2023

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  • New?! This is the original area in which China excelled at producing electric vehicles. London’s early electric buses were European licensed production of BYD buses (or more likely BYD licensed powertrains)

    Is China even allowing electric buses to be exported yet? The last time I looked it was still going to take over a decade to replace all the buses in China, but a chunk of a decade has passed since then.

    There’s an old report from New York City putting the value of an electric bus at about $1.2 million, mostly the health benefits from no emissions not fuel savings. At the time there was no way for New York City to buy them because there’s no way to fund transit out of healthcare when the state pays for one but not the other, there were no non-Chinese manufacturers, and then shortly after they couldn’t compete with London that valued an electric bus at £1.7 million if I remember correctly, and the UK could justify funding buses based on healthcare. I think those first buses were about €600k. At the same time kneeling electric transit buses in China were about $90k, and small electric buses were $30-$40k.



  • I’ve eaten on about that before, but decades ago when food was cheaper. Nothing is satisfying, you are hungry all the time, constantly craving some nutrition you no longer even know how to acquire or what it is, but it’s absent from everything you eat.

    Peanut butter and bread was too expensive. Peanut butter was a treat. Bread from bakery surplus cost two to three times as much as rice. For your example, at $400 a year you’re looking at $8 a week. If a jar of peanut butter is $3 and has 4800 kCal in it and bread is $1 a loaf and has 24 60kCal slices in it, then a jar of peanut butter and 5 loaves of bread a week only gets you 12000 kCal a week, which isn’t enough for a moderately active adult. And you’re going to be missing out on all sorts of nutrition.

    At the time the best things to buy were eggs, beans, rice, and processed dry foods. Then you buy things that make eating them bearable and are also cheap in combination: whole or powdered milk to eat cereals, raw sugar, fat to cook into things, very cheap meats, cheese when it was cheap, and processed frozen foods that are similar in price to their constituents, which at the time were common because they are a way of storing food from a production season to sell in an off season. Then you get a few things to try to stave off cravings, like some long-term storage plastic-packed cuts of meat, or canned vegetables, or concentrated frozen fruit. At a low budget a can of food represents everything you get to eat for a day, or more. Fresh vegetables or fruit were completely unobtainable unless there’s a local surplus.

    Now the structure of food markets is different and everything is priced based only on demand and not on supply, so frozen processed foods that were available then due to the product being made to take surplus or trimmings and then store them are now priced based on demand for the product. The only things that have stayed similar are the prices for eggs (usually), the cheapest meats (sometimes), staples (usually), and canned foods which are priced based on the cost of transportation and are still routinely too high for such a low budget.














  • I started doing that last year with Joplin on my computer and it’s a big help.

    I also keep big notes to just dump everything I’m working on into - websites, pdfs, screenshots, screen video captures with no commitment to organization except I can add things in chronological order. A lot of it is initiated by showing it to someone else and then realizing I should have a note for myself too.

    I really should start doing the same with personal stuff and random observations. If something is important enough to tell (or what to tell) other people about it should be important enough to tell my future self about.

    It’s crazy how much not experiencing rewards yourself/the inability to do things for yourself influences things I wouldn’t even imagine before understating what ADHD is/does and consciously examining them.