[Toshi]

Fodder for @SkaredShtles , who is an F-150 driver himself / on the topic of non-dirt poor people (those that have available credit, use banks, etc.) who make elective choices that then make them perceive that they are poor, even though they have a spending problem rather than an income problem. Whew. Anyway:

Average 1/2 ton pickup truck buyer household income is in the range of $80k/year. (This is on par with that for new car sales in general.)

Average transaction price for the F-150 is about $47k. (This is higher than the average transaction price for new cars in general, which is about $36k.)

Ford sells nearly a million F-150s per year.

In conclusion, we are a nation of idiots. If the averages are reflective of the median buyer versus being skewed by the random Warren Buffet in the mix, then this is an objectively bad thing that almost a million households are doing each year, buying a vehicle about 58% of yearly gross income.

 

[Pesqueeb]

In conclusion, we are a nation of idiots.

Just figured that out?

Edit:. I'm on a phone right now so I'll be brief:

X-post to half a dozen PaWN threads.

But the millennial generation is poorer.

“It takes four millennials to replace one boomer” in terms of economic impact, Szakaly said. “There’s going to be this gap between baby boomers and millennials.”

It's almost as if the boomers have fucked all of the proceeding generations by pulling up the ladder behind them.

Or too much avocado toast, I suppose.

Double edit: preceding /= proceeding

 

[Pesqueeb]

In somewhat related news:

Redirecting

www-caranddriver-com.cdn.ampproject.org

 

[Toshi]

Fasting update. Note that I started this on 8/10.

 

[Toshi]

This must have been a high pucker factor:

Rollover Crash Leaves Toyota 4Runner Driver Dangerously Dangling on Cliff's Edge

Black Bear Pass in Colorado is popular among off-road enthusiasts for its stellar views and downright dangerous nature.

www.thedrive.com

I'd love to run that trail but not with the kids in the car (not saying this guy had them in there, but that's what I'd be inclined to do since it's more than a day trip).

 

[Toshi]

This Taycan interior looks awful, IMO. Busy, cramped center stack, and a million touchscreen button UI elements with not a bit of haptic feedback.

 

[Toshi]

I plowed through Dr. Fung’s book on fasting, finishing it tonight. I’d seen/heard most of what was in it via YouTube already, but having it reiterated was good. Also good was the more formal structure of the sections as opposed to sometimes rambling interviews.

After having digested this book I’m going to try some longer periods of fasting. As part of his clinic (Intensive Dietary Management, up in Toronto) people with DM2 and morbid obesity are launched right into fasts up to 14 days (under monitoring) because apparently the hunger peaks on day 2 and then isn’t an issue thereafter.

From the math of lean and fat mass from my DEXA I have many days of fasting in me (in my fat, in particular) before I run out of calories to burn… perhaps 110? so in light of this it seems almost reasonable to try for a goal of a 14 day water + salt fast, sticking with 18-24 hour fasts as the rule otherwise and perhaps working into it with slightly shorter periods: see musing on life event timing below.

This upcoming weekend we have an unlicensed Harry Potter-type dinner on Saturday (they’re careful to not actually use Harry Potter terms), and on Sunday we’re going to the kids’ favorite Nepalese restaurant for lunch, so I’ll eat at those because that’d be the normal thing to do. Next Saturday the wife and I are going to the Dolby Cinema re-release of the original Matrix and will go to a nice local restaurant on our own beforehand.

So I could potentially go from Sunday lunch or dinner to Saturday lunch or dinner next week, working, bike commuting, and mountain biking like normal along the way. This should be useful to see how I fare with such things, and I can always just eat something if I’m not feeling great. Let the experimentation begin! Well, after eating some tasty foods this weekend, let it begin only then…

 

[jstuhlman]

i dunno . . . i get nausea/headaches within a few hours if i even miss lunch. in general, i'd rather eat small amounts throughout the day than three big meals. i'm almost never hungry in the morning. diet, lifestyle, exercise level, metabolism, etc. are all so variable that it seems to me there's really no "one" approach. as always, ymmv. good luck though . . .

 

[CBJ]

This Taycan interior looks awful, IMO. Busy, cramped center stack, and a million touchscreen button UI elements with not a bit of haptic feedback.

VW empire is running amok in touch screens now they finally are punching it out. It like the build up this huge department that really need to show their worth.

 

[Toshi]

i dunno . . . i get nausea/headaches within a few hours if i even miss lunch. in general, i'd rather eat small amounts throughout the day than three big meals. i'm almost never hungry in the morning. diet, lifestyle, exercise level, metabolism, etc. are all so variable that it seems to me there's really no "one" approach. as always, ymmv. good luck though . . .

That could be caffeine or hydration related. I've been fasting at least 17 hours for the past 14 days and haven't been nauseated or had headaches. Longest stretch thus far was 25 hours and that was fine, too.

Apparently hunger is worst on day 2 and then ketones ramp up like mad and you actually feel good.

It's amazing how much the research converges on how high blood sugar and high insulin are behind a very wide variety of ailments (not just diabetes, per se, but various cancers, neurologic disorders). The catch is that simply reducing calories while eating normally just causes our metabolism to ramp down. This really does seem like a whole different way forward, and on a population level whatever has been done since 1970-now is straight up failing.

We'll see how enthusiastic I remain about this 6 months from now.

 

[6thElement]

We'll see how enthusiastic I remain about this 6 months days from now.

 

[Toshi]

If I stick to this current plan then I'll be euphoric in the fasted state by Thursday, wafted along in the clouds on ketones.

 

[Toshi]

The surprisingly great idea in Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal: electric school buses

A small idea in Sanders’s Green New Deal could reap big benefits for kids.

www.vox.com

 

[Toshi]

Driving home from Deer Creek this morning. Doing about 4-5 over indicated limit (+ 6% due to oversized tires), passing some laggards on I-70 near Colorado.

I look in my mirror and see a last-gen black Charger with something about 2” tall sticking up off its roof, like a low profile LED bar.

I scoot on over and let him pass, as do several others.

Turns out it’s a private vehicle with normal CO plates (no GVT), no spotlight, and the thing on the roof was the little pop up wind blocker that comes up when one has the sunroof open.

Gah.

 

[Toshi]

Who knew that I am Japanese? The half is strong today. Baby is very plump and white.

 

[Toshi]

@rideit Jackson is affordable!

Breckenridge named 3rd most expensive town in America

BRECKENRIDGE — Breckenridge was named the third most expensive town in America in rankings released Aug. 15 by LendingTree. To rank the 50 most expensive towns, the study looked at median home values and median...

www.summitdaily.com

Compared to Breck, Summit Park, and Martha’s Vineyard, that is.

 

[Pesqueeb]

Took the golf-cart car to Mt. Princeton hot springs yesterday. Dinner/tourist crawl in Salida afterwards provided a 2-hour level 2/63 mile charging opportunity at town hall. Crawled into the garage at home with 11% battery remaining. Wouldn't go so far as to say I had developed "range anxiety", but I sure was working on a case of "range concern" given that the guess-o-meter never dropped below the number that google maps was giving me to the house, but a couple big hills by Fort Carson brought the numbers uncomfortably close a couple times.

I've been using A Better Route Planner to check out our "big trips" before we leave, and it's been pretty close so far. Actual charge/miles remaining never varied more than 1% from ABRP's figures. That's close enough for to be even more comfortable planning out bigger trips in teh golf-cart.

 

[rideit]

@rideit Jackson is affordable!

Breckenridge named 3rd most expensive town in America

BRECKENRIDGE — Breckenridge was named the third most expensive town in America in rankings released Aug. 15 by LendingTree. To rank the 50 most expensive towns, the study looked at median home values and median...

www.summitdaily.com

Compared to Breck, Summit Park, and Martha’s Vineyard, that is.

Our median price is now 1.4 mill...(current sales closed). You can’t get ANYTHING (free standing home) for under ~700,000, so I don’t know what year they are getting there numbers from...

Jackson Real Estate - Jackson WY Homes For Sale | Zillow

Zillow has 155 homes for sale in Jackson WY. View listing photos, review sales history, and use our detailed real estate filters to find the perfect place.

www.zillow.com

But this news is actually good for JH, all told.

Edit, there are some bargains, like this 800 sq foot condo for $500k.
But there is only one like that, so I bet something is wrong with it.

355 W Deloney Ave APT D-9, Jackson, WY 83001 | Zillow

Zestimate® Home Value

www.zillow.com

 

[Toshi]

Took the golf-cart car to Mt. Princeton hot springs yesterday. Dinner/tourist crawl in Salida afterwards provided a 2-hour level 2/63 mile charging opportunity at town hall. Crawled into the garage at home with 11% battery remaining. Wouldn't go so far as to say I had developed "range anxiety", but I sure was working on a case of "range concern" given that the guess-o-meter never dropped below the number that google maps was giving me to the house, but a couple big hills by Fort Carson brought the numbers uncomfortably close a couple times.

I've been using A Better Route Planner to check out our "big trips" before we leave, and it's been pretty close so far. Actual charge/miles remaining never varied more than 1% from ABRP's figures. That's close enough for to be even more comfortable planning out bigger trips in teh golf-cart.

Level 3 DCFC at 100+ kW would have cured that anxiety.

On that note, is anyone building new CHAdeMO chargers? Are some of the Electrify America units dual head CCS/CHAdeMO?

 

[Pesqueeb]

Level 3 DCFC at 100+ kW would have cured that anxiety.

On that note, is anyone building new CHAdeMO chargers? Are some of the Electrify America units dual head CCS/CHAdeMO?

There is something of a dearth of Level 3's in that part of CO. There is one in BV and that's about it unless one goes over the hill to Delta. I could have hit the one in BV but it was kind of out of the way and ABRP said I didn't need it, though ABRP did want me to hit the Level 3 at SCS Nissan for all of 7 minutes on the way home. I opted just to plug in at the level 2 in Salida while we fucked off instead. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose.

I'd have to look but I seem to recall reading something a week or two back about Nissan teaming up with someone to install a couple hundred more chargers around the country. All the Super Walmarts are supposed to be getting Level 3's as well, according to my Walmart employed neighbor. EVgo has a bunch of CHAdeMO's around. Actually the only level 3 I've used so far was an EVgo CHAdeMO at the local REI about a week after I bought the car, just to see if I could work it. I don't believe I've ever actually seen an Electrify America charger but it is my understanding that they do have a compatible plug.

 

[Toshi]

Two car-related thoughts:

1) I realized that my dissatisfaction with the Land Cruiser's pep isn't so much with its speed, per se, but rather with the interaction of its cruise control, powerband, gearing, and transmission calibration.

As it sits on 33"s with stock gearing then the cruise sees the speed drop a bit in 5th on a grade and then shifts down to 4th. Then it's impatient and quickly shifts again to 3rd, then overshooting the set speed. Then back down to 4th, and a few seconds later, 5th.

This behavior was certainly made worse by the taller tires.

But changing my behavior addresses this nicely. If I cancel cruise before substantial grades that I know will provoke this behavior then I can coax it up in 5th with losing a bit of speed, or manually kick down to 4th and then modulate the throttle/have patience so it doesn't rev like mad in 3rd (which shouldn't really be necessary while in the foothills on I-70).

2) As I posted in this thread a few weeks ago, my wife mentioned she really likes the powertrain and dashboard layout of the 3 and thus might want a Y. After teasing out this thought with her a bit more (while driving to and from the airport to let a sleeping baby sleep a bit more) she wants to keep her PacHy until something comes out that is:

- all electric
- AWD
- of equivalent size/ease of kid loading/unloading as her minivan

The Y would not be what meets the third requirement. The Mercedes looks to be Euro-only. That leaves the VW ID Buzz and Chrysler Portal as her potential future electric minivans, so we shall wait until those come to market.

 

[Toshi]

I don't believe I've ever actually seen an Electrify America charger but it is my understanding that they do have a compatible plug.

Ah, so you are correct:

Locate a public EV charger | Electrify America

Learn about our U.S. electric vehicle (EV) charging network, located along routes from coast to coast. Find the Electrify America station closest to you.

www.electrifyamerica.com

Caveat is that CHAdeMO in their hands tops out at 50 kW (still better than 6.6 or 10 kW), whereas their CCS installations will be 150 kW with some 350 kW ones along highway corridors for future-proofness. (Compare to big battery Model 3s charging at 250 kW on v3 Superchargers.)

 

[Pesqueeb]

I will say the CHAdeMO charging standard was/is one of my biggest worries about the Leaf, but I decided the chances of me keeping the car more than 10 years were so small I decided not to worry about it, given how the tech is changing so rapidly.

When the wifes car comes up for replacement, that may be a totally different story.

 

[Toshi]

She has the CX-5, right? Mazda is supposed to be coming out with a BEV slotted between the CX-3 and CX-5, iirc:

Mazda's first electric car spotted testing, looks like a CX-5

Mazda is preparing to launch its first electric car, and it looks like we have the first images of the...

electrek.co

 

[Pesqueeb]

I don't believe I've ever actually seen an Electrify America charger

I downloaded the EA app. There is ONE charger, in Fountain, explaining why I've never actually seen one.

She has the CX-5, right? Mazda is supposed to be coming out with a BEV slotted between the CX-3 and CX-5, iirc:

Mazda's first electric car spotted testing, looks like a CX-5

Mazda is preparing to launch its first electric car, and it looks like we have the first images of the...

electrek.co

Yes, and when I mentioned the possibility of an electric version she was intrigued. We shall see how the final production version pans out. She was pretty excited about the new VW bus......

 

[Toshi]

I downloaded the EA app. There is ONE charger, in Fountain, explaining why I've never actually seen one.

It should help you out for road trips to Denver, though. Englewood, Littleton, Lakewood, each with 1 CHAdeMO port (!).

Or you could grab a meal at my house and charge at our level 2 EVSE in the garage. It's 40A, and although it's awfully hard to find it looks like your Leaf Plus has an 11 kW onboard charger, so our EVSE would nearly max that out.

 

[Toshi]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/2019/08/23/how-climate-change-is-affecting-quality-life-italian-alps/

Climate change in Val D’Aosta means a shorter snow season. From 1960 to 2017, the Alpine snow season [became] 38 days shorter on average, starting 12 days later and closing 26 days earlier. The 2015 to 2016 winter season was the warmest on record, with the French Alps [receiving] only 20 percent the normal snowfall. This year in Val D’Aosta, there was almost no snow at all in February.

 

[Toshi]

24 hours down.

114 to go until lunch on Saturday. I shall eat some steak then, and then we are going for tapas before seeing The Matrix re-release that night.

 

[SkaredShtles]

 

[6thElement]

You should probably try to avoid scurvy before the weekend too.

 

[Toshi]

You should probably try to avoid scurvy before the weekend too.

Taking vitamin C during a fast is actually no good (not that I'd get scurvy without months at sea and a deficient diet to begin with in citrus-free olde England). The antioxidant effects screw with what the fast is supposed to do, which is to provide a stress on the body a la exercise.

 

[Toshi]

I have an abstract deadline of Friday coming up, and only got my hands on the relevant underlying data today. So I had to go through 100 charts on the electronic medical record to get pathology data, then quickly don my Matlab and then Excel coding hats to gin up some stats.

(We had an excellent statistician on the project that would have done this for me, but she was transferred to another research group and it is as of yet unclear whether my grant funding that covered a portion of her time still buys said time. Gah. Therefore I am the stats person given the timeline.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is that I am suitably awake at the 29.5 hours fasted point, and my thinking appears to be clear. Either that or I just created a bunch of crap analysis that my co-authors will call me out on tomorrow.

 

[Toshi]

Now at 46 hours into my 138ish hour fast. I am feeling fairly wired. Very mild headache. Mild hunger that has come and gone during the day, nothing too bad at all.

Today I drove in because I had a 7 AM conference and didn't want to get in earlier yet and change from riding clothes. Tomorrow I will likely drive in again because I have an 8:15 AM interview, and am working 8 AM-10 PM. (I try not to schedule these long days but someone else needed to switch working days so I obliged.)

 

[Toshi]

U.S. to test mirrorless, camera-based systems in autos

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to test how drivers could use cameras to replace traditional rearview mirrors in automobiles, a technology already allowed in other countries, the agency said on Tuesday.

www.reuters.com

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to test how drivers could use cameras to replace traditional rearview mirrors in automobiles, a technology already allowed in other countries, the agency said on Tuesday.

Approve.

 

[SkaredShtles]

U.S. to test mirrorless, camera-based systems in autos

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration plans to test how drivers could use cameras to replace traditional rearview mirrors in automobiles, a technology already allowed in other countries, the agency said on Tuesday.

www.reuters.com

Approve.

They sure as FUCK are more likely to look at their LCD display than they are to look in their rearview mirror, so hopefully this will help. But I doubt it.

 

[Toshi]

Some of you may be wondering whether I'll ditch the e-bike if I unfatten myself sufficiently. (Goal weight is 190-200 lbs--recall that my lean mass is 175 lbs, as underneath the hydrodynamic fat layer I am indeed built like a Siberian cage wrestler.)

No one? Well I'll answer it anyway: No. I shall be keeping the e-bike, because it makes the experience of riding better, IMO. More downhill time as compared to overall time on the seat.

I will likely rent some acoustic bikes here and there for trail days where the moped is verboten, like Lenawee and possibly Floyd Hill (still awaiting email confirmation from the Clear Creek County Open Space administrator re legality). I wouldn't ride such a steed enough in comparison with the e-bike to make it worthwhile to buy.

If/when I hit 200, I also will allow myself to seriously look into alternative e-infused commute-quickening things, with an idea of staying under the radar for use on the Sand Creek Greenway. No sense in a motorcycle proper without lanesplitting, as I've posted before.

 

[Nick]

acoustic bikes

 

[SkaredShtles]

<snip>

I will likely rent some acoustic bikes here and there for trail days where the moped is verboten, like Lenawee

Don't forget Kenosha/Georgia Pass to Jefferson Creek! Oh - and Buffalo Creek. And Searle Pass. And Cataract Ridge. And Miner's Creek. And Bowman's->Two Elks. And Meadow Mountain. And Lee's Way Down. And Pauly's Plunge. And 401. And 403. And Doctor Park. And Starvation Creek. And pretty much everything in Steamboat.

 

[6thElement]

I told him to aim for a ride from Kenosha and back down West Jefferson. Like Mountain Lion, only betterer.

 

[6thElement]

Searle Pass. And Cataract Ridge

Great, now you've made me hungry for some Searle Pass and Cataract Ridge which is still on my to-do list.