Ghost towns, fake developments, unprofitable expensive railways, millions of home owners defrauded out of their mortgages, millions more unable to access funds in their banks. Rising labor costs inside China leading to outsourcing of labor, further weakening the economy.
High oil, diesel, and gasoline prices as energy inputs raising the costs of goods within China. Radical slowing of the rural to urban migration of young Chinese people, who are also the first generation of Chinese people to throw in the towel, tired & feeling hopeless since they correctly believe they will likely never become home owners.
Why even try, it can take 50 years of middle class income to buy a small condo in China, as the real estate prices in China are some of the highest in the world! The cracks begin to show. The odd part about this, China, the manufacturing hub of the world, as noted in "Manufactured Landscapes" the documentary film that covers this, also must import petroleum, food & minerals, from America, Austrailia, Europe & South America. For example, the cobalt & lithium used in all the lithium ion batteries made in China, are imported minerals from outside of China.
Globalization reversing as many countries in Europe & elsewhere are looking to improve local production after supply chain interruptions caused by COVID19 caused shut-downs in production at American automakers & chip fabs & the failure of many restaurants & other small business of many kinds. All the stay at home orders & supply chain interruptions caused massive economy changes that illustrated why thin supply chain management, while cost efficient, has no resilience to a supply chain interruption. Critical drugs, food & other important goods were out of stock & unavailable. I remember a time when people were unable to buy toilet paper. I would go to the stores nearby & the shelves were empty. The toilet paper shortage did not affect me personally because I had purchased an entire pallet of boxes of toilet paper in 2018, noting that I was getting %65 off the best retail prices I could find, and used all the extra boxes to insulate our home. We still have some left over from that initial purchase :) One of the main problems most people have with purchasing durable usable goods, is a lack of space to inventory those goods at low cost. Think dish soap, laundry soap, toilet paper, paper towels, water, gasoline, things that have a long shelf life that you regularly consume in the shower or bathroom, like floss.
Years earlier I had been reading books about lifelong human consumption impacts & was in the middle of reducing my monthly overhead costs by changing cellular carriers, changing car insurance providers, modifying my telecom bills & electrical bills with conservation, using less hot water, showering less, driving less, using less electricity any way that I could. We put insulating films on the windows, installed an instant hot water heater & used hot water in active sessions of laundry, dishes & showers such that it was cold off for many days at a time, only using cold water the rest of the time. I switched to all LED lighting & put smart outlet controllers to get rid of phantom power loads.
I was able to reduce our ambient home electrical load so low that PSE the local utility company thought I was cheating the power meter, especially when I turned everything cold off for 2 weeks while Meg & I were traveling in western Europe. PSE then tried to send me a $900 electrical bill for the month, saying their computer figured out with the recently installed digital power meter, that I was using some kind of technology to cheat the power company, which was totally false or not true at all. I explained that we turned off the 200 amp service switch breaker in the utility panels when were were gone for 14 days, and had used every trick they had taught me by sending me LED bulbs & ways to save energy at home information. I was online on social media promoting energy efficiency & selling LED lighting at work.
I even purchased an electric car, a Nissan Leaf and was hypermiling using information I learned about how to drive energy efficiency to improve range in electric vehicles or to improve fuel economy in conventional vehicles, in articles from treehugger.com featuring Wayne Gerdes, explaining how he was able to achieve 30-70% better fuel economy than even the best cast EPA estimates of given automobiles.
Driving slower, smoother & calm, with a predictive safety focus itself a form of hypermiling. Anymore familiar with automobiles knows that jack rabbit hard acceleration increases fuel consumption. The contemporary relevance of fuel consumption relates to the consumer price index of gasoline within the contexts of the inflation reduced value of currency, such that $5/ gallon in America along with food prices that are up 40% of more, means that most American families are being marginalized, sliding from middle class to lower class. All of this while the arrogant selfish found of Amazon.com increased his personal wealth by almost $700 billion. At one point, during 2020, I paid $45 for a 10 lb bag of general purpose flour to bake bread at home, that normally sells for $4-8 depending on grade, organic or not & other factors.
Customers of my business in the construction industry that were purchasing lighting equipment from me, were telling me at this time that a 2x4 that normally sells for about $2-6 were selling for $50; that a sheet of plywood that normally sold for $26 was selling for $125. Graphics cards that originally sold for $400 were selling for more than $1200. A chip shortage caused GM & Ford & other automakers to stop automobile production. Millions of people were forced to work from home, do school on Zoom phone calls. To avoid the massive economy problems created by global COVID19, the Chinese government dumped $900 billion into infrastructure projects, and it worked for a little while. Now there are widespread defaults on loans, junk bonds forming & other signs of a pending internal economy implosion. I mention these in the context of COVID19 because it came from China, the virus that caused COVID19 came from a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China.
I went around telling other people "A lamp that burns to the enjoyment of no one, burns to the detriment of all people, making light pollution & wasting electricity, while also causing the lamp bulbs to burn out faster, which itself makes more waste faster" This can be easily addressed with occupancy sensor switches to control the lights such that if no person detected by the PIR sensor in the switch facing the room, then after a time interval it will automatically switch off the light, lamp, bulb, fan or electrical load. In our current apartment, the bathroom ceiling fan is automatically activated & deactivated by a PIR controller, since the on-off switch connected only turns the lamp in the fan on or off. Many commercial buildings have a PIR light control switch in the public bathrooms, so that if the bathroom not being used, the lights in the bathroom automatically turn off. When I am running extended electroplating operations in my garage, I turn the lights off. Why run the lights if I am not there & do not need to see anything. Lights off manufacturing trending in other businesses too, as they figured out this way of lowering operating costs.
Think like a business & reduce your monthly costs, by being smarter & applying that intelligence to use less electricity, less hot water, less gasoline. I found that I can use less toilet paper to wipe my bum after using the toilet. I found that urinating into larger plastic water bottles allows me to "Not flush" the toilet as much, as I can save up 10 or more urinations, then go one super flush, by emptying the urine bottle into the toilet after I have used it to go #2 which requires a flush. Thus I can get the toilet to consume 80% or better less water, by just peeing into a high capacity plastic bottle, that I keep with me at all times, in my backpack, in my car, in rooms where I am working. I was refreshed to learn that scientists working at the South Pole research station also urinate into high capacity plastic bottles for the same reasoning.
One way that you can reduce energy at home, run your laundry loads on warm instead of hot, or cool instead of warm, or cold instead of cool. You can do a "Submarine shower", get a nice warm rinse off then turn off the water. Soap up while the water is off, your hair, your whole body. Then, now all soapy, careful to keep soap out of your eyes (I do this step with my eyes closed, its a good challenge that improve balance & coordination, requires a little practice), turn the warm or hot water back on & rinse the soap off, then turn the water off again. This can slash hot water use for a shower by 90% or more! If you have an electric hot water heater, this will save a lot of electricity & reduce your monthly electrical utility bill a noticeable amount if you also switch to not showering every day. I shower every other day or every third day & noticed that my skin dries out less & stays more moisturized naturally, the major cost that I develop a ripe onion smell that my wife dislikes & that I am not a fan of either, though that depends on what I have been eating recently.
Up early today, at 4:30am, excited to donate a unit of my O+ blood to BloodWorks Northwest, so that it can help people undergoing cancer treatments, who have surgery, who need blood for other reasons in medical emergencies to treat diseases that affect people, or to help people who have been in automobile accidents. I really like donating blood because doing so every 7 weeks helps to lower by blood pressure, significantly since I have a history of hypertension.
I do well staying clam, focusing on being peaceful, breathing deeply & shifting my focus to being thankful & appreciative, loving & kind. I try to focus on appreciating life, since life is precious, special & ephemeral. We are all running out of time, and I endeavor to become a better person as I get older. I want to learn how to help other people more; how to be less selfish & less self centered. I want to improve my thinking, skills & knowledge so that I can do more with less effort, working smarter since the human body has physical limitations.
I wish to become stronger & am doing so with weight training. I wish to improve my endurance and doing so with cardio training. I want to learn new skills so I do so online & then create new hobbies & projects to utilize what I learned. Its fun to fail & figure out why & then do it amazingly. I really like doing something correct on the first try & often research more before starting something new so that I know the tips & tricks of how to execute what I am doing.
Lately I have been trying more off the cuff experiments, where I try something different & see how it works, not worried about messing up, knowing that I can start over again. Nothing to be wasteful, but to learn more like I did as a child. Having that youthful enthusiasm, hopefulness, motivation, energy, and "that's cool" attitude of "I can do anything I focus on" mindset really helps me to overcome challenges.
The economy goes up & down, just like people when they go to sleep & then wake up & get going for the day. Everything cycling between cooler & warmer & back again. The body itself has all sorts of feedback loops in biorhythms to regulate breathing rates, heart rate, body temperature, blood sugar & other metabolic performance aspects that influence the way the brain & other organs work to sustain life inside the human body; to maintain homeostasis or balance of the bodies systems in a harmony that enables life to continually operate in a human for around 100 years, though major inroads into age reversal & genetic reprogramming at happening right now, such that products & services to reverse your biological age are in the commercialization pipeline to become widely available at premium prices within about 5 years. Today, you can take Metformin & NMN to reverse your biological age or at least to slow down aging! Avoid sugar, alcohol, smoking & other sources of oxidative stress.
Try to stay calm & let go of things that are stressing you out. You have made it this far, so keep going. Think of all the times in the past that you got uptight & upset, was it worth even remembering? If not, then calm down & embrace a strong peacefulness, being effective & efficient with a cool head, being level headed, patient, kind, honest, smart, sincere, treating other people with dignity & respect; forgiving yourself of failure & forgiving other people with they wrong you in any way. Forgiveness itself very liberating and healing!
The Sun does not go up and down but the Earth is rotating so that it can seem like that before learning about astronomy & how the Sun, Moon & Earth are orbiting, as roughly spherically shaped celestial objects with local relevance to the biosphere of Earth & human populations given the radical effects on weather, climate & many other aspects of society that the Sun's energy has through agriculture & energy, climate change, weather, natural hazards & disasters, flooding or drought, such that the Moon influences tides & the Sun's solar energy output influences global warming & heat energy in Earth's water cycle & other aspects of climate and weather that are attenuated by human carbon emissions and the main reason why broad global decarbonization so important to reduce air pollution to improve public health & lower healthcare costs!
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