Yup. We also overestimate how much range we need. Average American driver drives 60km a day. The average Tesla has >500km range, meaning you need to charge fewer than once every 8 days.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
Tesla with lowest range has 430km, highest range 650. Let's average it to 500km.
The average American driver drives 60km per day. In other words you need to charge less than every 8 days.
You can charge to 80% in about 20-30 minutes.
In other words if you find yourself near a charge (easy) for 20-30 minutes a week (easy), then on average there is no range issue.
You're either in a rural area in a single-family home with home charging, or in low-density urban area with single family home charging, or in a dense urban area with lots of public charging. Very few sit outside these three categories that don't enable them home charging or 20-30 minutes a week public charging.
And that's only going one direction. The number of fastchargers 10x'd in ten years, the range of the model S grew by 50% in the last 15 years, the charging speeds roughly tripled. Sufficient charging infrastructure seems like a solved problem, resolving it is a matter of a mere operational roll-out everywhere rather than a political/technical/economical challenge, a matter of when, not if, and a matter of increasingly smaller pockets of the country that are yet to be fully connected. (whether it's 1% or some other small percentage, range shouldn't be a driving factor for tesla sales anymore).
Heatpumps are a proven technology, have been in use for more than a hundred years, and are one of the most efficient (and thereby cost-effective) ways to manage heat.
They're also technically simpler and have fewer components that can wear out. And they're a single system that works both for cooling and heating, rather than needing multiple system investments.
The majority of experts believe that its the future technology stack to manage heat, not a gimmick at all.
That having been said, always start with good insulation first.
In my house I only run LED lighting and an occasional oven, some phones and laptops, a cycling fridge and two weekly wash cycles, in other words, virtually no electricity. I'm at like 2 kWh per day.
The ~45 kWh a day for this family is gigantic compared to mine, like >20 of my homes in one.
But I don't have an electric car, nor electric heating or cooling, nor an electric stove.
If you have say a standard electric car like a Peugeot 208 which uses 15 kWh per 100km, and you both drive one hour (say 60km) to work and back, five days a week, that's already 25 kWh per day.
My heating bill (gas, europe) is an order of magnitude of my electric bill. Even if I'd electrify it (cheaper), it'd likely be an additional 10 kWh per day.
If you have slightly more fancy lifestyle (they run home-servers and a hottub for example), you can easily get to 45 kWh.
I think the fair comparison is to look at a household total energy expenditure (energy & $). My household has a low electrical share, theirs has an almost exclusive electrical share.
I ran my power bill for a small single family home through chatGPT and it was interesting. Cold winters/hot summers, electric stove, air conditioning during summers, and nothing else out of the ordinary that uses power.
- Base electricity: 17 kWh/day (10 in months without AC)
- Heating (currently gas): 33 kWh/day
- Heating (if I switched to heat pump with COP 3): 10 kWh/day
- EV charging at 10k miles/yr: 9 kWh/day
Total if I was fully electrified: 36 kWh/day, or 13 MWh/yr
Is it priceless? I literally wouldn't pay more than $200 to have electricity for a day while the whole neighborhood doesn't. Anything more and I'd prefer to just keep the money in my pocket to be honest.
In my country I've never had to deal with more than 15 minutes, twice in my life. In other countries its sometimes been a day but really I just go on with my life.
Tldr; their full costs of the system are returned in 11 years.
Whether that's good depends on your perspective and assumptions, you can take a look at opportunity costs.
Imagine you have 100k for say 30 years, and you have three choices:
1. put it in a UK government bond at 4.4% -> 100 * 1.044^30 = 363k
2. put it in the S&P500 (dividend reinvested) at nominal 10% rate -> 1.7 million
3. buy a system that can't be made liquid after 30 years, but returns 11k flat per year = 330k.
1 is very safe and virtually guaranteed. 2 is considered less safe, but over 30 years broad based stock indexes are far less risky than short-term stock investing.
3 is perhaps the most difficult to make assumptions, as its house-tied and operational. Switch houses for any personal reasons, and you'll not be able to fully make your investment liquid and recuperate it. Blow an inverter, see panels degrade and replacement costs must be factored in. This pushes down the final cash position of 330k.
We could be generous and say that the 11k flat savings will increase, as electricity prices rise. Prices grew by 5% yearly in the UK, under that rate so the 11k savings today would grow to 47k annual savings in year 30, and total savings over 30 years would be 870k, pushing up the final cash position, but still not getting close to a long-term stock index investment.
But even that's somewhat generous for two reasons: one is that the 5% inflation was unnaturally high due to the EU's energy crisis from the Russian invasion, and not necessarily indicative of the next 30 years. Various countries in the EU are also curtailing renewable production because there's too much of it (precisely during the moments solar systems were making their biggest profits < 2020, you since see curtailment growing), and with more storage coming online rapidly the profits from their battery system are expected to decline, not increase. -- generally speaking, solar energy producers were more profitable a few years ago, and are becoming less and less profitable over time as competition from cheap panels undercuts them. Many countries have begun to cut the reward from exporting back to the grid from the retail prices of €0.30 to the puny wholesale prices of €0.05 and all countries are expected to go down this road eventually.
On the other hand, AI seems likely to push electricity prices higher for a long time... but it's the newest and biggest question mark compared to the other assumptions we've made above.
Wdym you were eating healthy for a decade and still obese? How does that work. A diet where you eat to obesity isn't healthy.
And how did surpressing your hunger via GLP-1 drugs (a pure change to a more healthy diet for you) lead to big changes, if you apparently already had such a healthy diet.
Seems to me your diet was unhealthy for a decade and now isn't.
Think of it this way - once you're in a state of obesity, resolving that situation is quite difficult. Eating healthy may not be enough, particularly if there are other metabolic issues going on.
The imbalance of fat to muscle leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance gets in the way of weight loss. After a long time of trying other means, I decided to directly tackle the insulin resistance problem. And it's been the only thing that's worked.
Agreed, but thermodynamics (calorie in/out) still holds. If you actually eat healthy (say 2500 calories), you will lose weight if you're obese and need >3000 to maintain weight, period.
Sustaining that healthy diet is harder insulin resistance, agreed!
But you said you ate healthy for a decade. To me that's not eating obesity-maintenance level amounts of otherwise healthy foods, but rather eating healthy foods at a normal (say 2500 kcal daily) amount.
In other words, under your statement the behavioral impact of insulin resistance was already overcome, you were eating properly, and still didn't lose weight. And that's just not conform the science, which states that you lose weight even with high insulin resistance, as long as you're eating healthy (i.e. in a caloric deficit vis-a-vis obesity level maintenance).
In excess or a normal body's caloric need, not in excess of what you need to maintain your current weight. The latter would lead to infinite growth.
Once you're 140kg, a sedentary lifestyle requires you to take something like 800 more calories as the same person with the same lifestyle at 70kg, to each maintain your weight.
So excess eating of 500 calories over what a normal bodyweight (say 70kg) needs to maintain, leads to fat people (say 110kg) who at some point stop gaining weight and stay at that fat level (of say 110kg).
To be honest I don't even have a single fat friend, and I'm not picking my friends on looks. I couldn't imagine anywhere close to 1/6 taking this medication.
No this is the most repeated and most incorrect thing in the whole debate about food.
More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed.
Staples like legumes and rice don't cost much and are very nutritious. And supplementing with moderate amounts of seasonal fruits and vegetables and moderate animal protein is still very affordable and healthy.
A kilo of (dry) legumes is about $3.50, about 3500 calories (50% more than an average human needs per day), delivers >200 grams of protein, > 100 grams of fiber, some healthy fats and enough carbs to power you and a good set of vitamins.
Hell if you get down to it, vitamin pills to supplement any deficiencies is a budgetary rounding error.
Compare that to either Doritos and you don't get anywhere close. Doritos cost >$10 per kilo, and cost >$100 per kilo of protein, has low fiber, high fat, high salt. It's not nutritious, actively harmful and actually extremely expensive to fuel the body this way.
And it makes sense: processing ingredients leads to a more expensive product than the base ingredients. This is true in every economic sector. Only uniquely, in the food sector ultra-processing doesn't only lead to higher prices for the customer (the reason companies do it in the first place) but also less healthy outcomes.
Doritos are made of corn and vegetable oil. The prices of these ingredients are orders of magnitude lower than the end-product. Corn is like 30 cents per kilo, oil about $1.50. If you want the same nutrients without processing like frying etc, you can eat literal orders of magnitude cheaper.
> More than a billion asians eat nutritious, cheap and calorie-balanced meals every day, unprocessed. [...] rice
This is one of those reasons that the term 'processed' food is stupid. White rice is a very processed food - what is the removal of the bran and germ but processing? And many other 'processed' foods undergo processing with the same sort of ramifications for health.
Legumes are also not complete proteins in the majority of cases - soy is a significant exception here. Soy has a PDCAAS of 1, the same as whey, but lentils range from .5 to .7, many beans are around .6, etc., and this can end up meaning your 200g of protein ends up being quite different in impact to many of your body's uses for protein than someone else's 200g of protein.
PDCAAS is dumb when looking at multiple foods. E.g., beans and rice, when consumed together, are like, 0.99, depending on the ratio. That is, the sum is greater than the parts.
Adding rice might get you close to that for the amount of rice you eat, but 1 cup of beans will get you 16g of protein and 1 cup of rice will get you 4g of protein.
So a chunk of your protein intake would still be incomplete. It's not like the ratios are perfect so that a cup of each gets you 20g of PDCAAS 1.0 protein. Doing some quick napkin math looking at the AA makeup and protein digestibility of the two, it's like 14g equivalent of PDCAAS 1.0 protein.
~25% is a pretty significant gap if you're trying to hit optimal levels for things like muscle growth, etc.
From what you just wrote, it appears you misunderstood what I said. Just to be clear:
Red kidney beans (50g): PDCAAS = 0.88, Protein = 11.25g
Basmati rice (50g): PDCAAS = 0.7, Protein = 4.5g
Red beans + rice (50g, 50g): PDCAAS = 1.0, Protein = 15.75g
Milk (500g..): PDCAAS = 1.0, Protein = 15.5g
So, from a protein perspective (according to PDCAAS), 500g of milk will give you the same amount of usable protein as the 100g rice and beans meal. There is nothing left on the table.
So, just eating kidney beans, PDCAAS would say that you aren't really getting the full benefit of the "protein on the label". But once you combine it with rice, you are getting the full benefit (according to PDCAAS).
You can't look at the digestibility of the two foods in isolation to make the calculations.
As long as you are eating a varied diet, PDCAAS is pretty pointless. If you have an eating disorder, or food scarcity issues, then it might become important.
From a US perspective at least, you are right but also wrong. Like yes, it's cheaper to buy raw potatoes and dried beans and cook healthy food vs. ultra-processed "junk food." However, when most people attempt to eat healthy they do not opt for dried beans and potatoes every day. There is a huge time cost to preparing those ingredients.
And anecdotally, when I am eating healthier I am opting for a larger range of ingredients. Probably to keep my mouth interested as I am not getting the food that's been engineered to be perfect to my palate. While potatoes and beans are in my diet, I am also opting for a lot of vegetables that are more expensive, paying more for fresh herbs and interesting spices. I am almost always buying canned beans, sauces, and other foods with some processing to speed up prep time.
I think your analysis suffers from comparing processed food engineered to taste great to the blandest, driest raw ingredients. Factoring in the time and secondary ingredients to make those raw ingredients taste great adds a lot of cost. Add in the cost of more varied ingredients bc very few people want to eat beans, potatoes, rice, and bland chicken every day. And further, you're missing the savings processed foods add by being shelf stable. They can sit on a shelf or in a freezer for months or years vs. fresh produce with a much shorter lifespan.
So yes you can eat very cheap and very healthy, the vast majority of people will loathe that life over time. You can eat kind of cheap, very healthy, with a limited number of ingredients and have things taste great if you have a LOT of time to devote to cooking, this will still not satisfy many.
I just want to clarify that I'm obviously not suggesting to eat 3500 calories of beans daily, and that's it. Just like I did not straw-man OP by claiming he was arguing that we should live on 100% doritos.
I just made a simple comparison between two food types, on the one had the example OP gave (doritos), and on the other hand the most common staple foods eaten in the world, like grains and legumes.
Again if I have to repeat that, the most common staple foods in the world.
That I hope does enough to dissuade you from making the argument that eating these ingredients is a ridiculous endeavor. It's actually what the majority of healthy humans eat on this planet for centuries, the standard, the norm.
It's for anyone obese to figure out why they don't apply this norm.
Take legumes for example, cooked as a Daal it is eaten by more than a billion people all the time. 20 to 30 different types of pulses are cooked, and hundreds of recipies exist. If you walk into your local Indian restaurant, you'll experience a wide range of intense flavors. To say these are the blandest ingredients is incorrect, virtually everyone would prefer to eat such food daily compared to doritos for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The idea that ultra-processed foods are a staple in my diet, is insanity. I'd be disgusted. I love ultra-processed foods as an occasional snack, not as a diet. My diet is healthy, affordable and tasty. Google and youtube are full of examples of affordable, tasty meals.
Minimal processing is completely fine by the way. There's little wrong with a good canned bean for example, great shelf life, minimal salt, maximal convenience, good nutrition, good price. Thrown into a salad with a simple dressing of olive oil and lemon juice, with some cut vegetables, gives a complete meal. Not more expensive than doritos, healthy, full of vitamins, calories, low glycemic index, protein, and 'cooking' is a matter of throwing the ingredients in a bowl and mixing, childs' play.
Same with the daals I mentioned, mostly a matter of throwing ingredients into a pot. Cooks itself with no supervision in less than half an hour while you're on your phone. Stores 5 days in the fridge or months in the freezer. Can be a great breakfast or dinner multiple times a week.
There's just tons of these options that are delicious and easy, cheap and quick, enjoyed by billions. Obese people just need better education and mentorship in my opinion. I could never be fat because my parents and environment showed me normal food culture, without it I'd probably be fat. I truly believe in the power of mentorship here, which isn't properly institutionalised or commercialised, which is why so many people lack it.
This is the kind of thing that looks good on paper but then breaks down when you try it.
If you are seriously comparing the attractiveness of “legumes” (what legume and recipe is that?) with the attractiveness of Doritos I don’t know what to tell you.
If you cook something that is nearly as attractive as ultra processed foods, the price skyrockets.
> Processed foods are much cheaper per calorie than "healthy" options.
Attractive is a separate topic. Regardless of budget, for many people a chocolate cake will always be the most attractive food, regardless of cost. Doesn't mean we should have people living on chocolate cake diets.
Eh there was no comparison at all in attractiveness, but purely in price per calorie / nutrition. I don't see the issue in the comparison?
OP said processed foods are cheaper per calorie than healthy, i.e. eating healthy is more expensive and more difficult.
Nothing at all was said about 'processed foods are more tasty, thus eating healthy is more difficulty', so I didn't reply to it.
Then OP provided Doritos as an example. And I countered by showing that the worlds staple foods eaten by billions, non-processed, are much cheaper than eating processed foods like Doritos example OP gave. That's all.
Now as for your point on taste: try eating a nice daal at your local Indian restaurant and tell me you'd rather eat bags of doritos every day for breakfast, lunch or dinner. If you prefer Doritos then I don't know what to tell YOU.
You are SO SO wrong if you think ASIANS are not eating processed garbage slop food too.
Please actually go to east asia, go into their markets, and look on their shelves. They have SO much processed crap. Most Asians will gleefully tell you their love of the worst possible instant noodle (i.e. Mama brand) along with American cheese or other slop on top. Asians have the highest food standards when they want to, but their lows are as low as ours are. They love love LOVE spam for gosh sakes!
Also white rice has terrible macros and is why they have crazy rates of Diabetes despite low obesity rates.
Rural tends to mean space, and space tends to mean you can charge your car at home (that's different for a New York apartment dweller), making a once-in-8-day charge absolutely trivial.
In terms of economics, electric fueling of your car wins per mile.
And rural homes tend to have easy access to home-solar (again, good luck installing solar in a New York apartment rental). Electric cars tie into solar really nicely with a basic smart system, as it lets you charge at off-peak rates at night, or dump excess solar during the day into your car.
And what you've said before, it creates energy-independence, great when remote. Not to mention modern EVs allow bi-directional use of the battery, meaning the car can power your home essentials during an outage.
So I agree, EV is a great idea for rural.
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