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China’s recent covid debacle reveals incompetent and factious management
As of the Christmas Day of 2022, some 250 million people in China are estimated to have caught the Covid virus within a short period of 20 days (according to FT). I am not political scientist, so I will not say anything on the political side of things. Instead, I would like to talk about…
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Top 10 Bio-pharmaceutical Regions in the US by Numbers
The recent COVID-19 pandemic is a testament how incredibly important our biopharmaceutical industry is. It was able to produce vaccines in a record amount of time that saved million of lives. In the past decades, there have been a surge of innovation (and investment) in the biopharmaceutical industry in the US. To put it into…
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Electric airplane makes sense for one simple reason
It was in the news that an all-electric passenger plane called “Alice” made by Eviation completed its first test flight: Before you get too excited (or throw tomatoes at it, depending on which side you are on), Alice is designed to fly a mere 150-250 miles – As a reference, 200 miles is the distance…
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EV Charging Networks: The Top 8
In the EV book that I co-wrote and co-edited (with Peter Fox-Penner and David Jermain) in 2019, we documented the status of EV charging infrastructure in cities around the world such as Los Angeles, Oslo, and Beijing. Since then, EV adoption has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. In this post, I intend to…
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EV prices 2022 (I): The Distribution
How much more expensive are electric cars these days, compared to gasoline cars? Most articles are this topic compare the averages, and some look at the box plots. But I would argue that the best way to compare is to look at the entire statistical distribution of the two. I looked around on the Internet,…
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Choosing the right fuel (III): Whose perspective?
In this post, I will try to flesh out the perspective of a shipping company whose goal is to reduce its carbon footprint. Let us say there a shipping company that owns and operates deep sea bulk carriers. The following areas are of concern, from the greatest to the least: Fuel-related cost (FC): purchase, distribution,…
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Choosing the right fuel (II): Total cost
We have discussed the cost of using different types of fuel. Now let’s step back and talk about what are the total cost involved in marine shipping. For marine shipping, the following costs are relevant: Fuel cost, including initial purchase, energy conversion, distribution, operations and maintenance cost. Ship building/retrofit cost: How much does it cost…
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Choosing the right fuel (I): fuel and carbon cost
This is a series of post on my work in the field of green marine fuel. First of all, for marine companies that are considering switching greener fuel, choosing the right marine fuel is no easy task. To me, there are two major hurdles. First, there are many possible pathways. Here is a partial list:…
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Steps to calculate the carbon footprint of a supply chain
The steps of calculating the carbon footprint of a supply chain is straightforward: 1- You need to map out your supply chain. This also defines the boundary of your calculation. 2- Collect activity data at each level of your supply chain. For example, an oil company may start at the exploration and drilling stage, and…
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EV Fast Charging in the US is becoming better but still has a long way to go
Recently I experienced myself how hard/easy it was to fast charge an EV while on the road. To be specific, I drove a Nissan Leaf, and that excludes the Tesla network which to me is the most accessible. The Nissan Leaf uses the ChAdeMo charger, and had a partnership with the EVgo network, which was…
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The Multiplier Effect of Manufacturing: Where Jobs Come From
These days whenever we talk about manufacturing, the number 1 thing that came to people’s mind is that it is shrinking. And that it is a small pie of an economy. The truth is that according to the US government definition of manufacturing, it has been been sitting steady at around 12% of Real GDP…
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How large is the supply chain economy? The answer may surprise you
Recently I have been working on a book about the “supplychainification” of economies around the world – If you have never heard about the word “supplychainification”, no worry. I have not either. My collaborators and I invented it, and I will explain it in a separate article. In here, I answer a even simpler (but…
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So Ford Wants to Do Away with its Dealers…
According to the Detroit Free Press, Jim Farley, the current Ford CEO, said that he wants to sell its EVs online rather than through its dealerships. Apparently, he was upset at the markups added by many of its dealers on its ever-so-popular electric F-150 Lightning that offended many customers. For example, one of the dealers…
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How much do you pay charging an EV on a monthly basis?
I always knew it is a bit cheaper to drive an EV as opposed to a gasoline car (not the owning part, which deserve a separate calculation, but just the day-to-day cost of using it) in New England where I live, but I never bothered to quantify that saving. That is, until today. As you…
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Excel Trick: Import Data From a Picture!
Have you ever looked at a table in a PDF file (or a picture) and wanted to import it into Excel? This video tells you how! As shown in the short video, this function is not perfect – but its usefulness far exceeds its imperfections! You may still need to edit the imported table a…
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EV in 2022 and Beyond: More Good News, but Uncertainties Too
Recently I was asked to reflect a little on the recent EV movement, so I dug a bit on the latest statistics. 2022 is not over yet, so the latest number we have is from 2021. I was encouraged to find that while everyone was focusing on the COVID in 2021, EV sales actually nearly…
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What will happen to Zoom?
This is just a reflection of evaluating the long-term prospect of a company. As we all know, Zoom has been a huge successful company, boosted by the good timing of the covid pandemic. It has an easy-to-use video communication product with good overall quality. Its revenues has been growing strongly, even after the peak of…
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If Facebook (Meta) disappeared 3 years from today (in 2025), I will not be surprised
Warren Buffet famously said that “Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future.” So, do not treat this as a forecast. Just treat me as a bad forecaster. But really, I am trying to apply a theory about clockspeed into this specific case. Many years ago…
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Clustered bar chart and stacked barcharts, switch rows/columns, overlap and customize shapes
Bar charts are one of the most frequently used charts. To use them effectively to generate on-the-point graphs that deliver exactly the right message, however, requires some deeper understanding as well as a few tricks to make them more appealing. I made a quick video that talks about: 1- The basic difference between clustered bar…
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Are we still ignoring data in making covid-related decisions?
From the early days of Covid, I have been questioning the wisdom of lockdown. In a post I wrote in December 2020, I said the following: “For one, I question the wisdom of economy-wide lockdown. […] the majority of the labor force (people under 45) have a lower mortality risk (less than 5%). Because many…
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