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You just have to hustle
Photo: TD Garden, Boston, Feb 2024. I am reading the book “Don’t Trust your Gut” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. I highly recommend it. There are so many great insights and nice stories that are actually helpful to someone who wants to be happy and successful. I paid particular attention on how to make yourself more likely…
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Why should we improve public transit?
Photo: Luxembourg Station. Recently a reported asked me: “How do you make a case that we should spend money on public transportation?” What a great question. It gives me an opportunity to systematically list all the arguments for that. I would put those into three buckets: (1) Economic benefit. There has been much research on…
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Why do we need to fix the T?
Photo: Longwood Station, Brookline, 2023. Recently I was asked if I have any opinions on the announcement that MBTA was shutting down the Green Line in order to fix the “slow zones”. I can think of at least three benefit, and a big negative. Let me state the negative first. If the shutdown is too…
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Should I Buy or Lease a Tesla Part 6: The Saga Continues
Photo: A rainy day in Cambridge, MA, Summer 2022. Last year, I wrote a series of articles about the uncertainty around the decision of buying vs leasing a Tesla model Y. In particular, I cautioned in one of the posts that Tesla cars’ depreciation rates may be better than other brands, but there are still…
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India has the potential to overtake China as the world’s manufacturing hub, even though it may take a while
Photo: Building material in Home Depot, 2022. It was reported in the WSJ today that “China Finally Has a Rival as the World’s Factory Floor“. While some of the claims in the article are a bit ahead of themselves, I largely agree with the central message. To be sure, China is not going away from…
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How has the work-from-home world affected the environment?
Photo: Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, summer 2022. The net impact of work-from-home on the environment is actually quite complex, and depends on a number of factors such as commuting patterns and energy consumption at home and at workplace, both before and after the switch. But let’s first discuss where the potential positive and…
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How do sustainable supply chains improve the continuity of supply and protect the environment?
Photo: Woods in Sherborn, MA, Summer 2023. Recently I was asked by my School’s PR people to reflect on a few questions regarding the relationship between business practices and sustainability. They asked some excellent questions, which prompted me to write something down. Below is the first part. The question is: How do sustainable supply chains…
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Tesla’s ticking time bomb?
It was reported by WSJ that Tesla is halting its production at its plant in China. There are multiple reasons, according to the report, but one of the main reason was due to the waves of covid infections that have been hitting its workers and suppliers in China. This incident brings forth a more concerning…
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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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