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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Yup, they deliberately ran it into the ground. They took out loans against Kmart to buy Sears and sold Sears and Kmart properties off to give themselves money via stock buybacks.

    And what’s worse, because it worked, you can see similar actions happening to other major retail outlets. Target, in particular, seems to be following directly in the footsteps of Kmart.










  • Power to weight doesn’t matter as we are talking about using a solar panel instead of a roof. There’s no added weight. The car will already have inbuilt inverters so the only real weight add is the wiring. But also, this is a postal vehicle which will have large swings in weight anyways. A couple of extra pounds doesn’t make a difference here.

    Further, this isn’t a car, which has a much smaller surface area. These things have about 10 square meters of flat roof. That’s a peak output of ~3kW. (realistically, probably closer to 1.5kW average throughout a day) which translates into 12kWh of charge in any given day. Roughly 10% of the battery capacity could be restored daily.

    For large vehicles, like delivery vehicles and busses, the math on making the roof out solar panels instead of steel changes.


  • The one thing I wish they did with these things is make the roof out of solar panels.

    These things are going to spend most days sitting outside in direct sunlight. They have nice big flat roofs which makes them pretty perfect to throw on solar panels. You likely would not need much charge infrastructure for the new vehicles and you’d have cut the ownership cost down even more significantly (especially in states with high electrical rates).

    Regardless, these things are a no-brainer even without solar on all the vehicles. These are low speed vehicles with dedicated routes and loads of stop/go action. There’s not a more clear place to use an EV.





  • You know what would really help small businesses, like a lot? Public health insurance (covering things like vision and dental). A huge part of the cost of doing business is benefits for employees. Well, with public health insurance that’s a huge budget item that suddenly small businesses don’t have to pay.

    Want to make it better? Expand social security to be something you could live off of. Boom, now you as a small business owner don’t need benefits like 401ks. Your employees will be well taken care of by a government ran pension.

    Want to go a step further? Expand public housing, public transport, and food security programs. Now all the sudden a business doesn’t need to pay top dollar because the cost of living for everyone has been significantly decreased. You can easily find low wage workers and hire crews of them because the added income for everyone is more of a bonus rather than a necessity.

    What else could you do? Reduce the full time work week from 40 hours to 30 hours. For a small business, it means you can actually focus on having your employees doing useful work rather than having them hang around an extra 10 hours a week doing nothing. For the employees, now they have spare time on their hands which means more opportunities to interact with the community and small businesses.

    By taking care of the basic needs of the population you give the population a lot of spare capital and time. All of which can stimulate the economy to new heights.




  • The prime Republican demographic is rich white christian men.

    Voters that don’t provide proof of citizenship are very likely to be poor. It’s a hoop to jump through that’s a lot harder when you don’t have money, time, and a car.

    I’ll also point out that it’s completely unnecessary as the great state of AZ has all the resources they’d need to go name by name and verify that these people are indeed citizens. Making them provide it during registration is a filler for the poor.

    Much like literacy tests were there to filter out black people.