I'm that hoarder, and granted, not in terminal stage, but enough to severely impact my quality of life. And I disagree, I think it would take me two days to clear out the house, but mostly lack the energy and motivation to do it. So no, burning down the house would be way way worse.
If you don't care about the possessions you could remove it quickly. The problem is that when you try to clean it, they want to evaluate every single item for if it should stay or not.
Throwing it all in garbage bags and then in the bin takes much shorter amount of time.
I just recently helped a buddy clean out his dead relatives hoarder house. The only real decisions were "consignment, charity, or dump?" It took us weeks. I'm sure if we threw a ton of money, people, and vehicles at it we could have done it quickly, but that's not your typical scenario.
The problem is having to make an item-by-item decision for thousands of items.
If the decision is just "dump", the problem become easy: you strip the house bare and throw it in a dumpster. There was a hoarder house near me that was cleaned out in a couple days that way - they parked a dumpster in the front yard, hired a couple guys to toss everything in the house in garbage bags and toss all the garbage bags in the dumpster, gutted it down to the studs, remodeled it, and sold it.
The trouble is it's hard to get the hoarder to agree to do that, that's part of the disorder over valuing items that are junk, and also depends on the severity of the hoard. Sometimes the intervention can happen before it's all rotted to junk and there is legitimately items worth selling or keeping in the mess and the person just needs help letting go of the volume of random crap.
I would not be surprised if they would be money ahead hiring someone to sort through all the "junk" and make the decisions. There likely are a lot of things that have value in the mix that got sent to the dump.
You don't need to throw money at people. When we first moved abroad we ended up in this exact situation with quite a lot of belongings that we mostly just wanted to get rid of. We posted on Craig's List (maybe Facebook would be the goto now a days?) and literally within 30 minutes there were people there with professional moving gear clearing with us and then organizing/moving everything out that we didn't want.
They regaled us with a tale of how they just got to the city and were looking forward to being able to furnish/populate their house, but it was obvious that they were just grabbing and selling everything as a career. No harm no foul though, as we just wanted stuff cleared out and it certainly ended up 'in circulation' for folks that could use it.
When time came for my incapacitated-by-stroke father to move after we sold the family house to his new apartment, he did exactly this:
> they want to evaluate every single item
I almost gave up on him and only resumed when he was literally crying for me to come back. Did not regret coming back.
When he died 5 years later, my poor mother needed WEEKS to throw away all the useless shit he had accumulated in his apartment. Then I did regret not being harsher on him, but he was mentally and physically ill.
To anyone reading this: You are not the only one being hurt when you are a hoarder. Let people help you.
I suspect that many hoarders know this deep down. But the effort required for them to change their own behaviour is so great that they, most likely unconsciously, dismiss the harm it does to others as a lesser evil.
The hoarder houses I've been part of cleaning also require ripping up and discarding the carpeting. Some walls could merely be repainted, some required that special paint for trapping decades of cigarette smoke, and some required replacing the sheetrock that had been damaged by unspayed pets "marking" the walls.
Comments can be productive whether they are intended to be helpful or not. Just calling out a common case/rationalization can make the other person see it as a possibility. Or make others identify it as some problem they also have.
No helpful disposition is required behind the "calling out" for that to be the case.
The (unverifiable anyway) intention doesn't add some magic dust to a comment to make it good or bad.
Doesn't work. Did that with my sister. I managed to clear out the dining room so that it wa possible to sit the family around the table to eat. Went back six months later and not only was that room uninhabitable but the amount of junk in other rooms had increased and the family was eating off trays in front of the television.
It's not the junk that is the problem, it's the way of thinking that leads someone to refuse to discard it. Or more likely there is some even deeper rooted cause that makes them think that way.
It can also be the case that the people they live with don't help either.
I live in The Netherlands and my yearly expenses are less than 20k EUR per year, and also have a car (major expense around here). But I don't pay rent. Several years ago I used to live in Romania, and similarly, had expenses a lot lower than 10k EUR per year.
So I think it's possible just about anywhere in the world, if you're ready to do a lot of things yourself (don't rely on services such as a car/bike mechanic, fix plumbing, house issues yourself, don't pay a lot of money on going out etc).
I disagree. I spent about 2 years in Romania without healthcare of any kind. I was on a career break/sabbatical. And in the 4 years I've spent in the Netherlands, I've only went to a doctor's office once, for some abdominal pain. I was sent home by a receptionist, telling me to return the next day if it doesn't get better.
And I think that's my only interaction with the medical establishment for the last 6-7 years. The one before that was for some document I needed for my driver's license.
Of course, here in the Netherlands you can't avoid having health insurance, but it's technically free for low income people and not that expensive otherwise. In Romania, and I presume that a lot of other places, you can.
So is it that hard to stay uninsured? I do have some gripes to pick with the medical system, but yeah, I do think taking health into your own hands is a better choice (and a lot more is psychological in nature than the medical system would suggest, which is focused on symptoms and not causes).
I remember in my younger years, I would get a cold probably twice a year on average, and I would always get prescribed antibiotics by an overzealous GP. All of that stopped all of a sudden, and I haven't taken antibiotics in about a decade. I've caught a cold, maybe once every two years, but much lighter and goes away by itself in 2-3 days at most.
What you are telling us is that you were healthy and lucky. That has nothing to do with cost of living if we are to assume things like wanting to live and not be completely destitute after needing a major surgery or life flight.
I was always thinking this was a really underserved market. Ebikes have been really in demand for a long while, but most of the offer was based on very heavy city bikes. I was always thinking that a much sportier, more efficient race ebikes would be a huge hit. I saw some prototypes on kickstarter but nothing that sticked.
I wonder why. If I had the energy and resources I think I would try going into that product space. Seems like ripe for disruption.
I ride ebikes a lot, and I used to ride race bikes a lot as well, years ago. For a long time I thought that a heavy city ebike is similar to a very efficient race bike that in terms of effort required. After I started to ride them simultaneously (more or less), maybe an ebike is in fact more helpful over longer periods, but a light race bike isn't far away. So a product that captures best of both worlds would do great IMO.
LE. Apparently I'm late by around 5 years. When I last had this thought there was literally just a kickstarter project. Now I see most big brands have electric road bike offerings. Still, at 4-5k EUR price points, there's still a lot of value to capture.
Specialized has their SL lines that sound like what you're looking for. But what you're asking for is beyond the current technology. Motors to produce both enough wattage and torque are heavy, and so are the batteries that supply them, and they're big. Modern road bikes are lighter and thinner than ever before
Except that the recycling ... cycle is not perfect. Far from it. I'd reckon maybe half of all lithium ends up in recycling. Other half probably ends up in the landfill. For instance, I picked up a broken ebike from the trash not long ago (Amsterdam). Battery still in it. Same goes for lots of smaller electronics.
That's true, but seems unlikely to be an issue for EV batteries. Cars are large and valuable enough that there are established businesses that deal with scrapping them.
Lately blablacar has been charging hitchhikers/travelers up front. So you as a driver know for sure you won't end up with nothing. This is really useful IMO, but also mostly significantly reduce the popularity of the service in places with low reliability among members.
In western Europe, particularly Germany, it was still very easy to find people, in eastern Europe, not so much. Even though before this change, years ago, blablacar was very popular in said eastern Europe countries.
That comparison makes no sense because the ICE car is releasing carbon taken (mostly) from petroleum while the human is releasing carbon taken (mostly) from the atmosphere via plants and animals.
But only after you discard your mortal flash and upload your mind to a shiny Tesla-cloud. At which point you can probably afford to not care much about all the carbon problems anyway.
Alternator delete is a very common hack in the ecomodder community (usually coupled with LiFePo or Lithium battery instead of the regular lead-acid). It reduces the complexity and load on the engine, and does give a few percentage better fuel efficiency. But if you mostly ride at night, yeah ...
Everyone except you has approached this discussion with the intent of using the solar power to drive the car, but they should actually be thinking of using it to power the cars electrical system, and thus negating the need for the alternator.
A current gen 2.5L petrol Camry has a 12v 80A alternator. That 80amps likely covers driving at night in the rain (ie headlights on, window wipers going, HVAC fan blowing, etc). Normal daytime driving would be much less demanding, say 50A load, thus 600W power. Then you have to factor in the alternators inefficiencies, which could raise that demand to 1kW.
Next consider what the engine is having to generate whilst cruising, which could be 20kW for the Camry. In this scenario, that 1kW of alternator load is responsible for 5% of the engines load. So ditching the alternator would give 5% fuel efficiency increase on this Camry. A smaller car that only needs 12kW to cruise would see an 8% improvement (8% of a low consumption value though), whilst a much bigger car that needs 50kW to cruise would only see a 2% gain (but that's 2% of a high consumption value).
So if "solar body panels" could generate 500W like people have already guessed in this thread, then that would be close to offsetting the normal day-time electrical load. In this scenario it's probably a good idea to power the vehicles electrical system from a lithium battery, which wouldn't mind the gradual draw-down, because that could then be offset by parking the car in the sun (and possibly even by regenerative braking). Then there could still be an isolated lead-acid battery that is purely for starting the engine (because that needs high cranking amps), and that could be DC to DC charged from the vehicle circuit.
That 12v 80A alternator can generate almost 1kW at max effort. So even if you drive all night in the rain, that's still less than 1/5th of the energy in a Tesla or BYD vehicle battery. So this alternator-less car could get away with a much smaller battery, and it might even be smaller in area than the cars boot!
If you know anything about Japan it's very strange that a place wouldn't take cash. Post-covid (and a lot of that thanks to Olympics preparations) a lot of places in Tokyo have advanced to taking things other than cash.
You're not going far enough: before Covid, finding a place (excluding conbini) that took a credit card was rare. Credit cards are common now, like you say, but nearly any business will still accept cash.
I think I've encountered at most 1-2 restaurants in Japan that don't take cash, and none that don't at least accept credit cards.
Yes as recently as 2010s Japanese travel as a westerner was mildly stressful managing your cash balance.
Taxis, conbinis and restaurants all wanted cash.
Lots of ATMs (majority even) don't take western ATM cards, so you need to look out for JP/7-11/Citi? ones.
Delicate balance of keeping enough yen so you don't run out / have to go out of your way ATM hunting but also not head home with $100s in yen you don't need.
