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Comment on Sinosplice Tooltips 1.1.1 by Sinosplice Tooltips 1.2 is out | Sinosplice

Sinosplice Tooltips 1.2 is out | Sinosplice — Mon, 21 May 2012 03:01:41 +0000

[...] You can also search and add the plugin through WordPress itself, and instructions on how to do that are here. [...]

Comment on Sinosplice Tooltips 1.1.1 by John Pasden

John Pasden — Mon, 21 May 2012 02:42:54 +0000

The plugin has just been updated, and should work now. Please try again.

Thanks!

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by John Pasden

John Pasden — Sun, 20 May 2012 13:46:37 +0000

I didn’t check the calculations, but I did make sure (and just checked again) that I copied the numbers exactly as they were in the original article.

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by brodie

brodie — Sun, 20 May 2012 11:12:07 +0000

I’ll bite. In my experiance, Such people likely have other less reputable sources of income or sizeable family support. Whether they admit to that or not is another thing.

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by David

David — Sat, 19 May 2012 02:28:33 +0000

Thanks for the post John. I think that the table as presented is more valuable as it stands than adjusting it on a “per driver” basis, simply because petrol is used in every area of the economy. As most readers will know, the production cost of petrol is fairly similar all round the world – the difference is tax. Governments tax petrol for two main reasons – revenue raising and to account for the bad environmental impacts that are not otherwise priced into what you buy. Both these reasons resonate in China – it is low cost to tax petrol, and the environmental issues are evident. It is not primarily (or even mainly) about private cars, traffic and exhaust pollution; petrol used in private cars is a small part of the story, particularly in China. As with most pricing in China, even by the Government, the policy on petrol looks pretty efficient to me. Re: the point made above about ‘why don’t the Chinese stop trying to live a Western lifestyle’, they don’t. (1) The car ownership rate in the US is still roughly 10 times what it is in China; (2) Chinese cities are built at significantly higher density; (3) China is much more relaxed on juxtaposition of land uses, so people don’t need to travel so much for daily and weekly needs.

Comment on Sinosplice Tooltips 1.1.1 by Josh

Josh — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:42:48 +0000

Plugin does not work on latest WP version 3.3.2

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by 安东

安东 — Fri, 18 May 2012 05:55:08 +0000

Really interesting, thanks John. Here is some info I took from Wikipedia that may be interesting in this context:

List of countries by the number of motor vehicles per 1000 people (Rank)

China: 47 (113) USA: 808 (2) Japan: 589 (17) Turkey: 142 (81) Norway: 578 (18) Denmark: 549 (25) UK: 525 (30) France: 575 (19) Germany: 534 (28) Italy: 690 (10)

A chart like this and the one in the original post for all the Chinese provinces would be interesting.

China is suffering from pollution and traffic problems (at least in the big cities, which also have the highest concentration of people who can afford cars). Do higher gas prices keep even more people from buying cars? Does the government perhaps keep gas prices high for this reason?

Since China is the world’s fastest growing automobile market, I wonder what this chart would look like in, say, 50 years or so.

Little sidenote: The “100 L / Avg. Income” value for Turkey has not been calculated correctly… Probably a typo.

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by ash

ash — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:22:09 +0000

Perhaps Chinese consumers should stop trying to live a Western lifestyle on Chinese salaries? Its always been odd to see people earning 4000RMB per month driving BMW 3-Series etc, how did they afford the insurance and maintenance?

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by James H

James H — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:01:12 +0000

Need to figure out how to arbitrage the Venezuela–Norway price discrepancy.

I think you bring up a good point John in terms of income of Chinese car driver vs. income of average Chinese. Another point about China vs. US is the vast number of substitutes the Chinese have at their disposal–rogue tricycles, ebikes, buses, metro–that make their consumption of gas a smaller percentage of their disposable income.

Ultimately, I think anyone in a big city in China (read: me, who will not be purchasing a car here) would agree that the more deterrents for private car ownership the better. It’s simply far too crowded and dangerous as is…

Comment on A Chinese Perspective on World Gas Prices by Si

Si — Fri, 18 May 2012 01:29:19 +0000

The British data is wrong. Average income in the UK is around £25000, which at current exchange rates (which are around historical averages) of £1:$1.5, is $37,500. Given they have this basic fact wrong and to the order of degree they have it wrong, I am wondering what else is incorrect. Probably most of it, I should imagine.

The data also doesn’t take into account taxation levels (average net salary would be more revealing) or tolls (i.e. no/few tolls on UK roads other than in London, lots of tolls in Japan).