2026-03-26

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Guess what I've seen two of in Taipei: Trader Joe's shopping bags. My host brought some kitchen stuff in one, and tonight a woman on the escalator had one (bright pink logo), a bag with end pockets. Is there a TJ in Taiwan, or anywhere outside of the USA? No. Are people bringing them back from the US? Yes, at least somewhat: my host says her friend brought that one back for her. Is someone making knockoff bags locally? Wouldn't surprise me... An 'askai' web page said TJ is 'hip' in Taiwan, with imported products and people asked to bring stuff; it's obviously unreliable but I suppose something might have fed into that.

Makes me wonder if I could sell my bag for anything. It's very very old, possibly back to the 90s, with no structure -- it's just a sack, great for stuffing in my backpack. Don't particularly want to sell it, and I doubt an ugly old bag has much value, but it'd be amusing.


A few days ago I got looking into traffic mortality statistics. Wikipedia, World Population Review, World Life Expectancy, Our World in Data. The weird thing is that some countries have wildly different numbers across these sites: Vietnam is 30.6 deaths/100,000 people, 17.7, 29.8, 23.4. Granted the years are different -- 2019, 2021, 2020??, 2023, but still a big swing... though I guess 2021 being really low could actually make sense (covid lockdowns?). OTOH, the 2020 is high.

(Our World lets you examine earlier years, but doing so still doesn't match the other sources.)

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