danimal88

It is pretty outrageous that a company who purports to care about the environment turned this into a pile of garbage for the average user to save on some cloud hosting or devops. Or even worse, to sell the next generation.

Regarding the crazy prices - it’s structural.

In Asia, manufacturers sell direct or through highly competitive retail channels and the installers really only have to know minisplits.

Minisplits in the US get sold by the brand -> distributor -> dealer (contractor) -> homeowner with each step being a 20% market up. Sometimes there is even a master distributor in there AND usually there is a “rep group” taking points too.

That is fundamentally what drives up costs. That and the fact that the US housing marketing is very heterogeneous so contractors have to know boilers, ducted heatpumps, furnaces, packaged units, ductless, etc.

This article tries to get away with a giant sleight of hand for a reader that might not be super clear on lab grown vs plant based. The overwhelming majority of fake meat is plant based, not cultured. Sure, one day we might see competitive economics from cultured meats, but claiming that it won’t happen because their factories aren’t pound for pound equivalent makes no sense. People are choosing alternatives to meat because they don’t want the Amazon further destroyed for cattle production, because they watch a video of how animals are treated (I dare you to watch one slaughterhouse video from peta), and because the carbon intensity is simply too high broadly. Plant based meat is now widely available and just about at price parity (not $50/chicken nugget as the post misleadingly suggests of fake meat when actually referring to R&D phase cultured meat production). The main “source” of perspective for the first half of the article is an “animal health” industry insider aka, meat industry representative. His career has been literally to keep cows alive long enough to kill them at the perfect time before serving them in happy meals, forgive me if I think he more than a little biased

So far, I'm sold on Soft/Spreadable cheeses from Miyokos. I don't remember having had any real winners on the hard cheese side yet but I will keep trying different ones until someone cracks it. I'm actually most excited for the CRISPR'd yeast approach to cheese (food more broadly) approach because I feel like we will be able to get a culinarily equivalent product (eventually...) but perhaps remove some of the less healthy components (saturated fats and others) for a superior product with a lower carbon footprint.

OG cheese is obviously a processed product. I have never seen a cheese cow but perhaps that just me

I never got the impression it had much life in it to begin with

While that -might- be true, the question is whether the dollar, the RMB, the CAD, and every other currency have anything like the -direct- pollution cost of bitcoin, which my understanding is that they do not

Thats true, but it won't be some sort of open platform, it will be a utility for amazon that will come with some sort of monetization scheme. I say this as someone that has deployed 10s of thousands of 900 Mhz radios in devices over the last few years. Conceptually though, some sort of interop standard that would offer end to end encryption and access control could be quite cool. On the other hand, sending the garage door signal over an unknown network path and trusting that there is no chance for manipulation is also a tough sell compared to the relatively short wireless->wired topology that dominates most consumer IoT. I'm sure there are use cases where it could work great though.

I'd go for a much smaller bezel/frame.

As a manufacturer/seller on amazon, I sure wish I could stop doing business on amazon. Amazon charges me for everything, despite obvious customer abuse, simply because it's their customer not mine. Couple that with high margins and bad reviews sampling for those that don't cheat the system and you get beat up constantly on amazon. The thing is, if you have a shopify stores for your d2c you have an AB test on return rates, customer quality, CSAT etc., and while Amazon dramatically impacts your top line sales, it also really effects your bottom line because customers order carelessly (in our case they buy the wrong size product) which triggers an expensive and wasteful amount of reverse logistics. My customers that buy from my site ask us questions that we help with, get better service, and are better customers because there is a seller/customer relationship. On amazon, we cant even get their email address via the seller/customer messaging so we can't help them if they have configuration questions, troubleshooting, etc.

I just wish there was some sort of antiamazon coalition that would help move more e-commerce away and some standard messaging to make this movement known enough. The problem is that the point of sale and the seller credibility are comingled hence why even our shopify customers go to Amazon first. If you aren't on amazon, they wonder if you are a 'real' company. There must be a better way.

Would love to see a write-up on COGS. Others have said they are buying commodities from xiaomi and reselling but it's not like there is magic here. 50 employees and real working capital needs means real overhead. Obviously they are living on VC to some extent, but how is there enough money long term to sustain a business with zero or negative margin? Boom and bust?

Its funny because the most hardcore in open source and security would argue that good techniques don't rely on obfuscation and secrets because those cats can get out of the bag. Never purrsonally subscribed to those as I agree with the cat and mouse perspective. Information assymetry is effective.

The regenerative ag conversation is really overhyped. Its a way to justified the continuation of an industry plagued by environmental issues and ethical issues. The numbers don't work out in terms of how much land would be needed to effectively use regenerative ag at anything close to current meat consumption and there is still no agreement on whether it actually even works, mostly just meat industry advocates sitting behind flimsy science with a friendly sounding non profit sitting in front of the meat groups.

The idea that we need to slaughter cattle to regenerate land is pretty flawed if nothing more because if this was actually effective, we could simply reintroduce bison and other animals that are natural to a given local and not need to constantly pump meat out of that same land. Meat production will slowly decline as consumers have more ethical, environmentally friendly, cost effective, healthy, and savory enough alternatives. Impossible and Beyond are the mvp and this is only going to accelerate. Especially if we are eventually start to price GHG.

"China also knows that oppressing an ethnic minority and placing them in forced labor is good for short-term economic success"

This actually makes the case for banning their products, not for being above banning their products though, right?

Could they not just but an insane tariff on them?

I have conflicted feelings about this but I do think that the 'spin' is poor. China doesn't allow Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. behind the great firewall. Why not just say we are blocking their pseudo-government social apps to be at economic/market access parity. It seems accurate and fair. Spinning it as national security, while potentially true (really don't know), seems like an unnecessary narrative.

As I understand it, humans are overconsuming proteins

Not a strong conviction from me but I can see a case for liquidity when you can sell quickly.

38,000,000,000/4000 = 9,500,000 plants needed to get to net zero, just for the the carbon we are currently putting out, to say nothing of all the carbon currently causing warming...

Seems reasonable to say no.

Also adding that perhaps the biggest unnoticed feature with uber and lyft is the feedback loop. Good drivers and good riders stay on the platform, which is good for the users. The Cab experience on the other hand is some guy mumbling (best case) into an ear peice the whole ride while accelerating/braking like they are driving an indy car, all while getting into a sticky back seat and needing to settle up akwardly at the end of the ride. If cabs are going to take back some market share, they need to invest in their experience.

Raising prices != Doomed...

Their business model: request a ride, pay for a ride, is not doomed. Their low prices might be. Yes, their economics pitched to investors relied on automation that's not here, but for medium density spaces, cabs have so much more overhead and will struggle to keep up unless they have a platform/brand that is competitive with lyft and uber.

It's just price data collection. In particular, MAP policies can be skirted by not publishing a final price but having a price below MAP in the cart which is a common tactic that online sellers utilize. By pretending to walk through the cart, all sorts of data about pricing, taxes, etc. can be learned. It's not entirely uncommon to see different prices at different times, for different user agents, for different locations, etc. Used to work for a company that build huge price collection systems and built many of them...

Also was in NYC. My inlaws have a place in CT with a basement that is larger than my NYC apartment. Moved out a few months ago and won't be renewing. Might move back to the city in 6-12 months covid dependent but for now, I'm thinking we'll sit tight and enjoy the summer and fall in the foothills of the berkshires. no garbage on the street, lush green mountains all around. really hard to want to go back to the city at this point...

"shitbit"

Has there been any sort of research done on whether these changes have actually done anything consequential and positive?

I did a lot of tasks in inkscape for a while and switched to Google slides oddly enough. Of course it's a significantly smaller subset of features, but once you get good with it, it's very powerful. That said, I would be happy to switch back for a lot of things now that native macOS support is on the table. I think the big advantages I saw in slides is the collaboration and iteration (you just make another slide and hack) instead of cluttering a workspace and then having to collaborate or be a gate keeper on a local file. Super excited to give this a whirl though!

We make a smart thermostat for minisplits using IR (flair.co/products/puck). We have solved for state problems but some brands were such a PITA!

No

We are not home builders and our site seems like it makes it pretty clear what our consumer offering is. I'm not advocating for home builders to take VC money although there are plenty of construction tech companies with unique ideas that have taken VC.

The issue imo is that SBA is still too narrowly focused on the first 25% or less of commercialization. Perhaps that works for some, I'm not sure. I agree, getting innovation to market is way too dependant upon VC. Worth noting that the traditional banking sector entirely abandoned the innovation economy despite their willingness to fund breweries, coffee shops, restaurants ad nauseum and other business that have huge failure rates but have more collateral and hard assets they can grab on failure.