IMO this is pretty rational. Mistral is 'smart enough' for lots of applications, very fast, and embedded in a regulatory environment that people find more trustworthy.
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
Framework laptops are selling like crazy. The pre-orders on their highest end configuration of the new pro are completely sold out, and the pre-orders on the two lower variants are backed up until their 9th batch that wont ship until August.
It looks like theyre selling more laptops than they expected to, not less.
Their laptops are niche, but that niche seems to be growing quite nicely. There's a big cultural wave of frustration with Big Tech companies and their rent-seeking practices, and Framework is doing a good job of riding this wave.
Your concern about their being bought out is unfounded. They're not a publicly traded company and dont need to sell equity to anyone if they dont want to.
It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell, and likely dont have enough allocation of at least some of those chips.
Sure, they could have thought it'd only sell a tiny number of units, but if they thought that, they wouldnt have launched the product.
> It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell,
Hate to be contrarian here but this is a known marketing trick to make product appear as selling faster than it does to create hype. I'm sure you waited in line to a club/bar for 30 minutes only to realize club/bar was empty?
They are still a for-profit company and I totally expect those batches' shipping times to actually reduce soon. An order placed right now would ship in August and at this point it must be cutting into their earnings because any regular, walk-in type of customer is not gonna wait this long for their laptop.
This seems unnecessarily cynical. Telling your customers
> 'No, we won't sell you our most expensive new laptop config at all, and if you want the other cheaper configs, you will need to wait at a minimum until August'
is not a very effective marketing stunt.
Besides, Framework has a very consistent history at this point of quite frank, open communication. If they didn't have this history, I might lend more credence to your point of view, but my experience is that these are people that are pretty allergic to that sort of bullshit, and will just say what they mean.
I really can't imagine why they'd try and undermine that reputation just to counterproductively tell people they can't buy a laptop from them.
I am not saying you're wrong, I am just saying we can't draw serious conclusions based on pure speculation. They absolutely need to built their brand first and foremost to scale up and hyping up the brand by "selling out the stock on first day" is a legitimate way to do so. They can't stand clear of regular, high-school marketing for too long. Again, this is a for-profit endeavor with serious investors expecting a return.
This is a rather silly article. Yes, elevated fossil fuel prices are bad for Europe, but they're worse for the USA, even if the USA has more domestic supply. The USA is a significantly more oil and gas intensive economy than the European economy, and will suffer greater economic fallout from the rise in prices than the European economies. Sure, US fossil fuel companies are making huge profits, but that's nowhere near enough to offset the economic damage it does to the rest of the US economy when energy prices spike.
Furthermore, US voters are significantly more sensitive to inflation, and the US administration is more vulnerable to the political fallout of this price spike because they'll be blamed for it more directly by voters.
As for these examples that are meant to sound scary:
> As we speak, jet fuel reprices. LNG cargoes are rerouted mid-voyage. Summer flight schedules thin out. Across the industrial corridors of Germany and the Netherlands, energy-intensive firms that survived the Ukraine war crisis at enormous cost are running the numbers on a second shock.
* LNG cargoes being re-routed to Asia is because Europeans are more willing and able to reduce gas import levels in response to price jumps than Asian countries, because Europe is less gas dependant (especially in the warmer months of the year), and are more able to sit out the bidding war. That's not a bad thing.
* The flights that are being thinned out are almost entirely the ludicrously cheap short-haul flights used by people who decide "hey, why not take this flight, it's only 50 euros". These flights have real substitues with train and car travel. It's not a serious economic indicator if these trips are being reduced in response to fuel price spikes. People have actually been fighting for a while to try and get rid of these flights for climate reasons.
* The energy intensive firms in Germany and the Netherlands are running the numbers and are mostly finding they'll be okay, especially if they speed up on their already ongoing electrification programs.
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I'd love for European electrification to go faster, and I do think that we'd be in a better position right now if it had gone faster over the past couple years.
However, the reality is that electrification in Europe, especially in economic sectors where energy usage is a significant chunk of input costs, has been going forward at a rapid and reliable pace.
Trump's new adventure and its subsequent supply shocks are just going to speed this up even more.
High oil prices are good for most of the oil industry, but the oil industry is only like 3% of the US economy.
On the other hand, elevated oil prices are bad for a very large chunk of the other 97% of the US economy, who rely on buying oil and oil derived products in order to operate their industry.
Numerous commentators have already pointed this out, the dementia patient has done more for the takeup of solar and wind and EVs than any amount of COPxx talking ever achieved. I doubt he's aware of how much he's done to promote, or at least incentivize, the environmentalist cause.
The whole article feels little bit like Brexit articles in 2018, where people were spelling doom for EU and only upsides for UK, while ignoring how UK leaving EU could be positive for EU and severely damage UK.
Well, I have good news and I have bad news for you, and they're the same thing:
An electric machine (other than the Decent) is not any more reproducible in terms of the outcome of the shot than a manual lever, and in many ways they're less reproducible. The reason is that the actual pressure the water is under is not the important thing, the important part of coffee extraction is how that water is flowing through the puck.
Due to just random happenstance configurations that the puck can settle into, applying the same pressure every time will not result in the same extraction every time. Someone skilled with a lever and who is used to knows what it feels like when a shot flows too fast or too slow can adjust the pressure on the fly to compensate, improving consistency.
Not really a meaningful comparison because you haven't defined how much of a temperature difference versus how much of a water flow difference we're talking about here. But for most people, at least if they take the most basic level of care to not use water at like 85 degrees or 110 degrees, then no, that's just not really true.
There's a lot of folklore out there that's lingered from the early 2000s espresso community where it was widely believed that temperature was the holy grail control parameter, but now with modern instrumentation and temperature probes, it's been pretty much debunked. Temperature stability throughout a shot makes almost zero perceivable difference in taste.
It takes brew temperature differences swings of around 5 degrees Celsius before people can start to notice any difference better than random chance, and almost a 10 degree brew temperature difference before it gets to the territory of 'ruining a shot'.
Meanwhile, very small differences in puck preparation, including micron-differences in grind size, or sub-gram-level differences in coffee quantity have profound differences in flow rate, which has a very strong affect on coffee extraction levels, which has immediately recognizable differences in the produced flavours that a trained palette can reliably detect. This is before we even start talking about channeling which has an enormous affect on the coffee.
Manual control of the applied pressure can and does allow skilled people to compensate for those differences in flow rate, and combined with very basic attention to brew temperature, does help shot consistency.
So much bs that I don't even want to go further into discussion, sorry. I say this as someone who has made several thousands of espressos on E61 group machine. I'll let you have your own opinion but anyone who has made more than a few espressos will immediately understand if and when the temperature drifted away. Pressure? I've made espressos at 6 bars and 9 bars. Makes literally almost no impact or whatsoever. You're right though that 5 degrees Celsius is probably about the right minimum amount when the espresso starts to change in taste, and there's remarkably many machines which cannot sustain the temperature in shot after shot workloads.
Dietary need scales with volume, whereas incident sunlight would scale with surface area.
Assuming a spherical cow and a spherical human, the calories needed would scale with the radius cubed, whereas the calories gained from sunlight would scale with the radius squared. So while I agree this wouldn't be very many calories, even if you sat under the sun all day, I think the 4% figure is probably quite pessimistic.
Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.
Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"
NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.
With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.
I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.
The heatshield issue is the latter.
$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
People love to parrot this, but it's not true and makes no sense for them to try and game the system this way. The mandatory compensation and bad press from cancelled trains is way more costly on them than having poor punctuality statistics.
The reason that a late train can sometimes be cancelled is to try and stop a cascade of delays from happening. Tracks only have so much capacity, and if train gets delayed into a time-frame that is highly congested, trying to fit the delayed train into that time-frame will result in delaying other trains, which could then cause further problems down the lines and throw the entire network out of order.
They accept a certain number of cascading delays like this, but sometimes it's just known that a certain delayed train will just be too disruptive to the network, so they're forced to just cancel a train to try and save the network's stability.
By the time a train is delayed enough to be canceled the mandatory compensation applies anyway, and I'm not sure how much DB cares about bad press.
I can see the cancellations as a means of stopping a cascade of delays, but it's also true that doing so means the train won't count in the delay statistics for the remaining stops. If DB doesn't want people to accuse them of gaming the statistics, perhaps they should calculate said statistics in a way that doesn't directly benefit them when they inconvenience their delayed passengers even more?
More like "31% German according to stereotypes about Germans formed by some random foreigner who read some 19th century German philosophy texts, and has an affinity for Russian neo-fascis"
It's not exactly hard to see why people might feel that relying on an American or Chinese provider is a major liability.
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