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.

Probably for the same reason you bought one in the first place rather than using the cheap one that your home already had.

Wasn't our decision. At least it looks nice.

I see. That might be why you're having trouble understanding why someone would be upset to have spent the money for extra features, only to have them remotely disabled so that it was exactly the same as the item they'd replaced.

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.

I recently got a Mr. Cool DIY minisplit at Costco for $1600. I called an independent electrician to run the wiring for $200 and he helped me install the thing for another $200. So I got a fully installed minisplit for $2k and it works great.

Did the same thing except saved the $400 and did it in an afternoon.

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

Agreed. At this point there can't be that many people who would reject plant-based meat but would happily transition to lab-grown meat.

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 don't deny it, and Vegan cheese aspires to bring processed cheese to those who otherwise wouldn't go near it for containing animal products, rejoice!

More products for the grocery aisles best ignored.

All you need is a backhoe and a rocket ship that can carry a backhoe.

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

I think the dollar undoubtedly has several orders of magnitude lower direct pollution costs, but also have several orders of magnitude higher indirect costs.

It's a pretty tangly web, so hard to know what to lump in as a comparison but in the superlative case consider: the federal reserve, many bank/FI departments tasked with securing and transferring money safely, auditing (public ledger has many benefits for transparency and reporting), money transfer industry, international relations, lobbyism, US military dominance, etc.

Bitcoin has zero employees, probably only thousands of people working on Bitcoin-interfaced systems. The network uses a large amount of electricity, but that's kind of it - there are few other costs to account for. All of those industries above collectively employ millions of people - should we account for only organizational energy consumption or do we also account for salaries and thus private energy consumption of all of the individuals necessary to support dollar hegemony?

I think it would be really interesting to find a number for "for each dollar in existence, how much is spent per year preserving the dollar's position as the global reserve currency?" How does this number compare to inflation? If it is greater than inflation, does that mean that dollar hegemony is unstable and its fall is inevitable?

Can you share how Bitcoin has a direct pollution cost?

Last I checked BTC primarily uses excess electricity in the cheapest regions of the world. What if BTC only ran on solar power?

Of the estimates I've read, it seems like BTC uses about 60% green energy. Which is about double the 'green-ness' of the broader energy economy, but it's still a significant amount of 'direct pollution' from carbon sources.

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.

Surely the data is over either HTTPS or some encrypted VPN protocol - the only possible attack would be DOS.

Well, you could also attack the implementation.

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.

Anti-Amazon coalition is called "anti-trust". That's why we can't let corporations grow this big, at least not this big in such a far reaching industry (ecommerce retail marketplace).

They've captured the market, now they can exert the lever as they please.