My caving experience is less than yours, but I want to echo what you say. The average person envisions spacious tourist caves, not belly-crawling 800 yards through muddy gravel which has been more my experience with wild caves in the American Midwest. Gear gets shredded in caves worse than maybe any other environment, and slows you down like nothing else.
It has always felt to me that Wirecutter focuses on only one end of the Pareto curve ("what is the very best XXXX that money can buy, within reason") and ignores the middle of the curve where most people are actually shopping ("what is the best XXXX that I can get for $XXX"). It also seems to reliably ignore brands from Mainland China (Hisense, Midea, etc). I guess It makes obvious sense to court rich (or at least price-insensitive) readers.
Whether or not it started that way, yes, it makes sense to recommend brands that New York Times subscribers are familiar and comfortable with. I'll buy a GE Profile refrigerator or Bosch dishwasher. Not some Chinese brand I've never heard of and have no idea what the service situation will be with. Makes perfect sense to me and I'm in that demographic. Especially with major appliances and things I can buy at the local big box store seems to make perfect sense to not buy things you have to go to Alibaba to obtain.
It's not about being price insensitive but recommending things that are relatively mainstream and that don't seem risky, especially for major purchases that have to be installed and potentially serviced.
(Did have a service issue on my recent GE Profile refrigerator but it took one phone call and was a no-brainer.)
But you're probably right in general. Wirecutter mostly doesn't recommend unknowns it thinks are potentially bargains. Which I probably wouldn't do in its position either.
I only see power requirements (1300 W) but no mention of voltage or frequency requirements---not even in the user guide. The pricing in € hints that the creators are in 240/1/50-land, and that I'm out-of-luck in the 120/1/60 wastes of North America. It's a shame, because I'm very much the target demographic for a kit like this. One could transform it from 120 V or run it on our 240 V split-phase with an isolation transformer of course, but running the A/C pump 20% faster might be dubious.
As an aside, I'm frustrated for the same reason regarding induction cooktops. European units are a fraction of the cost of their American equivalents.
You're probably not out-of-luck. Just buy a heat element designed for your grid's voltage. The electronics' internal PSU might already be capable having a wide range input.
Besides that, I would absolutely not recommend you buy this.
Reason: the parent commenter already hinted in the right direction. The E61 brew group is ancient (invented in 1961 by Faema in Italy, hence the name), it sports 4kg of brass and many moving parts (3 valves, camshaft + lever) and features an analog pre brew chamber.
I do restore italian espresso machines for a hobby and have come to the same conclusion as the parent. Even if they're not maintained properly those things are meant to last and can in most cases be resurrected. Most spare parts are readily available and defacto industry standard (eg. The Brasilia ring brew head) and you can retrofit nice electronics easily (eg. clever coffee or the gaggiuino foss controller project featuring pressure transducers, pid controller(s) and a controllable Flow/Pressure rate, profiles, apps and so on).
This diy project is imho bland and uses the most ancient brew head available, with unnecessary heat dissipation, long warmup times and probably leaded brass...
As someone who has used 3D CAD professionally for decades, I must confess I had low expectations for this tool. My expectations have been greatly exceeded, and there is real value in something like this.
The value is not in creating models of new/custom parts, but in quickly generating models of standard parts such as pipe fittings, bolts, connectors, and stuff you could buy from a catalog. Prompts like "m4 cap screw which is 50 mm long" or "2 inch ASME B16.5 pipe flange" seem to reliably generate adequate results. Design of large assemblies often requires locating or drawing dozens (or hundreds) of such models (though there are sometimes libraries available). It's almost like the model was trained on the entire McMaster-Carr catalog! (maybe they scraped it?) The models will still need to be checked to ensure quality, but this is true regardless of whether a human or AI creates them.
Modeling even simple fixtures and brackets with a system like this is cumbersome: I tried, but requires paragraphs of metes-and-bounds language. Nevertheless I got the parts I wanted. Much of engineering happens at the interfaces, so accurately describing things like hole patterns and mating surfaces is critical. This can certainly be done in text, just not time-efficiently.
Additionally, the output (STEP files, etc) are what we call in the business "dumb solids." They don't include any parametric logic, and the sorts of edits which can be made to them are limited and often require serious creativity.
Another drawback: this thing is slow! A good CAD user could draw a lot of these parts in less wall-clock time. I assume this can be overcome by throwing more iron at the problem.
The UI/UX is has a ton of rough edges (and I'm still not sure if I made an account or not) but is totally fine for a proof-of-concept.
I went into this with incredibly low hopes: I've heard many promises of software which promises to make CAD faster and easier and accessible to non-experts. These look great in sales pitches, but the engineers and designers in the audience invariably wince (or worse). This is something that I could actually use and would make my life easier.
This is good feedback thank you! The model will only get better from here and we will work on speed and UX, we are also getting a bit pounded at the moment which might account for some slowness.
Also the goal is ultimately to return a KCL file which is our scripting language for CAD which is very parametric :) and easily editable, this will come next year
The value of a ML model for this is fairly low, though. An expert model, with fuzzy matching if needed, is going to be far more reliable for "standard" parts.
The only value of a "generative" model would be for "creating models of new/custom parts", but that's what you explicitely say it isn't for...
This ML/AI fad is looking more and more like the blockchain fad: redoing exactly what we already know how to do with boring technologies, but repackadged in a shinier coat hiding worse results, and the unproven promise of just-around-the-corner progress to suck in investors.
I'm sure there are instances where you have to model these parts manually, but I've never run into a situation where McMaster-Carr[1] didn't have the models I'm looking for.
Skimming the paper: it looks like they are performing sentiment analysis on books, effectively taking the Fourier transform of the sentiment-versus-time data, and reporting which Fourier component (up to 3rd harmonic) is strongest.
I read this as "person, 35-ish, stuck in a rut" which is a situation so common that automakers engineer cars like the Mazda Miata specifically for people in it.
BMW F900XR. I did a 4-day (over 2 weekends) learn-to-ride course and it took so much physical and mental coordination that all I thought about on those 2 weekends was motorcycles and slept deep for 10 hours each night. Snapped me out of the usual routine for sure.
Now when I ride, everything is easy, relaxing. On my commute, I only pay attention to riding. No music, radio, or cellphone. The commute allows twice a day to recharge.
You are braver than I am. The F900 is a beast and I did try it at a shop once. But yea, motorcycle riding makes you so much more aware on the road. No distraction and you are literally paying more attention to ensure Cars can actually see you and don't kill you, lol.
As someone who has owned 2 Miataii in their life, 100% agree. Current is a '91 NA in British racing green! When I'm getting hammered by the work / grind, I'll make sure I at least drive it to and from work for a few days -- still doing the thing I need to do (painter; partly seasonal type job with natural world time-frames... nearing soon!). Provides a bit of lark in the day and reminds me to stop stressing as much and to literally and figuratively enjoy the wind in my hair.
But regardless of "buy a car", put some effort into a thing you've always wanted to try to explore, no matter how "pointless" and explore it -- the point of life is to live it and we're all so willing to fall into our own filter bubble of life -- very realized at 'mid age' (41 here, really starting to appreciate birds and cars going slow by my house...)
Find YOU, no matter how unproductive financially / whatever metric that may be!
> I read this as "person, 35-ish, stuck in a rut" which is a situation so common that automakers engineer cars like the Mazda Miata specifically for people in it.
This refers to people going through a "mid life crisis" who end up buying a Mazda Miata convertible to drive around town in an effort to look young, cool, stylish, etc.
Just over 20 years ago, a small model aircraft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_of_Butts%27_Farm) crossed the Atlantic in 39 hours using about a gallon of Naptha as fuel. The same year, the Design-Build-Fly club at my university built an electric aircraft which had some serious endurance and payload capabilities, though I don't remember the details. Keeping a model electric plane aloft for a day is impressive, but how many hobbyists have built something similar by now without any expectation of VC money?
I'm similarly curious. Designing for a higher stall speed permits smaller wing area, lower drag, and lower weight. The cost is that takeoffs and landings become troublesome.
Other options that might work:
* Launch from the roof of a vehicle
* With a glider winch
* Towed by another aircraft
* Auxiliary engine / batteries that can be jettisoned & parachuted down
Climbing to altitude is the straightforward part. The transition from zero knots to the stall speed of the aircraft (minimum speed at which it can remain airborne) is the tricky bit. Designing for a lower stall speed necessitates wings which produce higher drag (by being larger) which requires more propulsion, which means bigger batteries and motors. So launching from a catapult or rocket or mothership or whatever means a lighter plane.
Launching by rocket means the plane would have to be pretty rugged to survive it. And that means more weight. You also have the issue of deployment. Folding wings means more weight and more things to go wrong.
I'm very curious what's going on here... Does the EU just have better negotiators? Did someone in the CDC get their pockets lined to accept a higher bid? Is there some law or contract which prevented the CDC from playing hardball?
USA doesn't have any drug price negotiators. Your question is almost nonsense.
USA is capitalist system. The price is whatever the free market pays.
There is a debate whether or not medicare / medicaid needs to begin negotiating the price with these companies. But even the idea of a central authority performing a large scale negotiation is seen as socialism in our political system and immediately dies.
Why not cut back on general aviation flights first? My naive solution (granted I know little about ATC) would be to give commercial flights priority over GA flights if ATC is overloaded. No 8-seat business jet is more economically important than a 200-seat airliner. Say nothing of recreational piston-engine flights. At the very least slap a $5000 surcharge on every GA takeoff or something.
Typically your single piston GA flight will be operating in very different airspace than a 200 seat airline. Just as you can't take a single piston pilot and put in as the pilot in command of a 200 person airliner, ATC personal are not easily hot swappable between airports or airspace.
