These never made it further than "I'm buying this because I like MrBeast/Logan Paul/etc." at least as far as I can tell. These wheelchairs are supposed to become good enough that any regular disabled person that can't walk* will seriously consider them even without knowing who makes them.
*English isn't my first language, no idea what a proper inoffensive way to describe the target audience is. I mean no harm :)
I ordered a Beast Burger on Door Dash without having any clue it was a Mr Beast thing until it showed up and was heavily branded. I wanted a burger and figured I'd try something new. I had never really watched any Mr Beast videos at that point. For whatever reason, he is never recommended to me.
The seasoning was so strong it was a bit hard to eat. I assumed it was covering up for lower quality meat or something. I have no desire to order one again.
As it pertains to the original query of this comment thread, whether this is a real business model, it doesn’t really matter that it’s not “a real restaurant,” what matters is whether it’s a viable business that makes money.
Mr. Beast burgers is not really that different than McDonald’s franchising if you really think about it. Most people don’t buy a McDonald’s burger based on who the franchise owner is and how they run their restaurant, they’re buying a McDonald’s burger because of the McDonald’s brand and product.
McDonald’s captures 80% of ~~revenue~~ net income and leaves only 20% to franchisees.
Essentially, the concept is the same: the business value and profit margins are owned by the brand and the laborious act of delivering the product locally is a thin-margin interchangeable “ghost kitchen.” Not only that, the power dynamic is one where the franchise dominates the franchisee. The physical kitchen, its owner, and its employees are replaceable, the nationally recognizable brand is not.
I would argue that ghost kitchens basically take the franchise concept to the logical 21st century conclusion: essentially, why bother doing all the expensive stuff that McDonald’s does with their franchises when your storefront is digital and anyone with a flat top, fryer, and a pulse can follow the directions to produce your fast food product?
>McDonald’s captures 80% of revenue and leaves only 20% to franchisees.
Most of the revenue goes to paying employees, real estate cost (rent or depreciation), energy cost and cost of ingredients. You mean, "captures 80% of the net income". Or profit.
I’ve tried various things from ghost kitchens via Door Dash. Some are better than others.
From the little I understand, someone like Beast Burger would come up with a recipe, then provide the supplies and recipes to the ghost kitchen to make it. If the ghost kitchen is really Chili’s, it’s not the Chili’s burger showing up when a Mr Beast label, it’s Chili’s Employees in the Chili’s kitchen, making the Beast Burger recipes.
My understanding is that they had massive QC issues. I ordered one on a lark and actually liked it, ended up getting a few times. But from what I've seen online that was not a universal experience.
From what I understand these drinks are massively popular amongst children (which I guess is Logan's primary demographic). I've never seen anyone over 30 buy one.
These developer personalities like Theo and ThePrimageon and PirateSoftware all seem holier-than-thou and know-it-all. It's like podcaster bro x programming and I hate it.
I’m unsure how PirateSoftware is popular. Most of the time has either spins a story that a team of people worked on at blizzard worked on as his own personal achievement. Or has no idea what he’s talking about.
Theo on the other hand is mostly an idiot and people think he’s an authoritative figure on everything. He will never admit he’s wrong, rather sweep it under the rug or pretend no one saw him be wrong.
I mean, fair enough you feel that but they don't seem that way to me.
Theo is too quick on the gun with breaking tech news and habitually does not come with the appropriate context or knowledge to sustain any insight. Though if I were in his shoes trying to cover every breaking development in tech (read: HN front page trending) I would be caught with my pants down 80% of the time.
Prime is really about the entertainment value from what I've seen, though to his credit is aware of his limits and knowledge. I have found his reaction videos tedious with the excessive commentary.
PirateSoftware, to his credit is quite an insightful person in my estimations and all of his advice is contextualised in his own experiences which is usually quite valuable but sometimes not given the highly individual nature of it. Some of his purported life hacks are flat out terrible, but for what he gets wrong, he does get a lot right, especially around indie game dev.
I often wonder about his indie game dev advice because as far as I can tell, he isn't a successful indie game dev. He's a streamer. That's fine, but I am a successful indie game dev and I think I may have better advice. That's just my internal monologue tho, I'm not trying to share my wisdom.
> I have found his reaction videos tedious with the excessive commentary
I don't follow any of the mentioned youtubers, but their stuff occasionally appears in my recommendations. I don't understand the point of videos where someone just scrolls through a blog post and reads it out loud. It comes across as narcissistic and an attempt to piggyback on anything to "create content". There's rarely any added value, and it also feels extremely inefficient to watch such "reaction videos" when I could just skim through the text myself. I guess I'm too old and not part of the target audience.
On the internet, the origin is the server sending the response to the user. I suppose you can look at it from the perspective of the owner of the server -- from their frame of reference, their journey _starts_ when they receive, process, and respond to the request.
Granted, computer scientists are infamously known for being terrible at naming things.
I've been thinking about this a lot where here in BC we just finished a new dam which could benefit 1.7m EV owners, 250k households........ Or the LNG plant just down the road. At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra. I get that the plant will positively impact GDP but how much? And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry? It's such a common trope "we don't have enough power to meet our climate goals" well yeah especially when it's being used to support carbonized resource processing.
> At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
I don't think these industries get power for free.
It's typical for high capacity customers to be paying a flat fee monthly for capacity in addition to the rates for usage. And when they desire things like redundant feeds from separate substations, that's likely to require payment for engineering and construction as well as extra cost for maintenance.
OTOH, large users can get discounts, sometimes substantial discounts if they participate in demand response programs. It's a benefit to the grid operator if they can have large users rapidly reduce their load if needed to maintain grid stability... it's historically been much easier to reduce demand significantly at a few large user sites than to reduce demand across a large number of households ... and the alternative to opt-in reduction is brownouts and rolling blackouts.
A sophisticated multi-region datacenter operation is a good candidate for demand response, as it's relatively simple to quickly migrate traffic away from a power constrained data center.
No, I know the plant will pay for its usage. But to me, the net benefit of the dam is effectively zeroed out from the onset. The province was barely able to carry the project through to completion in the first place. Now we gotta start the process over again with a new government and people on both sides are upset at the completion.
Likely, we'll simply build a bunch of LNG facilities which kind of defeats the purpose of the dam in the first place.
The LNG facility will presumably produce some jobs, and bring in a lot of taxes (from exporting large quantities of natgas overseas.) So, the dam is basically an investment for the state, which will pay dividends for decades to come. That’s on top of what the plant will pay for electricity, which, presumably, in itself is enough to, over time, pay off the investment and then some.
>At some point these industries should be footing the bill for this infra.
Isn't that what the usage fees are for? If the utility isn't charging enough to pay for the infrastructure and make a profit, it's doing something terribly wrong.
>And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Why are you using public finance for utilities there?
Because, socialism ! We can’t get private business to invest in infrastructure in Canada, because like Venezuela, we might just take it over and socialize it. Like the pipeline Canada now owns and might give to the natives… lol
So then all the districts fight over who gets the power plants and the 50 jobs
> And why are publicly financed projects basically preallocated for private industry?
Where I live generation is owned by privately owned/listed companies or for-profit government owned entities (we call these entities a State Owned Enterprise or SOE). The grid is owned by an SOE and local distribution is owned by for-profit corporations owned by local governments (cities or regional councils).
So energy consumers pay for the generation, other than Rio Tinto which has gotten subsidies from successive governments (but this is the last time, we promise) and lower income consumers who get a winter angry payment, and maybe some smaller industry subsidies I am unaware of.
To the owner, that is the state. No reason why dividends can not be returned to some government entity that then moves them to general budget. It is not actually horrible model if free market people are to be believed. Companies are more efficient than government. So separating companies from bureaucrats should be improvement.
By default, I don't believe your claim. Hydro power would be a horrible match for a LNG liquification plant. The strength of hydro is that it's renewable energy with flexibility on the timing of energy production. It means hydro power plans can be run at a low load when energy is cheap, and high load when it's expensive. (And thus, the average Watt of power generated by hydro is more valuable/expensive than the average Watt of power generated by solar.)
LNG liquification would have the opposite pattern. They'd either want to run the plant 24/7 to get maximimum utility from the capital investments into the plant, or if they are demand-constrained, they'd want to time their production runs to when energy is the cheapest. They're most likely to use electricity exactly when the dam isn't producing any. And conversely, there will be a lot of times when the dam is producing way more electricity than the plant is using.
So it seems totally impossible to believe that production from the new dam is getting allocated 1:1 to a specific LNG plant. It's just not how any of this works. If there's some kind of kernel of truth to your claim, I'd imagine it's some kind of greenwashing where they're buying the rights to claim the LNG was created with renewable energy.
Sorry for the confusion. It's not necessarily preallocated but it just so happens that the new dam will generate x mwh per year and the LNG plant will consume close to x mwh per year. They are also within a few hundred km iirc. The public utility says that the dam's generation goes into the provincial pool and the plant's draw comes from the pool and I have no reason to not believe them...
But effectively private industry gets the benefit and we have to start the process over again to build another generation source.
I’ll agree they are pests. They are cute, especially the little ones. I grew up in the woods and almost let one inside because I thought it was our cat (I wasn’t fully paying attention). Like mini bears.
This has to be a pretty backwards argument, to be honest.
You may not have to learn "new shortcuts" (they're pretty standard), but you're perfectly willing to learn an entire text-based configuration scheme?
VIM has its merits for _editing_ code, but that's not what you're doing with e-mails. You're usually just writing them and sending them off. It doesn't matter if you can save a few keystrokes to, say, change a word a few paragraphs back, and you're not producing structured text in any meaningful way.
It's perfectly fine to like the terminal, but you _have_ to admit it is a preference that has nothing to do with "efficiency".
I must respectfully disagree. It's far from just about writing an email; it's about managing hundreds of emails. With Vim keybindings, I can switch between email accounts, folders, and individual emails in Aerc at lightning speed. I can select emails using the same keybindings as I would to select lines of text in Vim. Then, I can use those same keybindings to delete, move, copy, or mark emails. The efficiency? It's many times better once you understand the Vim mindset. Plus, I can use the same keybinding system in other programs too. Take a look at [oil.nvim](https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim), NNN, or [yazi](https://github.com/sxyazi/yazi), or mpv or surfingkeys in your browser.
For Yazi, I even created a hardcore Vim configuration that makes it even easier and more efficient for any user familiar with Vim keybindings.
Just one example: look at your email program. Perhaps you have a folder open with 100 emails. Now, imagine that each email is nothing more than a line of text. So, you have a document with 100 lines of text. In Aerc, I can simply jump to the first line (the first email) with `gg`. And with `G`, I can jump to the last email. With `ff`, I filter all emails that have the same sender. With `fs`, all that have the same subject. With `V`, I mark an email, and with `X` or `dd`, I can delete the email. Before that, I can mark all the emails I filtered with `G`. If I don't want to delete them but move them instead, I just press `pf` and enter the first letters of the desired folder where I want to move my emails. I can also set certain folders where I often move emails as shortcuts. For example, `pb` to move emails to the "Brain" folder. Have a look at my simple config: https://github.com/rafo/aerc-vim/blob/main/binds.conf
Once understood, everything becomes incredibly fast.
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