The C-u C-u trick at 2:03 is such a neat hack.
Goes to show how with Emacs you don't have to compromise between customization and productivity: a true hacker can have both.
Bialetti has been on its last leg since 2015. They're drowning in debt and (in the best case scenario) are headed toward restructuring soon; in any case their future's not looking bright.
I'm not sure about the details. IMHO a contributing factor is that they're a company historically centered around manufacturing nearly indestructible appliances (even the newer mokas, however flimsier, don't break easily); once the market was saturated with the flagship product, there's only so much profit they could squeeze out of selling accessories and the like.
I don't know if this is the ideal takeaway. Otherwise, we should all prioritize making our products flimsier and more expensive.
I think it's just a straightforward failure of creativity — or, even more plainly, a failure to understand their customer. They had a great product, which led to a loyal following — why not expand into adjacent markets?
The cruel irony is that their product was related to something that's extremely disposable. Why not get into the business of coffee beans? Why not partner with interesting coffee growers? Subscription businesses have been huge for decades, now — why not offer consumers the ability to buy an espresso bean subscription to go with their Mokapot, thereby generating a reliable recurring revenue stream?
A glimpse at their Wikipedia page [1] suggests they never even tried to branch out from the small, comfortable niche of cookware.
> Otherwise, we should all prioritize making our products flimsier and more expensive.
It's the view of many that this is indeed what most companies prioritize — I'm not saying it's true, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly fringe opinion. It's in the vein of enshittification.
Also, might I ask how you inserted that em-dash? A keyboard shortcut? It's interesting to see fancy typography online.
One can look up the utf8 character for different typographical characters and copy and paste them in. On macOS at least, there is a keyboard shortcut for "emojis" (Cntl+Cmd+Space) and a little window shows up where you can search for emojis by name, and typographical characters by name (such as "em dash"). —pjh
Bring up the keyboard viewer widget on macOS and it will show you a live preview of what each key is... you can hold down the modifiers to see how the keys change.
Brand protection may be one reason. Branding with a supplier who messes up in the coffee bean arena would hurt their reputation. Some business will throw ideas out and see what fits and maybe get a second really good product. Getting another product and being successful is hard enough which is why you see larger companies buying out others. It’s easier to buy and get a successful product from and existing than branching out and hitting another success.
But even if the market is saturated... is it really? I'm just an armchair expert in this case, but as far as I'm aware, there's not a coffee maker yet in every house; they will eventually break if overheated for example (I broke mine's rubber seal by putting it on the stove without water); and there's plenty of untapped markets out there yet.
That said, one person may buy one coffee maker and never need another one for the next decade or two, or pass it on to their children if it's really good. So what another comment said, them expanding into selling coffee as well for example, sounds like an idea.
If the rubber seal is damaged, you can simply replace it, you don't need to buy a new coffee maker. When people mention that newer coffee makers are cheaper and lower-quality, that's probably Bialetti trying to reach a larger market. I guess lots of people bought one and rarely if ever used it (I think even I have one somewhere, but don't ask me where).
As for expanding into selling coffee: that's natural for systems like Senseo or Nespresso, where you have custom pads/pods which you insert into the machine (not sure if third-party pad/pod makers have to pay a license fee to the "system provider"?), but Bialetti coffee makers work with any ground coffee. Might be an idea nevertheless, but not sure about the odds of success - I imagine most Italians already have their favorite brand of coffee and wouldn't suddenly switch to "Bialetti Coffee" just because they say it works best with their machines.
Not really, it remains true even when you take competition into account. Also, the rest of the industry isn't really playing the same game: all other companies producing moka pots are vastly more diversified. You have e.g. Alessi which fills the design-oriented niche (and has tons of other products), or the countless crummy knock-off factories which churn out all sorts of trash and just happen to machine moka pots once in a while. But only Bialetti kept all its eggs in one basket (at least until it was too late).
their quality went way downhill and they shipped production overseas. I would love to have a nice bialetti moka express or a stainless version. i bought one probs 8 or 9 yrs ago, and it wasn't long before the tin lining separated, and the overall quality was crap. nothing like my mothers or any others I had used when i was introduced to them in italy. so i bought an alessi stainless steel made in italy pot at like 5x the price, and never looked back. but do i think a well built bialetti would be as good or better, they just dont make them well anymore…
I see a lot of Bialetti-branded cookware at local supermarkets. Things like nonstick frying pans. I actually bought one on a trip once when I needed a pan, and it's pretty good.
For one thing, things like Aeropress, Nespresso/Keurig, and cheaper/better home espresso and bean-to-cup coffee machines came along. People don't necessarily need to muck around with a Moka pot to make quality coffee at home any more.
And if you really do want a Moka pot, there's a lot of cheaper Chinese competitors now that look the part and actually have reasonable quality.
> The history of coffee is less than 600 years old.
The history of coffee being traded internationally is around 600 years old. Coffee began being "domesticated" (more in the Graeber "play-farming" sense of the word) at least 7k years ago
Likely even longer before that given the dominance of the plant in parts of Ethiopia. Today the few "coffee forests" remaining are protected ecosystems by UNESCO
I'm curious, why L2 norm? Each qubit lives in C^2, does it not? I've only ever seen quantum computing formulated over finite dimensional Hilbert spaces (though to be fair it was only in a math context, no real physics there)
We can't have a why, because the claim that the norm is L2 is axiomatic [1]. However, as the sibling comment notes, we can argue from consistency. Would any other norm give us a sensible theory? Or we can put quantum theory in a larger framework of theories and discuss why the L2 norm makes more sense within that framework. Scott Aaronson discusses some of these idea in his lecture [2].
I'm not familiar with this custom, but wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim? Surely after some point you hit diminishing returns, and after that it becomes downright damaging (in terms of mental health etc). So I'd expect the cycle to balance itself after a while, with parents eventually recognizing the importance of downtime. What gives?
(I suppose the answer is that there's an economic incentive in squeezing your kids into a pressure cooker of endless commitments, to the point where the pros outweigh the cons; but this assumption makes me feel like I'm being unfairly cynical to the parents in question.)
You end up with generational trauma, Asian parents who were worked to the bone as children, saw peers find higher-paying jobs as a result, the people who had mental breakdowns are presumably brushed aside and viewed as a source of shame, many keep grinding through the system because the alternative is poverty as a farmer, end up with scars repressed and treating their children the same way... and the children who break from the pressure bond over the Internet and try to treat each other with kindness, but are often unable to provide for each other because they're too mentally scarred to find jobs and make a living.
> wouldn't kids with more balanced extracurricular lives have an advantage over those who fill their day to the brim?
Depends on what you mean. Afterschool activities often include sports, so there's some balance between academics and physical activities, but physical activities won't get you into a good school unless you are at a competitive level, so there are high pressures there as well.
As for parents who recognize the importance of downtime? The ones that can afford it... send their kids overseas. But of course, even with added downtime, those kids are more academically competitive, so they end up ratcheting up the standards in the area they go to.
Depends. If you think it is just diminishing returns, than you always get more the more you put in. Just not as much. You have to drop to negative returns for that to go away.
And indeed, in that framing, it is going to be tough to make it so that those who can afford to spend their time shouldn't do so.
So, are there policies where we could make it so that folks can put a legit value in the things they are neglecting for this extra spend in time? I can certainly hope so.
Apart from what WJW said, it's not an objective criterion but it essentially means that you don't lose out in terms of initiative or position. A counterexample might be accepting the queen's gambit with black (i.e. 1. d4d5 2. c4cxd4), that way you win a pawn but you arguably give white an advantage in development (an in many cases white will be able to recapture the pawn as a result)
These small savings are worth the effort to people who are blowing away multiple times more cash on something else. For example, taking a vacation when they can't actually afford to do so.
