Advances in low-carbon and renewable hydrogen production also will be crucial to the maturity of the PtL value chain. Lowering the levelized cost of hydrogen (which includes renewable-electricity input but excludes transport and distribution) to less than $1 per kilogram would reduce the cost of PtL to $1,200 to $1,800 per ton, depending on the carbon source, amounting to a 40 percent reduction in average cost by 2030. While this cost is still higher than that of fossil jet fuel, it is within range of alternative SAFs. Low-carbon hydrogen, sometimes referred to as “blue,” is derived primarily from natural gas using carbon capture and storage, while renewable or “green” hydrogen is made with renewable electricity. Low-carbon hydrogen is more cost-competitive than renewable hydrogen today and can be used as a transition technology to scale PtL faster. Although low-carbon hydrogen has lower production costs, it requires capturing CO2 twice to produce PtL—once in the hydrogen production route and again in the fuel synthesis step. Since this is an inherently inefficient system, renewable hydrogen can be prioritized for PtL production over the long term.
Hydrogen aircraft could enter the market in the 2030s and scale up through 2050, when they could account for roughly a third of aviation’s energy demand. With current aircraft designs, hydrogen aircraft could be range limited to up to 2,500 kilometers. Redesigning airframes and storage technology might unlock longer ranges without reducing the number of available seats. If hydrogen aircraft enter the market around 2035 and achieve longer ranges, they could gain a market share of up to one third by 2050. The estimated market share drops to 13 percent by 2050 if they enter the market by 2040 and only achieve shorter ranges. Assuming breakthroughs in battery chemistries, battery-electric aircraft could potentially power regional aircraft on flights up to about 1,000 km by mid-century.
Beyond these major hubs, about 36,000 regional airports, suitable for smaller aircraft, provide coverage for less traveled routes. Lacking the facilities and landing strips required for large aircraft, regional airports are typically underused, even during busy travel times. They nevertheless serve as essential links in the transportation chain and often provide other services—from flight training to recreational flying and aerial firefighting to skydiving.
More than 50 companies are developing battery-electric, hybrid, and hydrogen powertrains; new and retrofitted aircraft designs; advanced avionics; operations and booking platforms; and other important enablers of the RAM ecosystem. More than $1 billion has been invested in these RAM start-ups to date and the first retrofitted aircraft are slated to enter service in the mid-2020s. Simultaneously, an ecosystem of operators, consisting mainly of established airlines and regionally focused start-ups, is coming together to drive the industry forward.
Battery-electric- and hydrogen-powered aircraft could make up between 21 and 38 percent of all aircraft by 2050, representing 15 to 34 percent of the sector’s overall energy needs.
65% of U.S. airports will have less air service in October 2024 than they had in 2019, with 30% of U.S. airports losing more than one in four of their commercial flights and 12% losing more than half of their flights. With
The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
Like any large open-source project, American democracy is kind of messy, requires a lot of volunteer effort, and often uses way too much memory. But it enables everyone to submit requests for changes so that we might better direct the power of our communities at every level toward solving our problems, and the democratic process provides an essential stability which allows people to keep buying into our country as the platform on which to build their own big ideas.
Cynicism is not a neutral position — and although it asks almost nothing of us, it is highly infectious and unbelievably destructive. In my view, it is the most common and easy of evils.
Mesa’s struggles have come amid rising doubts over the future of regional airlines, which account for roughly 40% of scheduled departures in the U.S.
They are, however, united by their self-mythologizing as “free thinkers” and a sense of alienation from mainstream liberal discourse. This brand of tech bro is proud of his heterodoxy, despite the fact that the worldview he articulates seems to have been passed top-down from a cadre of influential Silicon Valley executives.
Great founders are ferociously productive. It does not feel strange or silly to refer to them as an “animal.” Look for people you could describe with a straight face in this way.
You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
Four of the five delays were caused, at least partly, by failures to document work for certification or similar failures. As a result, development cost ballooned to 350 billion yen (US$3.17 billion) implying that the project might never be able to fully recover its costs.
The scope clause's goal is to protect the union pilots' jobs at the major airline from being outsourced by limiting the regional airlines' passenger capacity.1(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_clause#cite_note-1) These clauses exist primarily in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Here is where I should confess that I secretly want Marszalek to succeed. I like technology. Especially technology that comes
You will be amazed howmany windowshoppers you’ll deal with.
Big companies are rarely well-oiled innovation machines, and it certainly doesn’t feel like you’re constantly outpacing the competition.
Productivity—always an issue—has also become a greater pain point. With most aerospace companies focusing on immediate supply chain and labor issues, few have explored long-term strategies for increasing efficiency. They now significantly lag behind other sectors in digitizing manual processes, and the gap widens each year. Operational excellence remains elusive, with many airframers and suppliers struggling to meet their commitments.
The awareness of a sustainable/green economy and long-term energy security has given rise to substantial global momentum in the search for alternative energy sources. The carbon-free nature of green hydrogen production and use, and the versatility of both hydrogen production sources, as well as its end-use applications, have resulted in an unprecedented focus on hydrogen. In 2022, 26 countries have set national hydrogen strategies which forecast 145–190 GW total green hydrogen production capacity by 2030
Hydrogen fuel cells offer a zero-emission power source solution for future sustainable aircraft and are a competitive technology for eVTOL, CS-23 and CS-25 class aircraft, (potentially up to 100 seats), as well as for APUs within future wide body aircraft. Aircraft manufacturing primes Airbus and Embraer have launched their own hydrogen fuel cell aircraft development programmes, ZEROe and Energia respectively, in order to leverage the benefits of hydrogen.
An additional headwind was the nearing U.S. election. “If [Donald] Trump were to win, investors saw a significant risk that the massive green hydrogen subsidy enacted as part of the Biden Inflation Reduction Act would disappear,” Eremenko wrote.
For commercial long-rage airplanes, however, employing fuel cells will be limited due to the replacement of the axillary power unit (APU) in the foreseeable future. Using fuel cells to propel such large airplanes would necessitate redesigning the airplane structure to accommodate the required hydrogen tanks, which could take a bit more time.
When I asked, “What are you working on?” the first words out of his mouth was his fund raising progress. Sigh… What I should have been hearing is the search for the business model, specifically the progress on product/market fit, but I hear the fund raising story first at least 90% of the time. It never makes me happy.
When no is not an option, you gaslight yourself into saying yes and convincing yourself that this yes is authentic.
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).
According to the report, the hydrogen aircraft market was valued at $27.7 billion in 2030, and is estimated to reach $489 billion by 2050, growing at a CAGR of 15.4% from 2030 to 2050.
We are not taught as kids to feel okay in the wide expanse between what we want to happen and what happens because the bigger that gap, the bigger the failure.
Yet the truth is that, while it’s important to stay on schedule if you want to get to kickboxing on time, what’s *not* remotely important is getting to kickboxing on time. It just doesn’t really matter.
There is a gap, too, between the tools that exist and the future we’re being sold. The innovation curve, we’re told, will be exponential. The paradigm, we’re cautioned, is about to shift. Regular people, we’re to believe, have little choice in the matter, especially as the computers scale up and become more powerful: We can only experience a low-grade disorientation as we shadowbox with the notion of this promised future. Meanwhile, the ChatGPTs of the world are here, foisted upon us by tech companies who insist that these tools should be useful in some way.
The Cybertruck is mostly but not entirely car-shaped. It is stiff and very gray and looks like home electronics looked when Bill Clinton was president; it is both too jankily long and too upright for its amusingly normal-sized tires, in a way that makes them look like small, cheap dress shoes. There is a lot of vertical space serving no evident purpose, and the vehicle is somehow imposing and goofy in exactly equal measure. It looks like if Hot Wheels made a VHS rewinder, or like what the cars would look like in an version of *Freejack* in which a circa-now Rob Schneider was the star. Imagine a neckroll-equipped NFL fullback from 1995 who gets himself onto a frankly risky steroid program and simultaneously stops working out and you are maybe some of the way there in terms of the proportion.
And if you keep looking further and further, it turns out, the sparkles emoji goes *all* the way back to Emoji 1.0 in 2015
There are many of you with kids younger than mine—dads who find themselves deep in what a close friend recently called The Tunnel: the place every parent remains whilst their kids are four and under; when keeping a small child alive and under control takes all that you have. Parents in The Tunnel can cycle through bliss and despair on a turnaround that would give non-parents whiplash.
now I’m paying for duplicate services, terrified that I might wipe out precious memories if I cancel one.
• It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart but sanity.
The “size” of a leadership episode could be measured as a product of *stakes* and *energy.* Ie, the value of what’s at stake times the energy output rate (in the sense of Andy Grove’s idea of “high-output management”) that needs to be put in for the duration, to make something happen. Here’s the 2×2 with the resulting for BDFxing archetypes (which are transient *roles,* not personalities).
Some people tend to be more systematically curious than others. Those curious minds are generally adventurous, creative, less risk-averse, and seem to seek and enjoy exploration more than others.
In the presentation, when Jobs did the world’s first “swipe to unlock,” the audience made an audible gasp. A minute later, he brought up a list of artists in the phone’s “iPod” app and asked, “Well, how do I scroll through my list of artists? I just take my finger and scroll.” Another audible gasp. It’s weird that something so normal today was jaw-dropping 17 years ago.
This was as far from a VR headset as a kid’s Schwinn bicycle is from a Gulfstream G800 private jet.
We know what quality means to us! We *feel* it. We know why high quality things cost more and we know how it influences our choices. In the physical world, it’s the difference between a $15.00 price tag and a $150 one.
i went mostly offline and then all this happened
Every founder tells themselves a story about why they’re heading to the gold rush, but the executive coach I would eventually hire says there are really only two. Do you want to be rich, generating wealth in service of some further end? Or do you want to be king, with money a mere byproduct of trying to make the world the way you feel it should be?
The business consultant William Bridges argued that every transition involves a period of loss, then a period in the neutral zone, and then a period of rebirth. The loss that comes with retirement can be brutal. Some highly successful people mourn the life that gave them meaning and made them the center of the room. People in the neutral zone don’t yet know who the new version of themselves will be. They report feeling hollow, disoriented, empty.
Explain ideas in simple terms, strongly and clearly, so that they can be rebutted, remixed, reworked — or built upon.
You’ll have options! So many options that, unless you have strongly held preferences about spatula brands — unlikely, given that you just typed “spatula” into Amazon — you’re going to need some guidance. BANKKY or KLAQQED? Should you give IOCBYHZ a look or just pay extra for the Oxo?
Showing every SKU, of course, is exactly the Amazon approach - 'the everything store', and it works well for some categories, and especially when you know exactly what you want. But knowing what you want is not necessarily the starting point - that's what needs to happen along the funnel. Amazon's relative weakness at curation, discovery and recommendation (I've seen data suggesting the recommendation platform is only 1/4 of its books sales) is, I think, a big reason why, after 25 years of ruthless and relentless execution, it's still only got to 25% of the print books market in the UK and USA. A bookshop (or any shop) is, yes, the end-point to a logistics system, but a good bookshop is primarily a discovery platform. That is, it's more about the tables than the shelves. And the tables are lists, not inventory.
Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle. Amazon is great at selling you what's on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it's not very good at showing you what's on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It's not so good at selling the mid-list - things that you didn't know existed, or didn't know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it's not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn't work so well. (Even in print books, Amazon's market share only reached a quarter of the market after 20 years of ruthless execution).
Amazon is getting worse, but you probably already knew that, because you probably shop at Amazon. The online retail behemoth’s search results are full of ads and sponsored results that can push actually relevant, well-reviewed options far down the page. The proportion of its inventory that comes from brands with names like Fkprorjv and BIDLOTCUE seems to be constantly expanding. Many simple queries yield results that appear to be the exact same product over and over again—sometimes with the exact same photos—but all with different names, sellers, prices, ratings, and customer reviews. If you squint, you can distinguish between some of the products, which feels like playing a decidedly less whimsical version of “spot the difference” picture games.
Reflecting on his path at Pinterest, Sciarra shared some advice for founders and go-getters alike: “In the early stages of a product or a company, no one really knows what’s going to work,” Sciarra said via email. “Don’t take ‘no’s’—even ‘no’s’ from really smart, boldfaced names—too seriously.”