Awesome! Joby needs trained pilots so that may be a bottleneck to scaling. I am guessing they would have to create autonomous air taxis like EHang to scale.
Ehang had a scaled-up multi-rotor drone that could carry one person. They're a drone company. Worked, but max flight time was something like 17 minutes. Their new model has both lift props and wings, plus a pusher prop for horizontal thrust. Range about 200km.
Joby is more like an Osprey. It takes off and lands hanging from its props, then tilts the props horizontally to operate in airplane mode.
This potentially offers more range with less power consumption. They've tried running on hydrogen, and claimed 524 miles of range.
There's also Archer Aviation (https://www.archer.com/) which has a roughly similar vehicle.
Test flights since 2021. Was supposed to be in service in 2025. Didn't happen.
They supposedly have an air taxi contract for the 2028 Olympics in LA.
Owned, or at least heavily financed, by Stellantis.
There seems to be convergence on something that transitions to airplane mode, as opposed to the previous round of giant quadrotor-type drones.
It's now clear that this can be done, but not clear that there's a business in it.
For those with unilateral tinnitus that seems influenced by neck stretches or TMJ issues, try sleeping on your back or on the opposite side to avoid pressure on the affected ear.
Also, consider getting an MRI to check for possible causes; in my case, a vascular loop was found contacting the vestibulocochlear nerve inside the internal auditory canal.
While I consider my case largely managed, it still flares up a few times per month, usually triggered by irritation or inflammation (allergens, getting sick, poor neck posture, loud music for hours)
Oh! Before this thread disappears into the void (or until the next tinnitus thread), one more trick that really helped back then:
Percussion massage gun with the sharp tip, aimed at the trapezius and levator scapulae. Those muscles can refer tension right around the ears. Targeting them can calm things down fast, especially if your tinnitus is posture or tension-related.
I think there would be open-source machine variants that many people could own and modify. As population growth is slowing, finite resources should hopefully have a better and wider distribution among people as they would not be constraints.
Incredible news! This should be replicated in tropics everywhere. In Singapore, the government is using Wolbachia mosquitoes to control the spread of vector mosquitoes, which looks like another effective solution.
In a professional context, I use it to help a client (chemicals company) optimize their deliveries to customers. They have > 100 production sites and thousands of customers, so LP is used to allocate customers to production sites based on the product-cost and availability at supply site and trucking costs. We have evaluated multiple solvers (Gurobi/ Llamasoft/ GAMS/ LocalSolver etc) for optimizing deliveries, as well as evaluating the cost impact of changes to the delivery network.
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