> If you're exercising for cardio, and you're able to follow your book or podcast, you're probably not doing good cardio.
Nonsense. Elite distance runners are doing 80% of their miles at essentially a conversational jog with a starkly lower HR than the 20% of intense miles. Cardio exercise under all levels of intensity is optimal, not just easy or just hard.
"This means regular exercise (both strength training, ideally 3x per week, and cardio training that helps to improve V02 max like Zone 2 training)"
Actually, V02 max is best improved through High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) like doing 400m sprints 8x with a couple minutes rest inbetween. V02 max is famous for being one of the best predictors of longevity.
Zone 2 training (light jogging) is important in tandem (80% of exercise ideally), especially for overall cardiovascular health and lowering heart rate.
Best thing I ever did for my health was start running (mostly jogging) 4-5 times a week. It's amazing how much your health can be improved with 4x 45 minute jogs (just 3 hours/wk). I can consume practically any caloric food for needed energy and all my health metrics have been substantially linearly increasing since I started.
"the stuff that’s not good for you: pasta and pizza and bread."
Tell that to the paragons of fitness in marathon running or olympic swimming. There are none of them on low carb. The best cardio health requires cardio exercise and cardio exercise requires carbs as energy. Of course if you're not going to exercise and are okay with 50th percentile health, ya carbs will hurt you then because youre not using them.
He might be talking about zone 2 in a 3-zone model? Otherwise, I agree, zone 2 in a 5- or 7-zone model is not intense enough to provide VO2 adaptation.
No, on 15 April 2023 the RSF suddenly attacked SAF bases and tried to assassinate al-Burhan, SAF leader. That's a stark escalation just like how Oct 7th. happened to Israel, where both had simmering issues.
Not really, the Muslim Brotherhood association is complex and if anything more aligned with the SAF. The RSF receives support from UAE which hates the Muslim Brotherhood and officially designates it a terrorist organization...
> Global solar installations are breaking records again in 2025. In H1 2025, the world added 380 gigawatts (GW) of new solar capacity – a staggering 64% jump compared to the same period in 2024, when 232 GW came online. China was responsible for installing a massive 256 GW of that solar capacity.
> For context, it took until September last year to pass the 350 GW mark. This year, the milestone was achieved in June. That pace cements solar as the fastest-growing source of new electricity generation worldwide. In 2024, global solar output rose by 28% (+469 terawatt-hours) from 2023, more growth than any other energy source.
> Nicolas Fulghum, senior energy analyst at independent energy think tank Ember, said, “These latest numbers on solar deployment in 2025 defy gravity, with annual solar installations continuing their sharp rise. In a world of volatile energy markets, solar offers domestically produced power that can be rolled out at record speed to meet growing demand, independent of global fossil fuel supply chains.”
> Utility-scale solar power capacity in China reached more than 880 gigawatts (GW) in 2024, according to China’s National Energy Administration. China has more utility-scale solar than any other country. The 277 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in China in 2024 alone is more than twice as much as the 121 GW of utility-scale solar capacity installed in the United States at the end of 2024.
> Planned solar capacity projects will likely lead to continued growth in China’s solar capacity. More than 720 GW of solar capacity are in development: about 250 GW under construction, nearly 300 GW in pre-construction phases, and 177 GW of announced projects, according to the Global Solar Power Tracker compiled by Global Energy Monitor.
(1GW of solar PV is installed every 15 hours globally as of this comment; 4.6TW of new renewables are expected to come online globally in the next four years)
Added to the 45% direct fossil fuel usage... for 68% or so from fossil fuels.
Not counting the fossil fuels used to mine in other nations (likely diesel) the lithium and other elements, or transportation of materials (likely deisel) or the transportation of the final goods (likely deisel).
> 80% of the world lives in fossil fuel importing countries, with over 50 countries importing more than half their primary energy as fossil fuels. In contrast, 92% of countries have renewables potential over ten times their current demand. Replacing imported fossil fuels using three key levers—EVs, heat pumps and renewables—can cut net fossil fuel imports by 70%, saving $1.3 trillion globally each year. Once electrotech is bought, it lasts for decades, providing insulation from the vagaries of global pricing. When fossil flows stop, the economy stops. When electrotech flows stop, only growth is at risk.
> China’s pivot to electrotech has been central to the global shift, sparking an explosion in manufacturing, innovation and deployment. China’s domestic roll-out of electrotech is unparalleled: it accounts for half of global solar panel installations, 60% of EV sales and two-thirds of global growth in electricity demand since 2019. In the first half of 2025, Chinese fossil demand in electricity generation was down by 2%. This is highly significant because global fossil fuel demand excluding China has been flat since 2018, and China has driven all the net growth.
> As electrotech surges into one country and sector after the next, it drives replacement, not addition. Fossil demand has been flat for industrial energy since 2014, for buildings since 2018, for road transport since 2019, and may peak for electricity this year. Two-thirds of countries have already seen peak fossil demand in end-use sectors, and half the world has seen a peak in fossil fuels for electricity. China is the pivot nation in the global system, and fossil electricity demand in China is down 2% in the first half of 2025. If current trends continue in renewables deployment and electrification, fossil fuel demand will be in decline by 2030. That implies disruption for the fossil fuel sector and the rise of new electrotech winners.
It's a planned trajectory, China went hard on using fossil fuels to develop renewable power + 20% nuclear in order to replace their fossil fuel dependancy (which is coming).
Even their recent coal usage has been 'better' in the sense of closing down large numbers of smaller older inefficient and extremely dirty coal plants while building out a lesser number of larger, moder, more efficient, less dirty coal.
On the mining side they are partnered with suppliers like Fortescue Metals that has been making massive real investments in hydrogen, regenertive trains, water management, etc. at a scale of moving a billion tonnes of material per annum.
"Jim Bennett: I've been up two and a half million dollars.
Frank: What you got on you?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: What you put away?
Jim Bennett: Nothing.
Frank: You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at three to five percent to pay your taxes and that's your base, get me? That's your fortress of fucking solitude. That puts you, for the rest of your life, at a level of fuck you. Somebody wants you to do something, fuck you. Boss pisses you off, fuck you! Own your house. Have a couple bucks in the bank. Don't drink. That's all I have to say to anybody on any social level. Did your grandfather take risks?
Jim Bennett: Yes.
Frank: I guarantee he did it from a position of fuck you. A wise man's life is based around fuck you. The United States of America is based on fuck you. You're a king? You have an army? Greatest navy in the history of the world? Fuck you! Blow me. We'll fuck it up ourselves."
I like PlanetScale, but they already have precedent very recently for having a free-tier and then cancelling it for a minimum of $40/month plan, which made many people switch. What's to stop them from doing the same here?
Be wary of building a cheap hobby project on it expecting pricing to stay consistent. If $40+ isn't feasible for you, you may be trying to switch off to a hosted PostgreSQL option, with all the pain MySQL->Postgres entails, soon.
(Planetscale employee)
This is very different though: it's not a free tier, it's an actual single node DB as a paid product. It's definitely not a good fit for every usecase, but if you have a hobby project it's a great way to start with plenty of room to scale if/when you get actual usage
Similarly to other replies (but my own opinion): it's not a huge source of revenue today, on a single customer basis, compared to our biggest customers, sure. But our goal is to provide potential customers that can't justify larger scale, 3-nodes databases, something they can build on and grow on our platform.
We would never want to pull the rug on paying customers: we want to enable them :-) sure it's not a huge part of our revenue, but that's not the goal. We just want to provide a great product, in a way that's affordable to everyone.
You of course don't have to take my word, but I think it makes business sense to do this and not pull the rug.
Compare to a free tier where you bleed money in the hopes that customers will end up paying you. Hope isn't a good business strategy right? :-)
In what way? Companies drop/move on from small customers all the time as positions and analysis changes. $5 a month might make sense now, but with thin profits, a lower than predicted "upgrade rate" and maybe a higher than anticipated support cost etc and this becomes a less profitable option without price increases, which loses customers causing more increases because of none scalable costs etc.
Throw in a change of leadership or business focus and it's an easy short term boost to drop the many smaller customers and focus on the big fish who make the real money.
It's a common pattern, echoed over many industries, and while you might not see it being likely here right now, if the concept literally doesn't make sense to you, you need to look up some basic business ideas because it's a pretty valid concern.
It's easier to pull the rug out from under a group of customers who earn you 5% of your revenue than it is to do the same thing to a group of customers who make you 25% of your revenue.
This small $5 plan is obviously not going to make Planetscale very much revenue.
You were buying flow for your sales funnel with a free plan now you want to attract users with a low tier plan. Your reputation was hurt with the first rug pull so why be surprised that users expect another rug pull from you in the future?
If a free plan attracts users that can be upsold is that free plan not profitable _vs_ paying for advertising?
If such upselling is done via rug pull tactics it damages your reputation vs never having a free plan in the first place.
If a new bank offered you free or discounted banking would you move over your accounts and payments and credit cards? What if that bank has a reputation for upselling via rug pulling?
For users the cost of switching can mean that services that are free or cheap are not worth it if they are expecting a rug pull.
I agree, removing the free plan was a bad move. They should have at least grandfathered existing free tier users. I was just explaining their point of view.
When you don't need advertising anymore, the free plan starts becoming a net loss. If the $5 plan is profitable today, it will probably stay profitable forever as their costs will only go down, never up. There is little incentive to remove it (until Broadcom or Oracle acquires them).
You did a good job explaining their view. What I am doing is explaining the view of users and judging by your last post I have not yet done a good job so let me try again:
If elimination of a service plan is expected to push enough users to a _more_ profitable service plan why would a business not do it? Does it matter if the plan to be eliminated, generates _some_ profit?
Why would we? we make a (small) profit on these cheaper tiers. We are a sustainable and profitable company. Also the free tier wasnt cancelled very recently it was 1.5 years ago so you are reaching a bit here.
Your $5 plan may be gross margin positive but incentives are to push users into higher margin plans and from this pov this new plan looks much like your previous free plan which was rug pulled. Offering a free service to buy users then imposing migration costs on these users when you rug pull damaged your reputation. Next time perhaps grandfather existing users instead. If you want this new plan to be taken seriously update your terms to promise you will not rug pull again.
He's responding in good faith to people expressing doubt that they will maintain this pricing tier, and is responding to rebuttals. Whether you agree with his point of view is different.
Case in point. Potential customers will see this dismissal as the equivalent of how long they expect this pricing to remain. You’re free to increase the price in a year and when customers are irked, “why isn’t it $5 anymore?” They’ll be met with “that’s not recent.” “That was so long ago”
If you want to rebuild reputation with hobby tier, you’ll probably want to put in a 3 year pricing guarantee, not 1 month like the notice last time.
free tiers are a subsidy paid by either VCs or paid users that in some cases can function as a marketing cost, if the free tier is time-limited and thus represents a finite cost to the business.
far better to just have transparent pricing that takes customer needs into account. bravo planetscale
All takeout food did. I struggle to find why Chipotle would be considered expensive relative to other takeout options. You're getting chicken and 10 additional whole foods options for $10, when most other Mediterranean, Chinese, Japanese, taqueria, etc. options are at least a few $ more.
In the East Bay, I've noticed that the chain restaurants are consistently more expensive. Chipotle is more expensive than the taqueria down the street, not by a lot, but by a buck or two. And the bigger chains jacked up prices by more than the more regional ones: Subway costs the same as Togo's. McDonald's costs more than In n Out.
Businesses have found that people are willing to spend ~$20 on a fast/fast-casual lunch, and now most everybody charges that amount. But the national chains are also aiming for food consistency between locations, which means that my Chipotle and McDonald's meal is going to be only as good as they can economically make it in a blasted food desert like Indianapolis, whereas the local restaurants and regional chains can take advantage of me living less than 200 miles of 40% of the country's fresh produce production.
The fast food / fast-casual segments are losing price differentiation, and the fast food options are losing on quality.
That’s interesting because I’m in the East Bay Area too and have the opposite experience.
Chipotle burrito is $10.50, 80% of taquerias are $15 burritos.
In N out double double meal is $11, but McDonalds app has free fries so a Double Quarter (with 2x meat), fries, and drink is $9…
I just looked it up. At my local Chipotle, a burrito is $13.65 + $2.50 guac + $2.80 for chips and salsa + $2.85 drink, comes out just over $21.80 before tax. Tacqueria around the corner, Super fajitas burrito $15.49 + free chips and salsa + $3.75 for a drink, comes out to $19.25 before tax.
If you consider guacamole an extravagance, the more basic burrito at the tacqueria is $13.49, so the gap shrinks, but is still in the tacqueria's favor.
Between the two, Chipotle's chips are better, but everything else is a downgrade quality wise.
And I don't think it's reasonable to include coupons in McDonald's pricing. I'm not installing malware on my phone to save the $3 a McDonald's fry costs.
Other fast food options have recently marketed and offered cheaper options. Chipotle doesn't have a very deep menu. I see they sell a single taco for around $4 but not many other "value" options.
That’s kind of why Chillis is doing pretty well. It costs almost the same as McDonalds and for a few bucks extra, you’d get a reasonable sit down experience.
They're also benefiting from being practically the last man standing in the family dining segment. They're not in a menu category that was going to butt up against nicer sit-down dining places (if Olive Garden, for example, raised their prices much they'd be running up against sit down Italian places, likewise for Red Lobster and nicer seafood). And they adapted well to the COVID-era takeout boom, which suggests that they were actually serving food people would choose to eat, not merely offering the sit down experience like say Applebees.
All the expensive local run city restaurants benefited from inflation.
The McDonalds burger went from $12 to $18, but it's still the same terrible product. The hipster burger joint price went from $20 to $22, and that is a dramatically better burger.
The difference is that the local burger place doesn't have to show a 7% increase in profit year after year in perpetuity. Their price was set for "I can live a modest life off the profit and pay my employees a wage competitive enough to actually staff my restaurant, and therefore also end up with people more competent than your average fast food worker". That gives you more value per dollar, because more of your dollar is being spent on actual product and service rather than paying absurd and unjustifiable salaries to an entire building full of overpaid "management" and administration in the highest cost of living part of the country. Fewer shareholders to pay too.
So instead of the price delta between absolute trash and quality being $8, now it's $4.
I am told inflation is a bad thing, but it is making lots of small business that we desperately want and need much more competitive. A smaller business has far less pricing power and therefore less ability to pass on a cost increase.
> In my experience US power companies hate crediting pushback to the grid because it all happens at the same time during peak sunlight hours and then customers get to use those credits at night and during the winter which the power company thinks is unfair.
I'm pretty sure PG&E pays back something like only 5% of the generation of my solar panels. I'll end the year with $400 more generated than used, and I'll get a check for $20...
Nonsense. Elite distance runners are doing 80% of their miles at essentially a conversational jog with a starkly lower HR than the 20% of intense miles. Cardio exercise under all levels of intensity is optimal, not just easy or just hard.
reply