Yes, but local permitting is a complete shitshow. For example, I should be able to plug in a simple balcony-solar system, but my PUC prohibits the technology.
Yes. Though that’s the current regime most capacity is installed under. And the companies building solar farms have more energy to navigate the process than me/you.
But it just goes to show you being involved in local government, showing up to advocate for green energy projects, etc at local levels is one of the best things you can do.
(this is why it is so important to electrify trucks and to disallow industrial and commercial parks with lots of truck traffic near residential and school areas; all of this combustion/fossil energy pollution is creating health debt that will catch up with us)
what about the fourth with the gender bend twist? I guess the meme is older than the fourth movie, but I rarely see it even get mentioned let alone memefied. I guess less people would know tetralogy instead of trilogy, at least, I had to look up what a series of 4 would be.
The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.
The surprising and unsolicited fourth film had some promise in the first third of the film - I loved how it subverted expectations and was a meta deconstruction of the series itself. After the provocative and almost blasphemous setup, the film quickly devolved into poor action, weird pacing, and overall bad plot and character arcs. In a word, it felt senile. (The action shouldn't have been that bad with Keanu helming John Wick. It was just laziness.) The denouement was just same-y slop we see in every other dialed in action movie. Such a letdown for such a shocking cold open.
If you haven't seen the fourth film, it's a bit of a mind fuck. But turn it off the minute the reveal is over. That part is a treat, but it isn't worth your time otherwise.
>The first film was groundbreaking. It matched "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" in terms of its cultural penetration. Unfortunately the series failed to live past that strong debut. The second and third films were a total letdown, and The Animatrix only appealed to a niche audience and was itself a mixed bag.
I dunno, I feel like people had erased the entire film up to the lobby scene. It has frontloaded pacing issues. The sequels were 100% studio, but they were solid films in their own right.
> over-explaining removing mystery and undermining your world building.
This! Spending too long in a fictional universe waters it down. The trimmings of imagination are best when used sparingly. If you reveal too much, the magic ceases to work.
not just the midichlorians, but the fact that every little knob and lever in an x-wing or on your blaster has an explanation of what they do. every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (not to mention the small-world effect where it just so happens that most of those backstories intersect with the same small handful of important people).
so it's no longer a world where your imagination can run wild, it's a world where pedantic nerds get to tell you "you're wrong. here's the actual answer". and it's not even that the "actual" answers are necessarily bad... it's just the fact there is an answer at all removes some of the magic
And that every extra gets their own story; the random slave that Jabba kills is mostly forgettable but apparently in the extended universe, she survives, is or becomes a jedi and becomes Luke Skywalker's wife ???
It really feels like they have absorbed fanfiction into the mainline series. The Star Wars sequels had potential after the first film, but since it seems they had no idea what they were doing the second and third were a waste. The very intentionally placed marketable plushies did not help.
The Hobbit could have been fine, but they botched the production, had to pull in Peter Jackson to try and save it, they made it a cynical cash grab with forcing it to become a trilogy with unrelated story and made-up plotlines put in. Rings of Power was completely unnecessary and I have zero intention to watch it.
In hindsight, the Matrix sequels were actually alright. For one thing they pushed the technology (and budgets) of filmmaking forwards, with the big gun suits vs the tentacle robots segment costing more than most films that had been made up until then.
Much of the appeal of star wars is that things actually looked like they had purpose and function despite being a purely imaginative future.
> every single alien you saw in Mos Eisley eventually got an official name and canonical backstory (
This is such a weird meme. I suppose if you looked up every single story ever published referencing star wars you might be able to come up with names for most of them, but if you don't want to, why are you putting in the effort?
I'm not usually a fan of "don't engage with it!" defenses, but we're not talking abouy ignoring one movie out of a trilogy, we're talking about not deliberately searching out obscure fan fiction.
Beyond that, the people in the cantina should have names, because that's what "real people" have, and this is supposed to be a movie about a reality like ours that just happens to have spaceships and spacemagic.
In a universe with literally trillions of sentient beings, spaceships and literal magic, if your imagingation is lacking magic, I think that's on you.
The second/third ones never really captured the magic of the first - part of that is because of the refreshing world building.
The rest of the trilogy felt... a bit self-indulgent for lack of a better description. Everything from the "When Harry Met Sally scene" with the drink to the interminably long fight scene with every possible "martial arts" weapon - I found myself rolling my eyes even as a teenager.
I haven't seen the most recent one. Like Star Wars, I sort of lost interest with the whole franchise.
I feel like hardly anyone even know that a fourth exists, let alone seen it. Didn't it come out during COVID? I watched it because I had a home cinema at the time. The thing I hated the most was how it looked more like a YouTube video than a movie. Something just wasn't right and made it feel very much like fanfiction. I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.
> I've completely forgotten the story but remember it was unsurprising given the more recent developments of the Wachowskis.
I think you mean recent developments at WB. The movie was a self-parody, describing in painful detail the demands from the studio for a sequel Matrix movi- er, "game", even when the creator was so over it.
Eh... I feel like they have aged better over time than a lot of 'trilogies'. They do not measure up to the original but they aren't truly terrible, at least if you're looking at them from a more philosophical standpoint.
I thought Reloaded was amazing at the time (I was a teenager). I saw it three times in the cinema. I was so excited for Revolutions. Had all these theories about what the architect said, why did the kid give him a spoon etc, are they still in another level of the Matrix? Then when it came out I saw it once and pretty much never talked about the Matrix again. Massive let down.
Sorry, they are as canon as the phantom menace even if you don’t like them (neither do I for that matter but hey, if these creators wanted to wreck their legacy who are we to stop them).
Return of the Jedi (6) was perfectly fine. More like 7 which was ok as a nostalgic cameo vehicle, but resulted in throwing away the Rogue Squadron arc which should have always remained canon.
But not like that hadn't happened before. Anyone remember Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the original sequel to Star Wars?
It did feel derivative, but then they just did it again with one of the sequels because they could, except this time it's a death planet instead of star/moon. The Empire or whatever they called it had been reduced to a parody / comic relief.
The headline says "execs" but I don't see any Board members getting prison terms. Martin Winterkorn, the CEO, has basically escaped prosecution altogether.
It would be unlikely (not impossible) that board members would be briefed about ongoing criminal behaviour, and certainly not something so deep into operations as how the ECU is being programmed.
Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
The person that would benefit the most would be a senior executive who stands to gain a promotion, bonus or land an even better job elsewhere.
A former prime minister of my country was fined over $6 million for being on the board of a company what traded while insolvent. Not a prison sentence but a harsh penalty for someone that was not super rich (as far as I am aware).
> Can a board member be reasonably responsible for the actions of tens of thousands of employees if they have not explicitly enabled or condoned criminal behaviour?
Not sure what the answer is, but if the answer is yes, then that incentivizes them to build the oversight and reporting capabilities to be able to steer away from crime, and to hire noncriminal subordinates &c.
One way this could look in practice is board members having to post a large bond that gets taken away if the commpany is found to commit crimes during their tenure.
Hell even if not on purpose. The point of a board is oversight. If management can commit illegal acts without the board's knowledge, the board has failed. Of course incompetence in a board role shouldn't lead to prison. But it should at least bar someone from future board jobs for a few years.
Pour encourager les autres. If there's illegality going on at a company and the board doesn't know about it, future boards will make sure they are better informed.
Winterkorn has spent the past decade getting various postponements in his trial. Now that he is approaching 80 it is unlikely he will suffer any serious punishment.
The US indicted seven senior executives including Martin Winterkorn in 2017 [1]. None of these seven were extradited from Germany to the US to face trial.
> The losses go far beyond the cost of building and selling those 10,000 cars, according to Ford. Instead the losses include hundreds of millions being spent on research and development of the next generation of EVs for Ford. Those investments are years away from paying off.
That's missing the forest for the trees. They're losing money on every vehicle they sell. There needs to be a lot more R&D to get the vehicles to a price point that consumers will purchase them and they can actually make a profit. Thus far, their R&D has been a net loss for the company.
I'm sure at least a good portion of it will pay off eventually, but there's no guarantee of how much, or how long it will take.
I'm not sure if that's necessarily a fair assessment as Ford's laid out plan to get from the current 40% loss to 8% profit is pretty reasonable.
Of that 40 percentage points, 20 of them are directly attributable to economies of scale. As they sell additional units those costs will amortize out. i.e. the more they sell the less they lose.
They expect to pick up another 15 points via engineering changes that will unify a lot of parts between the different product lines. They apparently initially just focused on shipping the vehicles so each model has a lot of bespoke parts that could semi-trivially be reworked to de-duplicate them between product lines.
That gets you down to 5% losses. The bulk of the remaining 13 points they expect to pick up via battery design improvements and cost reductions in their supply chain.
And their stated deadline for this is the end of 2026 so it's not exactly like they intend this to take ages. Rather they expect to achieve this within a handful of model revisions.
If you lose 4 billion on the first car you sell and 40k on the 10,000th that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose money on the 1,000,000th one you sell even if nothing else changes.
People talk about EV’s underperforming etc, but there’re still steady year over year increases. They are just about to break 10% market share, and everyone sees the writing on the wall.
Ford is cutting back production because they aren't seeing the necessary growth. Even if nothing else changes, they will continue to lose money selling them.
> They're losing money on every vehicle they sell.
Unless I’m missing it, neither article shows the profit/loss of manufacturing the vehicle vs sales revenue of the vehicle itself, so we can’t know that. Even if it’s true, it’s not unusual when bringing up a new product as you optimise for scale.
> There needs to be a lot more R&D to get the vehicles to a price point that consumers will purchase them and they can actually make a profit.
Does there? Maybe all of the retooling and new assembly lines are done, all the designs are finished? Maybe not and they still have R&D budget left? They are also not operating in isolation - If another company comes out with a cheaper battery then Ford can just buy it with minimal R&D, they don’t have to invent everything themselves.
> Thus far, their R&D has been a net loss for the company.
I mean, that’s R&D? It’s an investment. The alternative is to do nothing and end up like Nokia. Even if they are losing money on every vehicle, “shipping fast” is better than not shipping at all and they can control the numbers. Most people want the 2nd or 3rd gen when all of the bugs have been worked out, so having units on the road lets you learn what doesn’t work.
R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over it's lifetime.
Car production is very capital intensive, besides R&D you have the retooling of entire production lines as another major cost factor.
The real question is whether the sales of these cars will eventually pay for the capital expended. At current EV sales number that is not going to happen, but manufacturers like Ford obviously speculate on large future growth in demand for EVs.
At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
> R&D are costs which a company needs to pay to get a vehicle on the road. Whether the car, as a whole, is making a loss or not depends on whether it can pay for the R&D costs over its lifetime.
You’d think this “101” information would not be needed to be said here, but here we are having to explain it.
> At least in the EU expected EV growth was much larger than actual EV growth.
We should also try to quantify things, because using terms like “much” in italics when it comes to EVs has been so misused that people don’t trust it anymore. We were told that they are much heavier, but then this turns out to be as little as 10-15%. We were told that they lose massive range in the winter, but it can be the same ballpark of 10-15%.
Hard to say. Profit per sale doesn't tell the whole story. Mach E and F150 Lightning help Ford offset the CAFE contribution of their high margin gas guzzling cars and trucks. How much would they be making on Mustangs if they had to pay CAFE penalties?
I'd be interested to know the profit/CAFE for each Ford model and how much they are spending on R&D for EV vs ICE.
Lots of new technology ventures lose money at first; that's necessary. That includes other electric car manufacturers.
You sell what you can and at least offset costs somewhat, and also build marketshare, build infrastructure (dealerships, etc.), and learn invaluable lessons about everything from sales to service to reliability to performance, etc.
Or wait until you have the perfect machine that makes you profitable, then begin sales. That doesn't make any sense.
