I love the assumption that somehow the problem was that he wasn’t spending enough time at Tesla, as if the Cybertruck wasn’t 100% his baby through and through. Clearly, with more genius ideas like that the company would be doing so much better.
Seconded.
Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media, period.
Yes, even including the original trilogy.
I want to note on the “mineral deal” thing that access to rare earth minerals has nothing to do with China’s ability to constrain their supply to the US, because getting rare earth minerals is actually relatively easy. They’re found all over the Earth, although some areas do have better naturally occurring concentrations than others. Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of finding a nice large swathe of land that you can easily strip-mine.
The problem is refining them. Digging up a bunch of soil and rock is easy, getting the trace amounts of rare (hence why they’re called that) earth minerals out of the soil and rock is really hard. While it’s true that China does dominate in rare earth extraction, it really wouldn’t be all that hard for other countries to catch up to them on that score if they wanted to. But the reason China controls the worlds rare earth supply is because they also dominate in refining, which is extremely difficult, technically complex, and not easy to replicate due to the highly specialised nature of rare earth refineries.
Trump can get access to all the unprocessed rare earth minerals he likes, but it won’t solve his current problems. First off, even if Ukraine were at peace tomorrow it would take most of a decade to prospect those mineral deposits and begin extracting them at scale. But even then, it doesn’t solve the refining problem. You’d just be selling the raw deposits to China so that they can refine them and sell the refined product back to you at a huge profit.
I tacked it onto your comment because I was chiming in with my agreement on your disagreement, if that makes sense.
The thing about the robotaxi thing is that it only really works as metro level infrastructure. Once you start trying to do that at a level where your vehicles can traverse whole states, the costs balloon like crazy.
I think Rogue One definitely has some issues worth criticising, but I really do like it a lot. For me it’s easily up there with the original trilogy. In fact if I were to rank just the Star Wars movies, no other media, I’d probably put it at number 3, despite its flaws.
It’s a movie where an absolute banger of a third act has to do a LOT of work to make up for a very weak first two acts, but my god the third act is so fucking good that it somehow pulls it off. The space battle, the assault on the tower, everyone doing their little part to help push towards one tiny little victory… that fucking Vader scene… it really does stick the landing.
I will grant, if they start adapting the Kieron Gillen Vader comics, that could be pretty fucking cool.
Should, but people don’t pay attention to those kinds of details.
Never said he was. I said he doesn’t “come off like” that kind of person. What I’m saying is he’s better than Pollievre at keeping the mask on, not that there’s anything better under the mask.
Sorry, you’re absolutely correct, I should have added “… or a pair of thigh highs.”
Shameful oversight on my part.
It wasn’t the wrong candidate, it was the wrong campaign.
The Dems stood in front of an electorate crippled by 4 years of rising cost of living and said “Look how good the economy is! GDP is up! Employment is up!” The electorate said “We can’t afford eggs,” and the Dems said “Shut the fuck up our economy is great how dare you say otherwise you worthless peasant!”
The Dems never stopped to consider that high GDP is meaningless if all the money ends up in the hands of billionaires and high employment is meaningless if everyone is working three jobs to make rent. Biden refused to allow any daylight between himself and Kamala on any issue, so they ended up just presenting a new wrapper on the same shit sandwich.
Trump meanwhile said “I hear you, everything is too expensive. I’ll solve it by blaming immigrants and doing some magic involving something called tariffs that I promise will make everything cheaper.” Now, none of that is actually a solution, but that didn’t matter, because when you yell “Help, I’m drowning!” and one person says “No you’re not”, while the other says “Yes you are and it’s because of brown people…” you don’t really listen to anything past the “Yes you are,” because the point is they apparently want to help you and the other person doesn’t. Trump didn’t need to have workable solutions, because the Dems forfeited the entire contest before it even started. Trump just had to show up and sit in the chair.
None of us are free until all of us are free
Hard agree. Andor is the best thing anyone has ever done with Star Wars.
Yes, I’m including the original trilogy. I said what I said.
Yes, but maybe you shouldn’t?
Who’s saying he isn’t? At this point they’re trying anything.
But I’ll grant that Harper is, at least, not a guy who has spent the last ten years regurgitating whatever bile comes out of Trump’s mouth. At this point Pollievre is completely toxic to older voters because he’s seen as a reflection of the US politics that lead to our closest ally declaring us an enemy. Harper should be completely toxic, but given time people tend to forget the bad that someone did, and you’re left with just the fact that he at least doesn’t come off like a whiny teen on 4Chan yelling about “THE WOKE RADICAL LEFT” or whatever dog whistle for “queer people” they’re using now.
Sketch? Nah bro, that is exactly the kind of “This looked sick in the early 2000s and we haven’t bothered updating it since” level of design that I want to see from a hardware vendor. That’s a company that’s just sitting there quietly trucking along, making nerdy devices for nerdy people. That’s a website that was never intended to be viewed by anyone other than a 30+ year old sysadmin who owns at least one beard grooming product.
“The main thing is that they [the Americans] don’t interfere in our affairs and don’t tell us how to live,” said a senior Russian official familiar with the Kremlin’s negotiating logic. “That they don’t hinder us in doing what we are doing.”
That being invading and subjugating weaker neighbours.
What this means is that while models like 338 are very good at predicting the overall trend of the election, in close or complicated races like the one being discussed they are not as indicative as people would like to think when it comes to, say, making tactical voting decisions. They are, ultimately, just making somewhat informed guesses about what these numbers are. In the aggregate those guesses tend to be right, but that doesn’t mean you’re getting accurate and direct data about how your particular riding is leaning, and people need to understand that.
Keep in mind, riding level polling doesn’t actually exist (in any meaningful way) in Canada. What these models do is take the historical vote distribution for that riding and adjust it based on national level polling trends. Don’t treat this kind of projection as remotely reliable at the riding level, it doesn’t actually tell you anything about what’s happening in your locality.
As always, the election is the only truly accurate poll. So get out and vote.
Yeah, I contemplated this idea, but you’d need a network of dealerships all within no more than about 450km of each other. Actually, a lot less than that if you want to deliver something like a cybertruck this way. And Tesla just doesn’t have that kind of infrastructure, especially in the Midwest and South. And that means there’s no good way to get a car from Fremont or Austin to anywhere on the East Coast either. At best you could maybe make this work in California.
But also consider the scale of what you’re talking about. Generally you’re looking at selling thousands of cars per day for a successful production model. Can their dealerships handle charging thousands of cars per day?
Oh, for sure, it’s absolutely possible that Trump does not understand the need for refinement infrastructure, or simply believes that its a simple problem that will solve itself. Given his approach to trying to rehome US manufacturing its clear that he has basically no understanding of industry realities.