Thanks for digging this up.

It would make sense if at least the vans would make some profit, otherwise it looks like madness (kinda still does to me) to spend this much money on getting into an industry that is actually imo not that attractive.

Even with the switch from combustion to EV, car manufacturing is still a capital intensive and low margin business. And they don’t seem to go for the potential jackpot that is autonomous driving

I’d like to think that I have a reasonably decent understanding of economics for a laymen, but in this case I’m a bit stumped.

Seems to me that for 5 billion dollar (+however much VW spent on their own software) you should be able to develop a good operating system for your own cars. But I guess VW somehow failed and now would rather license Rivians through this joint venture?

Is a car OS really that expensive and complex to develop? Especially when android auto and Apple car play will do a lot of the heavy lifting for most people.

Even with losses of nearly $40,000 for every vehicle it delivers, Rivian has been on a steadier footing than other EV makers that have been forced to slash prices to stimulate demand or file for bankruptcy protection.

Rivian’s cash and short-term investments fell by about $1.5 billion in the first quarter to just under $8 billion.

Nearly 40k loss per vehicle? That seems insane. How has that company been going on until now? They also say that they even before this deal they had enough reserves to last until their next models release and things were moving up, but still that is seems like an absurd rate to burn cash.

I get that it sometimes makes sense for companies to burn through heaps of cash to scaley capture market share or drive out competition, but is the car manufacturing market at this point in time one where this play still makes any sense?

Fallout probably got a boost from the new series, that was quite well received.

To be fair: from a financial perspective that sounds like the right call, even if the movie would have been interesting.

R rated horror movies just don’t bring in the amount of money to sustain high budgets like that. The exception being “It” (and the sequel), but that had more mainstream appeal and also only came out years later.

Although isn’t the break even number usually closer to double the budget?

Ich es gibt sicher viele Aspekte des öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundunks, die reformbedürfig sind, aber aus Prinzip sollte es ganz eindeutig Oben anfangen. Vollständige Transparenz der Verträge aller Intendanten und sonstigen hohen Managern, sowie realistischere Gehälter ohne die ganzen extrawürste wie exorbitante Pensionen und Abfindungen.

Mir fällt halt subjektiv auf, dass ein relativ hoher Anteil der Kommentare in die letztere Kategorie fallen. In der Summe sind sie deshalb für mich eher ein negativer Beitrag zum Diskurs.

Deshalb muss sich irgendwas and diesem Zustand ändern oder man schafft das Format ab. Vorausgesetzt natürlich es ist nicht das Ziel Leser mit emotionsgeladener Propaganda zu beeinflussen.

Ich würde mir z.B. wünschen zumindest immer eine begleitende Einordnung zu bekommen, wer der Autor des Kommentars ist, welche Qualifikationen er mitbringt und warum ihm diese Plattform gewährt wird. Klar man könnte jetzt sagen, dass der Leser anhand des Names selbst Recherche betreiben kann, aber ich finde das sollte nötig sein.

Ich wollte den Kommentar tatsächlich auch selbst posten. Denke mal zum inhaltlichen muss garnicht viel gesagt werden, was nicht eh schon hier und in unzähligen anderen Posts zum Thema Chatkontrolle diskutiert wurde. Aber was haltet ihr eigentlich von der Form des “Kommentar” als generelles Format?

Auch wenn es natürlich manche Kommentare gibt, denen ich zustimme und tendenziell noch mehr die ich ähnlich problematisch finde wie diesen hier, frage ich mich schon länger ob dieses Format nützlich ist oder abgeschafft gehört (zumindest in der derzeitigen Form). Mir fällt regelmäßig auf, dass sie eher populistisch verfasst sind, Fakten falsch, sehr einseitig oder verkürzt dargestellt werden und es keinerlei Informationen zum Autor gibt außer den Namen.

Daduch bieten die Medien letztlich dem Verfasser eine Bühne seine Meinung zu verbreiten und es entfällt die journalistische Aufbereitung (faktencheck etc), die man eigentlich sich von einer seriösen Quelle erhöffen würde. Ab und zu gibt es dann immerhin noch einen zweiten Kommentar, der eine Gegenposition darstellt, aber dabei ist mir z.B. aufgefallen, dass diese oft nicht gleich prominent beworben werden.

You are right, Apple also has some legit professional staff. And if the person using it gets paid a lot, then a one time hardware purchase becomes negligible.

Accurate fine motor control and even basic stuff like typing does seem not quite fleshed out, so that is indeed an issue. But I don’t think it’s a deal breaker that you can’t do long shifts with it, since you’d probably only use it for certain tasks.

Even more of a niche, but I could see it for something like architects. Both for work and to maybe even present to clients.

Performance and bettery is good, but they’re barely better than what Intel and AMD offer.

And both AMD and Intel have pretty exciting new architectures coming soon with zen5 and lunar lake.

Meanwhile, on Vive, you could stand up, walk around, and manipulate the world with two tracked remotes.

Issue is that if I remember correctly the vive was an outside-in concept that required base stations to be setup. So you lose the cable, but are still bound by location. And importantly also needs a pc aswell. So still far away from standalone.

I think the core issue is that every piece of new technology so far has helped us get lazier. People used to walk around an office, then they sat at a computer, now they carry their computer with them and do things from the couch.

Nobody wants to get up to do things if they can avoid it, and that’s the only real benefit VR/AR provides

But I think VR/AR could make us lazier:

For VR the promise is immersion. You get to experience a concert, sport event, unique experience or exotic place from your own living room. And for many of that it is just fine to sit on a couch and still have a benefit from the technology.

For AR i think it’s a bit more productivity focused. For example less need to train personel, if you can project every instruction into their field of view.

Ordinarily, Apple is good at throwing its weight (money) around to make things like this happen, but it seems like there weren’t many takers this go-round, so we just got an overpriced, beautiful and fascinating paperweight.

Yeah normally Apple is maybe the only company that has the scale and control over their ecosystem to force rapid adoption. But this was clearly not a consumer product aimed at capturing the masses, but more or less a dev kit sold to anyone willing to shell out the price.

The PS VR2 sounds nice, but feels like it is only aimed at the gaming market and even there sony only captures a fraction.

The Quest as a standalone device imo really would have the best shot at mass market adoption, but Facebook rightfully has an image problem. And despite spending so much on development doesn’t seem to create any content or incentivize others to do so.

Edit: actually kind of forgot “bigscreenVR”. I am somewhat surprised that the default is to cram all hardware into the headset making it much bulkier instead of a seperate piece on a belt, back, or maybe strap on your upper arm.

but it’s utterly useless.

That imo has been the issue with VR/AR for a while now. The Hardware as you said is pretty good by now and looking at something like the quest even afforable. What’s lacking is content and use cases.

Smartphones had an easier time being adopted, since it was just moving from a larger to a smaller screen. But VR/AR actually needs a new type of content to make use of it’s capabilities. And there you run into a chicken/egg problem, where no one is putting in the effort (and vr content is harder to produce) without a large user base.

Just games and some office stuff (that you can do just as well on a regular pc) aren’t cutting it. You’d need stuff like every major sport event being broadcast with unique content, e.g. formula one with the ability to put yourself into the driver seat of any car.

Didn’t they actually vote against the compensation package when it was originally proposed? I’d really like to hear a more indepth reason on why they changed their vote now.

There is no way he is worth this kind of money for the future, so the only reason to vote yes imo is if they’d expect a court to uphold it, if denied, and that legal fights would be to costly. But with this sum at stake I’d take those chances.

Sounds like what Apple is trying to do…

Yeah, although sadly Apple isn’t quite the good guy either. I feel like in a way instead of ads they use their walled garden approach to achieve a similar result.

They’ll make it really annoying or even impossible to use alternatives and mix things. This way they you are by design drawn to use their desired solutions.

Does make for a better user experience as long as you pay the price and play by their rules. And probably also better for privacy, because with the closed system approach they don’t need the data as much to target you.

But imo still problematic and Apple doesn’t want to just sell good Hardware, but also services.

Unfortunately I think without some kind of regulation that makes personal info a liability / hot potato, it will still be treated as an asset to be collected:(

Agreed, this is one of those problems where it is much easier to legislate from the top down, rather than trying to get each individual consumer to make fully conscious decisions.

Yeah, sadly from a economic perspective it is kind of obvious how a continuous source of revenue might be more appealing compared to a one time purchase. Especially with a product like TVs that usually have a pretty long lifetime before being replaced.

Although i would point out that (at least in our current society) privacy and an ad-free experience in many ways is treated as a luxury good. Persumably a TV with a better OS would be sold at a higher price, and confronted with this choice many consumers would likely choose the cheaper one.

Or “Citadel” for that matter, which apparently cost $300m

Same. The thing lacking is user base and content. Also a backlog of older content as knowledge source, but that would come overtime with through the former.

As far as usability goes Iemmy is just as good as reddit was for me. My instance (lemme.ee) is stable and the app experience (currently “connect”) is just as smooth as it was for reddit (where I used “relay”).

I sadly have to admit that I don’t contribute enough in terms of creating and posting threads.

Also I don’t think we’ve really run out of suitable space to install new panels. If that ever happens it might be worthwhile to replace them, but as you said we can otherwise just run them alongside new installations until they break or maintenance costs surpass their profits

He could also take higher risks, since he knew that there was a security net to catch him. Much easier to make high risk/reward decisions, if the risk (e.g. going broke) isn’t actually real. He presumably also had an above average education and many other benefits. This is also why many rich people might end up building successful businesses. The average person might get one shot and either makes it or goes broke. The rich person can roll the dice multiple times (and might have learned something from the last try).

Also disregarding everything even, if he had succeded: That would still only have been a sample size of one. I doubt anyone is saying that you can’t under any circumstances pull yourself out of poverty, but on average the cards are just stacked against you in many ways.

Also i doubt that reselling second hand stuff is a viable business model for a larger group. Like sure in a large city a few people might be able to carve out a niche for themself, but the more people do it or the smaller the market, the less it works.

signatories of the Budapest memorandum are keeping their word to defend Ukraine’s sovereign

Is that actually something they promised in the Budapest memorandum?

My knowledge on the topic is very limited, but based on Wikipedia i was under the impression that signatories essentially only promised to not attack themself (which Russia clearly violated) and offer assistance only in the limited case where nuclear weapons are used (which isn’t the case). Also “assistance” can mean defense, but doesn’t necessarily, making it quite vague and the point about consultations when questions arise makes it even less binding.