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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yup. With shows and movies it’s the other way around. Netflix was already losing a lot of the third party content I liked and then they pulled the whole “have to live in the same house” thing. Instant cancel.

    I do have Apple TV+ nowadays, but only because I have the Apple One package that gives you Music, TV+, Arcade and storage space for a bit more than any of the services separately. TV+ is also nearly all originals and there are a lot of good ones. They have much less content, but much better quality to garbage ratio. I’ve watched some shows 3 times over. Not a service I’d likely pay for separately, but the bundle deal is just an excellent value proposition for me.

    Everything else I torrent. Indiscriminately. Hollywood blockbuster? Torrent. Estonian movie? If I missed it in the cinemas, torrent.










  • Tesla had two advantages. Let’s ignore the original Roadster here, nobody bought one anyway and it was not a ground-up design by them.

    First off, they started with a “luxury” EV. Luxury cars have high margins and you can more easily fit the price of the big battery in there - and since the S was a pretty big car, you have space for a big battery. The other two mainstream EVs at the time were the tiny Nissan Leaf and the even tinier Mitsubishi I-Miev - you couldn’t fit a big battery in a car that tiny, nor can you charge enough of a price to pay for a big battery.

    Note here I said “luxury” because if you compare the Tesla model S to the similarly priced Mercedes-Benz S-Class or BMW 7 series… Yeah no, the quality isn’t anywhere near good enough. But it was still in the same market segment and competed by being completely unique at the time, instead of competing through luxury.

    Secondly, they had no ICE heritage. No existing cars to start with. It’s a huge advantage because they could design the platform right away to have a large flat battery pack at the bottom, etc. Meanwhile, Mercedes started selling its’ first serious EV attempt in 2019 and that still had a transmission tunnel because it was based on the GLC SUV (which itself was just a C-Class on stilts lol). It didn’t have a drive shaft, so no need for a tunnel for it. Just a waste of space. The first dedicated EV platform came out in 2021 with the EQS sedan. BMW made the i3 in 2013, but it was tiny, ugly and needed to burn gasoline to extend range. Bleh. First proper EV? The i7, came out in 2022, STILL shares its platform with the ICEs. Audi? First proper EV was the OG E-Tron SUV (now called the Q8 E-Tron, unrelated to the actual Q8) in 2019, shares platform with ICEs, but it was among the first earliest EVs to have a proper heat pump system to keep you warm without draining the battery straight to zero in the winter. Range? Bad. Overall quality? Meh. Performance was decent and it at least feels like a proper car though. Suspension was superb. Felt like a small light car driving it. For a 2.5 ton SUV that’s a compliment. But worst of all? It’s being discontinued, and the downmarket EVs (Q4 E-tron) from Audi are way worse. So of the big 3 Germans, Mercedes is the ONLY one to use a dedicated EV architecture for some of its vehicles.

    Look, I’m a huge fan of German cars. Love-hate relationship with Audi, love relationship with BMW and Mercedes. Starting with the Passat B6, I pretend Volkswagen doesn’t exist. But they fumbled it all HARD and they would’ve had the absolute best chance to be Tesla killers. They know how to make big expensive luxury cars. Could’ve launched proper luxury EVs a decade ago and Tesla would be a regional automaker for the US. But they didn’t. Because of their arrogance and complacency. Fucking Jaguar of all companies even beat them to it.




  • Yeah, having fabs in the US as well as other countries could pay off yuuugely. If potential fab customers are truly afraid of Intel copying their designs - Intel could enter an agreement with say Qualcomm that it won’t design any ARM CPUs for X years. Surely there’s a market for US made SoCs once you can assemble the logic board of a smartphone in the US, and a smartphone from parts. You’d still import some parts but shift production to the US for what’s possible - but you need to start with the end product and work your way down because otherwise you’re shipping components back to China for final assembly. And the more expensive the components you can produce in the US, the less you’re affected by tariffs.