CarbonIceDragon
There is a brand of flour called King Arthur that seems pretty decent as far as brands as a general concept go. I don’t get them all the time as their stuff does tend to cost more, but I’ve found my bread machine has consistently done better with their stuff than any other flour I’ve tried (I’m not sure exactly why, what is there to get wrong with grinding flour, that would enable a significant difference in quality to exist?), they don’t seem to have gotten any worse over the time I’ve known about them, and operate as some sort of employee cooperative from what I’ve read.
Isn’t it kind of the nature of the left to bicker with itself though? At some level, conservatism seeks to preserve an existing system, or at the extreme end, bring back a system recently removed. There’s some room for infighting between the most and least extreme there, but for the most part, it’s a goal that is easy to unite for. But the left, at it’s most basic level, seeks to change things. And changing things is not a goal that inspires unity quite so well, because to change things, one needs an idea of what things should be changed to, and what you think things should be may not be what someone else thinks things should be, even if you both want change. If it so happens that what someone else wants to achieve is in your view even worse than the status quo, then you can’t afford to unite with that person, because there is the risk that your efforts will further a goal you find even less tolerable than what you get by doing nothing, even though what you both want is change.
Giving the article a quick read though, it does look like this isnt their real issue, since near the end it says that the final van isnt supposed to be printed, its to be made via more traditional means and the printing is just for the prototype. However, their model seems to be that they want to get other people to actually make their cars, but then sell all the manufacturing equipment and parts to those factories. Which seems dubious to me, because while they compare it to McDonald’s franchising, it misses that McDonalds both operates by selling a well known brand that customers might find more appealing than an unknown restaurant, which is a benefit that a startup wont have, and that doing this enables the company to not have to run tons of locations everywhere directly, which must be located that way for a restaurant, but dont for a product like a vehicle that can be made efficiently in a few centralized locations.
Honestly what this seems more like is an attempt to make something almost like an mlm scheme but for cars; its not exactly the same, since theyre not getting their customers to rope in new ones, but they are creating a situation where what they actually sell only has appeal in that the customer is promised that they can make money from then selling to other people, thus meaning that as long as the customer is sold on this idea, the company makes money regardless of if making these pretty bad sounding cars actually turns a profit or not. I dont suspect it will work for them, given their customer base is a much more limited supply of businesses with the right amount of factory space and not just gullible individuals, and if the inefficiency of their decentralized production means that their customers close up shop, that business will dry up. They might make a bit of money at first from roping in a few companies into this scheme, but Im skeptical that will last long.
I dunno, there is some minor utility in that you can gauge how major an event is, or at least is perceived to be, by how many posts are made about it shortly after happening and how long they continue to appear or persist.