Month: April 2020

When we wrote about Karma Automotive announcing the battery-electric Revero GTE last week, we called this months’ trio of announcements “This month’s Karma Automotive extravaganza.” It’s possible there’s more to this momentum than the excitement of expanding the EV landscape. Jalopnik recently ran what’s practically a whistleblower piece, based on information from “a confirmed source, who has a position in the company where they would be exposed to information provided,” that info then backed up by another company source. The piece is titled, Source Claims That Karma Will Lay Off Most Workers And Some Recent Prototypes Have Been Fake. A one-sentence précis is that Karma “is knowingly showing vaporware in an effort to put on a ‘magic show’ for its Chinese investors in a last-bid attempt to secure funding even as plans to lay off workers in early May are in place.”

Let’s back up to October 2019, when Ward’s Automotive reported on “start-up demons” at Karma. Earlier last year, Karma president and COO Dennis Dougherty left the company, and chief technical officer Bob Kruse, the ex-GM engineer who helped develop the Chevrolet Volt and gave us a tour of the work he and his team did on the Revero GT, resigned. The executive restructure put Gilbert Villareal in as COO. Villareal came from VLF Automotive — which stood for Villareal, Bob Lutz, and Henrik Fisker — the company that turned Fisker Karmas into the Corvette-engined VLF Destino. During his tenure, a source told Ward’s he had “become the de facto president and CEO and is cutting the company down. The majority of employees are spending their time looking for other jobs while awaiting a layoff notice.”

Wards wrote in October that Karma had already “slashed purchasing and manufacturing staff.” In November 2019, Karma laid off 200 employees in Irvine and a few more at the company’s Detroit Technical Center in Troy, Michigan, a figure supposedly accounting for half of the company’s engineering and support staff. At the time, Karma spokesman Dave Bartmuss told The Orange County Register, “Karma is evolving, and we will emerge as more of a technology operation. To do that, we need to adjust our resources.” In February, Karma laid off 60 more workers in California, a big number for a company said to have about 1,000 employees around the world before the November layoffs.

Villareal was in the role for about six weeks before Karma hired new COO Kevin Pavlov, whose resume includes automotive suppliers Ricardo and Magna. The company replaced Kruse with new CTO Kevin Zhang, who we can’t find any record of outside a couple of quotes in Karma press releases. 

The Ward’s article also mentioned Karma’s troubles with “parts shortages and unpaid suppliers, as well as suppliers that no longer work with the company.” And there was the gossip that even an MSRP of $135,000 for the Revero GT results in a loss of around around $50,000 on every sale.

On top of all this, Ward’s spoke of whisperings that Karma’s owner, China’s Wanxiang, cut the EV maker’s annual investment from $400 million to $100 million “due to skepticism about the company’s prospects and ongoing trade war between U.S. and China.” That could be taken as part of China’s overall reduction in EV investment, with Pitchbook, which tracks private capital markets, saying venture capital cut its investment in China’s new-energy vehicle segment 58% over the first three quarters of 2019.   

Execs at Wanxiang North America and Karma have responded to inquiries about the situation with shorter or longer versions of “Business as normal.” Even if we ignore the reduced investment, that’s hard to square with the announcements. An Automotive News piece published four days after the Ward’s article included this paragraph: “Barthmuss said Karma’s production plans remain to build and sell between 500 and 1,000 Revero GTs per year, and that the company needs to be staffed appropriately for that volume. ‘Do we need all these engineers? No, we don’t,’ he said.” Yet Karma’s supposedly pitching its E-Flex platform and associated technology to other EV makers, it’s got the performance-focused Revero GTS and battery-electric GTE on the way, it’s shown a last-mile delivery van with Level 4 autonomous capability thanks to Nvidia’s AGX platform, and there’ve been rumblings about a pickup, an SUV, and a supercar, plus the one-time tie-up with Pininfarina. That development list makes us think yes, all those engineers would be needed. 

Bartmuss’ comment about Karma becoming “more of a technology operation” could undercut that development to-do list, though, making it sound like Karma will be an EV tech supplier that might happen to produce the odd car under its own brand. Nevertheless, technology operations need a lot of engineers, too. 

To Jalopnik, then. The source told the site that there are two E-Flex platforms — touted as the basis for Karma’s plans and a jump-starter for other EV makers — one cut out of a Revero GT taken from the production line, the other a “movie prop” that can’t be driven, and that “nothing has been proven to function whatsoever.”  The source said there’s a prototype of the battery-electric Revero GTE, but it hasn’t been tested; the specs, like the three trims providing either 200, 300, or 400-mile range, have zero basis in verifiable development because “anyone who was worth a shit to handle testing has been laid off, furloughed, or quit.” A commenter on the piece who said he’d been laid off from Karma wrote, “In no way could we get close to the range numbers they are throwing out there for an all electric version… The doctored video they released showing a sub 2sec 0-60 car is similarly impossible…”

The source put the L4 Autonomous E-Flex Van in the same whirlpool, telling Jalopnik that the engineers working on the marquee self-driving aspect “had no clue” how to program Level 4 autonomy, and besides, none of the Nvidia AGX hardware was installed in the sole prototype, meaning there was no software, either.

According to the insider, Karma will lay off another 100 or more employees next month, the eyebrow-raising “endgame… to reduce staff to 27 employees, consisting of exclusively employees at the VP level and two directors.” We do know Karma’s hired a chief innovation officer, chief revenue officer, and four new vice presidents since the October report in Wards. We’ll have to wait until May to see if the other shoe drops. Head to Jalopnik to read the full piece with all the revelations.

No matter what, we’re a long way from the Wanxiang founder Lu Guanqiu’s prediction after buying Fisker Automotive’s assets in 2012: “If I don’t succeed, my son will continue with it. If he doesn’t make it, my grandson will.”

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Following numerous user reports over the past few weeks, Nintendo has confirmed that over 160,000 Nintendo Network IDs have been compromised, forcing the company to temporarily disable the ability to log into an account using this method.

Users have been noticing unauthorized login attempts for several weeks now, prompting Nintendo to recommend users activate two-factor authentication to secure their accounts and payment information. Nintendo doesn’t, however, suspect that the compromised accounts are due to a breach in Nintendo’s databases, servers, or services. The company is still investigating the source and will begin contacting potentially compromised users to help them reset their passwords.

Nintendo explained in a statement that it doesn’t believe payment information was included in the compromise. Nintendo Network IDs store a user’s nickname, email, date of birth, gender, and country/region. Some users have reported unauthorized payments made on their accounts with attached payment options (such as PayPal), which is why Nintendo has suspended Network ID logins on all its services. All other methods of logging in are still available.

Although omitted in the English statement provided by Nintendo, the Japanese statement (via Eurogamer) mentions that Nintendo has been aware of the compromised accounts since early April. The company is still investigating further to determine the source, and will reinstate Nintendo Network ID logins when it is safe to do so.

Nintendo recommends resetting your password and activating two-factor authentication in the meantime, and has a help page for anyone who suspects their account might be compromised to work through account recovery.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

The researchers also studied data about how often patients visited doctors for allergy treatments, and they incorporated “patient hay fever diaries,” in which people reported data like the severity of their symptoms, which medications they were taking, and how much work they were missing.

Finally, they modeled where you might expect the beetle to be able to thrive in Europe, based on variables like rainfall and temperature. Introduce the beetle in these areas, they calculated, and you could reduce common ragweed pollen so much that the number of affected patients would fall by 2.3 million, and medical costs by over 1 billion Euros per year.

But you can’t just import a bunch of leaf beetles and set them loose. Intentionally introducing an invasive species might be good at controlling common ragweed, but the beetles might also be good at devouring native species. You have to test the insect’s appetite for other plants, because while it specializes in common ragweed in its natural habitats, there’s no telling if it might take to an important crop if dropped into a new environment. And you have to determine how it might interact with other animal species, or else you could make a mess you can’t undo.

“Then comes 10 years of research,” says Müller-Schärer. “You have to find out: Does it really feed on [common ragweed]? How much does it? And then you have to do that across generations.”

But given the amount of money that the control of common ragweed could save European economies, he thinks it’s an option worth exploring. “The results of our interdisciplinary study justify a comprehensive risk-benefit assessment of O. communa,” he and his colleagues write in their paper, “also regarding a possible deliberate distribution of this leaf beetle across the climatically suitable areas in Europe.”

Species interact with each other in an ecosystem in incredibly complex ways, which requires equally complex research to predict how a newly-introduced organism will interact with the intended target. Even then, that interaction can spring surprises on scientists. In the western US, for example, researchers introduced a boring moth (the verb boring, not the adjective) to control the invasive Russian thistle, which produces tumbleweeds.

“It actually made the situation worse because, yes, it bored into the little tips of the branches, but that made it easier for the plant when it started rolling to break off the seed heads,” says University of California, Davis entomologist Lynn Kimsey, who wasn’t involved in this new work. “And so that was a little oopsie, that it actually ended up helping the plant as opposed to hurting it. Things like this just happen. Biology’s a tricky damn thing to work with.”

We might also worry that if European countries were to introduce this leaf beetle to control ragweed, then the beetle might evolve over time to generalize and begin eating other plants. But worry not, says entomologist and biological control specialist Mark Hoddle of the University of California, Riverside, who wasn’t involved in this work. Generalists can become specialists, but it doesn’t work the other way around.

“It’s well accepted in ecology that specialists have evolved from generalists, and they have done so by removing or highly refining certain characteristics that would allow them to eat a whole variety of different plants,” Hoddle says. “And it’s extremely difficult if not impossible for them to re-evolve all of those traits they would need to become generalists.” Those traits include their physiology, behavior, and the biochemistry allowing them to be able to eat different plants at different times of the year.

Now, if the beetle happens to spread from elsewhere in Europe without the assistance of humans, that’s a different story. The insect has now invaded France, says Müller-Schärer, but the country has decided to let the beetles be.

Not a decision to sneeze at, that’s for sure.

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In a time where we all need a little extra positivity Bob Ross is still coming to the rescue, 25 years after his death. Cinedigm have partnered with Bob Ross Inc to bring around 380 episodes of The Joy Of Painting to a new streaming channel, Variety reported.

The channel will be operating as a free stream supported by ads, and has already launched for Samsung smart TVs, on the Samsung TV Plus service. It’ll soon begin to roll out to other services operating on a similar model, with Roku coming next on May 18.

The Bob Ross Channel will air episodes of The Joy Of Painting back-to-back, giving viewers a chance to experience the beloved artist’s full catalogue.

Bob Ross hosted 31 seasons of The Joy Of Painting between 1984 and 1994, just before his passing from lymphoma in 1995. While the soothing series was popular in its day, Bob Ross has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, including a marathon Twitch stream that attracted over 5.6 million viewers. You can still catch Bob Ross episodes on Twitch, where they regularly attract thousands of viewers.

Ross’s soothing manner and low-pressure approach to painting have endeared audiences to him over the years, and thanks to new platforms like the Bob Ross Channel, that legacy can continue on long past his passing.

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