Are they getting the rare earths they need from those places too? Even when batteries are made in Europe and the US, critical raw materials often come from China. Chinese companies control over 90% of the supply, and 95% for some things like permanent magnets.

Well that's the thing, a lot of experienced mechanics can actually fly too. They aren't qualified for licensed, but they know how the controls work, they know what the instruments show, and they know the principles. Maybe they have even done some time on flight simulators.

Back in the day it wasn't uncommon for them to take aircraft up for testing.

And that is essentially how Luke learned too. Repairing small craft, and racing them with his friends.

See, this is what I'm talking about. You can invent reasons why it all makes sense. Some fans enjoy that, it's fine. But if you are willing to do it to explain away Luke's meteoric rise, why not Rey's as well? Remember that most of this stuff to justify Luke is based on stuff from the books and other media, or from what amount to retcons in later movies.

Also are we all still pretending that the Holiday Special didn't happen and isn't canon?

He had flying experience at low altitude with gravity, and went from that to being an ace space fighter pilot in about a week. All the other pilots with actual military combat experience, the Rebel's best people, couldn't make that shot. It's not even clear why they gave a valuable X-Wing to a kid with no prior experience or proven skill, but then it's full of plot holes. They had to fly down the trench to avoid surface guns and get to the exhaust port, unless they were called Han Solo in which case they can just dive in a few hundred metres from it and take out the extremely Force sensitive main villain with a surprise shot.

Both Luke and Rey had the Force so we can suspend our disbelief for a moment and enjoy the movie. Pew-pew sounds in the vacuum of space just makes it better.

Fortunately it hit them where it hurts - in the wallet. Capitalism created this mess, and we have to use capitalism to fix it.

The worst part is we aren't even good at it. The nominally communist government in China is doing a far better job.

This reminds me of criticism for Rey from Force Awakens. Spends many years learning about starships by scavenging and repairing them, learning to fight out of necessity, and of course has the magic Force powers to help... Certainly a better training regime than moisture farmer boy got. First thing she does when taking control of a ship is crash it into the ground. Kylo Ren engineers situations to help her learn some basic Force techniques, and then easily bests her in a fight. Somehow this makes her a Mary Sue and a total travesty.

It's clickbait. Lots of money to be made ranting about how DEI and wokeness has destroyed yet another beloved franchise.

It's a general problem with stories involving Kryptonians. They are so powerful that the writers always have to find ways to weaken them, or invent a similarly powerful villain to oppose them. That's why kryptonite was originally invented.

Like many comic book stories, you have to suspend your disbelief a bit. None of it makes sense from a physics point of view, any more than most of Star Trek or Star Wars does.

Chinese companies (not the government) are doing what they always do. Refine the technology, and make it affordable. Get it running on lower end hardware, leverage the massive amount of cheap and clean renewable energy they have, push for volume over premium pricing.

They keep doing it in different industries and most Western companies seem to only be capable of whining about it, rather than competing.

We already have Superman for that, she doesn't have to be just a female version of him. She was older when Krypton was destroyed and didn't have Clark's wonderful parents to raise her.

I've noticed that there have been a lot of criticisms lately that boil down to "it wasn't made specifically for me, therefore it's terrible". Starfleet Academy got the same thing. I'm not the target audience by decades, but I was able to enjoy it anyway. Unfortunately the reaction to this is that anything half good tends to get cancelled, and we end up with generic slop that tries to please everyone and upset no-one. The current state of Star Wars is a great example of that, especially Ahsoka.

Social media and outrage farming has created a really nasty feedback loop.

Apparently it's only loosely based on the comics, and the ending is different. Thing is, some reviewers I find I generally agree with have said it was decent enough. Not as good as Superman, but not terrible either. Reminiscent of 90s stand-alone superhero movies like Blade.

I tend to be sceptical of "bad writing" these days, because it's the standard generic complaint made by people who don't have genuine criticisms. I haven't seen it so can't comment on the look, but unfortunately a lot of modern movies do look quite bland and dull. The look was one of the things I liked about Master of the Universe, which pitched itself just right to be enjoyable, a lot like Gunn usually does.

Houses in Europe were built for a different climate. Changing them now is going to be tricky, but we will have to find ways of doing it. For apartments that probably means lots of AC boxes on the roof and additional pipework on the outside.

It's hard to tell if they are talking about the power output capability of these systems, or the storage capacity. It could be either.

I'd like an eInk tablet, but I've been waiting for a reasonably priced large format one.