Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. More than three dozen California legislators are calling for Gov. Gavin Newsom to exempt the state's film and TV production incentive program from a recently approved cap on corporate tax credits, warning that without action it will be "significantly kneecapped."

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Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's factory in Fremont, California. Carmaker exceeded Wall Street's expectations with more than $26bn in revenue, but saw a 37% drop in profits Despite record vehicle sales, Tesla saw a precipitous drop in profit in its most recent quarter. A rush to buy electric vehicles before a US tax credit for them disappears had boosted Tesla's flagging sales, leading to the automaker exceeding some of Wall Street's projections in its most recent financial quarter. Yet the company failed to meet earnings expectations and its stock fell in after-hours trading.

The electric vehicle tax credit is gone, and Tesla's new, more affordable models don't quite close the gap. For nearly two decades, CEO Elon Musk has promised Tesla would make a more affordable electric vehicle, to, as he put it in 2006, "help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy." On Tuesday, Tesla announced a new Model Y and Model 3 Standard, versions of its popular compact SUV and sedan stripped of a few higher-end touches and features to bring the price down to $39,990 and $36,990, respectively. They're both about $5,000 cheaper than the Premium variants, which goes a ways--but not all the way--toward recouping the $7,500 tax credit canceled by the GOP-led Congress this past summer . The price point also puts Tesla's newest models firmly in the "more affordable" EV camp.

EV tax credits are dead in the US. Federal EV tax credits in the US officially came to an end yesterday. Those credits, expanded and extended in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, gave drivers up to $7,500 toward the purchase of a new electric vehicle. They've been a major force in cutting the up-front costs of EVs, pushing more people toward purchasing them and giving automakers confidence that demand would be strong. The tax credits' demise comes at a time when battery-electric vehicles still make up a small percentage of new vehicle sales in the country. This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter.

Can AI file your taxes? Not yet. Calculating US personal income taxes is a task that requires building an understanding of vast amounts of English text and using that knowledge to carefully compute results. We propose TaxCalcBench, a benchmark for determining models' abilities to calculate personal income tax returns given all of the necessary information. Our experiment shows that state-of-the-art models succeed in calculating less than a third of federal income tax returns even on this simplified sample set. Our analysis concludes that models consistently misuse tax tables, make errors in tax calculation, and incorrectly determine eligibility. Our findings point to the need for additional infrastructure to apply LLMs to the personal income tax calculation task.

After more than a day of continuous debate, the US Senate passed its version of the budget megabill Tuesday afternoon--with potentially disastrous implications for the future of renewable energy in the country. The bill ends credits for projects placed in service--a term meaning, essentially, that a project is ready to provide power to the grid--after 2027, putting hundreds of planned projects around the country in jeopardy. "This is a bill to punish renewables," says Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. "There is a real need to add clean energy supply to the grid--electrifying our cars, electrifying our homes, electrifying our buildings, electrifying our factories, and the demands from AI are all going to require new clean energy. What this bill does is make it harder and more expensive."

It only took a few hours to wipe 152 billion of value from Tesla's market cap and more than 100 million in value from TrumpCoin. The end of the bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has been brewing for weeks, but on Thursday, the breakup went nuclear. Musk took to the platform he owns, X, to lambast Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill," which includes provisions that restrict immigration, limit green energy subsidies, and is estimated to increase the US deficit by 2.4 trillion. Trump shot back on Truth Social, the platform he owns, to say that Musk was only against the bill because it would take away electric vehicle tax credits that Musk's company, Tesla, benefits from. It quickly devolved into dozens of posts, most of them from Musk, who claimed Trump is in the Epstein Files--which is, he claims, why they haven't been made public. Tesla's stock is now down roughly 14 percent at the time of writing, which is the biggest single-day hit to its market cap in years.

On Wednesday, during a gathering at Mar-a-Lago attended by some of Donald Trump's closest associates, a speaker demanded, "Where is the George Soros of the right?" In a scene that an attendee captured on video, Elon Musk, the fifty-three-year-old South African-born billionaire who reportedly spent about a hundred and thirty million dollars to aid Trump's campaign and support other Republicans in competitive races, raised his arm. Amid loud cheers, the speaker declared, "God bless you, Elon. We are so, so grateful." Musk has claimed publicly that he has never asked Trump for any favors, and that Trump has not offered him any. Despite spreading misinformation on X, his social-media platform, and heavily financing the campaign of someone who plotted an autogolpe, he has also denied being a political extremist.

To understand the system-level interactions between the entities in Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS), an agent-based foundational modeling tool, CCUS-Agent, is developed for a large-scale study of transportation flows and infrastructure in the United States. Key features of the tool include (i) modular design, (ii) multiple transportation modes, (iii) capabilities for extension, and (iv) testing against various system components and networks of small and large sizes. Five matching algorithms for CO2 supply agents (e.g., powerplants and industrial facilities) and demand agents (e.g., storage and utilization sites) are explored: Most Profitable First Year (MPFY), Most Profitable All Years (MPAY), Shortest Total Distance First Year (SDFY), Shortest Total Distance All Years (SDAY), and Shortest distance to long-haul transport All Years (ACAY). Before matching, the supply agent, demand agent, and route must be available, and the connection must be profitable. A profitable connection means the supply agent portion of revenue from the 45Q tax credit must cover the supply agent costs and all transportation costs, while the demand agent revenue portion must cover all demand agent costs. A case study employing over 5,500 supply and demand agents and multimodal CCUS transportation infrastructure in the contiguous United States is conducted. The results suggest that it is possible to capture over 9 billion tonnes (GT) of CO2 from 2025 to 2043, which will increase significantly to 22 GT if the capture costs are reduced by 40%. The MPFY and SDFY algorithms capture more CO2 earlier in the time horizon, while the MPAY and SDAY algorithms capture more later in the time horizon.