One hundred years ago, this is what the Rose Parade looked like:

Some things have changed a bit in the last century — like fewer horse-drawn carriages — but not the most important details. Now in its 131st year, the Rose Parade will roll through Pasadena with flower-decked floats, equestrian units and marching bands to mark the start of the New Year ahead of the Rose Bowl.

Here’s what you need to know.

Time and location

The Rose Parade rolls on Wednesday, Jan. 1 at 8 a.m. starting from the corner of Green Street and Orange Grove Boulevard For most of the 5.5-mile route, the floats will travel along Colorado Boulevard, where thousands of spectators will be stationed for the best views.

Public transportation, parking and road closures

The Gold Line has several stops near the parade route: Del Mar, Memorial Park, Lake and Allen stations. Umbrellas, chairs and coolers will not be permitted on the trains. Roundtrip fare is $3.50.

Overnight street parking begins at noon on Dec. 31, for that evening only. No parking is allowed along the route. Paid parking is available at lots and structures near the route.

Starting Tuesday night, several streets in the Pasadena area will be closed. The California Department of Transportation will also close or restrict off-ramps and on-ramps of the 710, 210, 134 and 110 freeways.

Weather

Skies should be clear and mostly sunny. New Year’s Day may start off chilly, but temperatures are expected to reach the mid-60s by the afternoon. A winter storm predicted to bring rain and snow on Monday has mostly stayed over the ocean.

Costs

Curbside, it’s first-come, first-served to grab a spot to watch the parade. The die-hard fans will have camped out overnight for a front-row seat.

Grandstand seating is available through Dec. 31. Tickets range from $60 to $110 and can be purchased from sharpseating.com.

Safety

Officers from the Pasadena Police Department — and their canine units — will be out in full force to manage public safety during the parade.

Overnight camping is only permitted on the night of Monday, Dec. 31.

Tents, sofas, boxes, unoccupied seats, ladders and scaffolding are not allowed along the parade route. Bonfires are strictly prohibited and considered “illegal burns,” punishable by a fine and/or jail time. Fireworks are also banned.

For up-to-date text message alerts from public safety officials, text ROSEPARADE to 888777.

Channels

If you decide to skip the crowds and watch the parade from the comfort of your home, these channels will have a live broadcast beginning at 8 a.m. PST:

• ABC-7
• KTLA-5
• NBC-4
• Univision
• The Hallmark Channel

Funny or Die’s “Rose Parade Live With Cord & Tish,” will apparently not be streaming this year. It’s a blow for all those who love Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon’s satirical take on live parade coverage — and the reactions from Twitter users who aren’t in on the joke.

Grand marshal and theme

This year, there are three Rose Parade grand marshals: Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez, actress Gina Torres and performer Rita Moreno.

Moreno is distinguished for being one of a handful of people who have achieved an EGOT: She has won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony.

The parade’s theme this year is “The Power of Hope.”

Calli Simmons, a 20-year-old college student from Tennessee, doesn’t know what she’ll watch after Tuesday.

Her TV habits have been automatic for so long: Pull up the Netflix app, watch three or four episodes of “Friends” each day, sleep and repeat — in between school and work, of course.

“It’s been a regular part of my daily routine,” she says proudly, noting that her mother was a devoted viewer of the popular series during its original broadcast run. “I never get tired of it.”

But she’s about to find herself on a break from that habit. On Wednesday, the sitcom’s 236 episodes will no longer be available to stream in the U.S. on Netflix.

And Simmons, like others who have (re)discovered the series through the service, is coping with the thought of going a day, a week, a month or even a year — well, not quite — without being able to hang out with TV besties Monica, Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe.

Alexandra Fitch, 29, a hairstylist and bartender in Oregon, remembers watching with her older sister during the series’ original broadcast run. The series finale stands out as a moment she and her family gathered round the TV.

“It’s been a constant in my life,” she says. “Especially with the age I am right now, which is the age the characters are on the show. I’m going through some of the same things you see them going through. And it’s not over the top. It’s situations that happen in everyday life.”

Fitch has the first and last season on DVD, but not the seasons in between. She knows the times it airs on Nick at Nite. But Netflix presented a more convenient viewing experience, making it possible for her and her boyfriend to go through upwards of five episodes a night, even if it was just to have on in the background while cooking. She’s been pricing her options but hasn’t figured out what route she’ll take to sustain her “Friends” habit.

After all, there isn’t exactly a scarcity of “Friends” — and there won’t be after Tuesday either. It‘s readily available on DVD and widely syndicated, and individual episodes and seasons can be purchased or rented on digital retailers. As for streaming, the series, which was produced by Warner Bros. Television, is slated to be available on WarnerMedia’s HBO Max when it launches in May.

Still, the social media air has been thick with annoyance and (cheeky) panic from die-hards in recent weeks. Some have expressed their disappointment by threatening to cancel their Netflix subscriptions. Others have simply relayed their sorrow in humorous statements about the loss. There are those who’ve declared one last marathon before it’s gone, and others relieved to have been gifted DVDs of the show over the holidays. Unsurprisingly, internet memes have sprung up in an attempt to capture the agony.

Jordan Finnegan, a student at University of Iowa who jumped on the bandwagon her sophomore year of high school at the urging of friends, plans to watch what she can before the show is wiped from Netflix. On her list: “The One Where No One Is Ready,” which birthed hallmark moments like Joey, in commando mode, wearing every piece of Chandler’s clothing and talk of cushions being the essence of a chair; and “The One Where Everybody Finds Out,” which gave rise to the epic mind-twister “They don’t know that we know they know we know.”

“I can’t explain the connection I feel toward it,” Finnegan says. “It doesn’t feel like an old show. It’s relatable. It’s funny. And it’s happy, not dark. I can go through three to five episodes a day. It is by far the show I watch the most on Netflix.”

Finnegan says she doesn’t have access to cable when she’s away at college. But when she’s visiting home, she plans to catch reruns when she can. Her parents have HBO, so she’s hopeful she’ll have access to the show when it hits HBOMax, which will cost $14.99 per month.

Until then, “I don’t know what I’m going to watch,” she says.

Simmons echoed the sentiment, but she isn’t resigned to letting her viewing lapse: “I’ll be signing up for whatever streaming carrier has it next,” she says. “But for now, I guess I’m gonna have to get the DVDs. I can’t go that long without watching it.”

Indeed, when word spread this time last year that the show’s time on the platform was winding down, Simmons was part of the chorus of reactions, sending Netflix a direct message over Twitter: “I along with thousands of others are deeply and personally hurt that you guys are taking Friends off … How many RTs [retweets] do I need to get for you guys to leave it on?” she wrote on Dec. 3, 2018. She never received a reply. But the outcry was short-lived. Netflix opted to pay $80 million to $100 million to extend its licensing agreement through 2019.

“Friends,” which revolves around six twentysomethings navigating love and life in New York City, ran for 10 seasons from 1994 through 2004, becoming a pillar of NBC’s once-vaunted Thursday night prime-time lineup and making stars of its cast: Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer.

But while it has remained in rotation through reruns in the years since, the sitcom’s popularity has been re-energized in a noticeable way since coming to Netflix in 2015. The streaming service, which has more than 60 million subscribers in the U.S., is known for being stingy with its viewership data, but the resurgence appears to be driven by a new audience of young viewers. (Overall, more than 180 million people in the U.S. stream video through subscription services, and almost 25% of U.S. households are expected to drop traditional TV subscriptions, or “cut the cord,” by 2022, according to research firm eMarketer.)

Saul Austerlitz, author of “Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era,” says the series occupies a central place in American pop culture as much today as it did during its original run — a rare feat in an era with 500 new shows a year competing for a viewer’s attention.

“Younger fans tend to favor Netflix; it’s their go-to place for television,” says Austerlitz, who explored the show’s Netflix-fueled resurgence in his book. “They tend to be very aware of what’s on Netflix, and anything not available on the platform often falls into a black hole.”

Streaming, he adds, serves “Friends” well: “Yes, it’s a sitcom, but it’s also a soap opera. So you can watch it in order, or you can watch your favorite episodes.”

Marta Kauffman, co-creator of the series, is keenly aware that the show has become comfort food for a new generation and that its departure from Netflix is making waves.

“The good news is it’s coming back. It’s not off [streaming] forever. Hang in there for five more months,” she says, referring to its new exclusive streaming home on HBOMax.

In the meantime, one thing is for sure, Fitch says: “Wednesday is going to feel weird.”

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There’s an anecdote about Alfred Newman, the veteran film composer and longtime head of music at 20th Century Fox, when Alfred Hitchcock was questioning the realism of having a musical score in his 1944 film “Lifeboat.”

“You’re in the middle of the ocean, Alfred,” Hitchcock supposedly said. “Where does the orchestra come from?” “The same place the camera came from,” Newman replied.

The composer’s son, Thomas Newman, faced a similar dilemma on “1917.” Sam Mendes’ World War I movie was shot and edited to appear as one long, uninterrupted take; Roger Deakins’ camera hurtles viewers along on a hyper-visceral, you-are-there journey through exploding battlefields and treacherous trenches for two breathless hours.

So where does the orchestra come from?

“If you see his stage plays,” Newman said of Mendes, “typically music plays a big role. So I think he likes it, which is obviously a great thing, as a musician, to be around.”

For this film, Mendes said he didn’t want to “pile gloom on gloom,” recalled Newman. “So the question was: How could you make justifiable contrast? I think we treated it just more in a notion of landscapes through which the characters would travel — most of the time — as opposed to the characters themselves.”

Newman and Mendes have collaborated on seven films, ever since “American Beauty” in 1999. They started discussing “1917” last November.

The primary challenge, Newman said, was that “you wouldn’t be able to use [film] cuts as transitions. So the big issue was: When would music go away? Why would it go away? And when would it come back? If the camera continued to just kind of rove around, why were things changing [musically], and when were they changing?”

The film is a relentless exercise in tension and release, and Newman had to vary the pulse and style of musical suspense and action so that there would be an evolving but cohesive arc to the score.

Fortunately, he earned a degree in action scoring by doing Mendes’ two James Bond films, “Skyfall” and “Spectre.”

“I definitely grew muscles on the Bond movies,” he said. “I’d done some action sequences in some of the Pixar movies, but I’d never scored an action movie before ‘Skyfall.’ There may be less a chance to speak as an individual, as opposed to speak as a required composer trying to make something more exciting. So action writing can limit one’s ability to be expressive, and that’s a good lesson to learn, I think.”

But Newman’s score for “1917” is an opera for both nerves and emotion. Amid the racing electronic heartbeats and jittery percussion are passages of serene, reflective beauty. Quiet character moments are scored with the composer’s trademark wispy woodwind lines and a gentle, worried motif for keyboards.

When a major tragedy occurs midway through the film, Newman wrote some tender music for the character of Lance Cpl. Schofield (George MacKay) that was “quite moving,” but Mendes rejected that approach.

“He wanted the starkness and the coldness of that moment,” Newman said. “And I think he was right. He wanted to delay that emotion, you know, eight or 10 minutes until [Schofield] got into the truck, and that was a moment of reflection there for him.”

The “delayed emotion” comes in the form of a lyrical lament for solo cello, which Newman later reprises at the end of the film with rich catharsis.

As verité as the movie often feels, it welcomed big emotions and big music in certain places — partly because “there’s something slightly mythic about it, and epic,” Newman said.

One of the most striking visuals is a nighttime vista of bright fires lighting up the ruins of a French village. Newman’s score goes full operatic, with strings spiraling up and down the spine of a mysterious chord inside a massive cathedral of orchestral sound.

“Sam really wanted that to be a musically driven moment,” Newman said. “I must have written five or six ideas — I’d had pretty good ideas, and Sam would like 60% or 70%. But it never took him where he needed it to go, until I came up with the idea that’s in the movie. There were just a couple of moments in the movie where music gets ahead of drama, and that’s certainly one of them.”

The big climax is a six-minute sprint, darting through the fray to deliver the vital message.

“Sam just always knew that there had to be a sense of imminent … ‘success’ would be the wrong word, but that he was going to make it,” said Newman. “That the odds were great, and yes, it was suspenseful, but that there had to be in the music the sense that this was going to happen, that this was meant to happen.”

He recorded that six-minute cue … in one take.

English musician and humorist Neil Innes worked closely with two of the biggest cultural juggernauts his nation ever produced — the Beatles and Monty Python’s Flying Circus comedy troupe — yet never became a household name himself, a goal he often espoused in interviews.

“I’ve been very close to people who have had all this terrible fame and renown — it’s really not for me,” Innes, who died on Dec. 29 at age 75, told The Times in 2003. “I’d rather be able to talk to people, my neighbors, or be able to be in a shop and nobody thinks I’m a freak. If that means I only do tiny things here and there, then that’s fine. At least it’s working the way I like it to work.”

Innes died of natural causes at his home in recent years near Toulouse, France, according to a statement released by his family. “We have lost a beautiful, kind, gentle soul whose music and songs touched the heart of everyone and whose intellect and search for truth inspired us all,” the statement said. “He died of natural causes quickly without warning and … without pain.”

His approach worked for more than a half-century, when he first gained some measure of celebrity in England as a member of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, whose humor-laden music often skewered the loftier aspirations of the rapidly expanding ‘60s rock music scene.

“The Beatles used to come to gigs,” Innes told The Times in 2003. “A lot of bands that were in the god strata used to be dead jealous of the Bonzos ‘cause we could muck about, and they couldn’t. Eric Clapton said, ‘I wish I could do what you were doing.’ … ‘Cause it’s too much for anybody to take all this idolatry.”

A decade later Innes took more jabs at such idolatry, helping create one of the savviest musical parodies of the 20^th century, the Beatles send-up project called the Rutles, which affectionately lampooned the Fab Four with its faux retelling of the history of a band whose legacy “would last a lunchtime.”

Innes also was dubbed “the seventh Python” for his close association with the comedy troupe, for which he wrote songs and appeared in films including “Monty Python & the Holy Grail” (he wrote the song “Brave Sir Robin” and appeared as the minstrel who sang it) and “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”

“Utterly dismayed to hear about Neil Innes. Right out of the blue,” Python founding member John Cleese tweeted on Monday. “A very sweet man, much too nice for his own good. Lovely writer and performer. When he worked with Python on our stage show, I listened every night to ‘How sweet to be an Idiot’ on the Tannoy [loudspeakers]. Very sad.”

Others who combined comparable passions for pop music and humor reacted quickly as well.

“I wanted Neil Innes to live forever,” actor-musician-comedian Michael McKean, aka David St. Hubbins of the mock rock group Spinal Tap, posted to his Twitter account. “A wise, funny and beautiful man.”

His Spinal Tap bandmate, humorist-writer-filmmaker Harry Shearer, tweeted “RIP the quite brilliant Neil Innes.”

Little-known among music fans in general, Innes was revered by musicians, especially those in England regularly exposed to his songs with the Bonzos and in the late ‘60s on a children’s TV series “Do Not Adjust Your Set” that was the launchpad for future Python members Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin and which counted their soon-to-be troupe members John Cleese and Graham Chapman among its fans.

Innes may be most widely recognized for the songs he crafted for the Rutles, ingenious original songs that evoked the style and sound of the Beatles without directly imitating them.

The idea was born after Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV series ended its run in England, and Idle launched a new show called Rutland Weekend Television, a parody of a low-budget British TV series that regularly included musical numbers provided by Innes.

“Quite frankly, the only reason BBC2 went for it was because it was going to be cheap,” Innes told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2017. “My job was to come up with songs and cheap ways of filming them. I said, ‘Why don’t we do something like ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? Black-and-white film, speed it up, very simple. Four guys in wigs and tight trousers running around in a field.’ He [Idle] said, ‘Great. I’ve got this idea about a documentary filmmaker who’s so dull the camera runs away from him.’ That’s how it started.”

Although the fictional group was introduced to English audiences first, the project hopped the Atlantic in 1976 when Idle was booked as a guest on a new late-night American television show: “Saturday Night Live.” Innes appeared in character as Ron Nasty, the quartet’s acerbic doppelganger for John Lennon, and sang the song “Cheese and Onions” (“I have always thought in the back of my mind / Cheese and onions”), all of which motivated “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels to start the ball rolling on a U.S. special spotlighting the Rutles.

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That show, “All You Need is Cash,” finished dead last in the ratings when it aired in 1978 but became a cult classic and created a template for mock music documentary that actor-director Rob Reiner would pick up and run with six years later for his “mockumentary” “This Is Spinal Tap.”

The companion album, featuring 14 Innes-composed songs featured in the show such as “I Must Be in Love,” “Hold My Hand” and “Ouch!,” reached No. 63 on Billboard’s 200 Albums chart in 1978.

The Rutles resurfaced with a second album, “Archaeology,” released in the mid-‘90s in tandem with the Beatles “Anthology” documentary TV series. Idle took another stab at the concept a decade later in a sequel film — minus any involvement of Innes or the other Rutle actor-musicians — “Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch,” which went straight to DVD when it was released in 2005.

A rift between Innes and Idle over the latter-year iterations of the Rutles sometimes surfaced in public but seemed to have been resolved in recent years, as Idle wrote glowingly of his admiration for Innes in his recent memoir “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

The book’s title references the climactic song from “Life of Brian,” a production number sung — and whistled — by characters who were being crucified. “I have to say I am the man who wrote the whistling for ‘Always Look on the Bright Side’,” Innes told The Times in 2008.

Neil James Innes was born Dec. 9, 1944, in Danbury, Essex, England, and spent part of his youth in West Germany, where his father was stationed with the British Army of the Rhine. Upon returning to England, he took piano lessons from age 7 to 14 and taught himself how to play guitar. He attended Thorpe Grammar School and the Norwich School of Art, then Goldsmiths College in London, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1966.

That was a big year for Innes: the same year he graduated he joined the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band (originally called the Bonzo Dog Dada Band after the Dadaist art movement) and married Yvonne Catherine Hilton.

The Bonzos had little commercial success, their biggest hit coming in 1968 with the single “I’m an Urban Spaceman,” produced by Bonzos fan Paul McCartney under the pseudonym Apollo C. Vermouth. The band also appeared in the Beatles experimental 1967 film “Magical Mystery Tour.”

After shortening the name to the Bonzo Dog Band, the group released an album in 1972, “Let’s Make Up and Be Friendly” that spent two weeks on Billboard’s U.S. album sales chart, peaking at No. 199. In the early ‘70s he joined another band, Grimms, which released several albums that had little impact commercially.

Innes, however, soon became an adjunct member of the Pythons, one of only two people with writing credits for the troupe’s TV show— the other being “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams.

In recent years he had toured regularly, sometimes as a solo act and sometimes with Beatles tribute bands supporting his performances of the Rutles song catalog.

“He’s a great showman,” Python member Michael Palin told the Times in 2003. “As soon as he starts, people just love him. It’s a magic ingredient.”

Innes said he preferred intimate spaces to some of the massive venues he played when he appeared with the Pythons in their heyday, among them the Hollywood Bowl.

“Who needs all the angst of big promotions and record companies and all that crap?” he asked in 2003. “I just don’t want it anymore. I don’t want to play to more than 500 people — 500 people’s too many.”

One facet of his music many people missed, Innes’ longtime friend and “Archaeology” album producer Martin Lewis noted, was the straightforward side.

“One of the ironies of Neil’s genius for comedic writing was his equal talent as a writer of poignant and really emotional songs,” Lewis said Monday. “After George [Harrison] died he wrote a song called ‘Friend at the End of the Line,’ about getting a phone call about a friend passing. I’ve often used it when a friend died as a comfort. It’s just exquisite — a wonderful example of his gift.”

In addition to his wife, Innes is survived by their three sons, Miles, Luke and Barney, and three grandchildren, Max, Issy and Zac.

“High Above the Water” may have just “come to” composer Kathryn Bostic, but she knew exactly what it meant.

“I envisioned this vibrant quality and energy — I wanted the movie to end on this powerful note of joy, of celebration. The director also asked that it be something celebratory,” she said of working with filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders on the documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.” Morrison, of course, was the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning author of “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and “The Bluest Eye,” among others.

“I started to write something that was more of an anthem and was almost done with it, and then around two days before I was supposed to present the first sketch to Timothy, I was struck early in the morning with this song, ‘High Above the Water,’” Bostic explained. “It’s about celebrating the inner space that can transform you and help you transcend from places that are stressful or distract you from feeling peaceful or strong.

“That second verse: ‘There’s a crack in the wall / of shiny things / for the broken and the blind / the one-eyed man is king.’ I wanted to describe how the shiny objects in our life, the things that we’re beholden to, can distract us from a higher place of self-awareness.”

The Oscar-shortlisted song is a rousing gospel number straight out of a revival tent. The message isn’t sectarian but spiritual.

“I didn’t want to proselytize but I wanted there to be a feeling of release and transcendence,” Bostic said. “I wanted it to be simple backbeat with those chords that remind me of an old call-and-response feel that people can join into. Keep it real simple. Foot stomps and clapping. A celebratory call to arms, if you will.”

The lyrical ideas were carefully chosen, starting with the title.

“It’s a strong tradition in African American folklore to talk about flight to freedom. When Toni Morrison spoke of her book ‘The Song of Solomon,’ she spoke of African slaves who ‘flew’ to freedom. They had been enslaved on these Southern plantations and during the Middle Passage; many were able to ‘fly’ back home. She had a lovely way of talking about flight, the ability to transform and transcend circumstances that are horrific.”

The Magnolia Pictures documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”

Bostic has composed for stage and screen, including for the current Alfre Woodard prison drama “Clemency” (featuring Bostic’s sultry blues song “Slow Train”). Her collaborators have included David Byrne, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Nas and August Wilson. She worked with Wilson on multiple stage productions, scored a PBS special on the playwright and composed “The August Wilson Symphony” in his honor. In 2016, she became the first female African American score composer to be named to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

“I have so many influences for the scores and the songs,” she said. “The essence of a lot of it has a soulful Americana — I mean real earthy and soul-stirring sensibility. I grew up listening to everything. My mother played her own compositions, Chopin, Bartók, Duke Ellington. Then my brother would come home and play Milton Nascimento and James Brown, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans, Miles Davis. Then my mother would play Rachmaninoff.”

Indeed, her “Pieces I Am” score has hints of the upbeat gospel of “High Above the Water” but also touches on decades of jazz and blues as it accompanies the story of a landmark American writer who lived from 1931 to August 2019.

“Toni Morrison is a force,” Bostic said. “She has an incredible quote from ‘Song of Solomon’: ‘If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.’ I’m so struck by the symbolism of that quote and the power of it. Yielding to a sense of immense fate and a trust and a desire to transcend circumstances that are disabling.”

The academy isn’t the only body to recognize Bostic’s work on “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am.” The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has commissioned her to expand some of her cues for the film for a Feb. 29 premiere performance.

“I didn’t write an orchestral score for the documentary because it didn’t have that kind of feel to me — nor did they have that kind of budget. But I’ve expanded them and written a short portrait, a cinematic journey with orchestra,” Bostic said.

Perhaps the most sought-after stamp of approval came from the author herself, who saw the film and heard the music before her death.

“She told the director she really liked [the score] and, more important, she really liked the film,” said Bostic, noting how private Morrison was, and how significant it was that the author allowed the filmmakers to paint her cinematic picture.

“Her words to him after she watched it were, ‘I like her.’ “

Kathryn Bostic’s Oscar-shortlisted original song, “High Above the Water,” from “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”

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Tesla Inc. is about to find out whether the second time is the charm for Elon Musk making bold predictions about how many cars the company can build and sell.

The electric-car maker handed over the first 15 Model 3 sedans assembled at its new multibillion-dollar plant near Shanghai — its first factory outside the United States — to employees at the facility Monday. Tesla took the same approach when it started production of the sedan in California in July 2017, delivering its first Model 3s to staff members.

After reaching that milestone more than two years ago, Tesla went through months of what Musk called production hell. After consistently falling well short of the chief executive’s ambitious targets, Tesla burned through billions of dollars and came within weeks of running out of money.

Investors have been betting this time will be different, with Tesla shares on a tear since the company reported a surprise quarterly profit in late October. The carmaker is on much steadier footing, having worked out the kinks that limited initial production of the Model 3 and managing to far outpace sales of many other automakers’ electric vehicles. The China plant is already assembling more than 1,000 cars a week and aims to double that rate over the next year, according to Song Gang, the facility’s manufacturing director.

Despite all the progress made, there are still doubters. Jeffrey Osborne, an analyst at Cowen & Co., predicted Monday that Tesla will fall short of the low end of its delivery forecast for this year. He predicts the company will hand over about 101,000 vehicles in the fourth quarter, coming roughly 4,000 units short of its annual target of at least 360,000.

Tesla shares slid 3.6% Monday. The stock is still up more than 62% since the company reported third-quarter earnings Oct. 23.

Osborne, who rates Tesla the equivalent of a sell, is skeptical that demand for the Model 3 will continue at current rates. He’s concerned consumers will be less interested in the car as subsidies drop in China and the Netherlands and as a federal tax credit expires in the United States.

“The large amount of over exuberance related to the demand for Tesla’s products in the mid to long term has increased over the past few months, and we believe much more successful penetration is baked into the stock than is likely to play out,” Osborne wrote in a report. “While Tesla has built a very dedicated fanbase that has been willing to excuse poor build quality, customer service, and service infrastructure, we continue to be skeptical around broader adoption.”

Tesla’s stock decline starkly contrasts the jubilant mood at the company’s ceremony to mark the first deliveries of Model 3s assembled near Shanghai.

A crowd of about 200 people, including media members and employees, gathered inside the plant to clap and cheer as Tom Zhu, Tesla’s head of the greater China unit, handed over the first cars. One employee receiving a car presented it to his girlfriend along with flowers and proposed to her. She accepted with a nod, and they kissed. More workers will receive vehicles over the next couple of days, and deliveries to customers will start in January, company officials said.

The Chinese plant represents a cornerstone of Musk’s plans to make Tesla a truly global carmaker. Last month the company announced plans to build a factory in Germany to cater to burgeoning European demand for electric vehicles.

The China plant could also help Musk build on recent momentum for the company in the world’s largest market both for electric vehicles and autos in general. The Model 3 will compete with electric offerings from local manufacturers including NIO Inc. and Xpeng Motors, as well as global companies such as BMW and Daimler.

Demand for the China-built Model 3 is “very good,” and Tesla is confident it will sell all vehicles manufactured at the site, Allan Wang, general manager of Tesla China, said at the plant. “Our aim is to kill all internal-combustion engine cars.”

Although deliveries to customers haven’t started, Monday’s milestone caps several months of wins for Musk. The latest came Friday, when the locally built car was included on a list of vehicles qualifying for an exemption from a 10% purchase tax in China.

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Tesla said in October the locally built Model 3 will be priced from about $50,000. On top of the tax exemption announced Friday, the China-built model this month qualified for a government subsidy of as much as about $3,600 per vehicle.

Tesla’s original car factory — and, for years, its only one — in Fremont, Calif., spent months trying to hit a 1,000 weekly rate. Musk has said a weekly production rate of 3,000 at the China plant is a target at some point.

The China factory broke ground at the start of this year. Originally just a muddy plot about a 90-minute drive from Shanghai’s city center, it is now a crucial test of Musk’s bid to prove Tesla can be consistently profitable.

As part of its China expansion, Tesla plans to add dozens of locations in the country over the next year for showcasing its vehicles and providing charging and other services, Xue Juncheng, director of China aftersales, said at the ceremony.

The company may lower the price of the sedans made in China by 20% or more next year as it starts using more local components and reduces costs, people familiar with the matter have said.

About 30% of the parts used by the Shanghai facility are sourced locally, and the company plans to increase that to 100% by the end of 2020, said Song, the manufacturing director.

A California law that would bar job applicants and workers from having to submit to mandatory arbitration as a condition of employment was put on hold Monday by a federal judge in Sacramento little more than a day before it was set to take effect Jan. 1.

U.S. District Judge Kimberly Mueller ruled that the California Chamber of Commerce and other business groups had raised “serious questions” about AB 51, which was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom following outrage over arbitration agreements that hid allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and other prominent figures.

Mueller issued a temporary restraining order halting enforcement of the law and set a hearing for Jan. 10 to consider the groups’ motion for a preliminary injunction, which if granted could indefinitely delay its implementation.

The law does not apply to arbitration agreements entered into before Jan. 1 and does not prohibit employers from offering arbitration agreements as a method of settling disputes. However, it seeks to in effect prevent them from being a condition of employment by barring businesses from forcing applicants or employees to “waive any right, forum or procedure” to contest an alleged violation of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act.

Proponents hoped it would push workplace claims out of private, closed-door sessions and bring them into public court proceedings.

The California Chamber of Commerce had labeled the bill one of its “job killers” for the year, saying arbitration is an efficient, fair and more affordable method for companies to resolve disputes. The California chamber joined with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as the National Retail Federation and other groups, to file suit on Dec. 6. The lawsuit argued the language of the statute violated federal law, as well as U.S. Supreme Court cases that have supported arbitration.

“This statute is just another in a long line where California is trying to essentially get around the Federal Arbitration Act and the many Supreme Court decisions that have enforced it,” said Donald Falk, an attorney at Mayer Brown representing the chambers. “They designed this statute thinking that could escape preemption. The court has more than once said you don’t have to mention arbitration.”

In seeking the restraining order, the business groups said the law would subject employers to “substantial civil enforcement” and criminal penalties. Falk said this is the first state law he knows of that would criminalize the use of mandatory arbitration agreements. “Other states have tried to render them unenforceable. Criminal sanctions have not come into play,” he said.

State Labor Commissioner Lilia Garcia-Brower declined to comment. The offices of Gov. Newsom and California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra did not respond to requests for an immediate comment. Garcia-Brower, Becerra and two other state officials are named as defendants.

Concerns over a conflict with federal law twice prompted former Gov. Jerry Brown to veto bills to curb the exploding practice of mandatory arbitration.

However, in the last few years, allegations of sexual harassment and assaults by serial perpetrators, many of whom were protected by arbitration agreements, fueled anger in the #MeToo era. At Google, 20,000 workers staged a global walkout demanding an end to forced arbitration. Other tech workers, including at Los Angeles’ Riot Games, followed suit.

Labor advocates also say arbitration agreements present practical difficulties for employees who might struggle finding an attorney to represent them.

An estimated 67% of California workplaces had mandatory arbitration policies in 2018, higher than the national average, and the number may have grown this year as attorneys advised companies to get ahead of the new law.

In signing AB 51 and a second bill that gives victims of sexual harassment more time to file complaints, Newsom said in October that “everyone should have the ability to feel that pride in what they do, but for too many workers, they aren’t provided the dignity, respect or safety they deserve. These laws will help change that.”

The state has also enacted another law to curb the use of arbitration agreements.

A new activist strategy this year was to file thousands of individual arbitration claims against Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and Postmates, which hit the companies with millions of dollars in arbitration-related fees. Companies used to dealing with employee grievances one by one refused to pay.

A new law, SB 707, imposes stiff penalties on businesses that stall payments beyond 30 days of their due date by allowing workers to skip arbitration and take their grievances to court.

Times staff writer Margot Roosevelt contributed to this report.

NEW YORK — 

An anti-robocalls measure signed into law Monday by President Trump should help reduce the torrent of unwanted calls promising lower interest rates or pretending to be the IRS, though it won’t make all such calls disappear.

The new law gives authorities more enforcement powers and could speed up measures the industry is already taking to identify robocalls. And when phone companies block robocalls, they must do so without charging consumers. This should help Americans dodge many of these annoying calls.

“American families deserve control over their communications, and this legislation will update our laws and regulations to stiffen penalties, increase transparency, and enhance government collaboration to stop unwanted solicitation,” White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

The law is a “big victory,” said Consumer Reports’ Maureen Mahoney. “The key is requiring these phone companies to help stop the calls before they reach the consumer and do it at no additional charge.”

The robocall problem has exploded because cheap software makes it easy to make mass calls. Americans collectively get billions of robocalls each month. Such calls have disrupted operations at hospitals by diverting staff time to deal with calls faked to look as though they are coming from inside the hospital. Scams conducted through such calls have also defrauded people out of millions of dollars. Many people now avoid answering calls altogether if they come from unknown numbers.

Under federal law, it’s already illegal to fake numbers on caller ID to defraud or cause harm. Scams are also prohibited, as are automated telemarketing calls from legitimate companies that don’t already have written permission. YouMail’s robocall index says that half of all robocalls today are fraudulent.

But enforcement has been tough. Federal agencies have fined scammers hundreds of millions of dollars, but it’s been difficult to collect. Many of the callers are overseas. It’s hard to throw the fraudsters in jail.

The new law builds on steps taken by the country’s communications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, as well as state attorneys general and industry groups.

The FCC has clarified that phone companies can block unwanted calls without first asking customers, paving the way to broaden the rollout of call-blocking services. The law says phone companies cannot charge for these services.

Another important step is getting rid of “spoofed” numbers, or when a scammer fakes caller ID to look like it’s coming from the same area code or an important government agency such as the IRS. The industry is developing a system to tell people when the caller ID number is real.

The new law requires all phone companies to put this system in place, which Mahoney said will mean phone companies have to try to stop these calls before they reach the consumer. This technology doesn’t work for home phones connected to an old-school copper landline; the law calls on the FCC and phone companies to come up with an alternative for those customers.

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The FCC also gets more time to fine robocallers and do so without warning them first. The bill also calls for tougher fines when individuals intentionally violate the law and pushes the agency to work with the Justice Department to go after criminals. Over the long term, that could act as a deterrent.

Nonetheless, determined scammers and telemarketers will probably find ways to get through, given the availability of cheap dialing technology and the big potential payoff from victims. Think of how malware on personal computers is still a problem despite antivirus software. Automated callers could circumvent new safety measures by buying or hijacking real numbers to make calls.

“They’ll always find ways around this,” said Paul Florack, vice president of product management for Transaction Network Services, which runs robocall analytics for Verizon, Sprint and other phone companies.

And not every robocall is considered illegal. Some robocalls are helpful reminders from pharmacies that a prescription is ready, or schools advising a snow day. If you’ve given written permission, a cable company or cruise line can pitch you with marketing calls that consist of prerecorded messages. While a House version of the measure would have made it harder for legitimate companies to make such calls, that measure was dropped in the version that became law.

The law also does nothing about telemarketing calls that aren’t automated. A human can still pester you unless you sign up for the Do Not Call registry, which scammers often ignore anyway.

And even when phone companies have in place the system for verifying caller ID, not all phones support it. A year ago, T-Mobile started telling customers if the number ringing them was “verified,” but it can’t do that on Apple’s iPhones until after the call has ended. That’s because Apple software doesn’t allow it, Florack said. Apple didn’t reply to a request for comment.

The law says phone companies can’t charge extra for blocking robocalls, though it doesn’t require that such services or apps be made available to everyone. AT&T’s version, for instance, isn’t rolled out yet to its 18 million customers on lower-income-skewing prepaid plans.

But ideally, Mahoney said, a consumer wouldn’t have to take any action by downloading an app — as the carrier would be able to block calls automatically.

SINGAPORE — 

In a year in which the United States mounted an unprecedented effort to undermine China’s largest telecommunications company, Huawei made sure it got the last word.

The firm announced Tuesday that its revenue surged 18% to more than $120 billion in 2019 despite a ban on U.S. exports to the company starting in May.

“Despite concerted efforts by the U.S. government to keep us down, we’ve made it out the other side and continue to create value for our customers,” Eric Xu, one of Huawei’s three rotating chairmen, said in a statement. “These figures are lower than our initial projections, yet business remains solid and we stand strong in the face of adversity.”

The New Year’s Eve message capped the toughest year yet for the telecommunications giant, which was pushed into the center of the U.S.-China trade war.

In addition to being blacklisted for U.S. suppliers, the company was indicted in January by the U.S. Justice Department, accused of stealing American technology and violating trade sanctions against Iran. As a result, the company’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, has been under house arrest in Vancouver, Canada, fighting extradition to the U.S. She is the daughter of Huawei’s founder and chief executive, Ren Zhengfei.

Huawei fought back by suing the U.S. government and launching a public relations campaign. Still, the company has struggled to dispel fears it poses a national security threat to other nations because of its dominant position in manufacturing next-generation 5G mobile network equipment.

The company’s murky past, which includes Ren’s tenure in the military, generous state support and evidence of spying and intellectual property theft has contributed to widespread distrust of Huawei among the U.S. and some of its allies.

The company’s 5G business continues to grow, however, as Washington hasn’t been able to persuade many other governments to follow the U.S. in banning the Chinese company’s networks. Huawei’s competitive prices and technology have given it a leg up on 5G competitors such as Europe’s Ericsson and Nokia.

Huawei is the world’s second-largest smartphone manufacturer, and sales of its handsets helped propel Huawei’s 2019 revenue, Xu said.

Continued access to components needed to build those phones has been crucial.

Analysts said Huawei has survived by increasingly relying on its own chip manufacturer, HiSilicon. It also switched from U.S. suppliers to those in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea after it was blacklisted by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, American suppliers that produce their equipment overseas are still allowed to do business with Huawei. These factors together allowed Huawei to forge ahead, said Dan Wang, a technology analyst for research firm Gavekal.

“Huawei has been successful in replacing components,” Wang said. “It’s a big surprise to the U.S. government. We’re in novel territory.”

Where the company will struggle, analysts say, is in producing a viable alternative to Google‘s suite of apps, which are no longer permitted on Huawei’s phones as a result of the blacklisting. While that won’t hurt the company’s China market, where Google is banned, it will affect its foreign markets, particularly Europe.

Huawei will have to persuade app developers — many who are cash-strapped because of the nature of their business — to take a chance on Huawei’s mobile ecosystem rather than a sure bet such as Google.

“The software is crucial,” Wang said. “It’s quite likely overseas smartphone sales will suffer.”

Xu said in his statement that the company expected to remain blacklisted by the U.S. in 2020 and warned of slower growth.

The political and economic conditions will accelerate Huawei’s bid to become more self-reliant, Ren told The Times in an interview last month.

Huawei’s ability to overcome U.S. efforts this year highlights the complications of a so-called decoupling strategy by Washington and Beijing — disentangling the supply chains and relationships that hold the world’s two largest economies together.

“We’re on the cusp of a soft decoupling,” said Paul Triolo, a Washington-based technology analyst with Eurasia Group, a consultancy. “Right now it’s fairly easy to move supply chain around. It will be really damaging if the Chinese economy designs [alternatives to] U.S. technology. Huawei is an example. It’s already designing U.S. tech. If this becomes the trend, the damage becomes irreversible.”

Longboards aren’t just for surfers.

In the mid-1800s, half a century before surfing ever came to the Golden State, longboard skiing took off among the young, athletic men in Sierra mining camps who liked to drink, gamble and carouse in their spare time. They strapped on what were called Norwegian “skates” or “snowshoes” — those 12-foot-long wooden skis you see on the walls of old-timey ski resorts — to get from one snowbound cabin to another.

Fast-forward a century and a half to the teensy town of Johnsville (population: 20) northwest of Lake Tahoe, where the locals are still crazy about longboards — so crazy they hold winter competitions every year.

“Plumas County has a really rich skiing history in the Lost Sierra region of California that not many people know about,” says Scott Lawson, director of the Plumas County Museum in nearby Quincy. “The Historic Longboard Revival Series is a way of keeping those traditions alive.”

It happens near Eureka Peak, formerly called Gold Mountain, where miners extracted around $25 million worth of gold in 1853. Events are set for the third Sunday of January, February and March, with the final contest deemed the “world championship” race. Lawson knows of no other longboard races like these anywhere in the West.

Participants wear period costumes and leather boots, which are affixed to skis with just two leather straps. Racers must use hand-crafted longboards, which some participants make themselves. Others are available for rent on a first-come, first-served basis.

Christopher Coughlin, a photographer who moved to Plumas County three years ago from the San Francisco Bay Area, made his own 12-foot-2-inch longboards using only hand tools at a community college class . He plans to race this year, once he gets his technique down.

“Hundreds of people show up to watch these races, and I don’t really want to crash and burn in front of a big crowd,” he says. “So I’m going to need to practice some.

“But just making the skis was a fun process, especially considering that we didn’t use power tools,” Coughlin adds. “I also joined the local ski club and have made a bunch of new friends through it.”

David Matuszak, 66, who lives between Redlands and Yucaipa in Southern California, said he became intrigued by longboard skiing during nearly 40 summers of panning for gold in Plumas County. He wrote a book about his experience in the Mt. Shasta area called “Nelson Point: Portrait of a Northern Gold Rush Town.”

Residents of that community who stuck around for the sometimes very snowy winters competed in longboard races. Matuszak became friends with Lawson, who about a decade ago gave him a pair of longboards to try out on the race course when no one was around.

Matuszak slipped them on and flew down the hill, crashing about 20 feet from the finish.

“Those skis are giant when you’re on them,” he says. “I’ve been a regular snow skier for many years, and the longboards looked like they were 12 feet long in front of me. They freaked me out. When I caught a tip, I tumbled but didn’t get hurt.”

Matuszak finally got around to competing in a race — complete with spectators — last year in Johnsville. He fell again, got back up and completed the course. “But I got across the finish line and got an official time” dressed in an old pair of logging pants, suspenders, a period coat and a cowboy hat, he says.

Longboard competition’s early roots

Perhaps the most famous longboarder from the mid-1800s was Snowshoe Thompson, a Norwegian who delivered the mail on 10-foot skis from Placerville to outposts in the Sierra. He most likely raced a time or two, though probably not in Plumas County.

For the miners’ contests, skiers basically climbed up a snow-covered slope, pushed off with the aid of a single pole, crouched in an aerodynamic tuck and sped down the run on 12- to 15-foot skinny planks of wood with turned-up tips. Ski contests quickly evolved, especially ones you could make money on.

The first documented ski races in the United States were held in 1861 outside Onion Valley between La Porte and Quincy in Plumas County. Miners and mine owners wagered thousands of dollars, with the winner taking home as much as $500, the equivalent of more than $15,000 today.

Lawson, who has taken up the tradition, says he’s gone as fast as 45 mph on longboard runs. But it’s the legendary Cornish Bob, a miner from Cornwall in southwest England, who set a record in 1867. He apparently strapped on a pair of long skis and then flew down a steep, 1,804-foot course near La Porte in front of hundreds of spectators.

His speed: 88.1 mph, thanks in part to treating his skis with secret “dope,” a kind of old-fashioned wax his friend applied to the bottom of his longboards. Ingredients in the dope, a precursor to modern ski wax, included paraffin, tallow and tar, as well as cedar, castor and hemlock oils. One favorite additive was “spermaceti,” which comes from the head of the sperm whale, Lawson says.

To slow down at the bottom of the hill, as the story goes, Cornish Bob dragged a single pole, sending up a huge plume of snow.

How longboards were made

Longboard racers never dared to attempt a turn during or at the end of the race because that would have risked a perilous crash. Skis were designed only to go straight, without edges for turning.

“Falling with a pair of those longboards is like being in the center of a helicopter with them spinning and flailing around your head,” Lawson says. “You could really get hurt.”

The skis — some as long as 15 feet, though 12 feet appears to be the sweet spot — were made by skilled woodworkers, who used two-by-fours planed down at the tail and front and then steamed to curl up the tip. To help with stability, the makers carved a groove down the center to keep skis straight. The groove also made them faster because racers could put a little more dope on their boards.

The sport died out in the 1930s, staged a comeback and then disappeared again in the 1950s. But Rob Russell, a former Plumas Ski Club president, along with Lawson and other enthusiasts, revived the longboard skiing races in 1993. The contests have been held near Johnsville ever since, with strict rules that ban modern waxes in favor of the old dope recipes.

“And no cheatin’ or spittin’ is allowed, either,” says Lawson.

Russell, 66, has won the world championship race at least eight times. And while he continues to compete, he says the competition “is getting a lot stiffer these days, with some pretty fast young men and women coming up.”

One of those racers last year was freestyle skier Jonny Moseley, a gold medalist at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan.

Lawson said he’s done exhibition runs at Mammoth Mountain, Soda Springs and Squaw Valley resorts, where he hiked up a slope and skied back down. He never dreamed of getting on a chairlift with the long, wooden skis.

“That might be difficult,” he says. “And I’m not sure if they’d even be allowed at a ski area. So if you have a pair of longboards and want to try them out at a resort, you’d probably better ask permission first.”

At the races

The Plumas Ski Club will host the 2020 Historic Longboard Revival Series at noon Jan. 19, Feb. 16 and March 15 at Plumas-Eureka State Park near Johnsville. You pay $20 for membership in the ski club and $20 to race. Beginners are encouraged to participate, as long as they are prepared to crash and learn. Ski rentals ($20) are available for the 18-and-older crowd.

Or you can watch for free. The final championship race in March usually draws crowds of up to 600 people who turn out to watch 30 to 40 racers dressed in mining-era costumes. “We’ve had some people who’ve never been on any kind of skis take part,” Lawson says.

Info: plumasskiclub.org

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