I think you vastly overestimate how many people buy new cars. Most new cars are bought by the same group of people year after year. Almost 75% of cars purchased in America yearly are used. It’s really only a specific class of people who can afford to buy new cars. It is not the norm.
I mean, if you’re well off enough to buy a $30k car, you’re better off than most Americans anyway. What about those of us that couldn’t afford that, and instead are faced with the choice of taking out exploitative loans and paying for years, or keeping our high mileage, high MPG vehicles?
It seems there’s an assumption that everyone eventually has to buy a new car, but that’s not true. I can count the number of people in my life who have ever bought a new car on one hand. The rest rely on old junkers they replace every couple years because $2000/2yrs is significantly more affordable for someone in poverty than $30,000+ in one year, or $500/mo payments for 5.
Like for me, I spend $30/mo on gas. That’s it. I spend about $25/yr on oil changes, I spend $75/every 2 years on emissions. I’d have to save a hell of a lot more than just gas and upkeep costs to save even a single dollar, and even then I’m definitively losing money over just keeping my car because I will have to pay payments for years because I don’t have the money to buy a new car outright. Personally, I will never buy a new car, nor take a loan for Car, so that puts EVs even further out of my reach. Wheres the $5-10k EVs that are present in much of the world? I don’t want a 16” tv in my dash, or heated seats, or a vision system, or rain sensing windows. I want a bare bones car, with no luxuries, for as cheap as possible, that is as efficient as possible. My 15 year old Corolla is better than the majority of modern cars available in my country in nearly every respect that is meaningful to me than any EVs available for sale in my country, every way except emissions. Unfortunately, my economic security takes priority over individualist attempts to address climate change.
I spend $30/month on gas. Electricity is gonna have to get a whoooole lot cheaper to justify at minimum $30,000 to purchase an EV. Maybe if we get rid of some of the protectionism and allow Chinese $10k EVs into the US I’d consider it. An oil change once a year over the course of owning a car is less than $1000… it costs $25 to do yourself, $50 to have someone else do it. That’s… not a significant cost for even the poorest of people.
What does a modern car get me over my 15 year old Corolla as far as reliability? Idk if I really need something that lasts longer, to be honest. I’ve put less than $1000 in this car other than wear items like tires in 15 years, and it cost less than $16k off the lot brand new. A new car would have to get like double the mileage or last a million miles without breaking down to be significantly better than mine, and it would have to be significantly better, because it’s going to cost significantly more even if I get the absolute cheapest cars on the market in their case trim.
Have you been in a South Korean plant? They famously have terrible working conditions, though they’re starting to fight back against that.
Yeah I feel that also. That’s why I believe in democratization of the workplace. Instead of obeying the whims of a single dictator-leader or small board of directors, labor should be able to collectively decide the motivations and direction of their labor power.
With such ownership of development, instead of working for someone else’s vision, we’d be able to collectively develop and manifest a vision that isn’t predicated solely on the extraction of profit, but on the collective needs and desires of those within and without the company itself, meaning those within the community who will also be affected by the decisions of the company.
But of course, as of now, this is just the rambling dreams of one person, and not an actualized reality.
Idk, I’d be willing to overwork myself if it were for a really good cause, like ending hunger, or rapidly building houses that will be provided free at point of use to unhoused and low income people, etc. definitely not a normal job I’d do it fit though.
Actually, part of the deal that allowed TikTok to stay in the US required their US branch to have some US leadership. The leadership that was picked was mostly former intelligence agency people.
Man, I make more than enough to replace my phone every year if I wanted, but I’m not as wasteful as you apparently. I used my iPhone 6s until the XS released, and I’ll use my XS for a couple years more at least. I’d honestly keep using it forever, batteries are cheap and I repaired electronics for a living so I can do it myself, but eventually they’ll stop letting me open apps on it like they did my 6s, essentially forcing me to replace a perfectly functional device.
“I am extremely wasteful and replace a perfectly good device every two years despite them having more than 5 year lifespans and no new features releasing most years, and this is somehow something I take as a good thing because it means I get a shiny new toy every so often.”
The Chinese government has only been in power since the late-40s/early 50s. Do you contribute the deaths by Nazi Germany to the modern German state?
Yep. I actually stopped carrying around my ID because the new RealID cards are horrifically brittle and just destroy themselves in my wallet, but the digital ID is required to be accepted statewide anyway, so I only need the card when I go out of state.
No, taking something without paying is theft. Piracy has many definitions, but none of them that simple.
-Robbery or other serious acts of violence committed at sea.
-The hijacking of an airplane.
-Copyright or patent infringement.
-The illegal interception or use of radio or television signals.
-An instance of piracy.
-In geology, that process whereby, because of a higher natural gradient, and therefore more efficient eroding power, one stream cuts back a divide and taps off the head-waters or a tributary of another stream. The captured stream usually turns a sharp angle into its new course and leaves a wind-gap where it formerly flowed. Also called stream-piracy.
-Robbery upon the sea; robbery by pirates; the practice of robbing on the high seas.
-Literary theft; any unauthorized appropriation of the mental or artistic conceptions or productions of another; specifically, an infringement of the law of copyright.
If I DuckDuckGo something and a video pops up and I watch it, I made no affirmative assent to giving them any data. Even if I go to YouTube.com, I made no agreement. Only if I make an account do I make any sort of contractual agreement with Google. If they only want to show their videos to those who agree to their policies, that’s their perogative. That they haven’t done so suggests that they know and allow people who haven’t done so to watch anyway.
Legacy 1Block, and the orion browser as a supplement.
So your issue with him is his emotional intelligence, but you lack the emotional intelligence to separate content from vocabulary. You admit that you would prefer to believe incorrect information just because it came from someone who says things in ways you don’t like. That is an astounding amount of irony.
Do you realize how much effort the military puts into propaganda programs? They have an office in Hollywood specifically for controlling the portrayal of the military in films. They’re currently paying streamers to simp for them as a recruiting drive, look on kid YouTube and you see them, “I spent 100 hours training with the Army and it was so fun, war is awesome guys!”… Dragnet was literally designed to reform the image of the LAPD, and I’m certain all the procedural crime dramas that exist didnt only get green lit because middle age women like them. It’s everywhere and in everything. We’re constantly surrounded with and bombarded by state propaganda.
It’s not even looking for the next best word. It’s looking for the next best token. It doesn’t know what words are. It reads tokens.
I laugh at this every time I see it, but I also like to point out that Rage was, in fact, extremely explicit about what machine they were raging against.