If only we had invented and built some sort of alternative mode of collective transportation. Maybe it could be in tunnels and ride on metallic rails. It would serve many people and make periodic stops to the same locations instead of the highway clusterf- we have today. Sad that we don’t, but a man can dream though. A man can dream.
Reported as not really being politics, and I could see it as being more !news@lemmy.world or even !business@lemmy.world
But pocket book issues like this impact politics.
“It’s the economy, stupid!” and all that.
Yern idiot
I didn’t report it, I’m stating it WAS reported and the reason why.
My post explains why I didn’t remove it. 😉
It’s good to have a forum to discuss the issue from a political angle. You can wedge politics into everything if you try hard enough but then for other stories, you don’t really have to try at all. This one seems like the latter.
Nothing like a great self-referential comment
Politics underpins finance at every level
I feel most of the mod decisions are arbitrary, but there’s also a good reason we don’t all just post everything in an “everything” com.
Everything is politics.
Ok, except for sportsball
The only way you can escape politics is to live alone on an uninhabited planet.
Even then, I’m sure someone would figure out a way to have conflicting ideas that need to be argued out. There’s a reason Tom Hanks invented Wilson (and the real-life stories such concepts are based on), we NEED other people to engage with, to debate with, to argue with, for validation and support and to negotiate with in order for our ideas to sharpen and for our minds to stay stable. Without this, we lose our minds or even die.
So not only is everything politics, we can’t live without it.
I think about this every time I see someone whinging about politics in entertainment.
America had a public rail system already…
We nationalized rail during WW1, and then after giving it back they all went broke in the 60s
So then Amtrak was created (there’s a push to privatize it right now) and when that was going to put private rail out of business, Jimmy Carter de-regulated rail so private companies could cut corners and not be replaced nationwide by Amtrak
We’ll never get nationalized rail on a good scale with neoliberals, they’ll never fix any problem where money is involved, because they’ll take the offered money to change their minds.
Cars and Wall Street and the American people for that matter can all go fuck themselves. Can’t we just have free and accessible public transit and walkable cities for fuck sake?
But the stock holders . . …
/s
Do you know what Henry Ford himself did?
Increased the wages so his own workers would buy his cars…
Henry Ford was a capitalist, racist, eugenicist asshole, but he had one thing the current capitalist, racist, eugencist assholes in power today don’t: long term economic planning.
It’s literally just supply side economics. If you have the power to increase the buying power of your customers, your customers can and will spend more money. Also more free time means people will want to spend more money on things to do and things to own, meanwhile if they’re stuck spending 60-80 hours a week purely focused on work they’ll be too tired to want anything other than food in their belly and a bed to sleep in
And gave them more time off to use them. He wasn’t any humanitarian paragon, just a good capitalist.
A capitalist with a longer time horizon than next quarter
Right, a capitalist. What we have now is something else, something demented, rotten. The wealthy are aware of that, maybe not that they caused it, but they pay smart people to manage their money and it must be obvious that a myopic business strategy is preferable to a long term one. Workers aren’t assets anymore. Ford might have been a shithead, but he understood the vitality of low turnover to a successful long term company. My grandfathers brother worked for Sikorsky his entire life, started turning a single bolt and retired from the executive suite. But his generation was among the last to be that lucky. There is a barrier between labor and management, it used to be a college degree, now it seems to be a PhD or a Masters. Which is just a different representation of money because education is wildly overpriced. There are obviously exceptions, but it’s rare to find large companies that still promote from within, especially from the floor to a desk.
Not sure we should celebrate that man, but the idea
Trump is bankrupting Americans and America so they can install a technocratic dictatorship
Why do we only blame trump?
There’s bi-partisan support for making sure China can’t sell its EVs in the US, even though they cost $15k and have 300km range.
Meanwhile we have dumbasses buying teslas saying “they didn’t get ripped off.”
Of course part of the reason those Chinese EVs only cost 15k is because China heavily subsidized their EV market. Basically they did what the Americans and Europeans didn’t have the guts to do and poured boatloads of government money into a brand new sector to give their companies a leg up while they ramped up. Guess what’s going to happen next?
These companies have all of the knowledge that making multiple generations of EVs brings you, they have all of the tooling already, they can now start expanding into more markets and start making it really difficult for competition to compete because the competition put in only the effort that they had the financial incentive to put into EVs and therefore they’re not ready to compete at all. The rest of the world basically ceded this entire industry to China because politicians were too heavily bought and paid for by the oil companies to do more than a pittance, and now the auto market is about to be heavily shaken up
maybe if dealers would actually tell you the price of the car instead of spinniing it as a monthly expense
Yes, but how can that poor salesman possibly get you into the most expensive car for the longest terms that way? They’ve got a commission to max out!
There is a dealership local to me that pays their sales staff annual salaries with benefits rather than working on commission. It’s the only place anybody in my family will buy a car now.
This is not a singular issue. That’s still millions who prefer the US to be car centric, and they fight to keep it that way. Just move to Europe
What if Wall Street failed and collapsed? I feel like that would be good
Every time they face consequences for their actions, we are robbed to save them, so be careful what you wish for
Maybe we should stop passively watching them commit crimes. French style revolution is the only solution.
For every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 people die.
The status quo of poverty caused by wealth inequality results in around 183,000 deaths every year.
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greatest-cause-us-deaths
Makes sense. https://www.lisep.org/tru
Anyone got a non paywall link.
Disable Javascript for that website and their paywall will disappear
Or use reader mode in your browser.
Archive.is is your friend
Install their Firefox extension (works on mobile too), never have this problem again.
So happy mine are paid off.
Awww. Theyre still not gonna make them one cent less expensive
Not long ago I could buy a used van for 5000. Now I had to pay like 13k for a used one after our typical accident caused by another person had an insurance that wouldn’t pay up.
That’s such a shit business going around telling people they’re covered but then in the end not actually covering anything. I get it cars depreciate… Well great, why doesn’t my insurance premium deprecate? I would gladly maintain the same level of payment if it means my car will be replaced. Similarly, if they won’t actually replace my car, they should just tell me…you’re going to need $5000 to make up the difference if you get into accident.
I shopped around for like 3 months before I finally found a car in my budget, and it was 600 miles away
My car needed more repairs than it was worth so I sold it and banked the cash.
I know what I want for my next car but it technically doesn’t exist yet. They’re still building the factory for it. 😟
Lord Bezos appreciates your sacrifice
Anybody notice how the video that plays after you scroll down is AI?
I mean, they literally only have a couple of prototypes right now. Very little of it is actually “real” at this point.
They let Leno drive one.
I wouldn’t buy that just based off their fucking terrible website design
that shit’s basically unusable, can’t even scroll through it on mobile
also wow another crossover, what’s so special about this one? I’m only asking because the website wouldn’t fucking tell me without flashing all sorts of shit at me
*oh wait that’s actually an SUV, body on frame
t.b.f the reporting is more about whether these companies have hidden loans (including possibly loans that other lenders don’t know about), which could have happened within railway companies just as easily as in car companies!
Fake News. All my homies can’t wait to go sixty goddamn thousand dollars in debt to by a house-sized . . I wanna say . . truck?
Me though, been pulling extra shifts - got my eye on that $90,000 volvo EV. Mmmm! You basically can’t afford NOT to buy it!
If I had the money lying around I’d totally buy a midlife crisis car. A v8, automatic coupe style with a real healthy rumble to it. I drive less than 3k miles/year, and barely travel far enough to make the lowest end of the fuel efficiency range. You know the kind of car that says “yeah this car is for fun, and that dude is probably not alright”.
But I have class so at minimum I’m looking at burning $60k on like a used Lexus RC F.
Like come the fuck on you know? Even if I ponied up “half” that cost, the 5 year loan runs $700/mo. $700. Who the absolute fuck has a monthly extra $700 just sitting there right now AND that mystery $30k I mentioned.
Are people just not able to math?
The average American car payment right now is like $670 per month. Its truly absurd. Its no surprise that people are drowning when you look at what theyre paying to have this or that.
Even more shocking is the amount of people buying their next car while still underwater on the first one. A large number of people are rolling $10k of prior vehicle debt into the purchase of a vehicle, driving up their monthly even further
You have gotta be shitting me.
I thought I was being unreasonable for playing around with the idea should I figure out a way to save up the $30k for a midlife crisis car.
And here people are already paying that premium while in debt with another vehicle. So they roll over the debt. Now, I’m not exactly sure why the people bought a new rolling death machine, but it sounds a lot like a significant lack of reason.
He’s not. I bought a Subaru with an 820 credit score and still couldn’t get less than like a 6% APR through my own shopping and dealer even looking. This was a year ago. My payments are in the 500 range though.
Thankfully my other car is paid off and we’re in a position to afford the Subaru without issue. It’s become my wife’s daily while I drive the paid off Hyundai.
No, they are not. That’s why a significant number of students fail math classes. The number of children who cannot even perform basic 7th-grade math is shockingly high. Then, they discover that they will pass even if they fail, so they relax and blame the teachers when their parents see their grades.
My wife and I are saving for a “down payment” for our next vehicle. I’ve got about $10k saved but I really need at least $20k down to make the payment manageable. I should be buying outright with $20, but here we are.
Don’t forget about insurance and property tax. The monthly payment isn’t all you have to spend.
Registration fees too.
