- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
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 though. A man can dream.
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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.
Everything is politics.
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.
Once living in your car became a viable housing alternative, they had to take that away, too.
Wait until they figure out we need food to live.
US admin is catering to corporations who only want to suck in everyone’s money.
The new corporate objective is to have everyone die penniless, with no inheritance for their children.
Except for the wealthy, of course. They know how to handle money responsibly, by investing it properly, and not blowing every last penny on fleeting pleasures like food, housing, and transportation.
deleted by creator
The name of my local mall is prefaced by “Cadillac Fairview (CF)”. Cars have been overpriced for a long time now and the auto industry is investing in real estate. I think they may price themselves out of customers, just like the theater chains but at least they’ll get a bailout.
Damn I wish theaters had priced themselves out yet people are still out here paying like $20+pp for a movie ticket. It wasn’t even ten years ago I could go to a second run cinema and get tickets for $2 :(
CF has no relation to Cadillac the car company. Fun fact, it’s parent company is the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan
I learned something new today.
My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife’s car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it’s necessary.
I’m round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it’s actually a bit over 400k km) and it’s not even the most kilometers I’ve had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn’t have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
Ohhh there are so many options here!
The app is often more important than the adapter at this point. Some marques have bad 3rd party app support unfortunately (looking at you, Subaru). Others have pretty great support (BimmerLink is adapter-agnostic, though they recommend using a high quality one and they have an affiliate deal of some kind with one manufacturer they recommend)
Personally I own a Chinese fake VCDS cable for <20 euros that allows me to do literal magic on anything VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda… and could probably do a few things on modern Lamborghini and Bentley as well. Mysteriously, Porsche is the least supported out of all the VAG marques - they insist on having their own electronics. If I ever buy another VAG car, I’ll probably buy a genuine adapter to support the company behind it. I also own a Chinese fake Delphi DS150E clone, but at this point I don’t think it’s as great as it was 5-6 years ago. It doesn’t get cars newer than 2013. Plus it’s still missing some crucial things on some cars between 2000 and 2013. And outright missing some models.
Then there’s options like iCarsoft. More expensive than just an adapter and an app, but you get pretty great support for a lot of different marques. A lot more than some cheaper generic options.
And finally, marque-specific solutions. BimmerLink and VCDS I already mentioned, then there’s GAP for Land Rover, etc. Worth investing in if you’ve got a car you’re going to keep for a long time and want to be sure you can do stuff like air suspension ride height sensor calibration and all kinds of other procedures that generic tools might not have for your vehicle.
Yeah, why can’t these people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like you?
Just got my timing belt done, hoping to get to do it again at 200k miles
You mean there is a flaw in the capitalistic idea of infinite profit growth. I am shocked.
Bicycles and trains. Always has been.
Don’t forget proper bike infrastructure, trams, subway, busses. Like in most European countries. You’ll end up with smaller roads, lower speeds, less accidents, cleaner air, faster transportation, less car parks so more room for development of huises, more jobs, less waste. Or you could widen the roads, remove sidewalks and force people to drive cars on a road crowded with massive trucks which will crush you like a tank when hit. Hard choice.
Sure but one of the problems is North American cities are to sprawled out.
That’s one of the amazing things about ebikes is they make the sprawl so much more manageable!
Sure commuting 10 miles by ebike (probably about an hour commute or noticably less if you go faster than the 10mph average of an accoustic bike) isn’t as nice as commuting 2-3 miles by ebike (about 15 minutes commute time at 10mph), but chances are you’re already commuting between 30-60 minutes by car depending on traffic so what’s making that a consistent 45-60 minute commute with no meaningful traffic jams and wonderful fresh air and sunlight?
Our cities are fine, they’re just governed by shitheads. It’s the spaces in between that are the hurdle.
Public transport in the U.S is tricky. Half of the population probably is rural, and the U.S is very spread out which greatly increases the costs. American cities were also just built around cars. The car was like the most American invention ever for a long time outside of the firearm which made everyone equal in a way. Cars were sort of the thing Americans liked because it represented autonomy and freedom to people who were mostly stuck living with other people, and Americans traditionally being the most liberal, but also innovative culture, tended to butt heads a lot and needed personal space.
European cities were built in a time when people walked mostly, and are laid out to be compact and narrow. The entire EU is like the size of the U.S maybe even less. The population is much more urban. They have urban zoning, so you have houses mixed in with shops and industry where in the U.S you have HOAs, suburbs, parking lots, and dozen of miles of flat and sparsely populated cities with distances of hundreds of miles between large urban areas. Americans are also obsessed with material things and want to work long hours so traveling for work is harder.
Trump being dumb, wants to force Americans to buy shitty American cars. There is a reason nobody buys them, they are junk. They break, are a ripoff, they drink gas, even the small cars. They are slow and dangerous, and likely won’t even last until they are paid off.
Without cars, many people have become desolate. Entire families have been made barren. It’s kind of too late to fix it.
Its never too late to build better trains and bike lanes everywhere
It actually is because building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive. The economy hasn’t grown in 50 years in fact much of it has been shifted into bubbles to hide automation and globalization which hurts more developed economies. It’s nice to have bike lanes be included when upgrading but it depends on the situation. In many places you can’t really build wider roads without tearing down billions of dollars worth of buildings, and if you reduce the amount of road width, you greatly increase the amount of traffic which causes issues in cities. If traffic backs up through intersections, it brings entire chunks of a city to a halt and the problem just snowballs. Trains are cool but if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station it’s not really feasible for most people lt takes half a day at least to walk 20 miles and it leaves your body sore. A train station in a modern city might only cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build as you have to lay out track.
One potential solution is to tear down and rebuild entire areas of cities after they become desolate but with a more urban and public transport focused layout. This is still expensive but cities can actually start with a good layout, like wide roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, with tunnels and walking paths and stuff everywhere with better urban zoning more like what they have in aisa and Europe, and then let the city build around that. Another solution is to just build cities from the start to be urban and let the populations migrate over time out of the old car centric cities so they can rebuild, but this is hard because of corporate capitalism which creates a very inefficient economy, so you just don’t really have the resources to do these things like people did 100 years ago who lived in much more socialist and worker centric societies with more labor valued economies and less fiat currency protecting every terrible corporation from having to give up their assets to be better managed in an actual free market and small business.
Not that I want to argue with you but when reading this, I thought
building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive.
Wasn’t one of the recent goals to bring labour back to US? Doesn’t that seem like a perfect fit?
If traffic backs up through intersections
Replace cars with buses
if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station
20 miles?! There should be at least 5 stations on that distance Build the local train in a circle, with a station every few miles. Disperse the “last mile” via buses. Attach one point of the circle to the intercity railroad with a big station servicing inter- and intra- city trams, buses, maybe add a parking lot for now, so people can leave their car and continue with public transport. Later it can be changed to a mall, office space, hotel, w/e. Administration buildings maybe? So those are easily reachable?
cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build
Is road maintenance, drivers’ policing, car reliance and car-related deaths cheaper?
at least five stations.
This, but we need 4 lanes dedicated bus-only. Two for “local” busses that stop at every station (in both directions).
Two more lanes (in both directions) for “express” busses that only stop at a few major stops with transfers.
Why express busses need separate lines? A bus at a bus stop should not block the lane. Unless you expect to have really many busses, you could just have a separate naming convention for the express ones
It costs nearly nothing to put bollards in the middle of roads to make existing paved roads bicycle-only
And it very quickly pays for itself because the roads last wayyy longer.
It does because you have to have the capacity for cars first, and many cities are already under built for the amount of traffic you have there. You can’t just take roads used for cars and convert them to bicycle only lanes in many cases because you will gridlock the entire city in traffic if it isn’t gridlocked already you cant haul 30k lbs of food on a bicycle. These roads are like the arteries of civilization. Modern cities can have more then a million people living in them and they all need resources to survive as well as they need to be able to commute to survive.
It’s also a compounding problem. The more traffic backs up, the longer it takes to merge and turn, the slower people drive and the more stressed people become so they highly the passing lane and stuff. In a city some places can be a bottleneck where a single bad accident can bring 80% of the traffic to a stop within minutes.
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
Not sure we should celebrate that man, but the idea
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.
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
Have they Tried RAISING Prices while DROPPING Wages? That might help!
Just stop importing avocados and toast
No! Only import avocados and toast.
From Argentina
Why not just finance the unaffordable cars for 10-15 years? That’ll solve the problem.
And ensure they catastrophically fail around year 6 or 7
The slow wither approach.
WHAT??? HOW WOULD THAT POSSIBLY HE----oh. I see what you did there. I ate the lemon.
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.
Uh oh
In August, the share of subprime auto loans where borrowers had missed payments for 60 days or more was 6.43pc, according to Fitch Ratings. Bar a 6.45pc reading in January, this was the highest level recorded since Fitch’s data began in 1993 (back then, the rate was just 0.12pc) and far above the financial crisis peak of 5.04pc.
How do I Michael Bury the auto loans? 👀
Woah
I’ll tell you what though, I’m glad I have a paid off car.
