But don’t worry, you will be at moderate risk of the car breaking down before 10,000 miles and you can’t fix the part because it has been deliberately engineered so that mechanics can’t fix it and it has to be replaced.
https://xcancel.com/unusual_whales/status/1987985187918192870
Has wealth ever been more stratified? Like really objectively? Because I don’t think it has. I think right now the level of opulence enjoyed by the bourgeoisie would beggar all the Caesars and ancient emperors of China. Meanwhile the poverty of the poorest living human is probably nigh identical to the poorest in antiquity. They have taken an incomprehensible amount. They’re taking more than they have ever taken before.
Because this shit is happening and we’re all paying for it. The environment is paying for it. The biosphere is paying for it. If we seek to change this arrangement? They say…. WhO iS gOnNa PaY fOr it?
Edit: making the late capitalist bourgeoisie is the most expensive fucking thing we have ever done as a species and that sucks. Fuck that sucks so much, dawg.
I remember reading many years ago that we had passed the level of wealth stratification in ancient Egypt when the pharaoh owned all of the land by the Nile and leased it to peasants to grow food, so uhh I’m guessing “no”.
how could we possibly know enough about ancient egypt to quantify the wealth stratification at any point in time? sounds made up to me, even if it is believable
It’s a complex topic that I’ve only scratched the surface of, and of course with thousands of years of history there were multiple systems with multiple levels of stratification at different times, but during the time of building the pyramids at least we know from written records that the Pharoh in theory had extremely strong, centralized control of the country through a system of ownership of the land and its resources, which allowed them to marshal all of that labor into megaprojects like the pyramids. Later dynasties weren’t able to do this, not because they lacked the technology or desire, but because economic control had decentralized to a degree where they simply couldn’t control labor the way their predecessors did.
From there there’s a lot of extrapolation, assumptions, and estimates, and it’s totally valid to say that those estimates are too unreliable or that comparing an ancient economy to the modern one is an apples to oranges comparison and therefore not applicable. If we limit ourselves to just industrial economies the answer to the original question is still “no” but the data is much more concrete.
We know more about the economy of ancient Egypt than like any other ancient economy thanks to the climate preserving papyrus. We have much more records.
Because legions of scientists have dedicated their lives to studying it
no shit. i’m asking about the methodology, obviously
That means Ford and GM are actually making 15 year cars, right?You will buy the Stellantis cars that breakdown in the first 100 miles and you will like it!
Do cars seriously not hold up 15 years? I’m very obviously not a car toucher, genuine question
Cars can easily hold up 15 years of regular use if maintained properly.
…which costs a lot of money and free time.
The biggest problem is 1) owning a car doesn’t mean you know what necessary maintenance even needs done to begin with and 2) almost everybody working paycheck to paycheck means nobody has money or energy to fix shit NOW so small problems get left until theres nothing but big gaping problems you still can’t afford to fix
My fucking car has been sitting in the driveway since March because my registration expired and to renew it I needed an inspection done but I can’t get an inspection done because “something chewed through the harness” holding my O2 sensor onto my engine or whatever and since the mechanic I usually use said I “had to take it to a dealership because they have the tools needed” I basically was like “well that’s never getting done since that sounds expensive”
I could maybe still pay my registration if they’d let me switch it to the new county i live in because they don’t require an emissions inspection but like, I still don’t have money. And the battery is dead and who knows what else is wrong with it after 6+ months sitting in the driveway
yeah I mean if you’re a mechanic then, sure enough you can actually do that but talking commuter vehicles absolutely not. It’s not “easily” for most people, it’s a huge chunk of your livelihood trying to keep up on these shitboxes if you’re barely keeping ends meet lmao
the question rent or car (also food but food is dramatically cheaper day to day) is a question that comes up constantly in the states when you’re on the low end
EVs will probably last longer because there’s so little maintenance and the battery degradation hype is way overblown
Good God no. Well cared for you get like 5-7 years with regular commuting. Rarely over 300,000 miles or so
I mean I don’t drive much, obv, but I’ve never had a car younger than 15 years and they all held out for years. Is there like a split here when they enshittified the things that hard?
It’s mostly a mileage thing. You can buy a car that old so long as it doesn’t have a ton of miles on it. Also, yeah, enshittification hit cars probably before anything else
I think the problem is you need expensive scan tools to diagnose modern cars and even just do basic maintenance.
The scanners aren’t nearly as expensive as they used to be. You can get bluetooth OBD2 scan dongles for about $30. Sure those don’t have all the features of the pro scan tools, but they’ll read codes and that’s all most people need.
Can the cheap OBD2 tools reset maintenance intervals, TPMS, etc? My perception was you had to spend a lot more to get scantools that would do that stuff. Newest car I’ve owned is a 2001, newest bike a 2009 and it was still carbureted, so I’ve never dealt with the modern stuff personally.
edit: and just to vent, I work on a family member’s car pretty often and it’s a 2014 - it has no dipsticks. You have to work through a bunch of menus and idle the car until warm before the dash will give you an actual oil level reading. I hate modern cars.
I’m not sure if they can reset the maintenance intervals. All the cars I’ve owned or worked on, those are reset through menus or other means.
Also 100% agree on modern cars. One of my dads vehicles needed a special factory tool to change the sparkplugs. It’s complete bullshit.
2014 - it has no dipsticks
That’s wild, but it’s a problem with specific models/manufacturers, not the entire industry. i have a 2018 car and a 2022 motorcycle and both are pretty maintenance friendly.
Don’t you typically reset the dash lights through codes in the cab? Like, my maintenance light resets by doing something like turning the key five times and pushing a button, I can’t remember because it’s been a few years.
At the very least, it will prevent you from needing to pay the $35 OBDII fee that most mechanics have. They’ll still use it because they never believe you when you say what codes yours spit out, but they won’t be able to charge you for something you specifically mentioned when you bring your car in.
I have one and I make sure they can see it when I drop my car off.
I mean, 300,000 miles is a lot more than 5-7 years for most people. Now, American cars don’t last, but my car is old enough to get its drivers license, and it’s still doing pretty damn well. Until I moved into the city this year I was regularly getting 36-38mpg, I’m still getting 30 with my short city driving commutes though. Sitting at 240,000 miles. It’ll probably take about 5 more years to hit 300,000 unless I do some big road trips.
best I can do is 4 years
we fixed the affordability crises by increasing the total cost of ownership
Protip: Get a van with room for an air mattress doubles as a home and only a 15 year loan rather than a 50
which loan would you get for a Winnebago?
The 69% apr loan
Sublet the passenger seat
I’ll airbnb one of the beds to increase the value of my parking lot
The rent to own economy is here folks
It’s communist to actually own a home.
you joke but home ownership is genuinely higher in china, cuba, and vietnam than in the us
higher than the US in all the former communist places too.
Oh yeah? But what about FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY? SMH my head silly commies don’t understand! Also forgetting that treats are the bedrock of humanity and freedom!
Can’t wait for rent to own groceries. When the card gets declined, your stomach gets pumped.
pump me harder daddysorry sorry I’m trying to fix it~
fair
What’s got me fucked up lately is this whole “everything needs to be a subscription” model would be so perfect for trains. The streetcar/light rail lines in most cities used to be mostly privatized but automakers were too concerned with dismantling that shit.
Why would anyone want a single-service infrastructure to be privatized? There’s economically and practically only room for one tram line, train line, water line, electrical line, etc. Therefore, competition is unlikely, which means that privatization is going to hurt the service.
I’m not saying the current systems should be privatized. Maybe this is just my city and wasn’t the norm across the country, but back in the 20-40s my city was completely covered by around 10 different street car lines run by private companies and not run by the local government. GM later bought all those companies through a shell and phased them out in favor of cars. It wasn’t until years later that the city tried to implement its own light rail.
well y’see the car is both product and subscription as you’re tied to purchasing gas, tires, parts and maintenance, and when it’s worn out after being so used to driving you’ll probably get a new car
Big part of why the whole industry is resistant to EVs, and why those that are doing EVs are introducing obscenely expensive subscriptions to basic features, is because of the reduced number of maintenance items on a battery/electric motor compared to an ICE motor.
average younger GOP voter is probably like “wow thats way better than the 300 years at 95% APR i signed for my dodge challenger immediately after i enlisted!!”
I did some jank estimates and I think the 50 year mortgage thing would stave off the affordability crisis for about 10 years before we’re back to where we are now. Then back to the normal increasingly unaffordable housing. Then a total meltdown of material conditions when those loans start getting past 30 years and people become too old/sick to finish paying off their mortgages.
i mean, with current apr, 30 or 50 years doesn’t change that much shit deal no?
plus developers would just immediately increase prices even if apr came down.
That estimate assumes there’d be a one-time 40% decrease in mortgage/down payment costs, then prices grow at the same rate they’ve been growing.
It could very well be overly optimistic. I did say it was jank.
but is it kinda rolling credit, so first years are devoted mainly to paying interest anyway, so it doesn’t matter much that principal is spread out longer, the first year apr hard restricts you anyway (that say on 300k home you have to at least be able to pay say 21k in interest with 7% apr, independent of 30 or 50 years + principal a little bit, that part dependent) (without going into calculators, vibey based it would be like 8k vs 6k +21k, 7% drop or some shit)
which, assuming my vibey estimates in correct ballpark, the market will fuck in 2 years of rises as is.
Also, longer loans typically have higher interest rates. So…
Brb starting a secular, modern, free-market loan service called “Serf.”
This loan was borrowed by your ancestors 3000 years ago and now you have to pay it off.
Now will people start paying attention to how everything is made to break down faster and not be repairable more and more every year? My last pair of headphones started breaking apart seriously the day I got them and ended up not lasting a year covered in a pound of duct tape. My last pair lasted eleven years and never broke at all. That was the lower end shit too.
Now will people start paying attention
If you’re in the mood to read a crazy comment.
Horseshoe theory. Here’s where this logically leads: payment in kind (PIK) mortgages and car loans that are securitized and then sold to a government sponsored entity (GSE) that then sells the low risk liquid securities to institutional investors who are required to hold low risk but long duration securities and they are the ultimate bag holders as long duration fixed income is toxic as the Federal Reserve inevitably monetizes the Federal debts that would otherwise be unpayable.
This is, of course, equivalent to the government providing free autos and housing.
The more I read comments like this, the more I’m thoroughly convinced that people just throw economic terms as gobbledyremoved together to try and say something smart that makes no sense.
It’s like when people want to seem smart about computers and start throwing random terms together that they don’t understand.
Econobabble
bro just download more RAM to up your bandwidth
I only go to Twitter via posts here so I’m hardly ever there.
throw economic terms
I wonder if there a large amount of “I am very smart!” Twitter posts on all sorts of topics that are like that.
Dunning-kreuger
I need an aspirin after reading that
payment in kind (PIK) mortgages
Gonna dig up my front porch and send it to my bank for my interest payment, dawg!
Edit: PIK Loans are an actual thing, it just means that you add the interest payment onto the existing debt rather than pay it over time. Which I’m sure would be great for a mortgage and not at all portend a crisis big enough to send us back to the stone age.
So the debts get sold around a whole bunch like a hot potato (for some reason) until it eventually ends up at these ‘institutional investors’ (who? The federal reserve I guess?), because these ‘institutional investors’ have to have low risk long duration debts (probably true?). They’re the ones who have to pay for the debts because long duration fixed income (which is the same as low risk long duration I guess?) is ‘toxic’ (even though they’re apparently required to have them). They’re toxic as (can’t tell if ‘as’ here means because or while?) the federal reserve ‘monetizes’ the debts (forgive the debts? pay the debt’s instead of the debtors? sell the debts to someone?) because the debts are unpayable.
I think he means the government’s going to buy the debts then forgive them? Because they’ll totally do that, just look at student loans, right?
Also this is communism btw
Soon - legally mandated predatory mortgages for anyone slightly above the poverty line!
/s
it really brings a tear to my eye seeing cars becoming almost as unaffordable in the US as they are here.
Renormalise private used car sales at a fraction of the price.
Yeah it’s a hassle and there’s a chance of buying a rustbucket. Though… that’s already fairly true of dealers too.
