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.
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.
Ok, except for sportsball
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.
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
That’s the funny thing about it all: the ruling class couldn’t give less of a shit about the wellbeing of the people. But they care about their companies’ revenue, and that is threatened if people have no money to spend. That is why we need Universal Basic Income in the near future.
UBI is a great idea, but it allows people to take risks. Including the risk of forming a union, protesting in a larger way and so forth. That sort of happened with the Hippies in the US. It was easy to get a job, so people used that to earn some money, quit and enjoy themself for a longer period.
That is why the social safety net is as crappy as it is. Fear is the only way to keep the general population in line.
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
Can’t we have affordable repairable cars AND reliable public transport? That would sure be nice.
Many places in America at least are just too spread out. But we dont need a super mega duper feed f teenthousand to drive around. Shit like the Slate would be amazing if it could exist (I realize bezos funded it. Still doesn’t keep it from being a bad idea).
Thats why I will argue old cars were undeniably better. You could actually repair them and they weren’t rolling spyware with a subscription.
1990 to about 2014 is the perfect spot for cars. Before that is archaic for most people (i prefer 80s cars myself) and newer than that its just a corpo bot on wheels.
Good luck finding parts from the 80s though besides pickup trucks since I still lots of those from that era on the road still
Oh there’s a lot of parts for American 80s cars around. And their crude enough you can fab most things to work fine or just get aftermarket if you need to.
Just bring lots of money for gas.
Also, Obama trashed most pre 2000s cars, so Detroit bailouts would work.
Yeah that whole thing really pissed me off. Tons and tons of great old cars destroyed. Further helping the rich and fucking over the poor.
Might I suggest Open Source Repairable Electric Cars, Trains, Trams, Bikes, Bike-Cars, Walking Bikes, Boats, and VTOL’s those would be awesome to get open source alternatives for
Slate EV is open. But watch, no one will buy them.
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.
Sure. An eroded economy. Stagnant wages for many long with decreasing buying power. Price hikes thanks to tariffs, increasing insurance costs, rising subscription costs, etc. Cars bought at inflated prices and high interest for extended payment schedules during the covid price gouging, and just generally way too expensive these days anyway, are all draining bank accounts far more quickly than ever.
Bet any repos don’t go back on lots for resale, they’ll park them in the desert somewhere just to prop up scarcity and new car prices.
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.
They already have. Why do you think grocery prices have been a major political talking point? Since most people don’t have enough money to buy property where they can grow/raise their own food, and many municipalities explicitly ban the raising of animals to “protect” the agriculture industry, most people are stuck. Your only option is the monopolistic grocery chains.
Awww. Theyre still not gonna make them one cent less expensive
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.
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.
When someone says family comes first, they often mean their family over yours.
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.
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.
Your point about it being a cash-flush industry stands though, a huge chunk of the rich families around come from dealerships. Realtors (another high margin sales job) are smarter about hiding their money from their client base, a lot of them take trips constantly and buy secluded homes. Dealership families building mansions on acres of lawn, visible from the main roads, like castles. Not a smart choice but we’ll see how that plays out.
This got 15 up votes?
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 :(
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.
Woah
I’ll tell you what though, I’m glad I have a paid off car.
About to buy one, but old and easy to fix. And cash lol.
How do I Michael Bury the auto loans? 👀
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.
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
How much do you use the train? I spent 8 years without a car, and let me tell you this, getting that 4 to 5 hours back that I was wasting on the bus, commuting, shopping, going to entertainment, Eric, that’s something I don’t ever want to do again. Bus and train combo with a bike still was hours to do a commute that takes maybe 30 minutes by car.
It’s a drag, but that’s just an example of a poorly planned city. I’ve lived in places like that, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I saw a you tube video about a city in the Netherlands I think it was where every house was within a 5 minute bike ride of a train station, and you could get around the city on a bike just fine, but if you wanted to drive, you’d have to go around to a road that looped the outside of a city. https://youtu.be/r-TuGAHR78w
That’s not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.
If we keep on saying, “Well, it’s not good enough now, so forget about it,” we’ll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn’t take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.
Well, Shaun, lemme tell ya; I didn’t mind the 4 to 5 hours a week I spent on the train or the bus. Partly, because sometimes I got to meet genuinely lovely and hilarious strangers, and even make friends with people I never would have met otherwise. Or help people that needed help, being in the right place at the right time. I kinda miss that, having chances at being a kind stranger.
And you know, there is the savings to consider. Not having to spend the extra 30 hours at a job I hate to pay for an $800 expense I don’t need was worth the extra commute time, in my opinion. All that extra free time that I wasn’t driving or working to afford driving, I could use to read books. Or write books.
Beyond that, it was nice to have the cheapest and most freeing exercise I’d get. That’s more money I didn’t spend on a gym membership, owning a bicycle and taking it to visit my friends or getting groceries. And when the weather got bad and I needed a car, I’d just call a taxi. Or set up a carpool with a coworker, offer to pay for gas. It was still cheaper than owning a car. It was nice to have a chance to make friends with my coworkers too.
How much effort did it take to plan my entire life around the logistics of taking my bike/the bus/the train? About as much effort as it did planning my life around owning a car.
The only time I ever needed a car, Shaun, was when I lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no public transit. Because the local government designed the infrastructure that way.
Well I don’t know where you getting the name Shaun. But when I say 4 to 5 hours I don’t mean 4 to 5 hours a week I mean 4 to 5 hours a day. I would get up and on the bus by 3:30 in the morning to be to work by 6:15 I would then get off work and I wouldn’t be home until sometimes 5:00 or 6:00 at night and if there were a delay could be as late as 7:00 at night. I too had great experiences with people I met on the bus I’m at a lot of great people I took homeless people out to eat I became friends with quite a few people the bus drivers hell my next door neighbor that ended up moving in I knew him because he was a bus driver before he moved in. However there is a limit to how much we need to be able to do.
I dunno, you called the other guy Eric, so I thought ‘Well, alright, if we’re doing the naming-strangers-on-the-internet bit, I guess I’ll call you Shaun.’ No harm or offense meant, friend. There were places I lived where the bus infrastructure was legitimately that bad. I remember the 3 hour rides to work too. -_-; Those were awful. I spent months camped out at the city planner’s office begging for extra service on my route after I quit that job and got one closer. No dice, sadly.
This is my absolute most favorite post comment and can relate to all that fully
