You obviously have never set foot in SF if you’re spouting this nonsense. Hey everyone, the city with an insane concentration of wealth and corporations is also a lawless anarchist zone, just ignore your eyes and ears and it’ll make sense…

So, my perception was probably misinformed.

In Australia there is the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Act 2021. It is speculated that it was passed to plug a capability gap in data collection for Five-Eyes/USA.

as a USian I hope that we do? As a planet of nation-states, China does not have the best interests of US citizens in mind long term, and it would be super neat if they dont usurp Taiwan and subject all of its citizens to its particular brand of totalistic authoritarianism.

Feel free to criticize the US in a separate thread. I'll join in. Please don't derail criticism by changing the subject.

Did that conversational gambit ever work on your parents?

I’ve never seen evidence that US agents attempted to infiltrate Chinese companies to steal their secrets, meanwhile just one recent example is the FBI catching Chinese espionage on camera trying to steal glass trade secrets from Corning, also see the Google employee who tried to steal AI secrets, a while ago it was the Coca-Cola can lining formula

> this is so silly

Tell that to my former coworker in the U.S. government, that this happened to. I was the person who found out and reported it, and action was taken.

" Palantir are actively feeding information to cops in my county who don't like me because I walk in the pride parade."

Can you prove this?

The only reason why all those gibberish brands exist is that Amazon gives better placement and seller tools to sellers who have a registered trademark. Since the sellers don't care about what the trademark is, they just want to sell on Amazon, making up some nonsense by smashing letters or phonemes together lets them speed up the registration since they won't have to deal with people saying it's too similar to their trademarks. If Amazon didn't have that policy, your Nwouiiay car battery charger simply wouldn't have any brand name printed on it.

Like what? They all have AC and a stereo of some sort. Like WTH else really matters? TBH most of the feature upsells make so little sense to me (floor mats and real spare tires excepted I guess) that I don't get how they're successful.

I like the auto dim mirrors, but not enough to add a grand to my price.

and a lot more shit to break. nice thing about a cheap car is it has manual seat adjustment, an AC and a radio.

My friend just bought a 20 year old volvo and the locking gas cap malfunctioned while we were being shown the vehicle and testing all the buttons out. The dealer just took a screwdriver and popped the lid with a screwdriver - now the gas cap doesn't latch at all.

Nissan Versa is like my one and only example of a new car that feels so cheap I'd only ever buy new or used as a last resort. It used to be one of the cars that would help make things like the Kia Soul seem amazing in comparison . (And I saw with my current car being too cheap for cruise control.)

I hate dealing with cars and I hate status signalling, and car maintainence, and buying used and buying new are both miserable IMO, and don't have a clear front runner for comfortable low risk purchase that doesn't look like it's way too expensive (anchored by my concept of what cars should cost relative to median income).

My current >13 year old purchased new car has done better than my previous used car. But it's probably not because it was new, so much as because my previous Used car had high mileage and succumbed to the environment. And buying new felt super weird. But now I look at the market and no matter which you buy it seems miserable.

Why buy a basic cheap car when you can get a not very old luxury car for the same price?

> If you didn't care about status signaling you typically skipped the "new" label (which loses you tons of value right at signing) and bought used-whatever-the-rich-people-were-buying-but-upgraded-from.

This is describing a specific kind of person and it is not a general rule, at least not for the last 30 years. I would be surprised if it even applied to a plurality of people, but this all comes down to anecdotes anyway. The narrow examples I can think of are vehicles and, to a lesser extent, game systems. But anyone I knew who wanted to know the time would just buy a $20 Casio watch and, in that same vein, would buy whatever product is the equivalent of a $20 Casio watch in that particular product category.

Buying used anything is pretty time consuming (unless you do no research and just pick the first thing you see) and a lot of people want(ed) to save their money by saving their time (time is money as they say) buying a reasonably-priced new product.

For my entire post college life (think financial crisis +) the difference in price between new and used cars has been inconsistent, erratic, and extremely hard to evaluate. While it's true that cars eventually depreciate enough to be cheaper, I have 2012 model year that's probably worth < 20% of what it was new even with reasonable mileage, when I look at used cars less than 5 years old and without a ton of miles, most models that are considered reliable or remotely popular seem to sell above 80% of new model sticker price, and often are marked at or above new sticker at car lots. Choosing between, say a new Coralla vs. a used Camry seems far removed from what I remember in my youth, which is that for model pairings like that maybe your new vs used model overlap would be another mark or maaaybe something like a Yaris, and you'd be like "buying new is for rubes." But today, you have to spend several days of part time work to figure out something like "a new model a, or b, in price range x or a used model c or d with sub n miles in price range z will have similar TCO, let's see what's out there..."

I think there's a reason that that Slate truck seems interesting to some people, and why people think stuff like the Maverick that has gone from a reasonable deal to a questionable one but still remains popular.

That said, I think it's true that most new car buyers are mostly buying expensive cars and that there aren't many cheaper cars despite evidence that they'd sell. So what I'm curious about is that means 5 years from now people will have to sell them at an increased rate of depreciation or they'll just keep them longer.

In the worst case this seems on the verge of cars being driven out of middle class hands (or houses going from two car to one car) if the median income relative to average car price grows more.

Buying used is genuinely a pain in the ass.

On that page, I clicked on the "Build and Price" button. All that page contains is their SUV models.

I then checked the 5 dealers closest to me. At these 5 dealers, there are only a total of 3 base model cars in inventory, all last years' model: 18k, 18k, and 20.6k

The explanation is obviously the chicken tax and fat profit margins on their larger SUVs.