341–350 of 568 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go one step further and become a Bicycle Guy. Consider what will still be operational 100 years from now once fossil fuels have dried up and we have fully transitioned into Life As A Service.
The problem with being a "Bicycle Guy" is that people like to run them over...
Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever. It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
Having trouble thinking what user-facing technology cars have gained recently that I actually need. Backup cameras are nice, my last two cars had them but my current one does not. Life goes on. Heard anecdotally that new cars in US require then now, so I guess next car will probably have one again. Blindspot indicators on side mirrors are nice too, but physically turning and looking is too engrained in me to stop doi…
Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever. It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
I think this is a sign of the times we live in. Innovation today seems to have shifted towards serving the owning class.
Shifted? When was it different?
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Manual transmissions are almost entirely extinct in new vehicles (in the US at least) and even some manuals have an interlock that can prevent you from taking it out of gear if the power-train control module decides it needs to stay in gear.
That's why I jumped to buy a new one as soon as I had the money. No interlock on the gearbox, no electric seats to break, manual parking brake, but with android auto on an OEM infotainment. Not saying they're super common, but as someone who writes software, I don't like the increasing dependency on software implementations of certain components that are fairly simple in their mechanical form.
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How much was the underpayment (I know you said a dollar or two, but I presume this had gone on for a while?). It's odd to me that they repo'ed rather than contacting him to say 'hey, there's a problem with your account.' I find the story wholly believable, a lot of people who work in payments seem to be stupid and/or stubborn, and it might be the industry selects for those traits.
> It's odd to me that they repo'ed rather than contacting him to say 'hey, there's a problem with your account.' I imagine there's a lot more money to be made making someone pay for the fees and costs of a repo, than a phone call asking them to pay a few dollars. Although his friend could also be lying about the few dollars part.
General industry practice people are put in delinquency buckets, and generally not by amount but in the 'are they past due or not?' I'm speculating but there could be other behavioral scoring as well and if they just automated the process of dispatching well... that's on them and good luck with that overhead.
Well if this is how the new cars are gonna be, I guess I'll just go ahead and teach myself to be a Car Guy so that the one I have now will run forever. It's not that I'm afraid of missing a payment. At this point I would probably buy the car outright. But after the robo-signing debacle with BoA repossesssing houses that they were never party to, the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy.
> the mere capability renders the machine fundamentally untrustworthy. I've said this a couple of times before, but I find it fairly astonishing that we don't have legislation covering what manufacturers are allowed to do to a product with embedded devices after a user has purchased it. I want to be very clear - after I have bought a product, ANY CHANGE WITHOUT MY CONSENT done by the embedded software at the behest o…
True story: my neighbor's lease payment was under, by a dollar or two, no more. An error in his banking practices, I guess. They came and repossessed it in the middle of the night. He offered to pay, and they wouldn't take a credit card, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, wire transfer, or any other modern form of payment. No, he had to go to Western Union. Someone who's more up on this sort of stuff can explain that. A week late…
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I think this misses the forest for the trees. This technology in any car should be a violation of our rights. A corporation dictates when to access the vehicle remotely? It’ll start with justifiable use cases. In a not too distant future, imagine something like: * can’t access car during peak CO2 emission times because you got the cheaper monthly rate that uses a green subsidy to pay for the cheaper rate * your incor…
I do get your point, and I agree. My thought process was that the inherent evils were already being discussed, so I figured I would point out something that I saw in the article which I thought was interesting but not already being discussed.
True story: my neighbor's lease payment was under, by a dollar or two, no more. An error in his banking practices, I guess. They came and repossessed it in the middle of the night. He offered to pay, and they wouldn't take a credit card, PayPal, Venmo, Zelle, wire transfer, or any other modern form of payment. No, he had to go to Western Union. Someone who's more up on this sort of stuff can explain that. A week late…
I saw someone's RV getting repossessed over $50 in 2019. They were clearly living in it. I walked over and handed the repo guy $60. He wouldn't take it. This was in a cul de sac. I parked my truck across the way so that it would not be possible to enter or leave the cul de sac. Someone called the cops. The cops showed up after a few minutes, good response time. The lady living in the RV was told that she could not pa…