331–340 of 363 posts
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To put a finer point on it: actual experts in the study of government routinely refer to the US as a democracy. It’s absolutely not a sign of better familiarity with the topic to “correct” that usage—it’s a sign of low side of middling familiarity, specifically.
Debate whatever you want, we do not have a direct democracy, which is what most people hear when they hear "Democracy". It's Representative Democracy. Supposedly.
Crazy how we are talking about this like a weather event, like it's just an unfortunate outage. Cyberattacked by whom? How? What vulnerabilities allowed the intrusion and what organizational processes created those vulnerabilities? Naturally the people who know these answers are very busy today but hopefully we will hear more soon.
I'd be willing to bet that they have comprehensively sloppy and terrible infosec practices and that we'll never hear any details about it - most of their customers wouldn't understand, and it would only expose how bad they are at all of this if they did.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To put a finer point on it: actual experts in the study of government routinely refer to the US as a democracy. It’s absolutely not a sign of better familiarity with the topic to “correct” that usage—it’s a sign of low side of middling familiarity, specifically.
Debate whatever you want, we do not have a direct democracy, which is what most people hear when they hear "Democracy". It's Representative Democracy. Supposedly.
It is also a republic. It could be a republic even if it was a pure direct democracy somehow without "issues" - in fact I struggle to see how a direct democracy without issues could be something other than a republic.
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My entrepreneurial mind immediately thinks: Let's create a better solution to revolutionize this industry and make the old, expensive incumbents obsolete. We can drive to the affected car dealers and migrate them one by one. Of course, I'm not going to do it and it's probably extremely hard :)
It is extremely hard! Dealerships don't make most of their money (or any money, really) selling cars. They make their money from service, and selling info to 3rd parties (ever notice when you buy a new car, you will receive mail from SirusXM for a year after). In order for this to work, their systems are all tightly integrated. When you buy a new car, the dealer will know when you're due for service. When you have yo…
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Dang it's a shame there's no list of features easily found on the windows or something.
All those dealerships really should have checked on HackerNews before investing in all these pointless computers I guess.
One of the reports of this I heard was on Marketplace the other day... and the part that made me chuckle was on cursive. Pen and paper, but please no cursive: Widespread cyberattack sends car dealers back to 20th century - https://www.marketplace.org/2024/06/21/cdk-global-hack-softw... > Car dealers are a pretty big part of this economy, doing some $1.2 trillion in sales last year, according to the National Automobil…
Sorta-related: manual-transmission cars. About a year ago, my girlfriend found a VW Jetta that she liked on the BMW lot with a manual-transmission. She offered the dealership about 60% of what they were asking. The dealer strongly rejected the offer, even laughed at it. My GF and I walked away. The dealer called back a few days and accepted her original offer. They were never gonna sell that car with the manual-trans…
Related note: car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. I am personally not a fan of Tesla as a vehicle, but I admire the business model of buying directly from Tesla. Stealerships are a drain on the consumer. All that land they own can be used for productive economic activit…
> car stealerships are a relic of the past. There is no reason why a middleman should exist when buying a car. Consumers should have the option to purchase directly from the manufacturer. This is really such a classic clueless HN comment from someone who both doesn't understand business and hasn't taken the time to understand why things are done the way that they are. (My comment doesn't mean in any way that things c…