jjav

> Fed is trying to thread the needle between the two

Not really, inflating it away is the only possible choice.

> We can’t afford healthcare because they revoked the subsidies but at least we now also can’t afford gasoline too!

But we can easily affort 500+ million per day for faraway foreign wars! That, no problem.

These are all problems. On the other hand we know for sure from centuries (millenia?) of evidence that allowing the people who most crave power to be the ones who seek and obtain said power, is a recipe for disaster as well.

It is interesting to brainstorm what could be a better system.

I think clear qualifications should be required. So to use the HHS example, it would have criteria to be a doctor, certain years of practice, perhaps practice in several specialties for breadth, some research experience, some administrative experience. You'd want to make the criteria narrow enough that only mostly truly qualified people meet it, but also broad enough that at least tens of thousands of people do qualify for the role, so that someone can't just easily fine-tune their resume to assure themselves a spot. It needs to be impossible to game.

I don't have the answers, but clearly we can do better than the current system where only power-hungry psychopaths choose to travel the road to obtain the vast power they crave.

> Many (most?) politicians were traditionally (at least partly) motivated by public service

At the entry level of politics, I feel this is actually true. And having known friends and acquaintances who have gone into low/entry level political offices I know they have been clearly motivated by trying to make things better for the common citizen.

So where does it go wrong?

To move up the ladder you can only really do it (with very few exceptions) by having full support of one or the other party. And to gain that support you can only do it by fully aligning with the party sponsors and contributors and their selfish interests. If you're not seen as a party team player who votes in block with everyone else, you won't have the support you need to gain higher offices. So either you burn out and leave (as all my friends have) or you stay at low level political positions where you can do some good, but very little influence.

That's why all the top-level politicians are so clearly thoroughly extremely corrupt, because you couldn't possibly get to that level any other way.

Your primary duty as a citizen consumer is to maximize shareholder value for the dominant corporations.

The argument, which isn't entirely unreasonable, is that ICE cars are obviously paying a per-mile usage fee in the form of fuel taxes which supposedly (not always in practice) are supposed to be used to maintain roads. And it works sort-of, since very light cars (which do least damage to road surface) often have good fuel economy so they pay less tax per mile, vs. heavy trucks which do more wear on the road have usually worse mileage so end up paying more per mile in taxes. Not perfect of course, but approximately reasonable.

EVs break this system because they pay zero fuel taxes but are quite heavy (for their size) so they wear out the road like a heavier car but pay nothing.

> That is unacceptable especially from local grid providers and many in the energy sector

I truly can't tell if this is sarcasm..

Of course people should be encouraged, wherever feasible, to take advantage of natural energy like solar and wind. That is a feature not a problem.

Only for the corporate oligarchs is that "a problem", since they want everyone to be paying perpetual fees to them.

> What's stopping IDScan from "delegating" the storage to another company so they're no longer liable for stolen data?

You can't really delegate the liability to a vendor. Of course in current world it means nothing since there is effectively no liability anyway, but if we're dreaming of a world where there is liability, you can't delegate it. You can delegate the operation, but not the liability.

The company is responsible for vetting their vendors so they meet their requirements. Today that is done with a silly dance of exchanging SOC2 reports and such, which means nothing. But if there was actual personal liability for the board and executives, that would change in a millisecond.

> If you have a tech job in America, you have good healthcare, your schools are safe,

That is not true. Way too many murders in middle class schools.

Not that it should even be a justification. No school of any level should ever ever experience a murder.

Pay is worse, but you get to live in a place that is not under a mad dictatorship, have healthcare, education, vacations. Not a bad trade.

> And your North American friends do not? Please.

It's not even close. Both my current and previous company have substantial percentage of engineering in Mexico so I have good visibility into this. Even middle-tier software engineer salary band in Mexico allows for a very comfortable high class life. Whereas the same level engineer in Silicon Valley is crushed by rental costs without not too much left over, and if they also have kids expenses they are barely scraping by.

Who pays is not that simple.

The employee pays for their insurance, out of their total comp package. Typically that gets divided into a part the employer pays behind the scenes and a portion that gets declared on the employees W2 and then deducted right back out as medical insurance. Different companies use different proportions for these two parts, but in the end it's all the same, it is coming from the total comp package of the employee.

So the employee pays for it. But of course all that money (the whole total comp package, not just the insurance part) is really coming from the employer.

So I guess you could say the employer is paying for it since that's where the money originates.

But.. the employer isn't printing that money out of thin air, it is actually coming from their revenue, so it originates from the customers of that company.

So in a very real way, it is the customers of the company that truly pay for that health insurance, in the form of higher prices of all the products they buy. This is obviously true, in that if the company didn't have to pay for any health insurance for any employee, they could have the same profit with lower prices for the consumer.

So it all comes full circle. Employer-provided health insurance is just a tax on all consumers in the form of higher prices on all products & services.

Technically it has comprehensive as well although it's a moot point. My deductible is $1000 and they'll just say the car is worth less than that, so they'll never pay anything.

I guess I should reduce it to liability only but it'll probably save me like $2, so haven't bothered.

Did you know insurance works by pooling and sharing the risk amongst a group?

The larger the group to share the risk and cost, the more efficient it becomes.

If you try to buy health insurance for all your employees as a tiny employer, costs are higher than if some employer with hundreds of thousands of employees seeks to buy the same insurance.

Because that huge employer is sharing the risk of some employee having to get very expensive treatment across all those employees.

You know what is the largest group available? All the citicens of the country in a single insurance plan. That is the point of maximum efficiency (least cost). As a bonus, you can remove all the middlemen of insurance companies, further increasing efficiency.

If that is being sold as new, it is a leftover model that has been sitting in the dealer lot for a year or so, depreciated accordingly.

A quick search shows me a bunch of 2025 Nissan Versas for sale between 16K-17K, so someone buying this dealer leftover for 19K gets an instant depreciation of ~2.5K.

Unfortunately the US is moving hard in the opposite direction, making cycling choices less achievable.

https://ctmirror.org/2026/03/12/bike-walking-trails-lose-fed...

> when repairs get more costly than what it's worth

I've never understood why that would be a relevant criteria?

If the car is cheap enough, it's easy for any repair to cost more. So what?

The comparison to make is not whether the repair cost or car value is higher.

The interesting comparison is whether repairing this car I already own is cheaper or more expensive than selling it getting a different one. Nearly always (unless catastrophic failure like blown engine etc) it is cheaper to repair the one I already own.

Not even close. For example insurance on my early 90s Mazda is $192. Insurance on my partner's three year old VW is almost $900. I could have a fleet of four older Mazdas and still be cheaper to insure.

> to fix your vehicle when something needs replacement every month or two

You'd have to be spectacularly unlucky for that, many sigmas away from the bell curve of average car experience.

Having owned lots of older cars, typically repairs are once every few years and are pretty cheap.

If you do get unlucky and blow an engine or similarly high cost repair, sell it for parts and buy another cheap car.

Two of the three warranty covered it. I don't remember why the ECU repair was not fully covered by warranty (that was over 25 years ago) but I do remember the sting of paying for it since we were younger and poorer at the time.

I've never had a dealer provide any loaner car. The best I've seen is they give a coupon for $xx off a rental from the car rental place next door.

This link does now show a single new 2026 model car under 20K, what is the point?

Also be aware that even if you buy comprehensive insurance for an old car (don't do it), they won't actually cover anything useful.

If there is an accident, the insurance company will say: Your car is only worth $700 per blue book value and your deductible is $500 so here's $200 and your title is now totaled.

Buy liability only and self-insure for any damage (or just buy a new beater as needed).

You can't legally forego insurance (at least in the USA). But comprehensive insurance is silly to pay for an old car so you buy only liability so it's a lot cheaper.

> If it fits, it's not the wrong year. I once put an exhaust manifold from a 95 Civic into a 98 Civic

No such thing as wrong year nor wrong model, or even wrong brand as long as it works!

Honda in particular lots of parts interchange (at least used to) between Civics and Accords and other models.

I had a fuel pump die on an older BMW on 101 (Silicon Valley near googleplex). Late on a Saturday, could not get the BMW part. Found an Audi fuel pump which was similar enough, installed it on the side of the highway and worked fine. Ran for many years, still going when I sold that car.

Cops showed up to harass us about working on the car on the side of the highway.. Fortunately my friend is a big talker and kept them entertained while I finished the installation and started the car.

> There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.

True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind. And more than peace of mind, can be critical to remaining employed, etc.

A new car does not guarantee you that. I've had partners who are way more into new cars than me and those new cars have failed to be usable in various ways.

A brand new EV was in the shop for 3 weeks. Oops, can't go to work.

A near-new car had an ECU lock up so no way to start it. Call a tow truck to the dealer ($$$) and took a week ($$$$).

A near new EV had an EV-specific problem: it refused to charge. Car ran fine, but couldn't charge so only so many miles left. Drive to dealer, took a few days. At least warranty covered it.

> In many cases it might be better for someone to go deeper into debt on the car if it means they will be able to focus and perform better at work.

Going into debt for a car (a fast depreciating asset) is always a terrible idea. If you're super rich and can afford it, fine, have fun. But for anyone counting money, it's the second worst financial decision you can ever make (second only to carrying credit card debt).

Back to having reliable transportation, which is super important for most people.

Solution? Buy two used cars for way less than half of a new car which can still fail.

I only buy cheap used cars, but always have more than one available. Occasionally one needs maintenance and is out of commission for a few days. That's fine, I have another one (actually a few more, but even one more would do). All my cars put together cost no more than an average new car today. And insurance is way cheaper since they're all old beaters.

It's like servers. You can spend gazillion on the highest end server but it can still fail resulting in downtime. Or you buy a few cheap servers for redundancy and accept that failure is ok and redundancy is in place.

> we cannot rule out that Google deliberately introduced or wanted to keep the leak in place

I'd say a lot stronger than "cannot rule out". Regardless of how it was introduced, if it is now known and the issue was closed without action, they are actively choosing to keep it.

> I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K

Since you are sure, can you name a few?

You can't because none exist. There are no new cars in the USA for less than 20K.

The alternatives offered here are nonsensical. Where in the US does one buy this youtube solar car or KEI cars? Nowhere, that is where. They are not sold in the USA.

Golf carts are legal on hardly any roads so that is another non-starter unless you live in a neigborhood where they are allowed and never plan to go anywhere outside of it.

Cycling is great, that is the only practical suggestion on the list. But of course a bike is not a car so if someone actually needs a car, a bike is not a car.

For anyone poor who needs cheap transportation, old beater cars are the best.

Don't have to be poor either, for anyone who doesn't want to throw good money away at depreciation, old cars are the best deal. As an engineer in Silicon Valley I could technically afford many kinds of expensive cars but I've yet to ever spend more than 20K on any car or truck. Buy used, keep forever, that's the best.

> I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning.

Curious why not simply replace the exhaust flange? Cheap and easy repair.

Because LG is a large corporation and if there is something we have learned (or had proven) in 2026 is that laws don't apply if you oligarch hard enough.

> "TiVo still exists?"

Certainly that's my reaction that made me click on this. Hard to believe.

Never used TiVo but I ran a MythTV box for a long time, it was really awesome. But it's been ~15+ years or so haven't used it. Can't believe TiVo still exists.