So what happens when dementia finally takes its toll, and Vova stops listening to Winnie?

smarter choice to attack elon, trump wont be with us that much longer in the grand scheme of things. good chance he passes in office. one way or another

Lobbyists throwing money at politicians with no limits - yeah go back to what I said earlier about America being a lost cause.

I bought an older VR set from my boss at the time, played Alyx and Blade&Sorcery for a week or two. dont get me wrong, VR is awesome. but its a toy. an expensive, gimmicky toy . the fun passes after a while and soon enough you end up putting it on the shelf.

My money is on VR related toys again. I have a slightly better feeling about HL3 than I have had in years but I’m old enough to know better

I also, don’t care anymore. As far as I’m concerned the industry is getting ready to crash. I’m divesting a lot from. It.

Forget about what men are reading. Kids as younf as 12 are getting politically charged. And being praised for it

America is a lost cause. But maybe the rest of the world should be reminded that businessmen and oligarchs from other countries screaming on the internet have no affect on law.

Bloodthirsty nuts want a license to be able to shoot and kill things legally, to the surprise of no one

Money stopped caring about Nature a long time ago.

its a highway robbery situation too. because dental issues can be life ruining, in the sense that you are basically in a permanaent irratiable bad mood because of irritation and pain. people are desperate for care and unable to get it.

The UN is a corrupt authority. Especially when it comes to the UNSC. 2 of its 5 permanent members legal entities ceased to exist and fundamentally different successor states assumed their place.

The case is far more aggregious with the USSR and Russia. Ukraine tried to sue in 2022 arguing russia wasn’t legally entitled to just assume the USSRs position as far as the security council was concerned. “Technically Kazakhstan was the last state of the Soviet union. Etc”. But ultimately. As expected. “Realists” didn’t want to hear the argument. And it went nowhere

Trump represents overt corporate oligarchy taking over America. Those people don’t care as long as they live comfortably. The US is building chip factories in the southwest to replace TSMC for domestic use. Once thats completed. Corpos don’t care about Russians and Chinese carving out spheres of influence across the world and killing millions. They only care about their own hides and the last reason to care about overseas affairs would have become redundant.

And this is the same scenario where millions of Americans are thrown into abject poverty by the deliberate crashing of the economy as technofascist corpos like Elon musk are allowed to shape the economy to their designs.

Once again. Those corporate only care about their own kind. Everyone else is expendable assets. Whether it be lower and middle class american citizens. Or entire countries. Panama. Canada. Mexico. Ukraine. Taiwan. You can’t appeal to the morals and nature of corporate oligarchs because they’d rather kill you for wasting their time.

China hasn’t fought an interstate war in decades. The last well known example was korea. All the other fights they had were with the soviets from 1950 to present. And they lost every one of those border wars

China is very very inexperienced when push comes to shove.

The free world is being torn to peices by the Russian Mafia and its American Oligarch allies.

before I joined the company I work for, the sales manager pushed those kind of subprime loans that you’re suggesting with the old woman story. the business suffered a reputaiton hit locally, and sometime before I joined, the nuclear option was excised, basically the entire department was fired. New people brought in or promoted, and now its actually quite nice.

If I didnt say so before, I dont sell cars and have no intention of doing so, most of my job revolves around updating and being a contact point for customers who’ve already made orders for stuff not already on hand. doing motor vehicle registry paperwork, and managing the website. Its a fucking job. Thats it

If someone wants to tell another person they shouldn’t have the job that they do, then unless they’re either going to pay the living expenses or arrange for them to move somewhere else without taking a huge loss on the home they currentley own, Their complaints are just noise.

There’s things I’d rather do, but I never got the opportunities to realize them without taking massive risk to myself or family. And the job I have, fell into my lap during a time when it was and still is hard to find decent paying work around here close to my home. So at the end of the day, its the lower and middle income people telling other lower and middle income people their jobs shouldnt exist, who can get fucked.

thats a shop level determination.

depending on how the shop is run, and how strict of regulations set by the manufacturer there is, your mileage may vary.

in plain english. yeah if you go to a ***** dealer they might do everything by the book, refuse to work on other brands, and basically sabotage your car to rack up a more expensive bill because of corporate level corruption.

on the other hand, the place I work at , we’re toyota, but we take Fords all the time because our head tech worked at ford for 10 years. and has no problem working on somebody’s hoopty as long as he’s getting his flat rate.

Im not a salesperson, but I do work at one.

This has been a very “First they came for the Insurance Then they came for journalists then they came for salespeople” kind of feel

Technology doesn’t make more better jobs for people. It just eliminates jobs, and people move on to usually worse jobs. or none at all

The moment someone ponies up and decides to pay my bills, I’ll quit my job and join the rah rah crowd. but until then, I speak for both the innocent office workers, the technicians, service advisors, and the sleazy salespeople, they all gotta fucken eat.

the american system with car dealers, and how they fuck people, is intrinsically connected to how the financing for them works.

I cant tell you what the numbers are because Im a non-american car dealer person, but the system in the US is built around the fact that the dealers can ruthlessly mark up the price. depending on the manufacture company too.

(for context Im a Canadian Toyota dealer that is strictly MSRP and no haggle , although I admittedly work for a very good dealership. 95% of the time the only complaint or drama we ever get is people just complaining that its taking too long for their order to arrive or get fulfilled

I dont think I’d stay in the industry if I had to work at another one though. The bar is very very low for the field. constantly being pulled down by people exactly like you describe, in my town there is I think 8 car dealerships (new ones at least), and 4 of them are owned by one man. and he’s a total sleazebag. he tried to poach me once, fuck that

Side eying the casual treatment of car dealership workers like they’re insurance people. Everyone’s gotta find work somewhere.

As someone involved in the industy I have to wonder if this is more indicative of Volkswagens greater issues than it is a focus on dealerships in general. I do administration for a Toyota dealer and Just a few weeks ago our owner was talking about how both Nissan and Volkswagen are in crisis mode. Nissan then like 2 weeks later, announced a merger with Honda.

Im not up to date on VW’s issues because they’re more of a european brand, but thats probably half the problem, they used to be fairly prominent in north america. but they just stopped making cars that people wanted to buy. I guess