Louis Rossmann made a video on it, and something that came to mind while I was watching it was that while regulation can in fact be abused, I think some regulation has to be in place because a company that can charge whatever it wants for a car doing this just for the sake of control is awful. Do we really own the things we buy, or do the corporations?
I know in the EU, they have a lot more laws/regulations about warranties and other R2R shit, I just want to be able to fix the shit I own by myself without the company hindering me from doing so because they want to treat me like a leasee while charging me purchase prices.
Edit: Starting in South Korea, but very concerned that it could be brought here considering horse armor started the gaming industry’s bullshit.
Buy now for a chance to win the ultra rare 1 hour of heated seat card! Special deal today only! 50% off was 50k BMW marks now only 25k marks.
What you really get most of the time is a 60 seconds of heated seat card and random logo variations for the inside screen.
Consoomers: "Look I'm fine with pay2drive as long as it's cosmetics like that."
I'll be curious to see in a decade when the ones even more raised on this stuff come of age. I was helping my kid cousin hack a gacha game for free money and realized playing it that it's basically reminded me of slot machine, but it's used against kids. This particular kid is one of the better parented ones and has a lot of critical thinking skills and common sense for his age, but I know others that have lived doing almost nothing but consuming garbage media since they were an infant. It's going to be crazy to see how wholeheartedly they jump on board with this stuff.
I notice this with a lot of stuff, particularly the cashless trend, the removal of services and infrastructure (road access, public transit, payphones, post boxes, etc.), and even the removal of objectively useful business branches, like the only bank or post office in a whole town, or region, let’s say (a regular occurrence, where I live)…
These people a) live on their smartphones, b) are not poor (so they’ll never have their phone service cut off, and so will never need a payphone, or a fucking post box), c) rarely leave the house, d) do everything online, and e) think that EVERYONE is exactly like them, and that if they aren’t, they’re some sort of “anti-corporate Luddite standing in the way of muh progress”, which is literally what I was told on local subreddits when I pointed this out…
Live in a commuter town. It is very (generally upper) middle class, but I’m below the poverty line. As a result, almost none of those services I mentioned above exist here anymore, simply because “the upper middle class” here doesn’t care, and people living in the cities (which this isn’t) don’t have to deal with bald-faced corporate bastardry like that so much, so they don’t care, “lol”.
Especially galling when it is a government entity (Australia Post, the National Broadband Network, partly) doing this, while also signalling their “wokeness”, and giving the executives Cartier watches as “bonuses” (that’s a whole saga. Seriously, look it up). It’s fucking insane, and almost sickening, how “Gordon Gecko” they are…
Literally the entire “town centre” here is pedestrianised and “corporatized”, now. It’s fucked. They didn’t ask, they just did it. Even the parkland…
The whole thing is a fucking nightmare, yet the yuppie millennials around me have their wholefoods (literally), and their fucking “healthy takeaways”, so me raising these issues just makes me a “Luddite”. I kid you not. 😒
I used to live in such an area. At least somewhat but nowhere near the extreme. It was more of a new build area and the main reason I moved is everything got out of hand in a lot of those respects. I've been to dinner, hung out, whatever with people like that where they just look at their phone the whole damn time. It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine, like really, I took my time for this and you just sit on your phone. I've been very fortunate to build a small friend group and small family group of people that I get along with and while I wouldn't say we are like minded on everything political, we are like minded in how we do things and get along. Even more so since Covid, I really just would rather spend my friends time strengthening those relationships than bothering for a bigger group of people that would jut irritate me. So that's what I do to get by. I don't bother with people otherwise. If it's family I'm stuck with I'll tolerate them or just ignore them, because in the end I have my few close ones that I know are there.
I have called myself an old codger several times, so I guess the same as a luddite. Mainly because I don't like everything on my phone. I use my computer for most things I need tech for. I don't want to pay to park with my phone, use it for event tickets, look at a damn restaurant menu on it, etc. I've surprised people when I say I've never done a Zoom call and honestly have no idea how. Only video call I ever do is Facetime with a certain family member, because we are really close and don't live in the same town and he's young and accustomed to it. I use my phone for talk, text, and music otherwise and that's about it. Everything else can go back to the old ways.