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Comment Re:Meanwhile in the USA (Score 1) 79

They would rather not sell you a car. More profitable to sell you a loan to buy a car, or even better just lease it to you for a monthly fee, then take it back and sell it to someone else, maybe in a different market.

List prices are mostly to deter people buying those cars, but at least in the UK if you look around you can usually get them with a very hefty discount. Mine was about 30% off.

Comment Re:Need a prescription. (Score 1) 49

As the other poster says, the reason for the shortage is because successive British governments have cut funding in the NHS in real terms, and are now flailing around as those cuts have really started to bite.

And every time the doctors or nurses strike to make a point, they get gaslit because "think of the patients".

Healthcare systems run on two things - staff, and good will.

The government has reduced the staff well below minimum, and burned up all the good will, so now theres nothing left. Fewer doctors are coming into the NHS through British training schemes because those are capped and indeed some have been reduced recently, and more doctors are retiring early or leaving the country.

And thats not counting the doctors who were forced to retire early because of the Tory governments cap on lifetime pension contributions - when the government dictates how much you pay into your pension, and also dictate that above a certain threshold of lifetime contributions you become liable for a huge tax bill immediately, and you cant withdraw from the pension contributions without also forfeiting the pension itself, then your only option to avoid a huge tax bill is ... retirement....

Comment Re:Sneaky... (Score 1) 54

Normally I don't give a flying Fibonacci about reducing corporate profit, but... yeah. I'm totally on board with this policy change. Especially since the exploit-bots hurt franchise owners rather than Big Hotel.

I mean maybe, in theory, but how often do prices actually drop on hotels? Prices are usually based on occupancy, so unless somebody cancels a block of a hundred rooms or something, this seems unlikely to make a meaningful difference in hotel revenue.

Meanwhile, if this had happened five years ago, it would have meant not going on trips for me, because traveling with my dad in his last couple of years had a decent risk of having to cancel.

There are people for whom being able to cancel a trip without significant penalty is the only thing that makes travel possible. And if hotels are more concerned with maybe losing a few bucks in rare circumstances than they are with whether the elderly and disabled get to have a vacation at all, then F**K those hotels. They aren't worth doing business with.

Comment Re:Regulations? (Score 1) 54

For a pro-capitalist, anti-socialist country, its astounding how much US law makers get involved in the running of businesses, whether it be with regulations, hearings or "opinions". US law makers love to do it.

Of course, its all performative - calling CEOs into hearings to berate them rather than actually doing fact finding, basically using the hearings as a court where the people appearing have already been judged and sentenced. Got to be seen doing something, but lets certainly not fix the issue through good legislation, because berating people in public is more fun.

Comment Re:Suspicious (Score 2) 88

They wear out and need to be replaced. Demand was low, AI increased demand, but the manufacturers see it as a bubble and aren't going to massively ramp out output to meet it.

This reminds me of when Germany built new coal plants and there was much hand wringing. In fact they closed more than they opened, and the new ones were designed to fit better into a heavily renewable grid.

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