New car sales is merely the convenient excuse that makes shipping and selling new inventory easier for automakers. But the reason the dealership exists, is service. Also known as the main reason we call them stealerships. Before COVID invented the MSRP+FU pricing model, dealerships made 90%+ of their profit from service. Not sales. Still holds true today.

Before society ignorantly cheers for the death knell of stealerships, try and remember what the cost is going to be when you’re forced to return a broken down car to the car factory to repair instead of one of the local service departments that used to.

No. You won’t be going to your local independent repair shop either. Even if they had the electronic access to ALL ODB2 ports and control and access to ALL parts needed (which they don’t), they will be SWAMPED with new demand after dealerships close.

When it takes people 9 months to fix a broken car they still make payments and pay insurance on, they won’t own one. Neither will the Uber driver who can’t afford the downtime either.

If people don’t like that “crony” capitalism of today, they might grow to hate themselves for cheering on an alternative not well thought out. Time is far more valuable when your transportation is disabled.

The same people who steal music, software, and videos now want others to pay for their work.

It's not as simple as just that. It's a monopoly that is fearful that it might lose the monopoly if it isn't seen to be doing a good job. If you just have a monopoly, as Microsoft did in operating systems, the tendency is to exploit your customers for gain. If you have a monopoly but you think someone with the power to do so is out looking for an excuse to take it away from you then you want to avoid giving them an excuse.

I was purposefully giving it the best possible reading to show that even under those generous assumptions that it falls orders of magnitude short from the sorts of revenue it needs to be generating to keep working.

The USD is still the world's reserve currency. Almost all international trade is demarcated in USD. This means a weak USD is a bit bad for the US on balance; but it's devastating for the rest of the world. Tbills are a fundamental part of most central banks' portfolios. A crash in Tbill returns is, again, bad for the US but devastating for the world. The US is also a major oil producer. When oil is above ~$120/barrel, shale oil and gas is suddenly economically viable again. Considering oil is traded in USD and Trump's war has already taken out about a third of the oil production in the region, and the imperialist bullshit Trump has pulled with Venezuela, the US is set to be the world's largest oil exporter. All this is to say that, "When the US sneezes, the world catches cold," is still true. Except the US is going to go into a recession, possibly a depression. The rest of the world was just starting to fully recover from 2008 in 2020 when covid hit. I'm honestly not sure if it can take it if the US goes into recession again.

Even being as large of an economy as it is, the US still punches well outside its weight economically.

Delivery vehicles are small.

They were in the process of being replaced with larger vehicles, most of which would be electric. The postal carriers who got to the drive the new ones raved about how comfortable they were, how large they were, and importantly, had air conditioning. I said were because his Orangeness wanted all the vehicles removed even if meant paying a $1.5 billion penalty to clear everything out.

Fortunately, Republicans tripped themselves up because the bill they put this provision into needed a 60 vote majority, not a simple majority. Needless to say, no more of these vehicles will be purchased.

Bold gouge while assuming GTA6 is going to actually release this fall.

I would normally be measuring the release of GTA6 in Grand Theft units, but since that's too hypo-ironic I'm forced to measure it in Nukem units instead. I'd estimate we still have another 2.7 Nukem Forevers to go until someone can actually commit grand theft at the GameStop register at midnight circa Christmas Eve 2028 when the game finally drops for a mere $1,199**.

** NOTE: It is a felony in all 50 States to sell or purchase GTA6 without a PS6 console.

Good. THEY will be held accountable for every vote they don't get as a result.

Then THEY won't fucking matter, because THEY will instantly become one of US.

Disagree, computers need a cupholder *and* a cigarette lighter, and Thermaltake was there for us in the glorious bygone days of computers with actual drive bays and cool things to put in them.

* Glances over at The Rest of the razor-thin unitard-chassis computing market now dripping with soldered-on components *

Tell me again how the rest of the industry didn’t follow THAT fucking Glock design like a wanna-be lost puppy.

Greed, isn’t merely contagious anymore. It has infected the human race to the point where our species will most likely die right here on this rock, forever addicted to it.

(CEO) ”So, what would you say is the most critical component in IT to secur..”

(IT) ”Porn spam!”

(CEO) ”Wait, wut?”

For companies needing uptime measured somewhere above 99%, that kind of downtime will force them to question why GitHub is anywhere near a DR plan.

Uh, that’s a rather odd response. Cause? Check. Effect? Check. Solution? Stop the cause or accept the effect; an 80% uptime rate within 6 months. IF the other half of the users left still give a shit about a solution by then.

* Gives GitHub the Private Equity side-eye *

Heeeey. Wait a minute. Did someone..

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

It will cure cancer. In combination with robotics it will make personalized cancer treatments based each person's tumor genome. Basically once you have a few biopsies of a person's cancer, you can determine what proteins, DNA, and RNA are aberrant and design a treatment against that.

What did he expect? That there wouldn't be ads? That's quite naive. If there is space, and money to be made, and they can do it, you can expect it to be done.

I will never get an appliance with internet connectivity. It's stupidly unnecessary and just a vulnerability. I don't want to be like that Vegas casino that got hacked through their thermometer.