Lmfao who wants to buy a Chrysler Stellantis product? They’re just… bad. They’re not even cheaper. They’re just worse, and break more.

If you go to a us dealership, there’s pretty much always some sort of financing deal or somesuch. But there’s also very often a “dealer markup”. Never, ever pay that.

That said, for some cars, they refuse to budge on that. For instance, when the new Nissan Z came out a few years ago, the dealers tacked on like 10-15k pretty much across the board, and then Nissan corporate was surprised when it didn’t sell too well… because the dealerships got too fucking greedy.

If I needed to buy a new car, I’d vastly prefer to just spec it out online, click “order”, and then have a text come in when it arrives at my local Nissan or BMW or Hyundai maintenance facility (as appropriate for the car). I do not want to talk to a human and have to literally socially engineer them into giving me a fair fucking price. Jesus christ.

I’m guessing she’s a fan of Emperor Hirohito, too

It really is

I want to see how they react when I put on my robe and wizard hat

I mean I don’t either, but us unitedstatesians are now subjected to the tender mercies of Palantir, which is kind of fucking awful… so, potato, potato.

Tbh being able to purchase cars direct from the manufacturer would be dope. New car dealers are literally nothing but middlemen.

God I fucking hate stealerships. If car dealer cartels in the US as a concept die as a result of this era of idiocy we’re in, that’s a pretty great silver lining.

Their demographics are crashing, young people are not having kids, or waiting until far later in life, and her solution, as far as I’ve heard, is “bitch you gotta max that grindset, 100h weeks are for closers”. Which is just leaning further into the already insane work culture of Japan.

From what I understand she’s also something of a fan of orangeboi

Did anyone scrape and archive the contents?

Clueless lying politician? Good heavens! Surely you’re not serious!

/s

One one hand: wow wtf

On the other hand: I’m mildly surprised that he’s now both understanding and admitting that PR is part of the US.

No, I get it. This is how it needs to be played. I consider myself an outlier in that I know and care about all the insane geopolitical shit we’re doing now (in addition to the domestic situation), but there are a fuckload of complacent and/or bigoted assholes here. And the only way to shake them out of their complacency is pain and discomfort, economic or otherwise. So, genuinely, have at it. I know this is what the situation requires, and I for one really do not hold it against you. Our government is forcing your hand.

I don’t go on reddit anymore lol

Commonwealth of Independent States. It’s basically Wish.com EU, but Russia-centric and with them calling all the shots.

God I fuckin hate orangeboi.

For what it is worth, as an American, I consider this development to be a fucking embarrassment.

Yeah - I tend to downvote stuff that’s aggressively dogmatic, especially if the user is being a combative asshole about it, but simply offering an alternative hypothesis is, in my book, not grounds for getting ratioed.

It’s frustrating to see @lauseta@piefed.social getting that treatment. It discourages open discussion and makes this place more of an echo chamber, which is absolutely a bad thing.

FWIW, I don’t like that you’re getting downvoted swamped either; you’re simply expressing a hypothesis for discussion, which is why many of us post here.

I would like to point out that in the excerpt you quoted from me, “at this point” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I expect we will learn more things about more players in this whole clusterfuck saga in the coming months and years. And it is very important to point out that Russia did run a ton of influence and cyberattack operations in support of the orange campaign all the back from 2015-16, and hasn’t really stopped. And that the lineage of the FSB and the parallel tactics to the KGB that I’m sure they quietly employ should not be trivially dismissed, even if there’s no overt evidence of it at the moment.

That’s the thing with “great power” geopolitics, both now and in the Cold War - there’s an absolute fuck load going on behind the scenes that the vast majority of us are generally not privy to until (at least) well after the fact