How much do you use the train? I spent 8 years without a car, and let me tell you this, getting that 4 to 5 hours back that I was wasting on the bus, commuting, shopping, going to entertainment, Eric, that's something I don't ever want to do again. Bus and train combo with a bike still was hours to do a commute that takes maybe 30 minutes by car.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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That's the funny thing about it all: the ruling class couldn't give less of a shit about the wellbeing of the people. But they care about their companies' revenue, and that is threatened if people have no money to spend. That is why we need Universal Basic Income in the near future.
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My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife's car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it's necessary.
I'm round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it's actually a bit over 400k km) and it's not even the most kilometers I've had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn't have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
Ohhh there are so many options here!
The app is often more important than the adapter at this point. Some marques have bad 3rd party app support unfortunately (looking at you, Subaru). Others have pretty great support (BimmerLink is adapter-agnostic, though they recommend using a high quality one and they have an affiliate deal of some kind with one manufacturer they recommend)
Personally I own a Chinese fake VCDS cable for <20 euros that allows me to do literal magic on anything VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda... and could probably do a few things on modern Lamborghini and Bentley as well. Mysteriously, Porsche is the least supported out of all the VAG marques - they insist on having their own electronics. If I ever buy another VAG car, I'll probably buy a genuine adapter to support the company behind it. I also own a Chinese fake Delphi DS150E clone, but at this point I don't think it's as great as it was 5-6 years ago. It doesn't get cars newer than 2013. Plus it's still missing some crucial things on some cars between 2000 and 2013. And outright missing some models.
Then there's options like iCarsoft. More expensive than just an adapter and an app, but you get pretty great support for a lot of different marques. A lot more than some cheaper generic options.
And finally, marque-specific solutions. BimmerLink and VCDS I already mentioned, then there's GAP for Land Rover, etc. Worth investing in if you've got a car you're going to keep for a long time and want to be sure you can do stuff like air suspension ride height sensor calibration and all kinds of other procedures that generic tools might not have for your vehicle.
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I shopped around for like 3 months before I finally found a car in my budget, and it was 600 miles away
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So happy mine are paid off.
t.b.f the reporting is more about whether these companies have hidden loans (including possibly loans that other lenders don't know about), which could have happened within railway companies just as easily as in car companies!
What if Wall Street failed and collapsed? I feel like that would be good
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can we make city streets public transportation only and resort personal vehicles to the outer parts? Like we dont got trolleys going down our cities' broad streets/broadways these days, but lets get a shitton of busses goin up and down with no worry of joe in his civic.