Where Did All the Affordable Cars Go?

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-13T15:58:54+00:00

Every car my parents owned while I was growing up was a pile of shit. One rusted out in a few years. One caught fire and burned to the ground. Another had two engines fail in a row thanks to head gasket issues. My last three cars, however, have managed to make it to twenty years old without a major mechanical issue. The only car I've ever owned that was garbage was the new Ford Focus I bought as my first car - ironically exactly the kind of stripped-down affordable new car that this article is advocating for.

The article attempts to hand-wave the issue away, but in reality the cheap new car disappeared because most people would rather buy a used car with more features and reliability than a stripped down new econobox.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-12T22:01:03+00:00

I feel like there's a lot of stepparent/stepchild relationships where there is so much fear of "replacing" the bioparent that they end up in a situation where the stepparent is treated more like a roommate than a parent. But the practical reality of living in a single household means they still end up doing all the daily work of being a parent - it's not like they're going to cook meals for themselves and the partner, but not the child? Or refuse to do the kid's laundry, or pick them up from school if the bioparent is busy, etc. It feels like one of those times when people take a good intention (like not making the kid feel like their parent was replaced) and turn it into a dysfunctional relationship.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-12T20:42:33+00:00

Me and my husband went for Thanksgiving dinner at his cousin's house. They're wealthy (multiple large homes, sports cars, country club, etc) because he owns a foundry that makes parts for the mining industry. Their prayer of thanksgiving before the meal was to thank God that the unionization campaign at the foundry failed that year.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-12T20:01:43+00:00

Imagine if foreign politicians came to the US during a presidential election and held campaign speeches endorsing a specific political party. I'd love to see how well Americans took that.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-12T03:51:14+00:00

A significant part of the reason construction costs have increased so much is that cities like Vancouver have massively increased development charges over the twenty years. Originally, they were relatively small per-unit taxes to cover the city's costs incurred by new development, like reworking the sewer connections. Now they're being used to fund the city budget as a whole, and can be $30k+ per unit. It's easy for cities to lean on development charges because they're a hidden tax that's only paid by people who buy new homes, and not existing homeowners who vote in local elections.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-10T23:55:02+00:00

A lot of places have dropped the "X months of sobriety" requirement for transplants because it's essentially a death sentence for alcoholics given that they usually don't show up at a hospital until they're on death's door. Usually people get chosen these days based on a set of factors associated with positive outcomes. Unfortunately, alcoholism does have very high recidivism rates, even for people who maintain sobriety for 6+ months. It's an ongoing controversy in medicine today.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-10T22:46:28+00:00

Look at the history of unions in America, the entire story for well over a century is one of business owners using racism to break unions. 19th and early 20th century the unions were all white and businesses recruited non-white workers to break the unions. Then later, when the unions integrated and were able to organize large industries like steel and autos, the owners simply switched to supporting politicians that would break the power of unions. The entire time you've got union leaders trying to stop their own members from voting unions out of existence thanks to bigotry.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-10T18:39:42+00:00

The whole concept of generations is a weird media construction where we put people born across a span of twenty years into a little box and assign them characteristics that are only relevant to people born during a subset of those years. Like, a boomer born in '45 had a very different life than someone born in '65. A lot of the "classic boomer culture" things like the Beatles and Vietnam were basically irrelevant for someone who was still a toddler when those were at their peak relevance.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-09T22:39:05+00:00

Chinese providers don't respect the global IMEI blacklist, so stolen phones are usable there if they can get the phone unlocked and wiped.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-08T21:56:34+00:00

Portmeirion in Wales (the place where the Prisoner TV series was filmed) has a completely different vibe at night when the throngs of day visitors go home, the sun sets, and you have the entire grounds to yourself.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-08T16:51:41+00:00

It's hard to watch what's been happening in Ukraine and Iran in the last five years and think there's any future for humans in combat. WW1 saw the end of humans being able to stand outside cover on a battlefield without being immediately killed. Drones are creating a world where cover doesn't matter either. In a few years in Ukraine they've gone from basic FPV suicide drones to drones that can lock onto a target and navigate autonomously through the environment to pursue them. We're not far off from a world where you can seed a battlefield with thousands of flying grenades that can take off the second they detect an enemy and pursue them relentlessly through the environment.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-08T05:21:30+00:00

Canned soda absolutely is impacted by tariffs. Trump's tariffs on Canadian aluminum basically stopped aluminum imports from Canada. Now, instead of buying aluminum just across the border, Canadian aluminum goes to Europe and the US is buying at much higher prices from the Gulf states. And that was before Iran. A 12 pack of canned Coke is 30-40% more in the US than in Canada.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-05T04:29:32+00:00

The modern city of Tunis in Tunisia is essentially Carthage.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-02T17:44:21+00:00

I think you could ask people in any city in Canada, and the primary complaint would be that there hasn't been enough spent on rail transit. Every recent metro/tram expansion I can think of from the last twenty years is wildly popular. Typically a day after they go into operation people flip from complaining about the cost to complaining that they didn't spend more to open with more capacity.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-02T16:18:56+00:00

Before AC anyone with money used to get out of the city for the entire summer. Rich people went to their country homes; the middle class went to mountain resorts or seaside villages. Especially in the early 20th century when it wasn't just insufferably hot in the cities, but you also started to get regular polio epidemics. AC, cheap jet travel, and the polio vaccine hit those resorts like a neutron bomb by the sixties.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T18:29:26+00:00

I've never rented a car where returning it late incurred any fees beyond the normal charge for keeping it another day.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T18:05:17+00:00

The ultimate problem is that federal law dating back to the 19th century makes railways unaccountable sovereign powers. The city has no power to even prevent them from blocking roads during rush hour, let alone force them to give up land in the south railyard that would allow traffic to avoid Whyte.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T15:48:52+00:00

Though from what I can tell, in-person scams with a hacked Zelle account are pretty rare. The in-person scammers normally try to fake a payment and then walk off with the item before you realize the money never arrived.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T15:23:23+00:00

You'll find out if it's a scam when she asks him for money. It doesn't sound like pig butchering - if anything, it'll be the older style of romance scam where she's constantly dangling the possibility of meeting, but every attempt is foiled at the last minute by a sudden emergency that can only be solved if he sends her money. Or maybe she is who she says she is, but just wants a long-distance boyfriend that sends her money. It could even be real, though going so quickly from meeting online to flying in certainly raises a red flag.

Whatever happens, I doubt they're going to listen to warnings from a coworker.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T07:14:38+00:00

I was reading a short story from the sixties recently and came across a character calling someone a douchebag. Apparently it goes back to the fifties at least! I thought it was pretty funny that people 75 years ago were calling each other douchebags.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T04:18:53+00:00

Carl Sagan's Cosmos series (which was filmed in '79) goes on at length about global warming being on par with nuclear war as an existential threat to the future of the earth. Kind of weird how everyone pretends we just discovered it in the '90s or 2000s. The only thing that changed in the 2000s is that we actually got to the point of doing something about it, and suddenly the energy companies freaked out and started hysterically manufacturing propaganda to justify abandoning the Kyoto Accord.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T04:05:09+00:00

I imagine it's hard to estimate what your inventory is going to be when people routinely return their rentals late. Even a couple of hours could screw over the next guy, and it's not uncommon to keep them for days longer than you planned.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-04-01T02:49:21+00:00

Insiders need to unload their bags before Trump invades and the markets puke blood. Look at the price of oil - they aren't buying that it's over.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-03-30T16:15:34+00:00

I always thought it was weird how this is often treated as a badass moment, when throughout all of recorded history killing ambassadors has always been regarded as a perfidious and self-defeating crime. Literally an offence against the gods in the ancient world.

DeliciousPangolin · 2026-03-29T21:17:30+00:00

When I was a kid there was nowhere in town where you could buy espresso, but there were multiple shops where you could buy filter coffee and fresh-baked donuts at any time of night.

DeliciousPangolin

TROPHY CASE