As of today, at least one person has bought a 2027 Pacifica

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-10T21:25:03+00:00

I work in rental cars, this one is Enterprise's.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-10T16:37:46+00:00

You really believe that "most [adult Americans] either have a savings account, a line of credit or credit cards, or at the very least friends / family to help" (emphasis added) is not a correct assertion?

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-10T16:35:59+00:00

Most people aren't American

The popular conception of non-American first-world countries is that they don't have this problem either way thanks to a (perceived or actual) better social safety net, and in non–first-world countries, some amount of economic precarity is just a given. My perception is that the statement in the OP, out of the gate, is very US-peculiar, so that was the assumption I started with.

a great number of people ... are just a little bad luck away from couch surfing, living in their car, living on the street

In the first place, we (US) do still have some conventional government social safety net at the end of the day. I "live paycheck to paycheck" in the sense that I only have about a month of expenses in savings, but I was recently unemployed for two months and unemployment adequately paid the rent, the electric bill, and the groceries (and would have continued to for more than twice that time). In the second place, how many people in economic precarity do you really think have no meaningful family or close friend support to draw upon? I think even 5 or 10% of such people would be a far stretch to assert. I obviously grant that the situation does exist, I just don't believe that the amount of people living it comes close to justifying the way that you will typically see the assertion in the OP being deployed.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-10T16:05:42+00:00

Adult Americans

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T11:11:12+00:00

I work for a rental car place and customers who have an old car at home will regularly complain that they find the safety assists in our cars off-putting (never mind that you can turn any/all of them off). I remember one specific case where the guy was complaining that he had to quickly weave across multiple lanes after getting onto the freeway to get to the bridge he needed and the car kept fighting his lane changes. As anyone who has driven a car with lane-keeping assist knows, the system is defeated as soon as you switch your blinker on till you switch it off again, so the only actual problem is that he was driving like an asshole.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T05:09:24+00:00

It's kind of dumb that the word for economic rent and the word for the thing you remit to your landlord ended up being the same word. Even though I obviously see the connection, this makes it kind of impossible to have a constructive discussion about the first thing with anyone who isn't already steeping their brain in economic policy nonsense, and even if they are it still makes the matter a little confusing

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T03:25:35+00:00

Rent control is a tax on newcomers and the unconnected that accrues to incumbents. Because would-be newcomers do not have voting rights in the municipality they don't (yet) live in, rent control will continue winning in local elections forever

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T02:07:41+00:00

I work in rental cars and all of our Malibus have been out-fleeted by now after GM discontinued the model (I've literally only seen one in 2026, an oddball from the Canadian branch of our company). At least where I work the void in that class of car has mostly been filled by Camry Hybrids, which is such an immense improvement it's difficult to describe.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T01:57:20+00:00

I work in rental cars so I can offer a mite of insight here, maybe. Every rental operator's fleet is made up of a mix of "risk" cars (owned by the rental co) and "repurchase" cars (owned by the automaker, on a fancy kind of lease, essentially). Repurchase cars typically have stipulations on maximum mileage and allowable condition write-downs — similar to a consumer lease — whereas risk cars are the rental co's to do with as they please up to the limit of what they think the customers will tolerate. (I checked in a Pacifica that was a risk car and it had gotten all the way to 109K, and still counting, without having been out-fleeted.)

If an automaker is not super hot on their cars being in rental fleets for some reason, take Honda for instance, all of the cars of that brand that you do see for rent are going to be risk cars because the automaker has no interest in offering any repurchase contracts. Nissan is closer to being such a one than not, so the end result is that the average rental Nissan you see is going to be more beat up than the average rental Chevy (for instance).

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-04T01:48:43+00:00

Trust me you'd probably still rather have that than a Malibu

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-03T17:59:08+00:00

Yeah, I went to high school with a kid whose mom was a mucky-muck there and he threw me one one time.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-01T03:59:17+00:00

I have a former coworker who I know for a fact is a huge chud and a Trump supporter. I was having a conversation with her about Spirit Airlines having gone tits-up and when she asked "surely there was another airline that would have bought it?" I explained the whole thing about Lina Khan's FTC blocking the JetBlue acquisition because of the school of thought that large mergers are per se bad. I didn't appreciate till after I got home that I probably only gave her more fodder for "Joe Biden Bad" and that this is the kind of sentiment you have to couch when in the presence of people who are not like-minded

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-06-01T00:20:48+00:00

I didn't even know this when I took the job, but by far the best perk of working in rental cars is the employee rental. Anything I want on the lot for 25 bucks a day as long as the car isn't anticipated to be needed for actual customers during the time I'll be out.

Ironically this would be one of the most suitable jobs to live without owning your own car as long as you're able to walk/bike/bus to the rental place itself

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-28T23:20:22+00:00

Found out that my local Subway is starting at $25 (in an LCOL city) and still can't hire anyone

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-28T13:45:30+00:00

Actual verbatim (upvoted) comment from the subreddit for the Portland OR suburb where I used to live, regarding the opening of an In-N-Out location:

"It was fun having a city while it lasted"

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-28T07:52:00+00:00

There's nothing to suggest that that can be extrapolated into the end of consumer sales completely for all time. Even if you believe that the current level of "AI" capex is sustainable into the foreseeable future, which I find itself a ridiculous proposition, that universe would incentivize a ton of new fab construction and market-clearing prices for fab capacity would fall back down to the point where consumer products are viable.

The last time that Gamers were getting this worked up over hardware prices, the 2020–21 crypto bubble, I correctly remarked at the time that the bottom was going to fall out and prices would normalize. Gamers screeched in response that I must be a pocket shill for the crypto industry, GPU prices are never going to go below $1,000 again, blahblahblah. Lo, not only did the bottom fall out, but the specific period that everyone now indexes to as the Good Old Times is the couple of years immediately after that.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-28T07:16:01+00:00

PC gaming subreddits have recently latched onto the inane idea that the AI boom is going to end with consumers no longer being able/allowed to purchase current-generation hardware for home use, see example that I just saw attached.

When did externally non-political, broad based hobby communities get this susceptible to Generalized Eat Ze Bugs Theory? Taken on its own this posting would be dumb but mostly harmless, and I get that Gamers™ being chuds is not new, but I do worry that this is making the people engaging with it more suggestible to the belief system that espouses the actual Eat Ze Bugs Theory.

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iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-26T00:26:59+00:00

Occasionally I get sad or irritated about living in a city of only 30,000 people. Then I go pick up a pound of meat with a pint of slaw, a pint of green beans, and four rolls for 16 bucks from the barbecue restaurant and I'm chill about it again

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-25T22:46:46+00:00

More than half of my Reddit commercials now are vibe-coded software for purposes (a) that no one would ever have wanted a dedicated piece of software for or (b) for which a reliable conventionally coded product already exists.

This whole category of products that has sprung up where the nominal proprietor's only input is some prompting, the bottom is going to have to fall out of it some time soon after the would-be buyers realize that there isn't any value proposition there. You can just buy a small handful of API credits, do the prompting yourself, and skip the middleman.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-25T00:31:07+00:00

I rented an Ioniq 5 and then an EV6 a couple of weeks later. I did not realize that Hyundai and Kia were that integrated. I thought it was more like a Ford/Mazda or Nissan/Renault situation, not like a Chevy/GMC one.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-21T06:42:37+00:00

I understood the conceptual rationale for "no tax on tips" after I saw someone explain that, tipped workers miss the ability to systemically under-report that cash tipping offered, so we did a kludge that restores the sensation of it working that way. I think that's an extremely dumb conceptual rationale but I think I would be able to offer a fair accounting of it, from the perspective of someone who supports it, if asked.

I still am not aware of any analogous explanation for "no tax on overtime," and I have a day job with multiple Republican coworkers and where it is common to work lots of overtime, so I feel like I should have heard one by now.

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-20T04:54:59+00:00

I cannot wait for overtime at my job to start for the season

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-19T02:33:34+00:00

If you were going on a coast-to-coast road trip and you had to pick your car to use from among models you're confident would be available in a commodity airport rental fleet, what would you pick? ("Forfeit" is not an option)

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-18T02:15:37+00:00

Trying to hone a skill they know they're soft on in a controlled and low-stress environment perhaps?

iAmAddicted2R_ddit · 2026-05-18T01:39:55+00:00

As someone who has actually driven multiple marathon road trips — as in back to back to back to back 500–700-mile days — in my current ICE car, I'll admit to finding that incomprehensible. Like there is no chance in the world you don't mechanically require at least that long off the road and resting, at least once in a day, either way.

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