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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • a loan for a used car sounds wild to me.

    Predatory car loans has entered the chat.

    I don’t know about Carvana, but plenty of scummy dealers will give insane rates to people with no credit check, repo the car while they’re still underwater on the loan, and sell it to someone else. You can have two or three people paying off the same car.

    Oh, also, they somehow encourage the most gullible people who can’t afford their loans to just let the car get reposessed instead of attempting to sell it back to the dealer.







  • ch00f@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlZoomers & Boomers are the same
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    6 days ago

    To use your car metaphor, there was a time when you basically needed to know how a car worked in order to own/operate one. I’m talking like the 1910s-1920s. They were unreliable, simply made, manual transmission, hand crank start, and needed a lot of maintenance.

    Millennials grew up at a time when you needed to have some understanding of how a computer worked in order to do basically anything.

    I suppose the issue is that the car metaphor breaks down because a vehicle really only does one thing. Push pedal and go. Maybe worry about snow conditions if that affects you.

    Meanwhile, computers can still be used to do thousands of different tasks and the only thread tying all of those tasks together is that they’re done by the same machine. So knowing fundamentals about the machine gives you access to a lot of capability vs. just memorizing how to do a few tasks.



  • The perfect consumer-facing example of this is Clear at the airport.

    Instead of waiting in line to have your ID checked by a TSA agent, you let an iPad take your picture and then have an agent walk you to the TSA agent and vouch for you.

    The whole iPad thing is marginally faster than just checking your ID by hand, so really they just found a way to monetize cutting the line. This provides zero net benefit to society except for extracting money from people for something that’s supposed to be free.

    Also, when everyone has Clear, we’ll be back in the same boat with long lines and they’ll probably charge more for Clear+ or some shit.