Not the OP but have a 20-year-old car. The relevant calculation is not cost of annual repair v value of car, but rather annual cost vs annual cost of a new car. Even if you amortize the upfront cost of a new car over 20 years, the increased insurance cost and (depending on where you live) property taxes plus some annual maintenance, at least for me, is substantially more expensive than annual maintenance on my current car.
I did a from-the-ground-up rebuild (including the engine) just after buying it. That cost an arm and a leg but all in (including the original car) it still came to ~half of what a new one would cost. Anything that had been 'improved' on it was brought back to stock. It's been super reliable, I've had it since jan 2020, put a considerable number of kms on it and it hasn't let me down (so far :) ).
As for doing the maintenance myself, I don't have experience with this kind of car at all, I've worked a lot on classic Mini's, Citroens (2CV and DS) and Austin Maxi. But never anything like this so I'm more than happy to let someone else earn a buck on it. But it's been pretty cheap to run so far, fuel, oil, regular service and once a control arm that got bent out of shape.
Compared to a new vehicle I'm considerably better off.
That would not be the case amortized I expect. You can sell virtually any car for $5k as a floor price I’d say. Most yearly maintenance amounts to changing oil. Maybe tires every four years. Every 5-10 years maybe a bigger couple hundred dollar job. That has been about my experience owning used cars. But still well below $5k/yr.
The black market is not an institution, it's a messy anarchy where you have zero guarantee you'll get what you paid for.
> As is the "bribe economy" – the general understanding that getting X done generally costs you around Y, where Y is not arbitrary
That's really not how that works. Sometimes your bribe will be refused. Sometimes they'll ask for more money even when you think you paid. Sometimes they'll simply not do whatever you bribed them to do. Sometimes it will work as expected.
There is no certainty in autocracies, no guarantees. If Americans only knew what they're heading into, they'd be fighting tooth and nail to avoid it.
Most are not making one trip to the black market - they start to figure out who delivers and this reputation matters. However there is a limit to how much you can deliver in a black market and so it is low trust not zero trust.
I'm obviously not defending these things, but people do get things done in everyday life in deeply corrupt countries. It's not chaos. Society is self-organizing like that, and this stuff is all iterated prisoner's dilemma in the end.
> Society is self-organizing like that, and this stuff is all iterated prisoner's dilemma in the end..
"Iterating the prisoners dilemma" at all levels of interface with government, moral qualms about autocracy/authoritarianism aside, is a very inefficient way to run a society, because government is an inherent and natural monopoly.
Even in private commerce, it only works where there are choices and not monopolies.
"Zero trust" is optimal for machine communication networks, not human organizations.
I never said it was efficient. There's clearly a lot of potential value wasted compared to more trustable institutions. Your point about monopoly is off the mark, though – in every high-trust society it's the government that people need to trust, because it's the ultimate enforcer of trust in any other institutions.
> Your point about monopoly is off the mark, though – in every high-trust society it's the government that people need to trust, because it's the ultimate enforcer of trust in any other institutions.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is. I agree that people need to trust government in a high trust society. Government is also the ultimate inherent monopoly.
In the EU, yes. When you go to those dark corners of Europe that never achieved the membership, all bets are off.
In Montenegro and Serbia they charge per minute because the only entity allowed to sell kwh's is the national electricity company (in Serbia it's owned by Russia, so it is heavily legally protected).
No need to go further than dead center EU to see chargers where the cost has a time component, and an energy component, and even a (small) one time fee. Sometimes the charger is inside a paid parking, there that comes on top. These aren't shady operators either either, just the way they saw fit to prevent abuse and make more money.
Some have reasonable limits to prevent abuse [0], others just charge the customer as much as they can get away with.
In Italy there are enough chargers that charge for both kWh and time connected. kWh for what you use and connected to discourage being connected all the time.
Russia is not a _physical_ threat outside of its immediate proximity.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
> its relative strength has only lessened over the decades
Russia is not a _physical_ threat outside of its immediate proximity.
But they invest large amounts of money to propaganda channels everywhere, have direct military influence in large parts of Africa, are known to poison people in the UK and elsewhere, etc.
That sounds dubious. The government's actual approval rating in Russia is, what, 5 percent? I remember watching a report about how people in Russia were literally jailed for giving the "wrong" answer to a street poll.
So, I suppose if they could somehow use money and influence to determine election results, they would use it in Russia, no?
So, I think the civilizational threat from Russia is about the same as from North Korea: nearly zero.
Russia's infinitration is long done. The brakes are cut and the cars moving down a steep hill. Putin can just sit back and watch the chaos ensue if he wants.
The way it's going, the AI hyperscalers are buying such a big portion of the world's hardware, that it may very well happen that tomorrow's machines do get slower per dollar of purchase value.
I wouldn't call it an Americanism, per se. There are plenty of countries where you can't become a citizen at all without having a relative who is one. There are also plenty of countries where, even being born there is not sufficient for citizenship (in fact, only 35 countries in the world grant citizenship unconditionally via being born within the borders).
The requirements to be US President isn't to be born in the US, but to be a "natural born citizen."
While the rules of being a natural born citizen is more complicated if born outside of the US, you can generally become one if one of your parents is a US citizen.
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