Aceticon

Almost every purchase for oneself is an investment, not in the Financial Investment sense of putting money expecting to get more money out but in the broader sense that we buy things because they provide some kind of value to us, which can be a utility value, tge satisfaction of an actual physical need, the pleasure one derive from using it or even just the pleasure of owning it

People don't just buy things with no reason at all at any level, though often people buy things for the emotional reason that it gives them a jolt of pleasure to buy that thing (not exactly the smartest thing to do IMHO, but quite possibly one of the core pillars holding up present day Consumer Society).

So in that broader sense even the peace of mind you refer to as a justification for buying a new car has an actual value which can be expressed into a rough money range or, even better, the more personal "how long do I have to work to pay for the peace of mind of a new car instead of buying a 2 year old car".

Further once you look at it that way, you start identifying which objective/need/feeling you're trying to satisfy and figuring out other ways of satisfying it for less - for example if a car is expensive enough you can literally pay to have many possible used cars you are considering checked by a mechanic before you buy, have car histories checked, and buy an extended warranty, to get that piece mind you wish and still save up a lot of money (or, in another "currency", a lot of days of work to earn that money).

In that broader sense, IMHO, new cars are generally a bad "investment" versus cars with a year or two because you're paying a huge premium for a piece of mind you might get for much cheaper or might not even need because your fears are just be the product of being widely misinformed about the probability of problems in cars relative (I can tell you from a broader Engineering sense, the rates of problem in physical products in general tend to peak first when they're new, then go down, then start going up again when they're aged, which for something like a car would be 5+ year at least, though beware that I only know this rule as a general thing and don't have car-specific knowledge on it beyond some vaguely remembered stuff I read over a decade ago) and of imagining the worst possible scenario in your mind about what problems a 2 year old used car can give you when the reality is that scenario in your mind is incredibly unlikely and you can buy stupidly cheap insurance to cover it.

It deceives people whose idea of how things work in large companies hasn't changed since the days when it was the manager of your bank branch who decided if you you should get a loan or not.

Nowadays, for certain in middle and large size companies, all the administrative main business pathways are heavilly if not totally automated and it's customer support that ends up eating the most manpower (which is why there has been so much of a push for automated phone and chat support systems, of late using AI).

Those $25 bucks for "account closure" pays at worst for a few minutes of somebody's seeking the account from user information on a computer, cross checking that the user information matches and then clicking a button that says "Close accout" and then "Ok" on the confirmation box and the remaining 99% or so left after paying for that cost are pure profit.

As somebody who works in designing software systems, including for large companies, lets just say that the amount of human time that goes into a customer account closure is negligible because main business operations such as openning and closing customer accounts are the ones that get automated the soonest and the furthest.

The stuff that uses "lots" (in relative terms) of manpower is supporting customers with really unusual problems involving third parties and even then spending 2.5 h man/hours (assuming the administrative person get paid $10/per hour) is pretty uncommon.

You've been lied to, repeatadly, for at least 3 decades.

If analyzed in purelly financial terms, buying a brand new car is almost invariably one of the worst investments there is compared to other options (if you really need a car, aim for a car which is 1 or 2 years), and if you couple that with taking a punt on a Musk product on the user side (not even the shareholders' side but quite literally the side of the people the shareholders, most noteably Musk, want to extract money from, so pretty much the suckers' side) AND, maybe worse, doing it as an early adopter, pretty much adds up to a guaranteed lubless shafting.

Investing in a "I'm a sucker" tattoo for one's forehead probably has a better return.

The totals should be compared ON A MAXIMIZATION OF RETURNS sense - i.e. how much good is done for each dollar being spent.

Giving money to people with lots of money - which is what corporate subsidies do, as that money ends up indirectly (and at times even directly) in the hands of shareholders - is just giving money to mainly very rich people and some middle class ones (who hold proportionally tiny amounts have shares either direct or via things like their pension fund), who need it far less than the kind of people who wouldn't be able to feed their family without those $1500 per year.

In fact the very same logic also justifies progressive taxation (if done properly without loopholes for the very rich) - every extra dollar in the hands of a poor or low earner person, no matter how it gets there (be it less tax or social security) has thousands, even millions and in some cases billions of times the utility value of every extra dollar in the hands of a rich person, not just in direct terms of the benefits it brings for that person and their family but even in Economic terms because they spend every cent they get, so that money circulates a lot more in the Economy, doing good for others as it does so.

One of biggest swindles in the discourse of modern neoliberal politicians is exactly to go around celebrating the good they do with taxpayers's money (or by "saving people from having to pay as much tax") whilst never showing or even discussing if that is the best possible use of that money, because generally its not, which is how we end up with corporates being subsidized and the very well off getting tax cuts whilst the money could've yielded far more massive returns if used differetly, not just in terms of a better life for more people but often even in purelly Economic terms, such as how, for example, State investment in free Education tends to all in all yield an actual profit for the nations that do it.

Everytime one hears a politician or media commentator harping about "the Economy growing" one should instantly ask "for whom?".

In fact, asking yourself "who is that really good for?" and "what's the point of telling me this?" is a pretty good general mental self-defense mechanism for handling the modern style of discourse from people trying to convince you to do something or form an opinion about them, using success stories - pretty much all such stories are self-serving in some way and generally either exagerated or lying by omission.

In Mr Ruffles' mind there is no~~w~~ doubt everybody wants to be alerted to the presence of that evil squirrel, including the baby.

I worked for maybe a decade in Investment Banking back in the 2000s and early 2010s and one thing I realized after a couple of years in the Industry was that fines for lawbreaking were really just another business risk and calculated into the Profit & Loss estimations.

Looking around I would say that, at least amongst large companies, that practice is now the general rule in just about all industries - if the only penalties are monetary and paid by the company, individuals controlling budgets within companies will treat fines for regulatory non-compliance or even crime just like they treat any other business risk.

Make people personally liable for crime committed for the company (including using criminal association laws against companies) and fines a percentage of a company's revenue (like the EU does for certain modern pan-European legislation) and most of these things would stop - there would be no need of Luigi doing what he did if Brian Thompson and those like him would've gotten jail time for Manslaughter if even just a single case of people being fraudulently denied life-saving treatment and dying could be shown to have been the result of his policies in the company.

The worsening of this and a lot of other things which are now reaching unbearable abuse levels all align neatly with Neoliberalism, starting with Reagan.

Take the State from the job of Regulation and you naturally end up with lots of feedback cycles were all the natural uneveness in real markets (effects totally unaknowledged in Free Market Theory and which make most Markets there very opposite of competitive) snowballs into monopolies, cartels, networking effects and other means of market locking, feeding into becoming ever more so, and when entrenched enough being abused to the max, from enshittification to health insurers knowingly fraudulently refusing to pay the bills for life saving treatment because they know those people are too poor to sue them or will die before any lawsuit ends up in a judgment.

When it's all self-"regulation" and there's no "big government" smacking down on abuses, the objectives of the actors still left in the market with the most power are the ones which the system de facto is optimized to achieve, and without "big government" the most powerful actors in the market by far are Big Money, who will optimizing things so that they become even bigger money.

It's one of those systems which is only "great" if you never need to actually get the money to pay for a significant healthcare bill.

In my personal experience, "the really old colleague" is often a real throw of the dice between stubborn-as-fuck-never-matured-know-it-all and very-interesting-seen-it-all-genuinelly-mature-colleague - so basically opposite ends of the scale. Often there's also the corner-guy-just-counting-their-days-till-retirement, which doesn't say much about that person since they're not really into establishing relationships with people whom they will soon never see again and just keep a low profile.

If you're early career, having one of the seen-it-all kind of older colleagues is probably one of the best things it can happen to you, especially if you're a bright kid.

The subtle just under the surface love-hate passive-aggressive interplay between Dayzie and Brice (if you're lucky, culminating in some kind of passionate-beyond-their-control office affair between them) would make that pair the most interesting to have as colleagues in the long run, IMHO.