Tangent

In my area the biggest factor is multiple families purchasing homes together. When you're splitting the mortgage it's a lot more affordable.

The overlap between "cares enough about image quality to not be okay with jpeg" and "doesn't know to install a third party app" is probably too small for most manufacturers to care about.

The perfect middle ground happened for me with my 2001 E46. Modern headlight shape but with easily replaceable lenses. Gluing the damn things together is BS.

• Manual transmission availability
• Being able to easily modify for more power
• Being able to take part in full sessions for a whole track day and be able to get home after
• Much less weight so you aren't cooking the brakes and chewing up tires on track
• Minimal planning for road trips
• Much better flexibility on stops on road trips

It's still like that?! That was one of the most irritating things back in 2015 - 18 when I had a Fiat 500e lease. I had to join several different charging networks, each with different options of free membership and paying per kWh, free that paid one rate and paid that was a different rate, paid by time, etc. I had to charge up some accounts while others were just pay as I go. Some I could tap my phone to start a session and others I needed to have a card or keychain tag with me.

Then I needed all their apps, plus a couple of independent ones to find the charging stations because the independent ones never showed everyone's stations or couldn't show the status. Even on those I'd have to check the comments about each station because it was so common for it to show as being available and working but every comment would say "doesn't work even though the app says it does".

I'd love to get another EV but it sure as hell won't be anything I take outside of single-charge distance from home until there are big damn changes to charging...

I'm really not interested in being told I need English lessons from someone who uses "sowing discourse" when they mean "sowing discord" and who implies that refuting something in a debate is a bad thing when it's literally the entire point. To be fair I suspect you used the wrong word there again. You might want to look up what a malapropism is and work on avoiding them if you're going to try and claim the high ground on language...

I'm not sure how you expect to get unpaid volunteers on an enthusiast forum that don't have any connection to said industry but in the real world that's just not going to happen. More importantly you're still ignoring the main point that insulting any group - especially insisting on doing it repeatedly - is a rules violation, whether a mod is a member of said group or not. I'm not in the slightest bit surprised you're sickened by a mod who applies rules evenly and doesn't make exceptions for you. I do appreciate your revulsion though; it tells me I was doing things right more than anything else could.

I'd suggest you take some time to ponder how the rules here even are a general "be cool / don't be an ass" and do not make any exclusions for groups you don't like. If the rules are ever updated to "don't be an ass except to people who work at a dealership or who don't hate them" you'll be good to go! I'm sure you'll have all sorts of arguments about how you should be allowed to be an ass anyway though. If you're going to insist on it, try to make it an original thought at least instead of reposting something so commonplace again and again.

Mods showing up and doing something in a thread you're freely saying was about hate? You don't say! You and I both know those kinds of threads never contain the hate to just that topic, it gets evenly spread around to anyone on the "wrong" side of the argument. If some of them are employees of dealerships you know that you're talking about posts that directly target them personally right? You're not discussing hate about some faceless corporate machine; you're blithely talking about how they, their friends, their family are horrible people. I can see how they might take that a bit more personally. Imaging someone whining about not getting to constantly post about how everyone doing your job is a piece of crap. Even if we take for granted that some of them are dealership employees, do you really think they went to their boss and asked to get paid to kind of sort of defend the industry on Reddit?

Dealership arguments also inevitably bring in Tesla which is a flame-bait topic and things get heated really quickly. Mods - despite your theories - don't get paid by anyone to do what they do. They show up to browse just like everyone else and while they're there they take a few minutes to clean things up. When somebody posts a topic that inspires hate and argument and it starts drawing in hordes of people it turns into a whole lot of work. Work that again, nobody is getting paid for. So yeah, when threads turn into high-volume spewing of "you suck and this is why", it's gonna get shut down because screw that. If people want to be children and ignore rules as simple as "be civil", and "no politics", it's gonna get closed. Yes, even if you think people need the valuable public service announcement of "dealerships bad" yet again.

And how exactly were the mods representing themselves so that you consider them to be "misrepresented"? Nobody there or here is telling anyone about where they work, or what investments they might have so I don't see how they're represented in any way at all.

Better brace yourself for getting those accusations anyway. The moment you do something they don't like - no matter how clear and simple the rule they broke was - you're automatically power-mad and/or paid off.

Having been a mod over there I can tell you none of the mods were getting paid shit by anyone and I can also tell you that not a single discussion was had pro or con about dealerships. Hell, a quick search will tell you that even if someone had been getting paid by some shadowy dealership cabal they'd have lost that pretty quickly considering how many anti-dealership posts you can find open right now. Posts got locked or removed because someone else had posted it shortly before or the comments were a total shitshow of hate speech, insults, and/or politics.

I can say for certain that the people that screamed the loudest about mods being paid by whatever group or of somehow power-tripping on their ability to delete an internet post were always the people who ignored the rules the most. Even this forum here has "Be cool / don't be an ass" as rule number 1. I can guarantee you that when it gets big enough that most of the "you're power-hungry / paid off" comments about the mods will be from people who got their hate speech or just plain douchebag comments deleted. Everyone wants the rules applied to people they don't agree with and exceptions made for everything they like. And no, not everything you personally agree with is "the true values of the community/consumers".

Even if it's not illegal it sure as hell makes their hypocrisy rather glaring doesn't it?

I've been on a jury a couple of times myself. The first time was boring and was a frustrating case. The second time was disturbing but very interesting and definitely a satisfying experience.

I understand that not everyone wants to serve if their employer doesn't pay them; it can be a burden. Luckily mine does so I always look forward to summons in the hopes I get on a jury now.

In modern media it pretty much just means they found two people who think that. If they want to get "official" they can arrange for polls to be done but those are very easily crafted to get the results they want.