I'm sure glad I make a living in Automotive Restoration, building Street Rods and customs. No computers, here! 😉 Maybe people will be more interested in old cars and business will increase! 🤣

Get your Corvega now! Only $199,999.99 😲

... and we didn't even need to suffer a nuclear apocalypse to get to this point. Cool!

I want a Mr. Handy robot too!

Walks the dog! He's soooooo handy!

I'm glad I live in an area where rust isn't much of an issue. The car I drive every day is almost 30 years old, and as long as it doesn't rust, there's no reason it can't last forever. At this point, everything about the car is well known, documented, and fixable by anybody with enough motivation to do so.
That includes the ECM. Being able to modify the ECM has allowed me to get the engine running correctly with different/better injectors than what the car shipped with. I never had the originals with the car, so finding those would have been an expensive pain and a downgrade.

There has been lots of reverse engineering and modifying of OBD-1 era ECMs on the internet. With earlier cars, you can reprogram them with a common EPROM programmer, and the configuration software is either cheap or free.
When you get into OBD-2 the hardware and software situation gets a lot more complicated and expensive. Glad I don't have to deal with that.

There are even some popular ECM swaps out there, where you swap an inferior or less documented ECM for one that has been well and thoroughly hacked. People then tune them to run on their own vehicle, and end up with a better running car than the factory setup.

I suppose government regulators would hate for people to have this power, so they probably would support anything that keeps consumers locked out of it. But despite what many people think, an ECM tune that makes the engine run well will also produce good emissions. Those things are not a contradiction from an ECM point of view.

The modern trend towards grossly expensive and complicated cars that people can't afford to buy, and instead lease, is troubling to me. I want to live in a society where individuals enjoy the independence and autonomy that comes from owning their own property. When people don't own things, it becomes easier for outside forces to control them.

Debt is slavery!

"Those who are in debt are not free" - Göran Persson - Swedish former PM

Even renting things are better than to buy things without really owning them.

Skyscraper wrote:

Even renting things are better than to buy things without really owning them.

It's a really simplistic approach which isn't automatically true.

If you take a loan to buy something, eventually you stop paying the loan and get to keep the thing. If you rent it, you keep paying forever.

You can't really make a claim as to which one is better without looking at exact prices of things, rent terms, loan terms, etc.

dr_st wrote:

It's a really simplistic approach which isn't automatically true. […]
Show full quote

Skyscraper wrote:

Even renting things are better than to buy things without really owning them.

It's a really simplistic approach which isn't automatically true.

If you take a loan to buy something, eventually you stop paying the loan and get to keep the thing. If you rent it, you keep paying forever.

You can't really make a claim as to which one is better without looking at exact prices of things, rent terms, loan terms, etc.

In a world where you actully repay all of your debt that may be true.

Skyscraper wrote:

In a world where you actully repay all of your debt that may be true.

It's up to you. I have no debt, other than the loan on my apartment, which I can repay any day if I want to.

If you were not indebted out of real necessity, you were indebted by your very own measure of covetousness.

dr_st wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

In a world where you actully repay all of your debt that may be true.

It's up to you. I have no debt, other than the loan on my apartment, which I can repay any day if I want to.

Lo Wang wrote:

If you were not indebted out of real necessity, you were indebted by your very own measure of covetousness.

In many parts of the world its not possible for "normal people" to buy a home and/or start a family without lending more money than they ever can hope to repay.

Im a free man, one of few where I live.

Skyscraper wrote:

Debt is slavery!

"Those who are in debt are not free" - Göran Persson - Swedish former PM

Even renting things are better than to buy things without really owning them.

Maybe if you're hopelessly incompetent with money.

I have a mortgage on a house. My savings are offset against the principle, reducing the interest compounded each day.

I buy everything every day with a credit card, and balance it at the end of the month.

This way, the cash stays offsetting the mortgage for longer, which over the life of the loan will save thousands of dollars in interest.

Big ticket items, I take advantage of interest free periods, even if I have the cash upfront. So rather than losing, say, $1500 of offset in one day, I lose $16 of offset each day for 90 days.

With the mortgage too, you're borrowing against an appreciating asset, so even if you lost your job tomorrow, you could sell the house for at least what you bought it for.

Debt can work for you, if you're smart. Debt is big and scary if you're bad at money.

SquallStrife wrote:

Maybe if you're hopelessly incompetent with money. […]
Show full quote

Skyscraper wrote:

Debt is slavery!

"Those who are in debt are not free" - Göran Persson - Swedish former PM

Even renting things are better than to buy things without really owning them.

Maybe if you're hopelessly incompetent with money.

I have a mortgage on a house. My savings are offset against the principle, reducing the interest compounded each day.

I buy everything every day with a credit card, and balance it at the end of the month.

This way, the cash stays offsetting the mortgage for longer, which over the life of the loan will save thousands of dollars in interest.

Big ticket items, I take advantage of interest free periods, even if I have the cash upfront. So rather than losing, say, $1500 of offset in one day, I lose $16 of offset each day for 90 days.

With the mortgage too, you're borrowing against an appreciating asset, so even if you lost your job tomorrow, you could sell the house for at least what you bought it for.

Debt can work for you, if you're smart. Debt is big and scary if you're bad at money.

This is all true. The issue is that the avarage man is really bad at money.

Im not saying that it isnt their own fault but in the end we all suffer for it because of inflated house prices and high taxes needed to help those in debt with different kind of social welfare.

Just to give you an idea of how bad it is here in Sweden. The average house price in my city (not Stockholm) is about $500000, the average income is ~$50000. That sound fair right but with Swedens high taxes there is not a snowballs chance in hell that people can repay their debt during their lifetime and house prices will crash sooner or later.

Large scale poor financial planning usually leads to lower house prices through foreclosures and panic selling putting more product on the market than it needs.

Agree on the welfare bit though. Not ideal.

If you happen to be trapped in a socialist hellhole, you have no rights and no hope to ever become anything but a slave, be it the productive type or the welfare type, and slaves can't afford stuff to begin with.

I think we're talking long prosperous countries that God has blessed with a certain amount of economic freedom like the USA and Australia, and even these two are about to go to the dogs.

A house is a necessity, but you didn't need a $600.000 house in America. Any man who was once determined to start a family, would have done wisely to settle for something much more humble, say a $75.000 property in the suburbs.

If people had played their cards right, if they had tightened their belt and hadn't blown their cash on frivolous thing, they'd have been off the hook very quickly.

Now it's all coming to an end and it doesn't matter one way or the other because all countries are going to suffer alike poverty under the same tyranny.