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roymorrison posted:are you guys at least willing to admit that teslas are the only electric vehicles that dont look absolutely terrible? They seem like the least offensive tech company to me Volkswagen's eGolf basically just looks like a Golf. The Globe and Mail was pretty impressed with the 2017 version. Tesla's electric cars are really appealing when compared to other electric/hybrid cars such as the Leaf and Prius, but suspect things are going to get a lot tougher for Tesla if the competition shifts from the current trend of making electric cars some weirdo different car model, into something like what Volkswagen is doing with the eGolf, where the electric version is more akin to being a minor variation of a known, popular model. I bet a BMW e3 series that looks exactly the same as a 3 series would be a lot more popular than the BMW i3.
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Apr 24, 2017 01:31
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ohgodwhat posted:edit: Anyway, I would really like for it to come out that Uber's time estimates are complete bullshit. They've always been so for me, but I'd like proof that it's intentional. Your wish is my command.
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Apr 24, 2017 02:26
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Kim Jong Il posted:Then defend them. I want to be able to buy a car online from 20 different retailers trying to undercut each other instead of a bunch of fat dealerships colluding on price and passing along to me giant markups. There's no possibility of vertical integration in auto manufacturing, this isn't the 1930s. Not only should the law go, the thread is right that Tesla is largely a blip, so who gives a poo poo what they do, let them sell direct to consumers.
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Apr 24, 2017 02:37
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Does this mean that the typical goon here would go full blown Mr. Hyde if they became incredibly wealthy? Or is it just all those other rich fucks?
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Apr 24, 2017 02:57
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Have you talked to the typical goon? Have you seen GBS?
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Apr 24, 2017 02:59
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Panfilo posted:Does this mean that the typical goon here would go full blown Mr. Hyde if they became incredibly wealthy? Or is it just all those other rich fucks? I personally don't trust myself with that kind of power unchecked. And you're a sucker if you trust either yourself or anybody else with it. The tiniest of vices and favoritism get magnified to an obscene level. Just think of the difference between using your employee discount to buy a friend a gift from your shop to giving your friend's kid a job in your company over more qualified people. On some level both of these stem from the same human wish to help your friends. But are they morally equivalent? I think not.
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Apr 24, 2017 02:58
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Femtosecond posted:Volkswagen's eGolf basically just looks like a Golf. The Globe and Mail was pretty impressed with the 2017 version. I like the way my Leaf looks!
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Apr 24, 2017 03:28
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Terrible Opinions posted:It's mainly to separate the car itself from the manufacturer. It prevents a least only model of "cars as a service" and releasing intentionally broken products then patching them later. We've found time and time again every single time you make it easier for a coporation to sell a broken product to the customer without some form of check they will do so more often. Patches to cars are bad because it would result in cars with steering assistance as buggy as Ubisoft games on release. I don't think dealerships are what's preventing car companies from releasing half-finished products. This argument is really bizarre to me. Do you realize that it is much more expensive and costly to fix a bad design with mechanical parts and hardware versus applying a software patch, and this is a huge reason why car companies operate much differently from software companies, right? Terrible Opinions posted:Also just as a general thing the more control you give a corporation over how and where it's products are sold the worse those products are for the end consumer. See block booking and cigarette company's suing countries over anti-smoking laws. Splitting up corporations as much as possible is always a good thing. I'm not seeing how dealerships are making things better for the consumer. They get to take a cut while not really adding much value to the process of buying a car. They probably make the experience worse for the consumer since there is less accountability in the dealership model--the dealership can always blame the manufacturer and vice versa. For something kind of frivolous like hotel or bed and breakfast stays or taxi-cab rides, it's not really a big deal when people pay a little more than they could be paying, since they are kind of luxury goods. But almost everybody in the US, including poor people, needs a car, and would benefit from lower costs to own a car. Terrible Opinions posted:Yeah you're right it's not the 1930s, and that's precisely why we have laws against it. Do you think for a second if we didn't have laws against it companies wouldn't try to pay employs in company script? Every single evil thing done by a company in the past is something some entrepanuring rich fucker wants to do now and is only stopped by laws. Rich people are fundamentally evil and will do whatever horrible thing they are aren't specifically prevented from doing. You've totally lost me here. How are laws protecting car dealerships' cartel in any way similar to laws outlawing indentured servitude? You really haven't explained at all why car dealerships actually help the consumer. Instead you are reasoning, like what posters in this thread sometimes do, that regulations and laws are good by virtue of being regulations and laws and therefore we should respect and cherish laws which protect the dealership cartel. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Apr 24, 2017 |
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Apr 24, 2017 04:33
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Peachfart posted:Users don't care about medallions. They care about cost, speed, and ease of use. Along with how cabs had a tendency to claim their credit card machine was broken. That was never happening if you don't break up the local monopoly. No one wants to get a million apps either. Yes it's subsidized, but more users driving also drives costs down, in addition to being able to get a cab when you want one. So yes, users did want the monopoly broken. Even if people don't like Uber's business practices, users are overwhelmingly voting in favor of ride sharing as opposed to cabs because the latter are still a horrible experience overall. Uber/Lyft are literally 1/5 the cost of a cab for me at an airport and a million times better. Terrible Opinions posted:Yeah you're right it's not the 1930s, and that's precisely why we have laws against it. Do you think for a second if we didn't have laws against it companies wouldn't try to pay employs in company script? Every single evil thing done by a company in the past is something some entrepanuring rich fucker wants to do now and is only stopped by laws. Rich people are fundamentally evil and will do whatever horrible thing they are aren't specifically prevented from doing. It's not the 1930s in that car manufacturers aren't super powerful, there's plenty of competition. All you're saying is a bunch of car dealership owners get to magically steal 20% of the purchase price of each car and make themselves rich for no discernible reason whatsoever. It doesn't matter to car companies either way, but you're empowering a class of worthless middlemen at the expense of the working class and middle class. It's the entrenched political class who benefit from the status quo. This has nothing to do with protecting consumers - you have not given one single example about how banning direct purchases helps consumers in any way. You know that you can have direct purchasing and then regulate the car companies directly, and/or beef up consumer protection laws? Jesus gently caress, socialize it, you could literally have the government run all car dealerships and have a gigantic improvement over the current setup, which gives dealerships a license to gently caress over customers with zero recourse. Kim Jong Il fucked around with this message at 04:57 on Apr 24, 2017 |
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Apr 24, 2017 04:50
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Car dealerships are identical to any other form of retail. They manage local inventory, provide a showroom and repair service etc. They're also one of the lowest margin and least profitable retail sectors.
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Apr 24, 2017 12:41
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asdf32 posted:Car dealerships are identical to any other form of retail.
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Apr 24, 2017 12:53
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Kim Jong Il posted:That was never happening if you don't break up the local monopoly. No one wants to get a million apps either. Yes it's subsidized, but more users driving also drives costs down, in addition to being able to get a cab when you want one. So yes, users did want the monopoly broken. Even if people don't like Uber's business practices, users are overwhelmingly voting in favor of ride sharing as opposed to cabs because the latter are still a horrible experience overall. Uber/Lyft are literally 1/5 the cost of a cab for me at an airport and a million times better. You'd like minicabs in London then. You can't hail them in the streets, only book them by phone or at the minicab office, and they're cheaper. (I believe this has been mentioned upthread multiple times.) This is functionally a solved problem here, and Uber operates as just another minicab service. You don't need to allow Uber to be Uber to have both proper hailable cabs and a bookable ride service in a city.
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Apr 24, 2017 14:10
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asdf32 posted:They're also one of the lowest margin and least profitable retail sectors. Are they? I personally know several car dealership owners and they all seem quite wealthy. There is also this: http://www.autonews.com/article/20140303/RETAIL/303039973/dealership-profits-keep-soaring
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Apr 24, 2017 15:27
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divabot posted:You'd like minicabs in London then. You can't hail them in the streets, only book them by phone or at the minicab office, and they're cheaper. (I believe this has been mentioned upthread multiple times.) This is functionally a solved problem here, and Uber operates as just another minicab service. You don't need to allow Uber to be Uber to have both proper hailable cabs and a bookable ride service in a city. In the US those are called `black cabs` as opposed to the `yellow cabs` that are street hails.
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Apr 24, 2017 16:02
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duz posted:In the US those are called `black cabs` as opposed to the `yellow cabs` that are street hails. Meanwhile up here (western Canada) we have a cab company called Yellow Cab that has a central dispatch number to phone. The terminology threw me a bit when I visited New York and tried to call for a cab.
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Apr 24, 2017 16:19
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PetSmart is paying $3.5 billion for Chewy.com. That's ~10x what Pets.com was worth at height of last bubble. Chewy.com is (of course) not profitable, but does at least have decent revenue and growth... PetSmart was presumably desperate not to get left behind.
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Apr 24, 2017 16:28
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Perhaps... this time might also be a bubble???
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Apr 24, 2017 16:37
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Cicero posted:Except for the part where their suppliers are legally blocked from direct selling to consumers. Which I'm not supporting but the basic retail model domainates even in industries where direct sales are an option. It's unlikely the major car brands would be interested in managing their own far flung retail supply chain. And like other industries, when you see vertical integration it's often more about marketing and experience than capturing a couple extra percent of magin which is true for both Apple and Tesla. enraged_camel posted:Are they? I personally know several car dealership owners and they all seem quite wealthy. Google search quote:As a general rule, new vehicle auto dealers have a net profit margin of 1-2% on new vehicle sales. It's pretty pitiful. Gross margins, however, run between 8 and 10% for most full-line automakers, and luxury cars often earn 10-15% margins.
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Apr 24, 2017 18:32
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asdf32 posted:Google search That's only on new vehicle sales. The overwhelming majority of a car dealership's profits come from service and parts.
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Apr 24, 2017 18:41
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Prism posted:Meanwhile up here (western Canada) we have a cab company called Yellow Cab that has a central dispatch number to phone. That's a franchise in the US. And they often offer both yellow and black cab service. It can get a bit confusing.
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Apr 24, 2017 21:10
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enraged_camel posted:This I don't agree with. I think each medallion should be tied to party it is being issued to and have an expiration date (e.g. 40 years, long enough to last through the working years of an adult). There should be a yearly "re-activation" requirement that costs a meager amount, like $100. Medallions that are not reactivated should expire, opening up spots in the quota for new applicants. Lack of use isn't really a problem that exists in NYC, none of the medallions stay inactive for any long period of time. When companies are buying up medallions as investments, they still put them to work with contracted drivers after all. About the longest you can expect a medallion to stay out of service is when an individual owner/driver has a sudden emergency come up where they can't drive, and need a few days to secure someone licensed to drive for them with the medallion. For starters, a lot of people's finances or retirement plans rely on being able to sell off the medallions they paid a bunch of money for at the end of their driving time or if circumstances change and they can no longer drive for other reasons. Additionally a lot of people directly have mortgages out against the medallion. Switching to not allowing resale anymore fucks them over entirely (unless the commission grants a one time reimbursement which hardly seems likely), and only preventing resale for newly issued medallions would leave tons of medallions on a resale market. It's the sort of thing that if you're going to bar it, it should have been barred from the start - I believe there are many cities that chose for whatever reason to not allow direct resale back when they started their taxi medallion systems in the early 20th century. Kim Jong Il posted:Then defend them. I want to be able to buy a car online from 20 different retailers trying to undercut each other instead of a bunch of fat dealerships colluding on price and passing along to me giant markups. There's no possibility of vertical integration in auto manufacturing, this isn't the 1930s. Not only should the law go, the thread is right that Tesla is largely a blip, so who gives a poo poo what they do, let them sell direct to consumers. You can already buy a car from 20 different retailers though? You can also already buy cars direct from Tesla in every state too? I seriously don't understand your complaint here. If you want a to buy any major brand of car, there are dozens to hundreds of retailers who will be willing to sell that car to you new, as well as the car company themselves being willing to sell direct if you'll be making a big enough order of cars to make it worth their while. There is absolutely no law against this, nor is their any law preventing a car company from selling direct over the internet/phone/mail order. Teslas in particular have always been available direct from Tesla via internet or phone orders. But it's funny you make the complaint, because Tesla actively tries to prevent there from being multiple retailers for their cars. So even if there had been a law against multiple retailers for the same car online, and that law got removed, you wouldn't be getting a Tesla through them! Maybe you're just confused by the fact that Tesla wasn't allowed to own their own dealerships? But just in case you really didn't know: https://www.tesla.com/order There's your Tesla ordering, right from them! Cicero posted:Except for the part where their suppliers are legally blocked from direct selling to consumers. Again this isn't true. It's completely legal to sell direct from a car company to the customer - in fact for many small time builders it's the only way they sell cars. Like Local Motors, or Tesla, or the various super custom vehicle companies. They just can't do it under the physical dealer method in some states. And most large companies don't find selling single cars direct to customers worth their time - if you call up Ford and say "I'd like a Mustang" they tell you to call a local dealer. But that's not because of any law. But if you call up Ford and are like "I want a fleet of 500 Mustangs" then they'll be more than willing to deal with you and your weird purposes, assuming you have the money to pay them for it.
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Apr 24, 2017 21:16
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fishmech posted:
I don't give a poo poo about most of this post, but I went into here and looked through the options Their premium air filter option is billed as including a "Bioweapon Defense Mode" Kill me now
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Apr 24, 2017 21:28
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fishmech posted:
Also, most fleet purchases are done through dealers and in many states have to.
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Apr 24, 2017 21:43
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shrike82 posted:"the power of collective hashtagging" "meme magic"
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Apr 24, 2017 21:52
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Protest movements of the 19th and 20th centuries were failures compared to the transformative actionizing of collective hashtagging in the 21st century.
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Apr 24, 2017 21:54
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Square buys YikYak . Or, to be precise, buys "5-10" of its engineers" for <$3 million. In a 2015 round of financing by Sequoia the company was valued at $400 million. Up there with "never get involved in a land war in Asia" is "Never invest in a social-media firm that isn't monetized."
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Apr 24, 2017 22:06
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asdf32 posted:It's unlikely the major car brands would be interested in managing their own far flung retail supply chain. [citation needed]
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Apr 24, 2017 23:26
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Juicebro teardown: https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50 It's amazing, every single component is overengineered. Custom motor, requiring a custom encoder, with such ridiculous power requirements that a custom power supply had to be designed.
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Apr 24, 2017 23:49
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JawnV6 posted:Juicebro teardown: https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50 The only way I could see this possibly getting anywhere is if they were angling for a military contract and had really good connections.
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Apr 25, 2017 01:26
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They could probably get a job working on the F-35 with that on their resume I mean at least the juicero squeezes the bags without catching on fire or anything
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Apr 25, 2017 01:32
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JawnV6 posted:Juicebro teardown: https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50
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Apr 25, 2017 01:39
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Shugojin posted:They could probably get a job working on the F-35 with that on their resume with those parts it probably flies better than an F-35
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Apr 25, 2017 02:12
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So the dirty secret about a lot of consumer hardware startups is that they don't usually design their initial product in house, but rather outsource it to one of a small number of product and engineering firms. In Juicero's case, they were laughed out of a lot of potential designers' offices because their spec was so overbuilt and ridiculous, a friend who works at one of those firms told me.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:39
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With Juicero maybe it was a tail-wagging-the-dog situation, with the tail being marketable top of the line specs.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:48
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IS there a chance of them being able to get rid of the proprietary QR code stuff and selling this to, say, high-end juice bars? If the press can actually muster 4 tons of force, it'd probably be one hell of a juicer even without pre-liquefied stuff.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:57
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fishmech posted:You can already buy a car from 20 different retailers though? You can also already buy cars direct from Tesla in every state too? 20 different retailers trying to gently caress me six ways to Sunday, and make the experience the absolute worst of your life. If you don't understand the complaint, you have never been to a car dealership.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:58
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I have the sense that juicing isn't an engineering problem, or at least hasn't been one for a long long time.
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Apr 25, 2017 02:59
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pangstrom posted:I have the sense that juicing isn't an engineering problem, or at least hasn't been one for a long long time. Juicero attempted to provide a final solution to the juicing problem and it went as well as you would have expected.
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Apr 25, 2017 03:00
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TheBalor posted:IS there a chance of them being able to get rid of the proprietary QR code stuff and selling this to, say, high-end juice bars? If the press can actually muster 4 tons of force, it'd probably be one hell of a juicer even without pre-liquefied stuff. Why would they get rid of the QR code for that? The entire business model is to sell the packs. If you just want something that juices in the same way, there's this juicer that Juicero is suing which uses reusable packs that you can put your own fruit in: http://www.juisir.com/ Or if you're an actual juice place, you'd jus tuse existing cold-press machines designed for them really. Kim Jong Il posted:20 different retailers trying to gently caress me six ways to Sunday, and make the experience the absolute worst of your life. Uh, so why do you think your "dealers but they're not called dealers and this is better somehow" websites wouldn't gently caress you over too? They have exactly the same incentives as the hundreds of dealers you can use online right now. I mean are you just that dull, that you think not being called a dealer will mean they won't try to gently caress you over?
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Apr 25, 2017 03:04
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Kim Jong Il posted:20 different retailers trying to gently caress me six ways to Sunday, and make the experience the absolute worst of your life. Ah, so this is a "Boohoo, I don't like dealerships because I have to talk to people" post. Got it.
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Apr 25, 2017 03:47
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