sohois
7mo ago
If you're doing a deal online, it will be with a used car dealer like Cazoo. Which there probably isn't anything wrong with, you'll get peace of mind, but you also pay a big premium. If you're buying from a private seller, you'll need to do it in person, and the best platform is Autotrader.
A lot of private sellers probably won't be willing to take the car to a mechanic for you, and used car dealers certainly wouldn't.
I'm not sure on automatic premium, probably sub 1k for an identical year/mileage car? So about a 10% premium at your budget.
sohois
7mo ago
I think given your budget you probably don't need to overthink it or look too much at advice here. You have enough to afford something recent without too many miles so really the only thing you want to think about is which car you like the look of. Plenty of people don't worry too much beyond that and do just fine.
Any of the prestige sedans will work for you. Some people will claim X brand has so many issues or to avoid one specific car, but most of this will just be anecdotal. No one owns enough cars to say that "every BMW is a pain". There will sometimes be known issues with certain models - e.g. the Jag XE ingenium engine had problems with the timing belt in early models. But these are rare and not normally catastrophic to deal with.
Other than Teslas, which have pretty poor reliability used, you can buy any of Audi, BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Volvo, Lexus, even Alfa Romeos are offering reliable cars these days. I would just look through these brands and find the one you like the look of most, then go and buy one. Personally I like the look of Jags, XE and newer XFs. I think the 2010 stylings of Audis and BMWs was a bit safe. Mercedes always does a decent job. I like the Volvo s90 a lot but that might be outside of your price range, and I'm less keen on the lower end volvos.
It's true that maintenance will be more expensive, much the same as a big house will cost more than a small house. Nice things always cost a bit more. But you would still be looking at a yearly service + MOT of around £300-£400. If you have issues it will run up the price, but this is true of any car. Of course you can also spend plenty on valeting, modifications, bodywork, tyres, etc. but this will be your choice.
When you come to buy, there are a couple of things to be aware of:
- Look for cars with "full service history" if you want maximum peace of mind, as this means they have been taken care of
- With a private sale, you can get extra detail by doing a free HPI check at sites like: https://hpicheck.com/. These will also give you a rough valuation
- Avoid cars marked as Cat N or Cat S. This means they have previously been written off
- Even if you know nothing about cars, just use your senses when test driving. Does it sound weird? Are there funny smells? Does it feel weird?
You're not that likely to get saddled with a lemon in the used car market, and although caveat emptor applies, there is some legal protection for complete deceptions. Mostly just a bit of common sense will be enough.
sohois
7mo ago
What are you looking for in terms of age and mileage? How far would you be willing to push to get a better deal? I went from buying private, to buying at auction, to buying salvage at auction and repairing them myself so I've run the gamut. I'm going to assume you won't be doing the latter, but auction is still a viable route if you're okay to gamble a bit.
If you're going autotrader, then 10-15k will be more than enough to get a 'prestige' sedan, a BMW or Merc type. For comparison sake, I just sold a Jag XE, 2015, for around the 6k mark. I'd imagine that a 2015-17, 60-80k milage sedan from any of those brands would be fine. You'll want a diesel if fuel economy matters, especially in Scotland where you won't be taking so many short trips.
Would I recommend the XE? Probably not, it will be a bit more work than you would like although I think it is the best looking in that category. Really I don't think you'll do much wrong just finding an e220 or c-class Merc in that price range. If you want more mod-cons and keep the budget low, a Mazda 6 perhaps?
sohois
7mo ago
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs. It's always going to be difficult for left wingers or liberals to post amongst a much greater proportion of opponents, which means they leave, which means the proportions become even more slanted, which means more leave, and so on.
It was a regular complaint on the subreddit that the posting populace was excessively slanted, but there was at least still the possibility of new entrants to keep it from tipping completely out of balance.
sohois
8mo ago
One aspect worth considering is the extent to which Chinese companies want to compete in the US (and other Western car markets).
And by "compete" I mean really go for the jugular and sell their 10k electric car for 10k (+ the extra you probably have to pay to dealers and the like compared to third-world markets).
I buy a lot of Chinese tech, because their extremely lax attitude towards copyright means you'll generally get all the bells and whistles of the good Western stuff but at a fraction of the cost. Except that this is only true if you buy in China or ship through AliExpress. As soon as Chinese manufacturers enter into Western markets directly, they immediately slap a big premium onto their products, far more than could be explained by local regulation or supply chain costs. BYD have started selling cars in Europe, and when I saw I immediately went to their website to see how competitive their cars would be... and the prices aren't competitive at all, coming in 2-3x the local Chinese price and offering little over Western EV prices.
As long as Chinese producers see the West as just a cash cow rather than a market to really dominate, Western manufacturers will be ok.
sohois
8mo ago
I feel like responders to 2rafa's post would have benefitted from defining what it is "good writing" means to them. Whenever conversations start about writing quality it seems like every person takes their own idea into it without explaining what that is.
Is good writing the overall feel of the narrative to you? Is it the plot itself? The prose, the dialogue, the characterization, the worldbuilding?
If I think of a great video game narrative, I tend to think of games that do something interesting with the medium, something like the adventure game 999. However, I wouldn't describe 999 as having good writing - the plot and dialogue are merely ok, it's how it utilizes the medium to deliver everything that makes it shine.
Similarly, some games basically abandon "writing" altogether; someone below mentioned Ico, and Ueda's games always opt for very minimalist stories, which is something you can get away with in a game but not in other mediums. However, simply opting out of writing shouldn't be called "good writing" even if it produces a very good game.
Meanwhile, titles like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid have very interesting plots and worlds, but the prose and dialogue are distinctly sub-par. I think this is what 2rafa means when they say the writing is bad.
Of course, both titles offer a lot to discuss in that regard. For example, how much of their experiences are defined by the technology of the time? Infamous lines like "What a shame" and "A bomb!" in Deus Ex might work a lot better with modern animations and voice acting. On the other hand, Kojima's 4th wall breaking was bold at the time but would be passé if done now. Plus, if they weren't very good games in other aspects, would anyone remember them?
sohois
8mo ago
Translation might well impact on prose and characterisation, but I've never heard of plot being altered. And it doesn't take much effort to find Japanese games with absolutely nonsensical plots
sohois
9mo ago
Walk into a Brunello Cucinelli, a Hermes, a Thom Browne, or similar and you'll find hundreds of pretty normal looking clothes selling at 1k+ prices each.
sohois
9mo ago
Does anyone mention or link to the Themotte in the comments of ACX? Either in Open threads or elsewhere. Given how much of the community came from slatestarcodex originally, it would seem obvious to try and bring more over from substack. I doubt many of the current readers of ACX have ever gone back and looked at Scott's old post talking about the creation of the motte.
sohois
10mo ago
I'm not from the US and have never bought a copy of Sports Illustrated; it's only really known outside because the swimsuit issue had reached iconic status. But as yourself and most other posters have indicated, the swimsuit issue and changes around it probably had little to do with the overall success of the magazine. It was apparently a weekly magazine up until 2018, and you have to assume that the other 51 editions every year would need to do well for it to have survived so long.
However, I don't think the failure of the title is an indication of a failure to market towards "red bloodied males", nor do I subscribe to FiveHourMarathon's view below that it represents the shattering of general sports interest. In both cases because there is still a "red blooded", general sports magazine that appears to be quite successful - The Athletic. This just looks like a classic case of a media business failing to really transition to a new business model with the arrival of the internet.
sohois
11mo ago
I came here to add the same, although you will also need to pay for hellochinese
sohois
11mo ago
This reads more like Moldbug started an essay but then got bored and just posted the intro.
sohois
1yr ago
This sort of outcome is what makes it very, very difficult for me to take the AI doomerism seriously. Yes, we may get Paperclip Maximiser AGI, but I think it's much more likely to come about by "humans in notional charge think it will make them trillions and so follow blindly its advice" than "machine becomes agent and decides on its own goals".
I'm not sure I follow your logic here.
You don't take AI doomerism seriously because you think that AI doom is likely but through a different path than the 'paperclip maximizer'? I'm pretty certain that the AI safety crowd are just as worried about manipulative oracle AIs as they are about mindless paperclip maximizers.
sohois
1yr ago
You didn't really address the above post, unless you are saying that Isreal is responsible for civil wars and general unrest in countries in Sub-saharan Africa. Why would they do such a thing?
sohois
1yr ago
Whenever I've seen opinions on the wider Elder Scrolls series, it has always been that the most recent edition has been a tragic dumbing down of the series. People who played Daggerfall find Morrowind to be a mass market, lowest-common-denominator mess. People who played Morrowind think the same of Oblivion, and those who played Oblivion find the same issue with Skyrim.
I've only played the last two, but from what I've seen of the other games there is certainly some truth that the series gradually became simpler, more accessible - but perhaps at some cost. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar plan was in place for Fallout, until New Vegas came along and ruined any chance of people looking positively at the others.
sohois
1yr ago
Yes, this site is built on rdrama code. You can tailor it exactly to your liking. The purpose of all that action is to scare off users who can't figure that out
sohois
1yr ago
One thing with housing is that we have examples of localized unaffordability that are much more extreme than most national housing issues, so the local response should give us an idea of what a nationwide response might be. Think of areas like San Fran, Vancouver, London, or most notably Hong Kong. These are often areas where there is some control over house building rates or other local powers that could swing things.
Hong Kong is both the worst in terms of affordability and the one with more control over local issues, but what have we seen there? The only protests in recent years have been from pro-democracy groups. The residents have just accepted worse and worse housing. Even if you believe the CCP's control is a unique situation, it's not like we've seen differently in other overpriced metros.
sohois
1yr ago
I think that this works for some aspects of the show but not all of them. The Guilty remnant, for example. didn't need an explanation - you can just assume that they were a weirdo cult capitalizing on a tragedy like plenty of other weirdo cults. But IIRC there were a number of other bizarre occurrences and red herrings thrown out that couldn't just be handwaved away and seemed like audience hooks that never got resolved.
sohois
1yr ago
I enjoyed The Leftovers but also find it to be a bit overrated. Perhaps my view is in part influenced by the foreknowledge that this was a show from Damon Lindelof, writer of Lost, and seeing people claim that the show "fixed the problems present in Lost" and was Lindelof redeeming himself with a well-handled mystery.
Except it wasn't at all. Where Lost struggled mightily to give answers to every little crazy incident, often to no benefit, the approach of The Leftovers was just to abandon the majority of mysteries every season and never mention them again. This meant it avoided lots of trite explanations or dumb exposition, but I wouldn't call it resolving the problems that Lost had by any means.
I suppose the answer to Leftovers' strong reception is in the idea that "it's really about the characters". After the Lost finale, this line was trotted out a lot to defend the show, that it didn't matter that the mystery box was unsatisfying because actually you just wanted to see what happened to the characters. To an extent you did care about the endings for the characters in Lost, but really it was much more about the mystery box. With the Leftovers, you could actually claim that it was really about the characters, and being an HBO show with a fine cast and big budget, its character stuff was really strong.
Nonetheless, I was disappointed to go in expecting a satisfying mystery box and not getting that. (I'm also expecting the exact same thing to happen with new mystery box show Severance)
sohois
1yr ago
Cyberpunk kind of managed to squeeze in a Trans character without calling any attention to it: the bartender at the Afterlife bar was trans, but the only way you know is because the truck she drives has a trans flag on it (IIRC). Their transness isn't remotely important to their questline, it's just a thing that's there.
sohois
1yr ago
Chinese restaurants in China also have very large menus.
I couldn't say why Chinese cuisine developed in such a way that led to this, but if you're wondering how they manage: Chinese food has very little mise en place. 95% of dishes in the average restaurant will require little more than chopping up your ingredients and frying rapidly. Take a look at someone like Wang Gang, a professional Chinese chef. The majority of recipes he shoots are <5 minutes, even accounting for editing tricks.
A new release sold 13000 copies, much lower than the figures for some of the other books.
Why would you post something that harms your own argument? Or are you saying that the 15million figure is the comparison? Except that's not the same time at all, those books were released in 1991 and that's 20+ years of sales, not to mention a massively book industry
sohois
1yr ago
Tbh this seems utterly pointless for judging anything about the wider "left-wing takeover" or even Disney. We have a list of declining book sales for Disney in a medium overwhelmingly known for movies. We have no comparisons to other books released at a similar time. We do have a comparison to a book series released decades ago, which is likely irrelevant in the current market. We have no analysis of anything else Disney does with the property, or Disney's own success.
You say this:
But it doesn’t matter for Disney
No shit it doesn't matter. Even if sales of the book series blew away the Thrawn trilogy that the author cites, it wouldn't even make a dent in Disney's P&L. Where's the look at Disney's overall financial health?
Every large corporation has issues with "fiefdoms" forming: is there any evidence that Disney is worse than, say, Ford? Or P&G or Salesforce or Shell or Walmart or Apple? Any evidence that left-wing or "woke" politics is causing particular problems for Disney over the pet issues of other large corporations
If you want to complain about a book series, go ahead. But I think you need to bring much more evidence to link this to any kind of issue with major corporations
This is true of pretty much all Final Fantasy stories. Actually the FF series is an interesting case study for this topic, seeing as games have been consistently released for the past 30 years with many of the same people involved again and again.
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