Do you mean that dealers ask for bribes to customers to deliver cars, or that customers bribe dealers to skip the waiting list, or something like that?
In many states in the United States it is illegal to buy a car directly from the manufacturer or from a dealer owned by the manufacturer. In all states it is illegal for a manufacturer with an existing independent dealer network (which is to say, every manufacturer except the EV startups) to sell directly to the customer or to open a new factory-owned dealer.
So companies like Ford can only sell what independent dealers want to sell. You can go to the dealer and ask to buy a car sitting on the lot, and the dealer can just… not sell you the car. For any price. And it is also illegal for the manufacturer to force/coerce the dealer to sell it to you.
Of course the dealer can do softer things also, like talk down the car when you test drive or talk up the benefits of other cars. Or tell you that next year’s model will be much better than this one, so you should wait.
Additionally, most dealers do not actually pay for the car until it is sold to the customer (the manufacturer offers financing to the dealer, called “floor planning”).
Independent dealers do not want to sell EVs because of the perceived loss of service revenue. So they simply offer bad deals on the car that most customers would not take. The cars sit on the dealer’s lot, but that costs the dealer nothing (see above), even though Ford wants to sell an EV and customers want to buy EVs.
Its from when cars were new and it was hard to convince people to buy them to start with instead of just using their horses and buggies and manufacturers didn't spend money on marketing or shipping or sales outside of the local area. So independent car dealers setup shop, bought cars, shipped them across the states, marketed them, trained mechanics to service them, built gas stations, and built a customer base. Then as soon as all the marketing was done and sales started picking up in the area the manufacturer would pop in, undercut the local dealer who just spent all the money marketing and showing off cars and building up stock, buy out their skilled mechanics, and left the dealer with all the debt from advertising and training that they could no longer pay off.
For awhile they got away with it, but eventually it became obvious as to what manufacturers were doing and not having to advertise and built up a local car and mechanic and gas supply economy, so legal protections were put in place to protect the independent dealers from getting shafted.
Of course add on another 100 years of political fuckery all around the industry and you get the mess of today.
Yes exactly that. Either outright via "market adjustment fees" or through mandatory addons like $5,000 in paint protection film that's "already applied, so if you don't want it you'll have to wait until we get another one of this model and we're not sure when that will be..."
Then because of the monopolies the sibling comment mentions, you can't go elsewhere.
It is almost gone for me too, except that I can't adjust brightness on my laptop with Wayland. I can with X11. It's a long story but that's the TL;DR of it. So until all of that almost goes away, it's full X11 at least for some people like me.
I was surprised to learn that Wayland still doesn't offer control of keyboard LEDs like Scroll Lock, so unprivileged programs that use those LEDs cannot be ported to Wayland.
Even if I didn't depend on such a program myself, I would find it strange that Wayland gives the compositor responsibility for only part of the keyboard: its keys, but not its indicator lights.
After all they started by locking down everything and then they are creating all the openings that real world programs need to do what people use computers for. It's probably a better approach that starting with everything open and attempting to lock down, but it takes a long time and some of us will be locked out by some hardware / software mismatch. In my case it seems that Noveau can't talk properly with the backlight control of my card. Neither X11 can with those new kernel and driver but at least it can use gamma correction to simulate a darker screen. Wayland does not have gamma correction or it doesn't work as it should, I can't remember.
Because that's always the case at the beginning, the country doesn't matter. It takes time to learn and improve. People look at the first or second generation models, get complacent and then they are surprised that by the third or fourth generation those remote countries start to innovate and sell better and cheaper products.
It's the same with kids. They start replicating what grown up do, then they start inventing their own stuff. Not everybody of course, but here we are at a scale of million people so innovation happens inevitably.
By the way, that complacency maybe is driven by a few parties, as they dismiss the inevitable future to cash in the initial benefits of offshoring production before moving to something else.
I use a tablet as smart TV. As a bonus it's portable around my house. I'll look into Linux tablets when Android will get too obnoxious to bear. Are they a thing? Basically I need VLC and not much more.
So, the requirement is a system to store all your keys and that it can be duplicated as many times you wish. It looks like a local password manager, let's say keepass. I use it and have copies of the encrypted db on every device of mine, plus the client to access the passwords. I don't know if it qualifies for dumbness but it feels pretty robust. It survived the fall into the lake test (a river in my case.)
But I see every customer of mine using web based password managers, because they want to share and update passwords with all their team. Of course those password managers can use E2E encryption and many do, but my instinct is that if you are using somebody's else service for your data, you can be locked out from your data.
Anyway, it's the concept of having many passwords and having to manage them that's not dumb enough. The most that people do is letting the browser store and complete passwords. The password can be the same 1234pass on every single site.
Web-based password manager user here! It's worth noting that Bitwarden and 1Password (probably all the others too) let you export all of your data into an encrypted archive, so anyone who does this periodically won't be "locked out".
(Naturally, this requires extra effort on the users' part, so who knows how many are actually using this ability.)
That's always the case for through stations, I believe. However even terminus stations don't have their platforms locked to a fixed destination. Milan Central station has 24 platforms and each of them hosts multiple routes. Rome Termini has 32 platforms, same thing. You can monitor departures at this link, if you are very patient to keep track of them
If it's only pay and go why have Sales at all? At the very best you need only a slimmed down Sales Department, so being against pay and go is self preservation.
Do you mean that dealers ask for bribes to customers to deliver cars, or that customers bribe dealers to skip the waiting list, or something like that?