Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Wow, a citation on something totally unrelated to what we're actually discussing and with no relevance, that market sure is solving issues! If anything that failure is actually proof against your position, even if the market said no on one old subscription service, they're still trying different angles and the cartel is trying to get around it and enforce charging you to use your own property.First, I absolutely believe every company would join a cartel if they could get away with it. I also think they are prone to cheating, which is somewhat self defeating.
In regards to this, you hadn't presented evidence of a relevant cartel yet. You are making a positive claim (saying there is something). So I waited for evidence that such a thing existed. As for looking up evidence, I do look up evidence and present it, just not all the time every time, because, well, I'm really busy right now. For example, in this thread, I did actually look up what happened in this case (I just noticed I forgot to link it, apologies. Here it is.:BMW does about-face, drops CarPlay annual subscription requirement), which is where I got that the market solved it.
You're in a remarkably narrow and precise state of busyness that lets you post all your opinions several times a day but too busy to meet the ludicrous standards of evidence you demand from others. I do want to note, though, you didn't answer my question at all.
Are you admitting you made an objection you knew was false at the time just because you could? Or did you genuinely believe that a cartel that was shown to be lying to customers in the first set of citations was not colluding against and scamming customers in the process of lying to them?
"The multi-time Axe-Murderer has a right to walk down the sidewalk like everybody else, just because he was purposefully striding towards you with an axe raised over his head in a chopping position doesn't mean you can just shoot him! You have no proof he wasn't just going to walk past you!"As for my position here changing, I have been arguing that the car market was a free market. And you have some definite legit points that there are real problems with it. So yeah, I'm fine conceding that it's a lot worse than I thought it was. I still could see the used car market keeping them in check, but that's still pretty bad and endemic and frequent. My position changed because you made good arguments. Congrats.
My real, original argument was that the $18/month thing is morally fine to offer, ought to be legally fine to offer, but something I dislike. It's sold with everyone having full knowledge of what they are buying and how much they are paying. I'd be very against hidden fees and sudden price hikes, I view them as close to fraud, if not just straight up fraud. "You didn't read the fine print, get fucked" ain't good enough.
But this quite simply isn't evidence of more collusion. It's just a company trying to get more money.
The rest of us have basic pattern recognition. We've already pointed out that this won't be profitable unless they go after property rights next. We've already seen how this dog and pony show plays out, such as John Deere doing the same thing to turn owning a tractor in a subscription service and John Deere went immediately to trying to remove property rights from people, such as the right of repair, because subscription services like this don't make money unless you take those rights away. Only you, who won't even meet your own standards given you tried to claim lying to customers wasn't colluding against them earlier, refuse to see it.
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