He reduced pay, the higher on the food chain you were, the bigger your cut. His cut was the biggest of all, and thanks to him, pretty much everybody at the company kept their jobs, and the company made it through while competitors folded.

That's what leadership looks like, and I can't tell you the kind of loyalty people had to him afterwards.

Our political/ruling class wanted more of the pie for themselves, dropped the trade barriers protecting American industry, and gorged themselves on the arbitrage as manufacturing flowed to our chief geopolitcal rival, who was quite happy to accept such a generous gift.

Ha! The irony is not lost on anyone.

"We've built the world's most advanced AI coding assistant. It can refactor entire codebases, debug complex issues, and ship production features autonomously. Anyway, here's a terminal bug that makes your screen look like a slot machine. We'll get to it eventually."

One, there's a big urban/non-urban split in American culture. The former are far less likely to know anything about working on cars, nor are they likely to have a friend or uncle that can help.

That cohort is very over-represented on HN.

Second, there's a lot of shady stuff happening in the used car market, and you really do need to be on top of things to not get scammed. We're talking that's absolutely illegal, but also difficult and expensive to enforce, so if you get stuck on the wrong end of a deal, you're just going to eat those costs.

Fixing your diet is one of those sort of flywheel problems. It takes time to figure out what's both healthy and palatable for you, time and freezer and/or refrigerator space to do meal prep, time and energy to work out, and so on.

All of those are skills that are hard at first. Even with YouTube, you don't go from "burns water" to "Michelin star bodybuilder meals" without a lot of practice.

The better you get at all of that, the faster and easier it becomes, until you hit a point where it's just "how you live", and all that energy and time are again free to pursue other things.

If you have money, sure, you can outsource a lot of that. Zuckerberg has a personal chef and dietician, as well as a handful of dedicated personal trainers guiding his fitness regimen.

But most of us can't afford to invest $250k/year or more into that problem.