Also hate clickbait title cards? Theres now an extension to remove those as well: https://dearrow.ajay.app/

This SponsorBlock extension also integrates with yt-dlp so downloaded videos can have ads stripped in the final video. That way you don't even have to ever go to youtube itself. The war isn't over yet and people must keep fighting back.

This video explains why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_epwf-IBgU

After watching this I totally understood why so many dumb issues occured:

Kia Boys issues: cheaped out on adding a immobilizer in the US only, Canada had laws in place.

Engine explosions: Poor manufacturing standards left junk in the engine causing oil starvation which caused spun bearings.

Oil consumption: GDI engine design caused excessive burning of oil and deposit layers of gunk if you keep topping up oil. If you don't(and most Hyundai owners expect their car to work like a normal car and not burn up to a qt/1000 mi) then the engine eventually runs dry and explodes(denied warranty as well).

We got Mustang, Camaro(Lutz had a hand in that), Jeep etc. They all don't compete with Toyota for quality partially because the culture drives the companies and that eventually drives car design and manufacturing. Tourists often rent these cars when visiting the US because they are one representation of the country's soul.

When comedians are making fun of this brand, I dont think its out of any love for the brand.

[1]: https://youtu.be/U33vwS1WcI8?t=86

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTfS0nAgfuE

So much of what we have has been brought to us thanks to ubiquitous fuel, ubiquitous technology, and institutions that took centuries to form and solidify. All of this built on the backs of people who sacrifiec and sometimes did horrendus things to allow us to be in the places we are. There's just so much hubris and misunderstanding of what they have been given in their lives that they don't appreciate. Pissing all this away is fine to them. Yes, I get it...they didn't get the same quality of life as their parents did(who came of age in an abberation).

What they don't realize is that it could get much worse. Many of them may not even live to see how bad it could get. This is so frustrating, and it just increases my disrespect for them.

Allegiant is an old Airline that has had a lot of problems. Breeze is new but both are starting super small and are not planning to really cover Spirits extended network anytime soon. The result of Spirit dying is alot of that prior investment in second tier cities/airports is just gone for the forseeable future. The potential value that could have generated will now not come to pass.

>Poorly run companies are supposed to go bankrupt, that’s the feedback loop keeping management in check.

The problem that is occuring in my opinion is that Spirit is a symptom of a greater problem. The "K shaped" economy is not only segregating groups of people into haves and have nots, its extending into regions of the country. Losing major airlines access is the precursor to entire regions declining, and ultimately dying completly. If the AI robot world comes to fruition maybe many humans just have no economic value at all.

Note: I was very emotionally invested in Spirit because they made possible many fascinating trips that wouldn't have happened so my take may be biased. I can only think of a handful of companies that clearly positively impacted my life and Spirit was one of them.

1. Post COVID, the structural costs went up: pilots, flight attendants, suppliers demanded more money. Spirit paid decently well, had decent benefits from what I heard. When you are Spirit...to attract good people you gotta pay. It really showed in their operations, they had 0 crashes during their 34 years and had notable excellence in their maintenace operations. People thought they flew rickety junk planes. The reality was that they had a stellar run.

2. Pratt & Whitney GTF issues: Spirit actually had quite a young Airbus only fleet. Great for lowering costs through fuel/maintenance savings, customers enjoy the newest best planes...the downside is that if a major issue comes out, it could spread across the entire fleet. Thats exatly what happened: They leased brand new planes and then a serious engine issue occured that forced grounding of many new planes for 1+years....while they are still paying the leases on those planes.

3. The bigger competitors are really just credit card companies that fly planes as a hobby on the side. That gave them the financial ability to siphon off customers by introducing a barebones tier. Spirit customers aren't really the type to play the credit card points game so they couldn't copy what the big guys do and despite travel increasing after COVID, people decided to pay a bit more to not have the barebones experience.

4. Spirit was in the process of revamping their entire offering to better compete. More simple tiers with things baked in and less extreme customization that they used to offer. Makes sense: 9$ fares were gone for good so maybe they could compete as a solid basic tier. They did not move fast enough to turn things around. Its a bummer because it looks like they had an interesting plan after the second bankruptcy but we never got to see it fully play out.

5. The final nail in the coffin: The Iran war took out any remaining breathing room. They were just coming out of their second bankruptcy. I personally feel they had a viable plan to try and turn things around but the Trump admin just let them die without really trying. From my understanding(and I could be wrong) Trump pulled some nonsense where he wanted like 90% of the airline for peanuts, they would support ICE transport operations etc. The owners of the debt obviously said no and that was the end of that. Great job losing 17k employees their livelihood. Since this is a tenure based industry, many end up starting from scratch at another airline. A emergency merger or something would have had better consequences for the employees. Will be interesting to see how this affects the midterms since Spirit was based in Dania Beach, FL (Miami area)

The idea behind a Frontier + Spirit merger makes sense. The airlines combining together can cover a greater network, Spirit was getting rid of its poor leases through bankruptcy and maybe they could have been a major airline in the low end. The argument against is that Frontier is not doing too well either so should you really combine bad + bad?

>The problem for US automakers is that by the time they see a local market, they'll be well behind the curve in development. I don't think a GM will be able to compete in product (never mind price) to a BYD et al.

It's possible that GM and Ford are dead companies already. Although at the same time, I'd expected Tesla to decline a lot faster than they really did post MAGA Musk. They've had massive duds and a lot of money spent. Yet in terms of the U.S. they are still ahead of the pack in technology development and sales are not abysmal which is insane given there have not been any new platforms introduced. In fact they have discontinued models.

Whether BYD overtakes the American market remains to be seen, and maybe even in Europe we might see eventual pushback as things get really dire with the local manufacturers. It's really too early to tell.

China has an oversupply of EVs. They have over 100 car companies right now competing to the very death, and only a small handful will survive. Those companies will be very strong. But due to the oversupply and the 25% youth unemployment rate, China has to find a way to offload these vehicles overseas or else they'll suffer significantly as well. So it's going to be interesting times, and I'm not too sure how things are going to play out long term.

The U.S., it should be clear by now, is just this patchwork of random laws and people blocking radical change at various levels. And everyone who wants to move forward is forced to find some other avenue to get some half baked solution in place just so they can get around the historical blocks. We see this in everything from zoning, to deploying Internet, to even fixing this system. There's just too much inertia to not change things.

I'm not sure if you are U.S. based or not, but if not, you need to understand the context as to why that system came to be. It wasn't all just nefarious. Voting intregity activists have argued for a two way verification system. Having paper ballots to provide a record that can be audited, as well as digital input so that you can achieve the goals of quick results. Obviously, two verification steps need to occur.

After the 2016 election, a lot of activists started pushing for each state to adopt this sort of system. In my particular state, NJ there used to be only electronic recording to a memory card which obviously can be tampered with. Now they have systems where you still input the votes digitally on a giant touchpad, but as soon as you make your selections, the choices you made are printed on paper and shown to you. Once you confirm that they are the selections you made, the paper is cut and dropped into a ballot box, giving you a paper record plus the digital copy.

The thing that NJ has not fully implemented is automatic two way verification. From my understading as of now results are still digitally tallied. I think Colorado has done in interesting process of mandatory risk limiting audits of the paper ballots to ensure no anamolies are present else the results are recounted manually. The problem with not doing some sort of two way verification is that the only time NJ would look back at the paper is if there's an obvious discrepancy or if a lawsuit gets filed. I'd argue that they need to take it a step further and do automatic two-way verification. Activists have proposed statistical risk auditing be implemented everywhere, so if there's any deviation, a full recount is automatically performed.

The biggest problem that I see right now is in a lot of the southern states or swing states that matter, the governments are not taking this issue seriously. And so they are still using direct electronic recording. So my frustration is: what's the point of putting in all this work if the states that really matter are not taking this seriously?

Maybe the eventual chinese sodium batteries will solve some of these issues.

You can debate all you want. If I have learned anything this past decade, its the internet has little bearing on how real life turns out. Just look at the sales numbers. In the US they are now slightly declining after years of steady growth. I watch auto industry shows that talk about how executives who bet their reputations on the EV transition at places like Ford and GM now stand with destroyed careers because the demand was just not there and billions of wasted capital that had to be written down.

A car company has to sell a product that the masses will buy. It turns out for the US (and I suspect Canda as well) that product is currently hybrids. It gets the fuel cost down for people while allowing them to not give up on what they come to expect.

Caveat: (Yes I know geeks here will say apple users are just dumb and want a status symbol....they'll never get it)

People say a lot of things. If the infrastructure isn't there, it will end up like the US. I'm not sure Canadian EV infrastructure is up to snuff compared to China or even Europe. In the US a lot of people tried electric and now I am finding again and again, for many of these people, the next car after their EV is a gas car. Because poor implementation of the charging experience has put a bad first experience in many peoples minds. In the US K shaped economy, there are enough people that can stomach higher gas prices, and the lower portion of the K shaped economy has an even worse EV infrastructure or otherwise cannot afford most EVs(used or new) anyway.