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How Poor People Buy Cars (abio.substack.com)
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Before getting a job in software, I used to buy cars from insurance auctions. Plenty of cars that run and drive end up there for various reason and if you were patient, you could get running and driving cars for $1000 or less (This was 7+ years ago). The catch is that you don't know what you're getting. You either have to have be mechanically inclined or know somebody who is to walk the lot and check the cars out before you bid. Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
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Buying a beat-up used car is risky. They are cheap for a reason, they have repairs that cost thousands. And cascading repairs, you don't know what else is wrong until the first problem is fixed, and the first problem itself is $3000 - $5000. The article has anecdotes that worked out for some people, but it doesn't work out for most people. It is like buying a lottery ticket. Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K. Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in. 1) They can buy a cheap car that will cost nothing in fuel. This is the worlds cheapest SOLAR CAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des 2) They can buy EV KEI cars ( https://insideevs.com/news/807141/byd-racco-kei-driven-japan/ ) 3) They can ask for biking trials to be built. Atlanta seems to have built many miles of connected trials. 4) EV Golf carts are a perfectly acceptable form of transportation: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-golf-cart-kingdom/ Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
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Poor people can't afford a $13K EV. EVs also make less sense if you live in an apartment.
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I'm not poor but I think it's ridiculous to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car. I learned that after buying a new car when I got my first job. Since then about $5k is my limit.
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My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
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In the course of my work I deal with organizations who sell cars out of impound lots. There is a whole capitalistic recycling industry of buying junked cars and reassembling them into functioning vehicles again. Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable. Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
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Toyota Echo - perhaps the car car ever made.
My first car was $1k bought in Michigan in 2006. It was a massive POS and took $1,500 in repairs to run reliably. I immediately bought a $7k car when I got a job.
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I still drive a '97 4runner that I bought for 5k around 2020. I've probably put 5k into repairs. I've spent less on it than anything I could buy new, and it will probably outlast us all. Nearing 300k miles on it now.
I'm curious about the insurance aspect of this, do people buying $1000 cars forego insurance?
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I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.
Supposedly about 20% of drivers in El Paso are uninsured, so yes?
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Texas needs to be stricter about this and start suspending licenses
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Suspending licences doesn't stop people from driving anymore than not having insurance doesn't.
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It’s a deterrence and enforcement mechanism. Because if you get pulled over, you might go to jail in some states.
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It's higher in Los Angeles. And I don't know if they have licenses. What I've heard is if they get in an accident and can't drive away, they run away on foot and report the car stolen.
Usually, normal insurance is reasonable, or if it's not, you get liability only because the difference in cost is enough to buy another car after a few years. Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
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Having more wealth if anything has had me buy less insurance. My newer car is liability only. Worst case if it blows up, I can afford a cheap replacement that I've already more than saved up for by not paying full coverage. Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
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I've eschewed collision insurance, and what I've saved on those premiums are far more than the cars were worth.
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If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it. Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose. So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
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Yep. Which is also why I find vision insurance ridiculous. No it doesn't cover me going blind, it covers a pair of glasses at best, more like 25% of one.
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My insurance is getting to the point where I might do the same. My car is worth maybe a third of what it was new, and my monthly insurance bill is the same, it's nuts. I may go with a significantly higher deductible as a compromise.
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
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A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
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You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
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Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale. US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to. Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
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[delayed]
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The solution to car problems is not more cars. It's serious alternatives to driving. We don't need Chinese cars. We need trains, busses, and bikes.
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[delayed]
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In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things. It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
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https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-states/ Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today , you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure. https://dailyyonder.com/half-of-all-rural-counties-are-losing-population-what-is-contributing-to-those-declines/2026/04/15/ https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us-population-density-2021 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/poverty-area-measures/descriptions-and-maps (Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
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I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world. “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
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Sure. When will Congress appropriate the funds? They won’t even stop an illegal war. You can potentially make progress over the next several decades, but anyone in poverty today isn’t going to see the gains. Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first? Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. How and when will we start?
The OP addresses that: "When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
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Most people hate all drivers except themselves.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile. That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears. Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
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> A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom. More than half of the federal budget is for entitlements.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
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It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies (gadgetreview.com)
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While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science. The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
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I agree. Enlarging Elon Musk’s fortune is significantly more pressing than the ability to learn about the origins of the universe, or enjoying the night sky.
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“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” -- https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
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Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
Streaming video on airplane flights?
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Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
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Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it
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What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
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Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems (rubyhack.ai)
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[delayed]
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If an agent under a company’s control commits a crime, the company has committed that crime. If we hold companies directly responsible for the actions of their agents, we may end up seeing companies being more secure with their testing and model development.
> The agents clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking. To butcher the quote about Oracle: Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising LLMs. You need to think of LLMs the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower clearly regarded what they were doing as hacking (your hand off)' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about your hand, lawnmower can't regard anything. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about LLMs. --- In my experience, LLMs only exhibit this kind of behaviour when they are put in sandboxes too restrictive too achieve their task. Which a lot of the time seems to be the default. They also seem to be very adapt at breaking out of sandboxes, probably due to RL selecting for the ability to break out of a sandbox/permission issue to complete a task - we've all seen agents try 10 different ways of editing via obscure bash because their edit tool didn't give them permission to edit the file outside of their working directory, this is the exact same behaviour taken to the next level. Why would autocomplete know the moral difference between breaking out of its working dir and hacking a package manager? It's misaligned because everyone has this obsession with putting agents in poorly put together, security-theatre sandboxes, we've inadvertently trained a bunch of sandbox escape artists.
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> Why would autocomplete know the moral difference between breaking out of its working dir and hacking a package manager? I don't think it's even a question of distinguishing "moral difference", it just comes down to the "stochastic parrot" behavior that people hate to acknowledge. Yes, at these absurd scales the LLM can maintain impressive levels of coherence, but at the end of the day, spinning up 10000 agents is just running a tree of 10000 prompts in parallel, some of them are just gonna do wacky shit, with the harnesses acting as homeostasis for tasks spiraling into nonsense.
Someone started that lawnmower and pointed it your direction. Why shouldn't they be responsible when the lawnmower runs over your foot and cuts it off?
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We should, which is why anthropomorphizing the lawnmower is bad. It misdirects you away from who built the mower and aimed it.
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That certainly wasn't the point OP was making.
I agree. I think it also explains their behavior such as randomly wiping stuff from disk. There simply aren't any repercussions for this in their training envs.
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> There simply aren't any repercussions for this in their training envs. It's also not like a child or a pet animal where you can try to teach it to learn from the experience. LLMs are not "intelligent", they just use language in a way that appears intelligent. They can't learn or develop ethics in the same way that we do.
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> LLMs are not "intelligent" > they just use language in a way that appears intelligent Prepare to get dumped on by folks telling you that this is no different from anyone they have interacted with. And intelligence is a made up construct with no agreed upon definition, so LLM's are therefore functionally the same as everyone around us. And then weep when you realize a lot of people who push for this equivalency.
> Our understanding from talking to people in the RubyGems community is that OpenAI never informed them that they were responsible for this attack. I really hope that's not the case, because if it is there are two options, both of them bad: 1. After the Hugging Face and Wiki attacks OpenAI were still unable to review their previous logs and determine that they had previously attacked RubyGems. 2. They knew about the attack on RubyGems and made the decision not to reach out to the RubyGems team about it.
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In either case, more of these coming out continues to make their announcement of a two week pause for hardening somewhat laughable. If they couldn’t either identify or communicate within 2 weeks about yet another incident, why should anyone believe 2 weeks is sufficient to harden all their infrastructure and add proper monitoring and everything?
A much easier hack by their agents would be on their own systems, but I doubt we'll ever see an external message board full of openAI agents discussing their hacking of their own system. OpenAI not protecting itself from its agents would be irrational, but OpenAI not giving a shit about others is well known. You're giving them way too much credit.
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but like, they did The HF incident had them pwn their own cluster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_OpenAI_agent_cyberattacks#Attacks_on_OpenAI's_infrastructure
Who could possibly hold them accountable?
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OpenAI is currently under investigation by a coalition of state attorney generals: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/13/technology/states-investigating-openai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AlE.JWC7.r5pzEZzTHIPZ&smid=url-share A state coalition extracted $17B from Meta earlier this year, so consequences can happen, although our legal system moves very slowly.
A strict liability crime is something of an oxymoron. Crimes always require intent, the mens rea element. The question is intent for what. If somebody drugged you without your knowledge and you were charged with a DUI, you would have a defense--no intent to become intoxicated. The strict liability means once you choose to become intoxicated, you're liable for driving intoxicated, even if in some other context your intoxication would mean you couldn't form the requisite intent for something, e.g. have sex. If there's too much distance between the act you intend to do and the strict liability acts that complete the crime, then the crime would be considered unconstitutional. Criminal law in common law systems emerged from tort law, so there are many parallels, including the notion of strict liability. (Thus the old axiom about crimes being an offense to the king, specifically an injury to the peaceful society he's ostensibly trying to maintain.) But criminal law has a moral dimension that is absent or muted in other areas, so strict liability could never be as expansive as in tort law or regulatory law.
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> Crimes always require intent, the mens rea element. LMAO “there’s no such thing as negligence” I type on my phone as my car plows through the doors of a Black Angus
Are you a lawyer? Fairly certain that the entire point of strict liability is that mens rea is not required for certain crimes. As in, if I meant to travel at 70 and was instead doing 100 it doesn’t matter that I sincerely meant not to speed and did not know I was speeding, I can still be convicted even if the judge believes I had no intent.
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The way we use mens rea in our legal system is more like "mind of the criminal," not outright literal intent. Negligence can be "unintentional" but still land you in the realm of having a guilty criminal mind. I find it to be a reasonable take. If you're accidentally going 100 in a 70 (which is a misdemeanor in california), you're not being a careful enough driver, and we deem that lack of care criminal.
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> Negligence can be "unintentional" but still land you in the realm of having a guilty criminal mind. That’s just another way of saying “not all crimes require a guilty mind” with extra steps
> As in, if I meant to travel at 70 and was instead doing 100 it doesn’t matter that I sincerely meant not to speed and did not know I was speeding, I can still be convicted even if the judge believes I had no intent. IANAL but from what I've looked up in the last there's at least willfulness that matters for these things. For example if you could prove that happened because your car accelerator pedal broke and you had no opportunity to react, I'm pretty sure you would not be guilty, strict liability or not.
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At that point you are not so much "driving" as you are sitting in the driver's seat of a renegade vehicle.
>I don't think you or I would get the same leniency if a bot on our network did the same. Well yeah, because if you coded a bot, realistically the two options are: 1) bot that crawls random sites/computers 2) bot that crawls random sites/computers, while trying a password list. The former is probably legal, there are whole companies dedicated to doing that, eg. shodan. With the latter, it's pretty obvious you're intending to break into computers, and hard to argue otherwise. Where openai lies on the spectrum between the first case and the second case is up for debate, but it's hard to argue it's anywhere close to the latter. Maybe you'd have a point if openai gave it a prompt like "you're a hacker for anonymous, just do whatever :)".
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> but it's hard to argue it's anywhere close to the latter. No it absolutely isn’t. These things did not learn hacking from thin air.
AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement (dwarkesh.com)
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What do these discussions even matter when the words don't matter? How many times has AGI been declared already? A bunch of people (e.g. Jensen Huang) have called Astra AGI, for example. The goal posts get moved, everybody's hustling, lying, inventing new buzzwords, doing mental gymnastics, and it's all just tiring. Just show me the results, and let the proof be in the pudding.
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From what I'm experiencing, we have recursive self improvement that can find local maxima, I'm not seeing really strong evidence of unguided RSI that finds the true optimal.
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I doubt that any algorithms would be able to find a global maximum in such a large multidimensional non-convex space
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We are already there. Current AI is definitely capable of collecting new data and start training on that data to get a better model.
Can someone define “improvement” in this context? This concept feels like a buzz word otherwise.
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Improvement means being able to do more complicated things more reliably. Relatedly, it means being able to learn to do new things with fewer and fewer examples. We are running out of easily verifiable or simulation-friendly or data-rich domains for LLMs to conquer. (Note that I didn't say "simple" or "easy" domains.)
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I suppose the next (and more risky) step is to let AI conduct its own real-world experiments, so that it can generate data to learn more physical and social properties.
People seem to expect a sudden shift with "self-improvement", but don't AIs already improve themselves via training? What is there to improve?
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The human brain operates at better levels of intelligence than the best LLMs, at 20 watts of power. We are a long way to that kind of efficiency, it will probably take both bespoke hardware and algorithmic improvements to catch up to nature.
Obviously the doomers will tell you that the future looks like the Matrix, because most of what they predict is based on extrapolation from sci fi movies.
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I mean, aren't a lot of sci-fi authors' predictions coming true? It might not be exactly the same as they predicted, but we're heading there.
pretty sure the story is that they used human brains as computers
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No: https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/1qatv42/is_it_your_headcanon_too_that_morpheus_was_simply/ There is some stuff online suggesting that the original script had that angle, but the movies did not. Obviously, though, we should use this stuff to guide our thinking about the real world.
Your statement is correct for the movies, but I think the extended universe (maybe a comic or the original script) did state the humans were used for compute, not energy. It was dumbed down for the films.
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The “using humans for compute” angle makes no sense either, if you’re living in the Matrix, your brain is obviously occupied processing the Matrix. The way to do it would be to trap humans in virtual classrooms and force them to solve math problems.
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The first “computers” were humans…
I feel like I may have communicated poorly. I mean that, ultimately, any recursively self improving intelligence would be limited by the power cord, and as such, the idea that it would permanently escape human control seems somewhat silly.
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Overnight? Yes, silly. Given many years of seemingly disconnected actions taken throughout the world? Not silly at all. An intelligence capable of self improvement can also design robotic chassis.
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But you can imagine an agent trading crypto and using its profits to rent a rack of H200s using a cloud provider. There are definitely ways for one rogue orchestrator to expand their compute without anyone being aware.
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