A more mundane one, but people on reasonably normal incomes living in a house that’s at least one order of magnitude more expensive than they could ever afford even if they purchased it twenty or thirty years ago. Its particularly bad in things set in expensive areas like London or New York or Tokyo. Like being able to afford a house in central London rather than renting a flat with three other people takes substantial money, you aren’t going to be afford that if you work in a supermarket.

The latter every time. It’s made much worse as it’s almost always achieved via a leveraged buy out, saddling the business with huge debt and absolving the vulture from most of the risk. It’s used as a one way ticket to stripping the company of any value.

So this is obviously McDonald’s but manufacturing suffers a similar path:

1. Make high quality and respected product onshore
2. Get purchased by vulture capitalist
3. Lower standards to increase profit
4. Product is offshored to cover up falling sales
5. Quality nosedives
6. Once the customer base catches on sales nosedives
7. Lower quality even more and brand becomes a joke
8. Get purchased by mega conglomerate who collects brands like Pokémon
9. Rival product gets made onshore by a small team who used to work for you

See Doc Martin and Solvair or Hunter Wellingtons or any other of a large number of former halo brands. Filson is one going through this right now

Yeah and he’s stuck as D&D would narc him out of he changed it now in a desperate attempt to save their tattered reputations.

As others have mentioned Danis heel turn was rushed by also Brans story was also cut short. If they had actually given him the time to have some epic adventures and actually save everyone then may be he could have lived up to Tyron’s billing at the council.

Some of it is also he just doesn’t know when to self edit out the additional pov stories. We should be reducing them as we approach the finish not adding new ones as he has been doing.

UK it will be possible to buy the vaccine in the new year at some point but not currently. Assuming it works the same as the flu vaccine you can book and pay at Boots online ahead of time and just turn up.

Its really hard to get the vaccine for free for the more moderate at risk groups if you are under 65 now, it used to be over 50s.

In the EU they would struggle to significantly cut the purchase price without screwing themselves with their liability with leased cars, particularly those on PCP (which is one of the most common ways to buy a brand new car) as the manufacturers own the liability on that final payment (via their finance arm) not the purchaser. If they cut new prices significantly then older cars will also see a significant drop in resale price, those final payments are already finely balanced.

VW in particular fucked up as they put in a janky in car control system after removing all the buttons, stuck the largest battery behind the expensive high performance motor setup only (more people want range not performance at this point, this was a cheap counter productive cash grab trying to force people to a more expensive model), and was at least a generation behind on the EV side of things for charging and efficiency. Oh, and they killed the cheapest version of the car as well. Now they shut down their EV factory and fire workers, blaming falling industry wide EV sales rather than their own fuck ups, and they have the most to lose from China eating their business from the bottom.