Slashdot Mirror
Dealership Remotely Disables A Car Over A $200 Fee (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes the CBC:
A car dealership in Sherbrooke, Quebec, may have broken the law when it used a GPS device to disable the car of a client who was refusing to pay an extra $200 fee, say consumer advocates consulted by CBC News. Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease for a Kia Forte LX back in May from Kia Sherbrooke. Two months later, the 20-year-old's grandmother offered to buy the car outright when he lost his job and couldn't make his weekly payments. After settling the balance and paying a $300 penalty, Lallier said, the dealership told him he would have to pay an additional $200 to remove a GPS tracker that had been installed on the car...
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."I just find it absurd that over $13,000 was spent on this vehicle and we still have to pay $200 more to have their device removed," he told CBC. After Lallier refused to pay the fee, a mechanic notified him by text message that his car was being remotely disabled until the dealership recovered the device and $200 fee. "I went outside and tested my car, and it wouldn't work at all...and I got angry," Lallier said.
Lallier had finally started a new job and was headed to work, according to the CBC. The president of the Automobile Protection Association says the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
A new business model: We'll remove that pesky fucker for only 100 bucks!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's a cheap car at 13k.
Why do you think the GPS device was in there in the first place?
It's a device specifically designed to disable cars remotely.
Don't you think that GPS device had something built-in to remotely disable the car?
If you leave your property within an item you transfer to someone else, you should pay, not be paid, to recover said item. The dealership should be sued for extortion.
He should sue them:
As this is Slashdot, I feel obliged to say my first action would be to find that device and attempt to remove it myself. I would keep that box as a trophy.
There is a Car Lot in my town where if you miss a payment, they disable the vehicle. This sort of thing isn't new and while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
GPS can't send shit. It's a receiver only, it picks up signals from satellites in frigging space. If your phone could send signals to space it would cost, and weigh, a fuckload more.
There's no remote tracking without a cellular modem or other transmitter to send the coordinates resolved by the GPS receiver across a terrestrial network.
I can't help but feel like you completely missed the point of OP's post. GPS has basically nothing to do with this story, except for what the people that wrote it were referring to the device as. Immobilizer is the proper term. GPS is only a secondary function of it, and again, not relevant to this.
Fucking brilliant plan. You fall behind on payments and they remove your ability to move around and have a hope of making the money. I bet they charge you for the privilege too.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
He had not agreed to pay.
The land of the little guy who means nothing anymore, and the coroprations/comanies that can stomp on people unable to legally defend themselves in many, many instances.
You cannot disable anything via GPS devices unless the device has a preprogrammed list of locations that will disable the car. More likely they disabled the car via mobile network (GPRS/EDGE/3G/LTE).
Now, that's the kind of insight one usually only expects to find from Gartner.
A free market always sorts things out the best.
Haha we mock you for much more than that. We also mock you for the atrocious health care you have because you can't afford to access it. The rise of less developed ways of thinking and increasing extremism which make your country an embarrassment on the world stage. Oh, and of course also for the third-world levels of gun crime and drug use which you just don't seem to want to change. Venezuela probably isn't half as bad as you appear to naively believe but you won't ever know that because Fox News won't cover that and you'll label any stories which challenge your limited viewpoint as "fake news". America is a laughing stock for things it appears its citizens haven't even realised they got a bum deal on.
His first action should be to file a criminal complaint for fraud and whatever they can make stick like some sort of "reckless endangerment" charge if he was on the road when it happened. "I'll see you in court" should start with the criminal and then go into the civil here if at all possible.
Unless you're friends with Venezuelans and realize fa actually twice as bad as you thought. Just hit their social media to see what's really going on.
Their toll free phone number is 1-888-258-7467
Time for an "inquiry" into their practices. If enough /. members call it will definitely cost them more than the $200.00 they did this for...
http://www.kiasherbrooke.com/fr/contactez-nous
No, you can't send other messages over GPS. There is no exploit, and GPS is completely irrelevant to this story.
Presumably there is a cell modem in the car, which was used to remotely trigger the immobilizer.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Once he have has bought out the lease, how difficult would it be for the owner to remove the disabler himself, or just smash the modem?
Except that he completely paid the car off, which is the opposite of embarrassing.
You've confused GPS signals with GPS tracking devices. You're right that a GPS signal is not going to disable the vehicle, but GPS tracking devices often include the necessary cellular network hardware to provide remote disable capability.
So, yes, you can disable a car via the GPS tracking device.
GPS can't send shit.
Yes and no. GPS can send RF signals. Not shit.
It's a receiver only, it picks up signals from satellites in frigging space.
See - GPS is a transmitter too. Why can't the car have a GPS transmitter in it?
If your phone could send signals to space it would cost, and weigh, a fuckload more.
It would probably weigh a tonne, cost about 13k$ and require a gasoline engine to run it?
captcha: quagmire
So it's k.
I tend to rant.
The cheap bastard should just pay up and shut up, and if he doesn't, he should be locked up. People should quit whining and pay their debts.
The problem in the US has never been lack of or availability of health care. The problem is that people in the US have a choice and many make poor choices. Even at minimum wage I was never unable to afford healthcare in the US and I've lived here for over 15 years.
I come from a country where healthcare is "free" and run by the government, it's nice but certainly not excellent nor cheap.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I can't help but feel like you completely missed the point of OP's post. GPS has basically nothing to do with this story, except for what the people that wrote it were referring to the device as. Immobilizer is the proper term. GPS is only a secondary function of it, and again, not relevant to this.
Does the immobilizer have builtin GPS? If so, then calling it a "GPS device" is correct, and the company die use this GPS device to disable the car.
Yes, the term "immobilizer" may be more precise. But that does not make "GPS device" incorrect.
Claus
Actually, according to the documents I have on my new car, once I have paid at least 50% of the balance, it's mine and they can't take it from me. If they want to recover from there, they can only pursue me as per a normal debt.
After 50%, it literally states that it's legally my property. Sure, if I refuse to pay, they know I should have a car, but they can't just repossess it immediately. Before 50%, if I refused to make payments, they could disable it, recover it, just walk up to it with a manufacturer's key and take it - it's still theirs.
And it counts the deposit and the finance, so you actually own the car earlier than halfway through the payment term.
Now, it's a bog-standard personal car purchase, so I imagine that that's pretty standard for the UK/EU or that it's a statutory ruling that they have to abide by and tell you.
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
If a person owes you a bill, you bill him. Or file a mechanic's lein. Or sue him.
Breaking his stuff is not on your list of legal options. Because it is _his_ stuff. You have damaged his chattel and deprived him of the use of it. Doesn't matter if you had owned it at some time in the past.
Governments usually come down pretty hard on any (unshielded) terrestrial transmitters on GPS frequencies. The only transmitters are supposed to be in orbit. That's why this car wouldn't have a GPS transmitter.
Or you take back the work you did. Being a welder this option is also has the benefit of being highly satisfying.
My guess is pretty difficult. You may not be able to even find the thing very easily.
At the very least I'd imagine that smashing the cell modem would trigger the immobilizer.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
Guess what I have? Food and toilet paper!
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Fucking brilliant plan. You fall behind on payments and they remove your ability to move around and have a hope of making the money. I bet they charge you for the privilege too.
Of course. And repo the car and sell/lease it again to someone else they hope can't keep up with the payments so they can do it again. And again... John Oliver did a good piece on the practice. IIRC one car had been sold 80+ times... A search for something like 'John Oliver car loans' on Youtube will probably find it.
Sounds like they have fitted a tracking device that lets them disable the car remotely if you fail to pay the bills and will report its position using GPS so they can go and recover their car. So this is exactly what it's designed to do. What it is not designed to do is do that *after* you've bought the car off them. They should have removed it when selling the car or left it in but disabled. The $300 penalty for paying it off early should have covered the work to remove the tracker.
It would be trivial... provided he manages to find the device, which really can be a pain.
Installation of these things use security-by-obscurity by not disclosing it's location in the car. There's no more than that to it.
That's like saying ISIS set off a bomb by calling a GPS device... which happens to be a smartphone. Technically accurate, but woefully misleading...
It WAS a lease, it became a sale when they agreed the sale and he paid the price for it.
"It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full."
Which he was. The tracker fee is not the sale of the vehicle.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like. In this case, all agreed that the car was paid off. That means the dealership was illegally disabling someone else's car.
Next up, the first mention of the devices existence was when the dealer demanded a $200 fee to remove it. Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point.
I have to wonder though if this is very much a game of luck. When you hit old age and may have issues do you really think you'll be able to afford decent healthcare whenever you need it? I suspect someone who has been on a low wage for the majority of their lives would not. I'm sure many Americans simply make bad choices and that causes health care to be unattainable for them but coming from a fairly progressive country with a health care system which is among the worlds best and is completely free in all but a tiny proportion of cases I find that incredibly backwards. I totally agree with taxing smokers and alcoholics so they pay their way but I really don't understand the logic in taxing all but the wealthiest (who can avoid it) and then making being poor even more difficult by having well below par public services.
However, GPS being a technology and not a device that recieves or transmits in and of itself, can do neither.
There is a device, and it uses GPS to do its work. And its work includes disabling the car. As well as locating the car.
That is the device. The dealer called it a GPS device. Blame them if you want to blame someone for your stupidity.
Yeah, because people in the US choose to have a trade policy that favors outsourcing jobs. Oh, wait, most are opposed to that. We even elected a President over it and yet the politicians STILL fight doing something about it. Or how people in the US choose to not have full time jobs that have benefits. Oh, wait, most newly created jobs are part time low wage positions that don't come with anything. Yeah, people totally choose to be like that.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem with health care is that we have private, for profit companies running it when health care itself does not obey the laws of the free market. Here's a few: nobody is forced to buy or sell (bullshit when you have a broken arm, or cancer, or something like that). Second, everyone has access to perfect or at least good information. Also bullshit. Need I go on?
The dream that the free market can fix something that so obviously doesn't follow its principles is what's stopping American healthcare from being fixed. The primary problem with Obamacare is that it left for-profit primary health insurers in business. We don't have a health care problem in the US. We have a health INSURANCE problem in the US. The problem isn't as the Sarah Palin crowd likes to say, the government getting between you and your doctor (though the war on pain treatment is a good example they'll never bring up)--the problem is that fatcats in business suits get between you and your doctor, or between you and any doctor. Doctors don't like it, patients don't like it, and it's bad for the economy.
What? Bad for the economy? How? Ever wonder why large corporations, which would stand to benefit financially from not having to provide health insurance as part of job benefits, are so opposed to actually fixing this problem? Why would a company be like that other than political stubbornness on the part of its leaders? The answer is control. Many people are stuck in jobs they hate just so they can have health insurance. If we didn't tie insurance to employment, these people would be a lot more free to leave. People who are free to leave are free to work elsewhere, to start businesses on their own, to employ others themselves if they do, and generally increase competition both in the product market and for employees. None of that suits the ultimate goal of large megacorps, which is to have a servile immobile low-wage workforce with no competition in the market. Think about that the next time you want to lay blame for all this at the feet of regular working people.
Yes. They would have used cellular communication for that. The disablers are commonly referred to as GPS devices since they provide GPS tracking info (also via cellular) to the dealer. It's just a short name for the thing, not a mis-understanding of the technology involved.
Asinine behavior like this is what inspires people to write up how to's for removing these things. Turns out a fair number of these how to's already exist.
http://www.instructables.com/i...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://trackimo.com/disable-g...
Social media... Seems legit.
On they Facebook panic button "We assume you are leaving a negative review because of the recent news coverage concerning Mr. Lallier. It would be important to understand that the CBC has unfortunately mis-identified Kia Sherbrooke as the seller. The car was in fact sold by a third party. If, indeed you are leaving your review because of this subject, we ask you to please remove your review as Kia Sherbrooke is not implicated in the sale. We simply share the same adresse as the third party. We are sorry for the confusion this has caused. We are currently in contact with CBC to clarify the situation."
We also mock you for the atrocious health care you have because you can't afford to access it.
Wait until you can't make the monthly repayments on your wifi-enabled pacemaker...
Its not repulsive at all. These devices are installed on cars sold to people with piss poor credit so that they can be easily repossessed if the person does not pay. If these devices did not exist interest rates would have to be higher and people who represent higher credit risks simply could not be financed. So people like the man in this story would likely not have the possibility of buying anything other than a terrible old beater that would not likely be reliable and cause them similar problems.
Really check your frigging outrage. This is market working! Now yes they charge you for the privilege of having this disable device installed. Frankly the dealer did screw up, they should have just built the $200 fee into the initial invoice one way or another so that it was effectively paid once the original invoice was but at the end of the day they were just collecting for services rendered. Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice. Still who hasn't bought something or subscribed to a service and found out that there is an install fee or a setup fee or something missing from the top line number and only in the fine print or worse when they actually were standing their CC in hand?
The alternative for the dealer would have been sending this to collections, so this guy could have been harassed for some indefinite period of time. I am really not sure that is better but it was prior practice.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I love this post. I do support work for a local Gartner office. It's fun seeing them randomly mentioned like this.
We have health care programs for both the poor and the elderly. As the prior poster said, no one is without it unless they make bad choices, or even stupid choices.
Theft = Market working ? Feckin-A most would say shoot the car dealer in the head ... that is the yeomanry working. EOF.
Does the immobilizer have builtin GPS? If so, then calling it a "GPS device" is correct, and the company die use this GPS device to disable the car.
Yes, the term "immobilizer" may be more precise. But that does not make "GPS device" incorrect.
You could shove one in soft fruit and claim it was immobilized by bananas. Its inaccurate and misleading to refer to features of the device that had nothing to do with how it was used to immobilize the car.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
dealerships are scum with there hidden / BS fees.
Hell some even did shit like after the sale called and said we forgot to add this fee or we sold the car for to low of an price and if you don't pay up we will void the sale with the car being marked as stolen
That's like saying you can kill an elephant with a rolled up newspaper if you tape the newspaper to a rifle.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
These things are often installed with the knowledge of the user of the car, as a way to disable the vehicle if they skip town with it or stop making payments on it, and so it's installed with a similar level of covertness as is a lowjack or a car alarm. Not to say they're all "installed properly", but the idea is to put them in some nonstandard location, made to look like they belong, not in a location easily discovered by accident or even if you're looking for it, and almost always wired up in such a way that simply cutting it out will render the car disabled by default. You have to know how to "restore the connections to the engine/computer/starter after cutting the unit out, otherwise the car's computer, ECU, or starter won't work because some of its lines (that were bypassed during the installation of the device) were not reconnected in their normal/default way.
As an example, on my new truck, the aftermarket remote start/alarm I had installed has "memorized" my chipped key and that's the only reason it can remote-start start the truck. (since the key isn't present) If you cut out the alarm, you will have interrupted the lines between the computer and the ignition switch, and the car won't start for you because it can't see the key.
Any alarm/disabler that ceases to disable the vehicle when simply cut out is junk. They do exist. I've owned one in the past that installed a relay in series with the starter solenoid power, and was connected by default. Only when the relay received power would it disable the starter. The relay was turned on when the alarm was going off. So in that case if you cut out the alarm (or simply unplugged the connector block from the unit, if you could find it) then the kill relay would have no power and the vehicle would start just fine. That's a bad design though. Reminds me of the movie trope where there's a bomb or something that's attached to a timer and the good guys are trying to disarm it but run out of time before they can figure it out. So they just reach in and rip it out, and that disables the bomb. (Rei ripping out the compressor, Carol Marcus disarming the torpedo by ripping out the fuser, etc) Or any number of movies where shooting the security panel at the door unlocks/opens the door, or shutting down the power to the building unlocks the vault door. Despite what you've seen in the movies, that's not how they're supposed to work. This is the difference between something that's designed to 'fail-safe" vs "fail-open".
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
But according to Forrester you can disable anything via GPS, and cause it to explode too.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
They probably DID roll the fee into the initial invoice, even if it wasn't explicitly mentioned, and are just trying to extort a little more money. But supposition aside, if it wasn't in the contract, then it wasn't in the contract. Case closed.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
In the UK, it is quite common to sign a *lease deal* for a new car. However, this type of "ownership process" rarely involves the dealership directly.
Instead [here in the UK] the client typically either enters into a hire-purchase type of agreement with the vendor of the vehicle [which in this case would be Kia Canada, Inc], or they enter into a quite separate leasing contract with a third party leasing company. Then what happens is the leasing company pays the dealership the ticket price of the car [sometimes less than that] and the dealer is fully paid for the vehicle. The leasing company then takes over collection of the monthly payments from the driver.
This is common because dealerships don't want to turn into debt collection agencies [in the UK the law on debt collection requires i.e. licenses], they just want their money.
So I would be asking someone to go over that paperwork with a very fine eye for detail. In the event that the dealership had out-sourced the purchase deal [perhaps for a commission on the sale of the loan] then their act of disabling the vehicle would effectively constitute an entirely different type of act.
Now this is where things get interesting. The law usually includes provisions for things like "Criminal damage" in anticipation of physical acts, i.e. "brick through windscreen", but what if the damage was caused electronically? Can you really call something "criminal damage" if the damage can be "reversed" remotely, as happened here? I guess the only alternative to criminal damage in this scenario would be some form of hacking charge, on the grounds that the dealership illegally tampered with the car's internal computer systems without authorisation.
I don't know if Daniel Lallier will be taking any legal action against the dealership for the aggravation they have caused him, but I certainly hope that a local public prosecutor will pick up this case and go after the dealership. Ignorance of the law is no defence, or so we're told, so I'd certainly hope that some form of punitive damages would be sought, to make it clear to others that this sort of thing is not acceptable.
You can't take back weld-work. The only thing you can do is more weld-work in the same place.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Also here in the UK, there are car dealers who do have the appropriate licences for offering credit, and do use the same remote immobilisation devices for use when payments are missed. I sold an old car to a local dealer, who specialised in car credit for high risk borrowers - typically charging 20% APR or more. It's quite a lucrative business model it seems - I sold them £4000 (CAP Value) worth of Ford Focus for £2800 (I needed rid of it, it was beginning to go wrong in a very expensive way) and a week later it was on their website for £4995. If the loan was repaid in full at 20% APR, that car they paid me £2800 for would make them £7000. Anyway, I Googled them when planning the sale, to see if they were at all dodgy. There was a newspaper article where they'd disabled a car they'd sold someone after a single late payment, and were charging a reinstatement fee to turn it back on. I imagine the car I sold them also went out the door with one of these devices.....
In the socialist model, the car never worked in the first place, the government promised they'd fix it, and the owner starved to death while waiting.
Better than the capitalist model, where the car never worked right in the first place, the dealer promised they'd fix it, and the owner was taken for all of his hard-earned money for nothing.
How's that Venezuelan socialism working out for you? More oil than Saudi Arabia, and socialism ran the entire country into the ground to the point the population is starving.
Hmm, apparently you don't know that selling Oil is a Capitalist business, and that Saudi Arabia managed 5 times the production of Venezuela, or that Venezuela, rather than being Socialist, is run by a corrupt oligarchy, and that they've been hindered by being unable to sell the oil due to foreign intervention.
In capitalism, the rich are powerful. Poor people in the USA have TVs and cars and cell phones, and anti-American leftists mock them because they get so much food they're fat.
It's not the quantity, it's the quality. You can suffer from being an overweight sack of crap as well. And Americans are exploited and victimized across the board, in case you forgot the mortgage crisis, Trump university fraud, and don't even know what's going to happen in Houston.
In socialism, the powerful get rich - and the people starve while the government goes broke. See Venezuela and Greece.
Venezuela, as already noted, has been hindered by a rich oligarchy, and foreign intervention. Greece, contrary to your ignorance, actually suffered from foreign manipulation as well, they weren't going broke due to any particular failures of their own, even the drop in tourism wasn't a real problem, it was all shenanigans in the financial centers of Europe.
Owner should find a really successful attorney and push to have the stealership prosecuted for unauthorized access to a computer and for wire fraud; both of those have some serious teeth and could land the mechanic in prison indefinitely.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
As pointed out above, anything with gps capability can be called a gps device but it doesn't make it accurate. Would you call a JDAM a gps device? Is your phone? Think it through, dear.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
This is why you never buy from a dealer.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
There was a device intended to disable the car. It apparently contained some GPS hardware, for some unstated reason. But the disable capability was not in the GPS.
Somewhere on an aircraft carrier, you might find a tape measure. That doesn't mean tape measures can launch fighter jets. The tape measure is merely part of the aircraft carrier.
GPS obtains coordinates, and then can make them available to something else. That's all it can do. It can't disable a car, show a map, or catapult-launch a fighter. But it might be a useful component for those types of jobs.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
This reply perfectly illustrates the blindness to issue I've just made. I thought I'd made my point very clear but I will repeat it again in simpler terms. I don't think relying on, for instance, vulnerable adults or people with learning difficulties making correct choices or being denied healthcare is acceptable in the developed world. I understand Americans generally don't agree with the sentiment but that doesn't make it incorrect.
And this is why the first thing I did after buying a new car is physically disable the Onstar antenna.
You sure can take back welds! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
And the government will save you. Like China, and Brazil, and Russia.
This was a lease. If it's a lease, it's still the dealer's car. Hence the whole reason the GPS was installed in the first place. It stops being the dealer's car once the dealer is paid in full. The naughty part is that the dealer probably didn't tell him about the tracker and the removal fee. The client should be informed, and the removal fee should be built into the lease price.
Wrong.
Canada is a Common Law country like most of the commonwealth. In fact their legal system closely aligns with the UK and most of the commonwealth.
Canada is Common Law nationally when it comes to the Criminal Code. For civil proceedings, it is Common Law in most jurisdictions, but in Quebec (where this takes place) it is Civil Law.
1) It's not the UK, it's Canada.
2) It's not Canada, it's Quebec.
It wouldn't surprise me if extortion was legal there, as long as it was done in French.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The alternative for the dealer would have been sending this to collections, so this guy could have been harassed for some indefinite period of time. I am really not sure that is better but it was prior practice.
Unless that fee was clearly documented somewhere such that the owner knew the bill was coming and that if not paid the car that he now owns would be disabled, then the correct alternative would have been to request politely for it to be removed and maybe offer them money for them to come in so they could remove it.
Their hidden crap, if not explicitly included was part of the car at the time of the payoff.
This would be no different than saying you didn't pay for the engine when you paid off the car. If it wasn't in writing that the engine is a completely separate issue, then it was sold at the same time the car was. Of course I suspect there may have been some documentation someplace, but still the dealer should have dealt with there BS device at the time of payoff, and made it a condition of removal for the title to be transferred into the owners name. The dealer screwed up. He needs to deal with it.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
I have no problem with that as long as 'disable' in this context means send out the repo men to pickup the car. If it means that they can remotely disable the car I have serious problems with that, and if that's allowed by the current laws the laws should be changed. For example how would the remote disable work? Do we trust the design of the technology to be done safely? Can it be inappropriately used by a malicious or negligent staff person? Can it be disabled while driving down the highway? Disabled only when the car has come to a stop, at an intersection for example? Disabled when the car is turned off? etc. It just seems like a bad idea period.
Dude, it's Quebec. Normal business rules, fairness and common sense do NOT apply in La Belle Province.
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like. In this case, all agreed that the car was paid off. That means the dealership was illegally disabling someone else's car.
Next up, the first mention of the devices existence was when the dealer demanded a $200 fee to remove it. Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point.
Obviously, this happened in Canada which is a sovereign nation that is not the United States. They have their own laws and customs. But... It seems highly unlikely that the dealership owned the car. Leasing is a very capital-intensive business and dealership principals tend not to have a lot of capital tied up in their business. They even finance the purchase of their vehicles from the manufacturer!
What most likely happened is that a young guy with crap credit and a crap job came in to a crap dealership of crap cars and wanted to lease to keep his payments low, because he has very little money. So they found him a crap finance company that specializes in high risk lending and got him his lease. The finance company provided a tracking transponder to the dealership, who installed it on his car. The dealership was on the hook to return the transponder to the finance company and made an idiot decision to demand the kid come back so they could get it back (and pay the mechanic to remove it) and when he didn't they made an even dumber decision to remotely disable the car.
[..]GPS tracking devices often include the necessary cellular network hardware to provide remote disable capability.
So, yes, you can disable a car via the GPS tracking device.
...correct, but No the car was not disabled via a GPS signal. The parent was correct (albeit a bit patronizing) in pointing this out.
There is also a question of whether the GPS device is separate from the car or whether, because of the way it was fitted, it formed part of the car as sold. If an optional extra or accessory is fitted to the car and, as a device which can immobilise the car must be, "intimately" connected to it, then it forms part of the car in the same way as a refurbished kitchen or bathroom or an extension such as a conservatory becomes part of a house.
No. It *contains* a GPS device. If it *is* a GPS device, then that's all it is (or at least that's it's primary function)
May as well call your car a radio - it has a built in radio doesn't it?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is a Car Lot in my town where if you miss a payment, they disable the vehicle. This sort of thing isn't new and while it may be embarrassing, so is not paying the Bills you agreed to pay.
Would you be as sanguine if it happened to you? Did you miss the line in TFS that said, "Lallier said there was no mention of the removal fee in the contract and he disputed having to pay it."? Or are you just being smug and self righteous in the Internet?
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
They could just get out of the way and let single payer occur in the states that want it.
The ironic thing about this is that the car was remotely disabled by the remote disabler the dealership demanded to be returned to them.
The Dealer: "WE DEMAND THAT YOU ALLOW US TO REMOVE THE REMOTE DISABLER DEVICE!!! WE WILL CHARGE YOU $200 FOR THAT SERVICE."
The new owner of the vehicle: "The car is mine now, I paid for it and you never mentioned it before. Bite me."
The Dealer: "OK. Activating car disabler...." (click)
The new owner of the vehicle: "WTF???? The car isn't starting and I need to get to my new job!"
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner
That is not how it works at all! At least not in the US and I doubt it works that way anywhere else in the world. When you purchase a car, even if the manufacturer loans you the money, the car is yours. You do not own it free and clear. There is a lien against it, and that can be used to repossess the car, but it is yours until such time that you default on the loan and a court with proper jurisdiction authorizes the repossession of the vehicle. Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
However, once they transferred ownership to him, with the GPS tracker installed, HE became the owner of the GPS tracker. The law is pretty clear that anything that is permanently mounted to the vehicle (as in you couldn't just detach it and walk away with it immediately) is the property of the new owner. So if it really is so integrated into the car that it takes $200 worth of labor to remove it, the tracker is his. Perhaps the dealership ought to have removed their property prior to handing the vehicle's ownership over to him.
In this case the car did not belong to them, nor was it part of an existing agreement. The fact that they happened to still have to ability to disable the car does not give them the right to do so.
So my phone is correctly called a GPS device?
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
I can only speak specifically to in the USA, but I'm sure it would be the same in Canada. You simply can't disable a car someone is driving whenever you like. Your statement implies that the dealership could do this for any reason at all including the amusement of the people at the dealership. It's not hard to imagine a scenario where the car is disabled in the middle of a high speed road or highway or intersection and a fatality results. That certainly would involve liability issues for the dealership and possibly jail time for the disabler. The law is not going to be amused that you acted irresponsibly and got people killed over a $200 debt you tried to recover.
I wonder why the Kia dealership in Sherbrooke is claiming they were misidentified in the article? You'd think the people writing the article could have at least done some basic research. Check out the google reviews.
This is how I try to describe mortgages to people. Most do not get it. Till you PAY IT OFF it AINT yours, but you are responsible for it lock stock and barrel.
I can't believe you guys are arguing over the semantics of this. It's a GPS device used to locate a car, and if needed, disable it. Obviously it's not only a GPS, it's got more functionality than just GPS. This allows the dealer to not only disable it, but repossess it if the buyer falls behind on payments. Here's an article about removing a "GPS Disabler": http://www.instructables.com/i...
Sat phones do exactly that (not on GPS channels) and hardly weight a tonne, cost $13K or require a gas genset. Ok that CAN cost $13k/year if you dont watch your usage.
You know what, I just contacted the dealer, and they say it is not THEM that disabled the vehicule, but the financing company. If that's true then, it's probably some Canadian corporation holding the lease that decided to disable the vehicle until the 200$ is paid.
I agree with you that in Quebec, everything is more f**ked than everywhere else.
HOWEVER, with the news coverage, the guy says it is a mechanics who sent him a text message saying his vehicle would be disabled. Two very contradictory versions. If the dealer version is true, then the dealer should sue the guy for a few hundred thousand dollars for attacking its reputation. This would not prevent the guy from suing the financing company for illegally disabling his vehicle.
A very nice legal mess to be.
Over here in Europe, we pity the people in socialist countries for being deprived of information and forced to live in ignorance. But we mock you for having information available but instead choose to live in ignorance.
Not being able to learn is miserable. Not wanting to learn is despicable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The extortion/blackmail isn't even the main point, if it wasn't mentioned in the contract, he bought the device with the car, just as he bought the water pump and battery and he should get the data and software needed to operate it himself if the car ever gets stolen.
Cellular network hardware isn't going to allow for disabling either.
What you really have is probably three devices integrated into a single package
A GPS receiver
An automotive immobilization device
And a cellular communication device to allow remote tracking and activation of the immobilizer.
If a tracking device allowed for immobilization, then a lot of geese, whales, etc. could be in for a rude surprise...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
That's just it they keeping lowering the entry credit scores to increase sales. Home sales are down to 1% down payments to increase sales of homes. The problem is with normal life debt the average salary of $50k a year isn't enough to purchase the average home price of $200k. So the banks and realtors are doing tricks to keep their sales up. Again. Except this generation has so much college debt in order to get a salaryabove $50k a year that they can't buy a home until they are 40 under the smart 20% down payment.
The same reason is why trade jobs are struggling. Trade jobs basically top out at 50-60k a year and that is just barely above poverty level in major cities and lower middle class elsewhere. We need a huge salary bump. Not a minimum wage bump but a median wage bump. That is something that hasn't happened in 40 years. And it is starting to drag the economy down.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Which would be fine, except that "GPS device" already has a well-defined meaning, and that's not it.
Now, you could argue that it's a "term of art" within the car-leasing business, and that's fine. But it's still shame on CBC for not clarifying the term when presenting it for public consumption.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
What part of "not in the contract" do you not understand?
Get service manual, find device, reconnect wires, take sim card. Free cell phone. Sell tracker on ebay. Enjoy.
This is hard to do when you're stealing the car. Not so hard when you have the wiring diagram and a whole day.
I know, I will turn in my card later...
The fee wasn't in the docs. The dealership asked for it after they sold the vehicle to him. The guy's mother (is he a Slashdot reader?) settled it with the dealership. The dealership removed the device at no additional cost.
I am guessing they forgot to remove their property and saw that the subcontractor (many times the service behind the hardware is someone else) would charge them ~$200 so they decided the pass on the charge. At this point, tough luck, deal was done. The user doesn't even need to return the GPS (service can be turned off), it kind of was sold with the car. The dealership should have asked nicely and gone to pick up their stuff.
And sweden, norway, australia, new zealand, switzerland, japan, etc etc.... all vastly better places to live than russia, china or the usa.
And now it's time for the Channel 5 sports report, brought to you by Kia. Kia: too bad it's a Kia!
You missed several points. The biggest one is ownership. Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner
That is not how it works at all! At least not in the US and I doubt it works that way anywhere else in the world. When you purchase a car, even if the manufacturer loans you the money, the car is yours.
Time to learn to read. I'll help you:
"Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease"
When you lease a car, you don't own it. It's owned by a third party and you lease it from them. A lease is a rental agreement with a specified time period. They later bought the car.
The device was likely on the car to facilitate remotely disabling the car if they got behind on lease payments, and should have been mentioned in the leasing contract. Since they were no longer bound by that contract due to the ownership change, they have no right to remotely disable the car. If the dealership has a smart lawyer they're already mowing the guy's yard, sucking him off, and asking how many 0's he'd like on the settlement check.
Do you have ESP?
The article was pretty clear that he had paid off the car and the fee for early repayment, and the contract for sale didn't mention the remote immobiliser. Indeed as a fixed item in the car, the sale by default would have included it, so it's his remote immobiliser technically.
It's obviously a ploy to get an extra $200 on top, that most people would not realise was a con to get more money. They should have accepted the loss of immobiliser, who politely asked to send someone round to extract it as the owner's convenience.
Not reading the article is completely normal, but replying not even having read the summary, now that's embarrassing.
Goddam go reinvent words you annoying cunt! GET A JOB.
Plus the consent of the owner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The alternative for the dealer would have been sending this to collections, so this guy could have been harassed for some indefinite period of time. I am really not sure that is better but it was prior practice.
The alternative is not selling a car to someone who can't afford it for way more than it's worth so you can repossess it down the line, sell it again to someone else in the same boat and keep collecting the payments.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Dealership = groupe Beaucage. Credit compagnie = BAC = Beaucage auto credit. Same address, same big boss.
If you add too much weld too quickly (I.e. Heat) you can absolutely remove weld using regular welding equipment (rod, wire, etc.)
As with all things accounting, the devil lies in the details. I guarantee that in their accounting system, there is a "waterfall" logic applied to any payments - where fees and taxes are paid first, interest second, and principal last. When he paid the payoff of the lease, it paid the $300 early buy out fee, any taxes, this stupid, allegedly undisclosed, and unbelievably unethical $200 fee, and left $200 of principal on the account.
In any legal proceeding, I guarantee this is what the stealership will claim - the car was not paid in full because all fees settle first, and here's a 20 page contract of legal administrivia with the plaintiff's signature on it...
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
So that article makes the point:
>> the dealership's action was clearly illegal, since once the balance is paid off, "it's not your car anymore."
Yet no-one seems to care that GM and Tesla are building exactly the same tech into their cars in a very non-optional way. You literally can't buy any Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, or GMC without Onstar already installed.
I have seen these devices before. The one I saw had a cellular modem and a GPS module and just plugged in the ODB2 port. I believe there are different kinds that can plug in other locations to be hidden. They are used in high crime areas and in high risk loans to help in recovery.
Strictly speaking a GPS device sends nothing. It receives only.
It was an GPS + radio device for tracking the car should the person who leased the vehicle stop payments and run away. The GPS had the location, the radio would call back the location so the repo man could pay a visit the immobilizer was so the vehicle would still be there when the repoman arrived. This is pretty standard these days.
The problem was the device was not included on the lease or purchase agreement as it was added for the convenience of the dealer. When the vehicle was paid off the dealer had no recourse to reclaim the device.
I looked at their address on Google Earth - 4339 Boul Bourque, Sherbrooke, QC J1N 1S4, Canada
There is NO other entity at that address. It's fully and wholly a Kia Dealership lot, both from satellite and street views. The only thing even CLOSE is an alignment shop, across the street, but that one seems to only do alignments for large vehicles (semi trailers, judging by what I could see inside the open bay doors.)
The dealership, like most car dealerships on the planet, are lying their asses off.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The really funny bit is that when they audited the agreement there was an illegal payment added for enrolment in the loan service. There is a massive, possible province wide, class action lawsuit possible here over the illegal charges for the car loan that the dealer, and likely dealer chain was doing to everyone.
Car EULA
Seems standard practice to me to put a GPS Tracker/Immobilizer on a high risk loan from a finance company. The clients was informed and has accepted the situation. The only problem is the use of the immobilizer for a 200$ unpaid fee in which the fee AND the use are debatable in the first place. I have first hand information that the finance company activated the immobilizer and not the dealer. In that scenario, by not removing the device free of charge, in their mind they lose the 200$ fee and the device itself on top of lose the high interest in that loan since the client paid the balance. I also have first hand information that this fee will not be charged to the client. The rest is a civil mater and if the contract really doesn't mention this removal fee, it doesn't look good for the finance company.
Unfortunately, even if the dealership itself was not involved it has already taken a hit from the bad reporting. Remember that this is how Donald Trump won the election, by spreading fear,uncertainty and doubt about his enemies and promising the undeliverable moon to his supporters.
Read my comment again, with comprehension this time. What part of "Nobody had agreed to anything about it at that point." did you not understand?
Time to learn to read. I'll help you:
"Bury, Quebec resident Daniel Lallier signed a four-year lease"
When you lease a car, you don't own it. It's owned by a third party and you lease it from them. A lease is a rental agreement with a specified time period.
Oh silly me. I must have forgot how to read. Thank god I accidentally covered myself when I said:
Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
They later bought the car.
At which time they became owner of the vehicle and all objects permanently attached to it. Like I said in my last post.
The device was likely on the car to facilitate remotely disabling the car if they got behind on lease payments, and should have been mentioned in the leasing contract. Since they were no longer bound by that contract due to the ownership change, they have no right to remotely disable the car. If the dealership has a smart lawyer they're already mowing the guy's yard, sucking him off, and asking how many 0's he'd like on the settlement check.
You're right, they have no right to disable the car. And it doesn't matter why it was on the car, only that they no longer own the vehicle or the tracking device. If they were in the US, I would certainly report this to law enforcement as an unauthorized use of a computer system as they clearly used a computer at some point to unlawfully disable the device.
I agree with you that there need to be further legal restrictions so people don't get stranded and particularly don't get endangered.
I was speaking to existing law which was also violated in this case since it was no longer the dealer's car.
I can't believe you guys are arguing over the semantics of this.
You know this is /. right? Semantics are important, you have to choose the right shapes to get your point across.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
HOWEVER, with the news coverage, the guy says it is a mechanics who sent him a text message saying his vehicle would be disabled. Two very contradictory versions. If the dealer version is true, then the dealer should sue the guy for a few hundred thousand dollars for attacking its reputation. This would not prevent the guy from suing the financing company for illegally disabling his vehicle.
The facts, what people tell reporters and what reporters report and usually three distinct things.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
You know, I'd have no problem with the dealership putting such a device to turn off my car if in return I had the ability to turn off their power when they do something like demand a fee that wasn't in the contract.
But he didn't agree. That's kind of the point. Also, once you sell a vehicle to someone else, it should be your responsibility to recover any items you may have left in it at the time of transfer. Trying to force the buyer into paying to return property he didn't even know he had is repulsive. The dealership should be sued into insolvency just for trying.
Exactly. They should have asked her to bring in the car so they can remove the device. failing to do that they are at the mercy of her goodwill as to when she can, if she will, bring the car in to remove it. I do not know about the law in Canada, but I bet she would have a decent chance of winning a lawsuit for the damages it caused her while the car was inoperable.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Not being able to learn is miserable. Not wanting to learn is despicable.
I work for a school district. There are a number of teachers that don't want to learn anything. It is the saddest part of my job.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Not difficult if it's an after market disabler. There are links to Instructables/YouTube videos* on how to do this in another post.
Good luck removing the function if you have a 'connected' car. OnStar, Tesla, etc. have GPS and cellular systems fully integrated into the auto's ECM. The disable function is just a software function and will be difficult/impossible to completely remove.
*I'm modding these down for not showing how to take the disabler and attach it to another vehicle for the purpose of leading the dealership on a wild goose chase.
Have gnu, will travel.
This.
Deep within that contract there may be a clause declaring that they retain ownership of the disabler. I suspect that one could remove it themselves and return it to get around their $200 'removal fee'. But they will just claim that you've damaged it in the DIY process.
Have gnu, will travel.
Things can be more than one thing. Such is the glory of words.
For instance, the authors above are both pendants and humans. Presumably.
You kinda lost the point of the discussion didn't you?
Anything installed by the dealer attached to the car that requires tools to remove at the time of sale is conveyed with the car. One can make the argument that they illegally accessed his immobilizer system.
It doesn't even matter whether or not he could access or use the immobilizer, it was part of the car they sold to him, therefore it's his.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
If it's attached to the car with tools and requires tools to remove, my argument is that it conveyed with the car. It's not their immobilizer anymore, therefore they engaged in electronic tampering at a distance and should be prosecuted accordingly.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
It's either that or get your news about Venezuela from the completely unbiased sources here in the US.
In Canada, if you buy a car, even finance it, the car is yours, you hold the title. However the lender has a lien on it which prevents you from selling it without their consent, and allows them to sue to recoup costs (usually the car) if the account goes into arrears.
I have no idea how remote disabling devices are even legal unless it was agreed to in the contract.
I think everyone misses the point that they may call it a "GPS" device, but in reality, it is a "recovery device". Primarily it allows for them to be able to find the vehicle as well as disable it so that it isn't a moving target. In the terminology of the dealership, they may call it a GPS device, so in the parlance of that particular industry that may be what they refer to it as, regardless of whether or not geeks agree. People need to stop being so pedantic.
I think what you're missing is that a good idea becomes a bad idea when you skip important steps and attempt fraud.
This guy didn't have an unpaid bill. He wasn't delinquent. He should not have been sold a car that comes with a vulnerability that allows it to be cracked. But not only did they sell him a car with malware, but then they used the malware to attack him. Imagine if you paid all your bills and then this happened to you. No outrage, really?
They started with what may have been a good idea, and then totally "forgot" (or we assume that's what they're going to claim) to ever have their lawyers look into it, get it into the contract, etc. All they had to do was put it into the sales contract and everything would have been fine. BUT THEY DID NOT (according to the article).
So just imagine some neat idea where a deal is working out for you and the other party, and then criminally change it so that it doesn't work anymore. That's what we have here.
e.g. perhaps you pay a mortage. Then suppose one day, even though you paid your bill, the bank kicks in your door. "Oh, we decided that your mortgage bill is double. Yeah, I know that's not the deal we made, but that's what we decided." And they have a bunch of people walk in your door, shit on the floor, rape your wife, and shoot your dog. Do you step up and say "banks need to be able to repossess bad mortgages" or do you accuse them of crimes?
The Dealership has committed multiple crimes.
1) Extortion. No contract = no right to charge the fee.
2) Vandalism. Sabotaging a vehicle without the contractual right to do so is outright vandalism.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And they say I'm a paranoid conspiracy theorist when I block and disable all remote communications to and from my vehicle.
What part of "not in the contract" do you not understand?
The part where you imply I'm contractually obligated to a term that is not in the contract.
I do not understand why you would think this, could you please explain in further detail?
Is that dealerships are allowed to remotely monitor and disable vehicles in this manner. It is anti-consumer in the extreme. If they're so terrified that people will default on payments they shouldn't be providing credit in the first place to those people.
Kia is notoriously bad like this. My uncle bought a car from them, came with no floor mats. When he went back, dealership said "that's extra". He called me, I called corporate and week later he had his mats.
Trade jobs basically top out at 50-60k a year
The salary of a given trade job depends too much on specialty, experience/credentials, and location for that statement to be true, since it's the local labor supply and demand which determines what a tradie gets paid. An apprentice electrician can eke out maybe $15/hr in some areas, but a master electrician with a Contractor's license can easily rake in $70/hr in other areas (which is well over a six-figure salary).
Here's the trick for home buying, though, and it's not a new one: buy small on a small salary, or expect a far longer commute time to get that 3-bdrm/2ba custom-built domicile. It also helps to ditch all other unnecessary debt as much as possible before you take on that mortgage payment. This means not going to Disney World, buying a flashy new vehicle, or blowing cash on {insert vices or hobbies here}.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The author would have been much more helpful by referring to the device properly and not simply as GPS device. Referring to it as a GPS device might lead many less technical folks to believe that GPS devices can disable vehicles. That is not the case. Had the author correctly described the device, such as a vehicle tracker with disabling capability, then consumers would might better what to look out for in the future.
This. All of it.
Modern businesses are really adept at lowering the standard. They're even better at taking what shouldn't belong to them.
Unauthorized hacking. What's that, 20 years in prison? Oh wait, those laws only apply to plebes.
Bar none.
They call you the ups but what you really are is the mark.
You literally argued the same thing as the guy you were trying to correct.
If these devices did not exist interest rates would have to be higher and people who represent higher credit risks simply could not be financed.
Oh, please. The presence of these devices don't bring down interest rates, unless you're arguing that interest rates for high credit risk people could be higher than the ~25% they currently tend to be.
Those sorts of loans don't actually help people who are poor. It hurts them.
Trade jobs basically top out at 50-60k a year and that is just barely above poverty level in major cities and lower middle class elsewhere.
Depends on the trade. I know more than one tradesperson who is making six figures.
Are you kidding? most people in canada would take a 200k house in a heart beat.
try having a 50k salary and all houses are 1million plus. 2 bedroom condos in vancouver start at 800k. Detached houses start at 1.5million.
Hell, rents in the major areas are double or triple what a 200k house mortgage would be. Thats like less than 1k a month!!! who the hell cant afford that if they make 50k a year???
You know what, I just contacted the dealer, and they say it is not THEM that disabled the vehicule, but the financing company.
That smells like bullshit to me. Perhaps it's technically true, but it's still on the dealer for tacking an unagreed-to fee onto an already established financing agreement. (And how is that even possible?)
That is not how it works at all! At least not in the US and I doubt it works that way anywhere else in the world. When you purchase a car, even if the manufacturer loans you the money, the car is yours. You do not own it free and clear. There is a lien against it
That has nothing to do with this situation, since it was a leased car originally.
However, what you say is very misleading. In the US, as you correctly say, you have title but, until it's paid off, there is a lien on it.
That lean means that you don't really own it yet. You can't dispose of it as you see fit, you can't modify it as you wish, etc. You can't even sell it without getting permission from the lien holder.
If you "own" something without having any of the rights that comes with ownership, you don't actually own it.
It depends on what you want:
A perfect car security system from the point of view of securing against theft will have disadvantages.
Sometimes there's a benefit to being able to bypass a car security system, possibly with the help of a mechanic, in the event of some mishap like your magic electronic key taking a bath or the battery voltage dropping while you're in some remote location.
Obviously, that's a tradeoff against how seriously the car needs to resist a theft attempt.
You think governments around the world, who have mandated computers be on cars, GPS navigation and what not was for YOUR benefit? Just wait til the day comes, that they start handing out speeding tickets, based on data from your onboard computer/GPS system, or, in the event of a "national emergency" or whatever, turn off all the cars. Think it can't happen? Guess again.
It is possible, and not rare, to have legal terrestrial GPS transmitters. You find them most often inside of tunnels.
The problem in the US has never been lack of or availability of health care.
This is not true as a blanket statement. In my area, there is such an extreme shortage of doctors and nurses that people often have to sit for months, sometimes years, just to get a primary care physician. It's been this way for at least a decade now.
And, the medical costs are mind-numbing, even if you have insurance.
It is unquestionable a crisis situation that is causing people to die.
Thanks for your brain dead obvious post dude. Once again the first thread is 100 off topic idiots arguing over 1 word in the article that is so from the point it's unreal.
By your logic, an ATM is a GPS device because it has a GPS time source.
"Referring to it as a GPS device might lead many less technical folks"
This is slashdot. Less technical folks don't come here. However, referring to the device properly would have avoided the thread being dominated "GPS can't do that!" posts.
There's really nothing magic about satellite phones. Decades ago, satellites had low-power transmitters (they were basically like an incandescent night light bulb in orbit), so you needed a big dish to have enough gain to receive the signal. Because dishes were so directional, it became commonplace to re-use RF spectrum for adjacent satellites. Fast forward to the late-90s/early 00s... satellites NOW have transmitters that can output hundreds of watts... but there are so many of them, spectrum-reuse becomes almost a necessity. So we now reuse spectrum by using a small dish to boost the signal strength of one target satellite above the strength of its neighbors, then attenuate it so the desired signal is weak and adjacent signals drop off entirely.
Services like Sirius/XM work because they combine powerful transmitters with a license to use their spectrum throughout all of north America, including Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Since there's no spectrum-reuse (by satellites, anyway), you can tune it with a regular antenna.
Sat phones just take it a step further by moving the directional focusing to the satellite itself (ie, "spot beams") so the downlink only occupies a chunk of spectrum in an area a few hundred miles wide, using a combinaton of TDMA & CDMA techniques to further reduce interference, then use TDMA for the uplink.
The main reason why Iridium uses low-orbit satellites instead of geostationary ones is spectrum-reuse... using geostationary satellites would be like trying to run a mobile phone service on a single chunk of spectrum shared by an entire hemisphere of users. There's just not enough. By using satellites in low orbit, they reduce the spectrum footprint of each one, allowing cellular-like spectrum reuse (basically, using them like 200 mile high cell towers with super-regional coverage, including areas too remote or politically-hostile for normal cellular phone service).
Sorry to be a pedant*, but you haven't established that said authors are hanging from anything or even attached to something.
*Disclaimer: I'm using a very non-standard definition of "sorry" here.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I'm hoping that a big car company does get hit by exactly those kinds of laws sooner rather than later. There is a very unhealthy trend in building extra functionality into modern vehicles that is actively in the interests of the manufacturer/dealer and actively contrary to the interests of the customer. We need someone to force full, up-front disclosure of these shady practices so customers can vote with their wallets, and we need manufacturers/dealers who pull shenanigans like this to be on the hook for meaningful penalties, or we're going to be in a customer-hostile market with no real competition and it's just a race to the bottom. For something as essential to many people as a car, that would be a very dangerous path to follow.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Isn't it "hacking"? ..?
or at least accessing system without owner permission?
Destroying private property, loss of income and making dangerous situation on the road?
What is the "price" of such behavior in prison month/years
Yea giving people choices sucks! Just admit it you think you are better than people who take deals like that and you want to dictate their choices to them. Well you're not rich so I'll decide that you should ride the train, no car for you; its not good for you!
You hate freedom. Freedom is messy sometime it means letting people make mistakes.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Really check your frigging outrage. This is market working!
This is all irrelevant. This happenned in Québec, and in Québec, we have the rule of law, and our law is far more reaching than US law, because we do not have common law, but the civil code, which is not precedent-driven (so the richest cannot purchase “justice”). And according to our civil code, what the dealership did was illegal, plain and simple.
Tell me where it is, and I'll remove it for you! No problem, I've got a crowbar right here!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Completely irrelevant, since at the time the crime took place the car had been purchased.
Completely irrelevant, since it was paid for completely, no financing required.
Even if this was the situation, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, it's illegal to disable the car.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I agree with you that in Quebec, everything is more f**ked than everywhere else.
That’s because we got so royally fucked by free enterprises that we have decided to gives ourselves a big government that corrects the damage done by free entreprise.
That's a sound argument for drastically reducing the supply of labor, which forces the market to increase wages. Idiots call it "racism" because it means drastically reducing immigration.
It would be like saying "The rifle can't kill elephants, it's unwieldy as a club and you aren't supposed to use it. And it's far too small to beat an elephant to death with it. Just won't work!".
The GPS device implements a car immobilisation ability. The GPS device disabled the car. The GPS device did it, not the GPS signal.
Well, a device that if it fails, disables the vehicle - that's not fail-safe. It's fail-fail. So a crappy install, the device bounces loose, and the vehicle dies right there on the bumpy road... Or, being an aftermarket device, could fail on its own anywhere any time and the mechanic doing the work (say, in the middle of your vacation) has no idea what he's looking for... ("Replaced the ECU twice and the thing *still* won't start!") unless it's a standard install at *every* KIA dealership.
Now in this case, the vehicle was a lease and they may have additional rights prior to the purchase of the leased vehicle due to the fact that the dealership or manufacturer does own the vehicle in this case.
Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department
This is slashdot. Less technical folks don't come here. .
Sometimes I'm not so sure that's accurate :)
Yes, and no... It's a combination of a lot of factors. Your typical transponder on a geostationary satellite has a nominal power of 100 watts or so, spread out over a 36MHz bandwidth. In the bad old days, especially when dealing with analog television, a typical transmission occupied the entire transponder, and could use the entire power output. In the modern era, transponders are usually sliced and diced into smaller segments (I buy 4MHz on SES-1 C-Band, for example). To prevent intermodulation between the different users, you need to apply about a 6dB multi-user backoff, so that 100 watts becomes 25 watts. (wattage numbers chosen for easy math, but correct order of magnitude).
Standard geostationary satellites are located roughly every 2 degrees along the equator. The earth station antennas are chosen so that they have a 1.5 degree beam width, and the links are carefully designed so that they will not interfere with the adjacent satellites (there's always some spill over). This gives you spectrum re-use between adjacent satellites. Due to the expense of launching/operating a satellite, the spectrum is doubly re-used through the use of polarization. My slot on SES-1 is 4MHz on Vertical polarization, there is someone else on the Horizontal.
Anyhow, your typical geostationary satellite is a very broadband beast, offering about 1GHz of bandwidth per frequency band (500Mhz on each polarization). The size of the antenna is dependent on the frequency (minimum 2.4m for C-Band, minimum 1m for Ku-Band). Also, spot beams are quite common in the geosync world (Viasat 1, for example, breaks up North America into a honeycomb of some 50+ spot beams).
Sirius/XM is a different beast entirely. They have a license for 12.5MHz in the S-band (down near 2.4GHz), and each of their transmissions is only about 4MHz wide. They can pump a whole lot more power into those transmissions, enabling reception with simple omni-directional patch antennas.
Iridium went to low orbit for a lot of reasons, not just spectrum re-use. The free space loss to a low orbit satellite is a heck of a lot lower than it is to geostationary, allowing lower powered transmitters, polar orbit provides truly global coverage, and the shorter distances mean you do not have the 500ms round-trip time you have when going through geostationary.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I saw an interesting documentary on something like that.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/
There are no GPS repeaters like that. Due to the way the system works, they wouldn't actually accomplish anything. GPS depends on the difference in timing of the signal received from each of the satellties in its view. Based on these time differences, it can then calculate the exact position of the satellites, and also the distance to each of the satellites. If you had a repeater that worked, all the subsequent GPS receiver would get is the position of the repeater's antenna, not is own. There is no way that you could replicate the differences in the satellites and vary them properly through the tunnel.
What you're likely seeing is what amounts to dead reckoning. The map data the GPS has tells it that its going into a tunnel, so don't' show the signal lost warning. If it's integrated into your vehicle, it knows how fast you're going, and what you're doing with steering, so that it can predict where you are with a reasonable degree of accuracy. If it's an external unit, it might just be dumb like my garmin, which assumes you are going the speed you were when entering the tunnel, or it might use onboard accelerometers and the like to try and work it out.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I ain't falling for no banana in the tailpipe.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. He had completely paid off his work truck a few months back and he woke up one morning at 5am to find a tow truck in his driveway hooking up his truck. He went running out and called the police. The tow truck driver already had his truck hooked up and drove off with it before he could stop them. When the police arrived, he reported it stolen, but when the police called it in, they found an impound notice had been filed by the car dealership for failure to pay the monthly payments (that's right, after he had paid off the truck entirely a few months back).
Long story short, he called the dealership and argued with them for a while. He hired a lawyer and shelled out around $2000 in legal fees at that point. Several days later they called him and told him he could come pick up his truck. He sued them in court and recovered all his legal fees ($10k at that point), cost of hist lost time, rental vehicle fees, other incidental costs and around $10,000 in punitive damages for theft of his vehicle (they had a pattern of pulling this kind of shit). All told the car dealership lost around $25,000 not including their legal fees. He found out later that several people in the financing department lost their job, as well as the senior manager.
The bottom line though is no one at the dealership cared until it cost them a significant sum of money. On balance, there are a lot of dead beats out there who are irresponsible and buy cars they can barely afford and when they lose their job, rather than doing the right thing and selling their brand new expensive car and paying off the loan or lease, they try to keep something that does not belong to them and thus you have immobilizers and crack of dawn towing companies.
The only real way to solve this problem is a federal law that realistically limits the % of a person's documented income that can be spent towards a car loan or lease. I have bought used and driven older cars for most of my life, and it is a much more economical way to live (not to mention new cars are a terrible waste of money). I paid $4800 for my last car that I drove for 10 years and my current truck was $4000 and I have had it for 7 years so far. Both vehicles have been quite reliable and I have only spent a few thousand over the years beyond routine maintenance.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
That could very well be. I retract my assertion. :)
The GPS part of the immobilizer is to help aid in repossessing the vehicle. It would suck to disable it then have to go hunting everywhere to figure out where the car was located when it got disabled. Of course, this should only be used lawfully for the contracted purpose of missed payments and repossession.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
He should send them a text notifying them that they no longer have permission to store their property on his car and have 12 hours to remove it, or else they will be liable for fines totalling $200 per day pending its removal.
I own a company that does upfitting for RVs, Campers, and public safety vehicles like police cars, and we also do installations for car stereos, ham radios, and other things.
You would be SHOCKED what we pull out of cars that roll off the lot "clean." We discovered a local dealership here that was installing OBD GPS trackers for a particular local insurance company - but they were spliced into the wiring harness up under the dashboard so the owner would not find them. We found these on several vehicles that were brought to us for car stereo installations.
We also discovered similar tracking devices installed on vehicles that were purchased from one of the local "high risk" used car lots, presumably for the purpose of facilitating repossession.
We've found them up under the dash, in the engine bay, underneath the car, and a couple of times we've even found the "big" ones used by police to track persons of interest.
We've also found countless drug paraphernalia and drugs themselves hidden in cars we've taken apart for upfitting. It's a crazy interesting business to be in.
Greece failed because they borrowed way way more money than they could possibly afford to pay back. The credit crunch came along and all of a sudden nobody was willing to lend them money to turn over all the sort term debt they had.
NOBODY and I repeat NOBODY forced Greece to borrow that money. They choose to do it of their own accord, and make tax dodging *THE* national sport.
In fact had the Greeks paid their proper taxes over the last 20 years they would actually not be in the dire straits they currently find themselves in.
Further despite being in dire straits they are still unable to accept that the problems are of their own making and as a result they need to accept a lower standard of living and actually pay their taxes in future.
It is really really hard to have any sympathy for them. Though they should have taken the money that the Nazi's stole from them in WWII, added appropriate interest and then simply taken a slice of debt they owed to German banks and said tough luck not paying that back.
So, can the car dealer say, after you've purchased the vehicle free and clear, "Oh, yeah, forgot to mention, the fuel tank doesn't come with the car. That'll be another $2000."
Of course not, because the fuel tank is an intrinsic part of the car.
In this case, the GPS tracker was an intrinsic part of the car, since the dealer sold the car with it fully integrated into the system. At the point of sale, the GPS tracker was a necessary component to operate the vehicle. Not only is it illegal for them to disable his car for a frivolous charge that was not in any agreement, it was further illegal to hack into his own property (the GPS tracker) using their unauthorized access (again, not in any agreement) in order to disable that vehicle. Lastly, because there was never any agreement to return the GPS tracker prior to sale, this probably amounts to extortion, which is a whole other can of worms. Bad news for that dealership.
Now, lets imagine another scenario, analogous to what the dealership should have done in order to get the GPS tracker back.
The friendliest person at the dealership calls the guy up after the sale and says this: "Hey listen, we're really sorry to bother you, but one of our mechanics accidentally left his favorite wrench in your engine compartment, would you please bring your car in so we can retrieve it?"
Unless the guy's a total douche (which is well within his rights to be), he's going to go back to the dealer and let them take the wrench out. If he's smart at all he shouldn't want that rattling around inside there anyway.
But there is no way you charge him for their own fuck up, as that is just beyond the pale, and a good way to not get your wrench back.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
There are GPS receivers like that, but the people who have need of them have decided the small amount of altitude (if directly above usage point) or position discrepancy are acceptable to their use case. I worked at a large manufacturer of consumer GPS devices and they were all over our building.
I always love it when one assumes that if you can't afford a house it's because you can't stop buying new phones, new tvs, or going to Disneyland. Or does it just make you feel better to pass judgment onto others based upon nothing other than assumption?
You literally argued the same thing as the guy you were trying to correct.
Not exactly. The guy just clarified that "leasing" and "buying" a car are 2 different processes. Leasing a car doesn't give any ownership to the buyer but rather the right to use it under some conditions. Buying a car, however, gives you the ownership of the car except the car is put on a lien by a finance (whoever finance the car for you), but you still own the car out right. The GP indicated his/her misunderstanding of the process in the 1st paragraph.
Err correct my own grammar...
Leasing a car doesn't give any ownership to the person who signed the contract but rather the right to use it under some conditions. Buying a car, however, gives the buyer the ownership of the car except the car is put on a lien by a finance (whoever finance the car for the buyer), but the buyer still owns the car out right.
In general, it is *not* *their* car until you pay it off. Instead, they have a lien on the vehicle, which is an interest in it. They share that interest with you, but their interest is deemed superior to yours. Once you pay off the debt, they relinquish their interest by removal of the lien.
Yea- we should eliminate government from health care. Period. The government doesn't even permit non-profit health coverage. There are only a handful of religious entities that are exempt. If I'm an atheist I have no options other than health insurance.
That lean means that you don't really own it yet. You can't dispose of it as you see fit, you can't modify it as you wish, etc. You can't even sell it without getting permission from the lien holder.
Yes, you own it even with a lien. However, the lien will legally stop selling process if you attempt to sell whatever property/thing that has a lien on because the lien is there to ensure that you WILL pay the money you owed. Thus, the lien has nothing to do with ownership. It is somewhat a collateral of the money you owed to the lien holder. Oh and yes, you can dispose/damage/destroy whatever property/item that has a lien on it (think of getting into an accident and it is total). However, you still owe the money to the lien holder whether or not you have the possession of the property/item.
In Canada, if you buy a car, even finance it, the car is yours, you hold the title. However the lender has a lien on it which prevents you from selling it without their consent, and allows them to sue to recoup costs (usually the car) if the account goes into arrears.
I have no idea how remote disabling devices are even legal unless it was agreed to in the contract.
This is not the case. Please read TFA. The car was "lease" and then "bought out" (paid off). Then later on, the dealer attempted to extort $200 after the car was bought.
Yes, you own it even with a lien.
As I said: legally, yes. Practically, no.
Oh and yes, you can dispose/damage/destroy whatever property/item that has a lien on it (think of getting into an accident and it is total).
If you can do this, you must be getting exceptional contracts from your lender. What's standard around here is that you can't do any of that without the permission of the lien holder. Accidents are covered by the lien holder's requirements that you carry comprehensive insurance.
Are you really sure that it is the lack of doctors/nurses, not the hospital management manipulating the situation for more benefit?
Exactly. There was no special agreement granting that the fuel tank would be extra. And there was no agreement that the new owner would pay for the removal of anything. So charging extra for the fuel tank is a non starter and removal of anything will be with the new owners kind permission only.
Yes, I'm really sure.
Vulnerable adults and people with learning difficulties are amongst the most protected individuals in the US. My wife used to work for an agency that worked with all forms of severely neurologically disabled adults (Downs, Alzheimer, ...), I've never seen so much tax payer money wasted on compliance frameworks and every single instance of scratches or even having to restrain them is severely documented. There are literally back-to-back commercials for vulnerable people, elderly, sick and others that have been affected to contact some form of legal assistance.
The problem in the US is people that are legally 'sane' and have no impediment to obtain aid CHOOSING not to get it. For many it's addiction, they rather get their fix. And these people choose to not address health issues with their children. In my city the school system provides breakfast, lunch and dinner FREE OF CHARGE and healthy food and they can even pick the school they want to go to for these benefits, it didn't even make a dent in the hunger statistics for our city (considered a 'crisis' according to the school board) because they simply don't want to get their asses up and walk quite literally down the street with their kids to get them some healthy dinner. But when the food stamps come in the mail, there is a line down the block right before the corner liquor and cigarette stores open.
In the US, people have much more freedom. If you did the same in say Belgium or France or Spain, your children first of all are obligated to attend school and if you don't they would be removed from your care by the state. In the US the government by design doesn't quite have that amount of power. It's perfectly normal in 'poor' neighborhoods in the US to see children aged 6-18 running around during school days, I remember when I even attempted to do that only a decade or two ago in Europe, I would get picked up by the first police car that saw me and after verification that I belonged in school, they would have brought me to my school.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
You're being overly pedantic here to the point where your statement is actually false. You do have an ownership stake in it, but not fully until the debt is paid and the lien removed. The lien holder can only deprive you of the use of the vehicle is if you fail to abide by the terms of the loan. You can't sell the vehicle without involvement of the lien holder, but you do not need involvement of the lien holder if you wish to change out the stereo head unit or change out the headlights with the exception where that is explicitly stated in the terms of the loan.
Realtors and banks are not "doing tricks" to keep up sales, they're just trying to keep up with the demand. Easy to try to blame the people that are within reach. Not as easy to realize that it is more complicated than that. Simplistic solutions like "just pay everyone more!" don't have a prayer of being successful on their own for plenty of reasons. Raise the median wage and what happens to the median everything else? It goes up as well.
This is how I try to describe mortgages to people. Most do not get it. Till you PAY IT OFF it AINT yours, but you are responsible for it lock stock and barrel.
I think you mean "it ain't WHOLLY yours". You do own it and you can make modifications to your property at long as you abide by the terms of the mortgage. I surely don't need permission of the mortgage lender if I wish to pain the house a different color, change out the windows, swap out the toilet, install a pool, or modify my fence.
That's like saying an iPhone is a 4-function calculator just because that is a thing that you can do with it.
Or for a car analogy, like saying a Chevy is a de-virginer because people fuck in cars.
I readily admit to being pedantic. However, in this case, I don't think I'm being unreasonably so. As long as there is a lien against a thing I own, I do not truly own it. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I am not the sole owner of it, since the lien holder also has property rights over it.
The alternative for the dealer would have been sending this to collections,
No, their alternatives(s) were to either leave the device in, or ASK him to bring the car in at no fee to remove THEIR device.
What's new is that they used it to disable a car that was fully paid for, and that they had no legal right to.
I had a conversation with a marketing guy from Kia Sherbrooke and he told me CBC will make a correction. The owner of the car was not transfered and BAC still are the official owner of the car. He also told me that Kia Sherbrooke and BAC (Beaucage auto credit) haves separate coffee machine and offices even if they are in the same building!
And that cannot happen as long as there's significant immigration. I don't oppose immigration out of a hate of people not like me, I oppose it because letting people in increases the labor supply which pushes down wages. If you're not independently wealthy (i.e. you rely on selling your labor as your source of income) it benefits you to see immigration significantly cut.
Lo-Jack called to have me renew my sub. And told they had to do maintenance as the transmitter stopped working. They raised the price and I no longer wanted to be tracked by them, so I said, no thanks, when can I take the car so you can remove the tracker.
They said it had a fee ($100?? or $75) and I had to leave the car there. I told no thanks, please tell me where the tracker is, I remove it and return it free of charge. They refused this. So somewhere in my car, I have a dead tracker, apparently not worth for them to recover.
If I ever have a tracker or kill switch in my car I want to be the only one on the other end at the "button". You can get a tracker for less than $30, and a prepaid card here will set you back .. huhh ... nothing.. really, a $10 recharge every 3 months and a sent SMS or call is all it takes to keep it alive.
When garage mechanics work on a mystery problem like this, they always replace the ECU first because that's the most expensive part in any car other than neurosurgery on the driver. Cha-ching!
"Surprising someone with additional fees at checkout time is a shitty business practice"
And you can refuse to pay.
Surprising someone with additional fees AFTER they've paid and actively preventing them from taking or using what they've already paid for is extortion.
Which would be fine, except that "GPS device" already has multiple well-defined meanings, and I was able to deduce the correct one through context.
FTFY. Next you'll be telling me that my "FM radio receiver" can't be called "radio" because someone used that word to describe a walkie-talkie.
Wait until you can't make the monthly repayments on your wifi-enabled pacemaker...
Wasn't that the plot conceit for the movie Repo Men? (not Repo Man with Emilio Estevez)
I've read TFA, I know the particulars of the case. I was explaining how in Canada, unlike in some other countries or US states, when you buy a car regardless of if it's financed you still own it. There are many places where you don't get the title until the car is paid off completely.
You're in such a rush to one up someone by telling them they're wrong that you didn't even bother to understand what the conversation was about.
Yes, we do have a health insurance problem and the problem is that people don't care about how much things actually cost. We run expensive and often pointless tests that can be more likely to result in false positives than lead to a real diagnosis, but who cares if insurance is paying for it? Your car insurance doesn't cover gas and maintenance, so why does your health insurance cover routine office visits? The purpose of insurance is to limit your losses when something really bad happens, not to pay for your kid to get antibiotics for a viral infection. No one should go broke or be denied care for serious conditions, but how do you control costs when all the costs are hidden? You do the same thing the insurance companies do now: tell the doctors what they can and can't do by denying claims. It doesn't matter if it's a for-profit corporation or a non-profit government program, the result is the same. Someone is getting between you and your doctor because if they don't they will run out of money to pay for your healthcare.
I bought my house for just over 200k, but I don't live in Vancouver or Toronto.
Which starts at $25k in 1977 dollars. When the term "six figure salary" came into common usage, it meant some serious dough. Now it means that you can possibly own your own house.
Its not repulsive at all. These devices are installed on cars sold to people with piss poor credit so that they can be easily repossessed if the person does not pay.
And that is fine, but you need to declare that upfront. All they had to do was add a line in the contract about a fee for collection of property and all would be fine. They didn't, so they are the bad guy. .
> Thatâ(TM)s because we got so royally fucked by free enterprises
> that we have decided to gives ourselves a big government
> that corrects the damage done by free entreprise.
That's historical revisionism. When the British Empire defeated France in the "Seven Years' War" of 1756 to 1763, they took over what is modern-day Quebec. To mollify the inhabitants, the British allowed Quebec to keep the French Civil Code.
Similarly civil law in Louisiana (i.e. contracts and torts) inherits a lot from French civil law. Remember that Louisiana was a French colony (like Quebec used to be until 1763) until the "Louisiana Purchase" of 1803.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
That's just it they keeping lowering the entry credit scores to increase sales. Home sales are down to 1% down payments to increase sales of homes.
Which is the perfect example for why regulations are a good thing.
America seems to have an unhealthy fascination with 'freedom' and deregulation, which means they prefer GFC-type events and people forced to live on the street than some sensible regulations which prevent such things in the first place.
Regulations improve quality of life. Learn to appreciate them.
Until you pay the car off, the dealership is the actual owner, so it is perfectly legal to disable THEIR car whenever they like.
Just like how until the bank which owns your house can sleep in your bed until you pay them off in full. It's their house right...
Freedom is expensive. People used to kill and die to gain or preserve it. Accepting small inconveniences is difficult, annoying and nobody likes or wants it, but ultimately it could have been much worse.
What is best in life? Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.
He owned the car, the $200 fee was in dispute. Vandalizing his car to force payment is criminal extortion.
Miss a few payments and see who the sheriff escorts out of THEIR house. Hint, you'll need a place to stay.
Not sure about the US, but in the UK, you have to be extremely careful about doing that.
If you've completed a contract and it's been settled, then you can't go reverting that contract due to a subsequent dispute over a different contract. Doing so would totally open you up for legal action - and in the UK, you'd get to pay the other guy's costs and expenses too! It might even prejudice your case in the subsequent dispute, if the other guy could point at evidence to say "this is the kind of knobhead I'm dealing with!"
True, but six figures is also about twice the median wage in the US, so by today's standards it's not too shabby.
Greece failed because they borrowed way way more money than they could possibly afford to pay back.
Nope. Greece didn't fail, and still hasn't failed. They're just being pressured by international bankers.
The credit crunch came along and all of a sudden nobody was willing to lend them money to turn over all the sort term debt they had.
True, the credit crunch lead to the bankers trying to call in all sorts of debts. Maliciously at that.
NOBODY and I repeat NOBODY forced Greece to borrow that money.
Nobody, and I repeat, nobody, forced the lenders to loan that money.
They choose to do it of their own accord, and make tax dodging *THE* national sport.
Man, is that line still being sold?
In fact had the Greeks paid their proper taxes over the last 20 years they would actually not be in the dire straits they currently find themselves in.
In fact, had the international bankers not had a record of malfeasance, misconduct, and deception, they wouldn't actually be the dire criminals that are trying to extort Greece, the same way they failed to do to Iceland.
Further despite being in dire straits they are still unable to accept that the problems are of their own making and as a result they need to accept a lower standard of living and actually pay their taxes in future.
Yes, yes, Austerity Now! Poverty for everybody! That's the line being pulled.
It is really really hard to have any sympathy for them.
International financiers? Absolutely. Also a problem in the US. Actually, it isn't sympathy, we should have vengeance.
Though they should have taken the money that the Nazi's stole from them in WWII, added appropriate interest and then simply taken a slice of debt they owed to German banks and said tough luck not paying that back.
Well, they certainly could try, but unlike Iceland, they don't have a water barrier. I'd still suggest inviting a few of the bankers to Sparta and tossing them down a well.
Just yet another reason not to buy a Kia. I've known a number of people that have owned kias. They say - Kia: Korean for Crap!
Why rant about U.S. policy in regard to a story about a Canadian issue?
Just noting a lack of applicability to the jurisdiction.
Miss a few payments and see who the sheriff escorts out of THEIR house.
Because not paying repayments is in breach of the contract, and the contract would specify these conditions and the consequences which both parties agreed to in advance.
There is a difference between that and what you claimed is legal in your first response.
mh microsoft had me at "you have seriously violated the EULA" "what exactly did i do?" "we dont have to give you a reason, this is the last communication on the subject you will receive" skype, onedrive, hotmail and all stored in the cloud "for safety since hard disks crash" all gone so i prefer €40 for a small 120gb ssd now, and im gonna buy one every two months
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?