I pay for a single netflix sub, crunchyroll, and a vpn service.

After netflix announced ads i’ve been more and more considering dumping them and just focusing on that vpn service. I have paid for years and years of streaming services but I can’t possibly comprehend how prices need to go up again and again, almost always by double digit percentage points. The cost of storage and bandwidth goes down over time, servers get cheaper over time… there’s hardly any first party new media that is worth watching so i’m struggling to understand why i’m paying more.

The most bizarre thing to me though are people who pay for live TV… why in the world would you ever do that in 2024 with all the better options out there?

They want their cut. Nobody with less than them can be given anything without them getting their cut. They had to work for it so why shouldn’t everyone else!!111

Seems to be the mentality anyway. “igmfy” It’s why people are anti-immigration (we’re all immigrants if you go back far enough.) It’s why they don’t want social service programs (taxing ME is theft, tax those others!), they sure as shit don’t want free education (hurr durr I paid for mine / I didn’t need it so why should I pay for theirs!!1111oneone)

It blows my mind that so many don’t want any change to the status quo because things were shit for them. It’s like at some point the resentment for being handed a shit deal is replaced by resentment for others who haven’t made it yet.

Yes, but usually they do something that provides value. A mechanic charges you more than their costs, but they are also charging for their expertise and skill.

Not all jobs are that clear cut though. Most white collar jobs are bullshit (sauce: been working in corporate environments for close to 15 years.)

Car Salesmen are useless for me. They’re still legally required. They get paid WAY too much to swindle grandparents out of a few thousand dollars per car.

Real Estate Agents generally do not produce any real value but are again required. 4-5% commissions for selling a home which today in the boston area is a median of over 700k. Don’t try and tell me that $35k of effort goes into creating a listing and doing a showing, and helping someone throw in a bid. It should be a couple thousand at most. Sales here are almost always a weekend of two open houses then offers due on tuesday… and then a P&S is signed on Friday.

If car salesmen and real estate agents are so valuable, then i’m sure a middleman finding furniture and reposting it on other sites that are more visited than craigslist free section and taking a commission is hardly any more dubious. After all the agents and salesmen in these cases do not create any value - they didn’t build the car or ship it over or really do anything except maybe detail it before delivery, even the paperwork is done by others! Same deal with the agents… they arent the lawyer, mortgage broker, house inspector etc which you still pay yourself out of pocket as closing costs as a buyer.

Anyway, yeah I totally agree about people needing handouts to get on their feet. I’m very much for housing the homeless and giving basic necessities to all (basic shelter, food, water, basic clothes, internet, electricity, smart phone.) We just aren’t that kind of nation though. We’d rather prop up insurance companies and pharma profits than lift a finger for the homeless. “IGMFY” is the way the US works, mostly.

Not exactly what I’d call hard work, but shitty assholery

Giving someone shit because they can sell things that others give away for free is… interesting.

There isn’t a business on the planet that doesn’t make more money than they pay for what they do. The guy literally took what others were throwing away and effectively recycled their trash and made a profit on it. When you are starting with literally nothing you need to find money somehow.

I bought a dresser from a guy with a storage unit full of furniture he buys from estate sales. I don’t have time to go to estate sales. I got a pretty awesome deal on the piece I got. Even if the got it for free or by running a 800 got junk type deal I would not hate. Better than another thing in the landfill!

The ads are coming! the ads are coming! -Modern Paul Revere

weird, my single mom driving beaters could afford short driving trips (2 hours is short to me.) We did mostly go to a campground that was less than 15 minutes drive away from home though.

We heavily used food pantries though, literally every single week. No air conditioning, bunny ears on our simple tv, school bus rides to school. We even went a couple years without hot water when our hot water heater broke down just boiling water on the stove.

Everyone’s experience is different though. Though I was in one of the poorest families in my hometown. None of my aunts, uncles or parents own their own home today and they’re 50s and 60s now. The sacrifices of growing up in a wealthy middle class town will enable me to buy a house. Going to see an open house in 35 minutes!

Campgrounds are everywhere and one in under a 2 hour drive is very doable throughout your whole life for a family vacation. You won’t lose access to that.

Housing costs will swing back. We’re around the point where we were in the last housing market crash. Prices are at the edge of affordability for the middle class. Mortgages are higher than what can be rented. One market course correction and a ton of people lose their houses and the market collapses again.

They’re doing everything they can to try and stop the collapse but homes are still increasing in price way more quickly than wages. Just a matter of time.

People who work full-time jobs used to be middle class. Living wages, affordable housing, yearly vacations, etc.

When?

Do you call camping in a campground a “family vacation” ? because that’s as far as my family had growing up in a pensioned job. We never could afford air travel, fancy new TVs, new cars… our house was very basic, we always drove beaters, we spent years without one thing or another to make it work.

This isn’t the current generation, or the last one, this was even earlier.

Just trying to understand when this idea that anybody in any job could have the white picket fence and world class quality of life was somehow a reality. I don’t think that’s ever been the case for the poorest full time workers or even the bottom 50%.

Opinion time:

Human population will grow to consume all there is, always.

We as a species will ever escape scarcity.

The owner who cared is dead. The ones who have control now are more interested in profits than trying to be good.

Wendy’s used to be the pioneer of the value menu too.

Sir, this is not /c/lemmyshittiestposts

I missed the hand crafted feel of previous Zelda games, where the majority of your time was spent dungeon delving in places packed with secrets and puzzles that weren’t just physics minigames.

This so much.

Shrines are not a good replacement for real dungeons. The “dungeons” we get are so minimal and the upgrades you get are so meh. At best you get mobility or more ways to cheese combat encounters. Gone are the days of unique equipment and things that fundamentally change how you interact with the world, metroidvania style.

I think the open world aspect of zelda is it’s weakest link, it’s just too big of a sacrifice. Korok seeds are not real content for anyone who isn’t obsessed with the ‘gotta collect them all’ mindset, it’s just a copy paste idea like what we’ve seen in gta and assassin’s creed. There’s no real reward for excessive open world exploration, you’re constantly just trying to get from point A to point B with no reason to really delve into the landscape except for more koroks. Combat is a chore where you’re just fighting to get equipment to fight more.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things going for the newer games, especially the controls. It’s just much less of what made the older titles great, and that’s fine. I keep having nostalgia for link to the past and that’s just not the kind of game this is.

Partial years, LOTS of rookies on backup teams making partial wages maybe.

i’m convinced if grocery stores charged a congestion charge for sundays and on french toast alerts people would change their habits. Too many motherfuckers going on sundays.

If it were up to my wife i’d be another one of the sunday zombies too. I try everything in my power to get her to choose any other day

When I saw in a video that 96% of animals are either human or living for human consumption it was the biggest what the fuck moment of my adult life.

https://ourworldindata.org/biodiversity?insight=wild-mammals-make-up-only-a-few-percent-of-the-world-s-mammals#key-insights-on-biodiversity

Population growth can go too far, can’t it?

Last I checked the world seems to be ending around us one day at a time as we march towards an ever higher global temperature, but if you want to say that’s normal and fine and we’re gonna be ok in 250 years then overpollution from overconsumption isn’t a problem yet.

At what point does the earth become overpopulated? are we already there? if not… what’s the magic number?

The young hate the old for having more than them.

The old hate the young for having more time left.

Probably this.

Ubereats lets you set the tip after the delivery. afaik the others don’t.

Should be illegal to prompt a tip before services are rendered, including at those POS machines that ask you up front to tip even a small amount.

Even if your drives are all SSD you’re never going to have so many writes that it dies unless you download a full catalog of 8k content daily then nuke it and start over… for a few years