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?

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%.

This asshole is just exercising his options to take money from the same moderators that were up in arms over his changes last year. Make no mistake, this is Spez’s revenge.

I really hope this whole thing backfires on reddit, but I think the reality is that it will further enshittify until it’s profitable, and it’s already so big it’s unlikely to fail.

Lemmy just isn’t a replacement and I think the nature of lemmy will stop it from ever being one unless someone throws godlike resources at one giant instance that federates with basically nobody.

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.

Not the same scale. If we had the same technology back then it would probably be possible, but the population has exploded since. If we still had 1/8th the people we might get that, but there’s no way we can produce a billion iphones every time an upgrade comes along, let alone 8 billion.

Standards have to drop for real even equity compared to what we are used to in the west. This would be true even if we took everything from the top 10% (which globally seems to include nearly all of the US, even us middle class working peons.)

We’re talking about a potential utopia where education is available to everyone, not restricted to first world countries. If you bring everyone UP to western world QOL and they are educated, you have to consider it in that aspect.

The immigrant fertility rate thing is because they come from a place with low expected QOL so they don’t think they need the american dream with air conditioning, going out to eat or having nice things and instead go with more kids because they were raised that way. The second generation gets used to say american QOL and wants to have those same nice things the neighbors have- after all they grow up in the american school system meeting other kids right?.. so you need to work to get those high QOL things and suddenly you’re in the situation I have described: needing more professional attainment to keep up the expected QOL and delaying children.

Does that make sense?

Do you have any kind of evidence showing that free of all financial constraints people will not have children in a mid-high COL area?

Eh? Why does birth rate drop in countries with top economies versus those that don’t?

Developed countries tend to have a lower fertility rate due to lifestyle choices associated with economic affluence where mortality rates are low, birth control is easily accessible and children often can become an economic drain caused by housing, education cost and other cost involved in bringing up children. Higher education and professional careers often mean that women have children late in life. This can result in a demographic economic paradox. sauce

In order to maintain that high quality of life you have to work a shitload and to get those high paying jobs you have to spend years of your life upskilling and competing for better jobs.

Remove the economic factor and give everyone that astounding QOL and boom… we can breed without worries of providing and we don’t even have to stress about maintaining our QOL. We can all be stay at home parents who just raise our kids if we choose to.

I can’t afford a 4-6+++ bedroom house in the Greater Boston area where my friends and family are without having soul-crushing long commute times. I need a commute because I need to work to put food on the table and pay for rent. Remove the barriers and keep at least even QOL and I will not work, i’ll instead devote my time to doing literally anything else.

Right… if one person owns a quadrillion dollars but doesn’t spend it there is no inflation. They’d just spend a billion here… a billion there… buying up all those midsized businesses or swathes of land.

We’ll all be long dead by the time interstellar travel is here for a handful of individuals, and we may even be dead before we find another planet that could be habitable in a million years time.

You’re realistically targeting ultra-long-term solutions, all of which ignore the fact that we’re trashing this one pristine planet right now by filling it with billions and billions of souls more than it can sustainably support.

That won’t stop population growth. Remember… the stress of work is gone. Now we all can have big happy families if we want without ANY pressure to ever juggle all those stressful conflicting priorities that take up familial resources. Voluntary contraception would not keep population stable or provide a sustainable ecosystem. I personally would have at least six kids. My wife would want more than that. You are free to be childless if you so choose of course, but statistically proven biological imperative drives us to procreate as-is, it’s literally human nature.

The biggest problem will quite literally be real estate. Unless you can picture a fully urbanized earth where everyone lives in tiny little cubby holes and not much else as being some kind of utopia. Even then the land on earth is finite.

Any hard science fiction clings to the fact that taking people off the earth is a luxury only afforded to the most influential and powerful, unless you have critical skills to do a job that they can’t find with space residents.

Imagine what would be needed to ferry a million people off the earth in one year. Then imagine that there are 20-50 billion souls eager to have that luxury off-planet destination life. The math never adds up.

ah no stress, no costs… perfect to increase the population and put more strain on the system.

I’ll wait for you to solve the overpopulation crisis while giving us all a first-class work free experience.

There’s no number that is “enough”.

A quadrillion dollars per minute ought to be enough for anybody.

Hard work always pays off.

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

Already cancelled my prime account when this was announced months and months and months ago.

You’re already getting recurring subscription fees from me, so you’re getting paid even if I don’t use your services for any period of time. Stop fucking around and playing games, adding ads is double dipping. I’ll just stop the recurring transactions and find services elsewhere.