Hard drives. I have a movie hobby and that takes a lot of storage and well, storage now is 3-5 times more expensive than not two years ago and I can’t afford it anymore.
But on the flip side, people can now finally nudify my daughter, so that is totally worth it!
Fuck everything about AI.
McDonalds. It used to at least be cheap. Now it’s both expensive and still tastes bad.
Streaming services of any kind. I’ve got a jellyfin server now that has everything I need.
It was fine when they were $5 a month, but this $20 a month bullshit is insane. And what do you mean I can’t share one account with the family if we’re not on the same network, get real.
My family will rotate Steaming services. We sub for a month or two when we wanna see a show or something, then cancel in favor of something else.
yeah, this is the way. i got lectured yesterday buy some weirdo about how doing that is ‘too inconvenient and a massive waste of time’. and then doubled down when I pointed out it takes seconds to do this, and were like ‘it shouldn’t have to take me seconds’. OK buddy… like i guess if you feel you must be subbed to 8 different services at once and forever because you can’t ever cancel or swap, it must be really tough to be you.
yup, which is why the money boys are desperate to make bundles. annual contracts with cancellation fees are in the future. line must go up!
dam thats like 100+$ of streams, its an addiction. good thing im satisfied by all the stuff being uploaded to YT in clips, basically tells you the whole story/seasons anyways.
Do you have any information that could help me understand how to self-host my own music streaming using jellyfin? I’ve been meaning to learn this as I’m over Apple’s last increase.
If you only want to stream music you might be better off setting up Navidrome. [email protected] is a good place to look for advice on this stuff.
You bet! If you only need to get it working on your home network then it’s really easy. The Jellyfin website has great documentation on the process and there are also great YouTube videos as well. It’s pretty much download the program and tell it where to look for the files, then visit the localhost link it gives you and bam you’re golden.
If you also want to be able to access it from outside of your home network then things get can get a bit tricky and you will need to set up a reverse proxy of some kind (Caddy, Nginx, Pangolin, etc).
Thank you so much! I should have just looked into it myself but it felt daunting as I’m new to it all but really want to own my own data and media again.
Or tailscale to ease things, really easy to setup, only caveat is that devices that will access the server must also be on the tailscale “network”
I don’t have that problem. I share netflix/HBO with my sister who is across the country with little to no issue.
but we never sub up more than two services at once.
I’m in the US and have to watch a few seconds of something on my phone while connected to the wifi in each location for two houses less than 3 miles apart every single month or it gets signed out of every device at one of the two locations. I only do that ao my daughter can watch shows at two places.
I will most likely cancel this fall after catching up on my backlog. It isn’t the cost that will be the dealbreaker, it is the hassle.
yeah and i have to mfa for my work vpn once a month… that’s pretty standard stuff dude.
you seriously think once a month auth is awful burden you can’t live with?
It is an annoyance for a thing that up to a couple years ago required zero effort and at that time the company promoted sharing accounts. Now they are so against sharing that they penalize people who use more than one wifi network.
I’m not even sharing accounts, just watching it in two places. If I could just mfa once at either location to confirm it wouldn’t be so bad. I have to remember to take action in two places and track it so it doesn’t get cut off in the evening at the other place while I’m going to bed and my kiddo is trying to watch a movie.
Also I’m paying for Netflix. Your job is paying you to do that.
yeah the world changes. nothing stays the same. what seemed like a good idea 5-10 years ago seems utterly stupid today. that’s how life works, including business.
I mean, I get it, 1st world problem of mind inconvenience is a moral outrage. But I don’t own two homes, I can’t possible imagine how difficult and awful it must be to have to manage my netflix account across multiple properties…
oh wait, you could just create a vpn and network your two homes so they appear on the same network! wow… almost as if there is a solution to every problem.
I don’t own two homes, what the fuck are you talking about?
My daughter moves back and forth between two homes, like a lot of kids do. You do understand that family situations can be complicated right?
Netflix’s “solution” is to have a second account, but then if she watches something at my place and then at her mom’s it would require signing in and out of Netflix constantly to have access to her personal profile. Netflix tying accounts to wifi networks is stupid and frankly you would fit right in there.
I don’t work for netflix but I do understand a lot about tech and I do very well in my career, yeah.
Because I don’t tolerate entitled requests from users who think their convenience is all that matters. They have to sign into the account everytime they they move locations because it’s a necessary security precaustion and contractually obligated by our insurance.
but right, I’m a dummy and you know better. you know you can just setup your daughters phone with a netflix account and have her stream from the phone to any tv without having to re-auth right?
but hey sorry for trying to help you out, when clearly you didn’t want a solution, you just wanted to be embittered at netflix because how dare you be inconvenienced.
You could just… no longer subscribe to them. but that would be even more inconvenient.
you act like having 2 homes is a normal thing.
Yeah, that’s super asinine. Do you remember when the internet worked without seventeen thousand layers of bullshit?
Lol meanwhile I have to punch in a code if I want to watch Netflix at work because I’m not on my home network. Somehow Netflix invented landline streaming services.
Concerts.
In the 90s youd go to the record store that had a ticket kiosk. Tickets were 10 to 20 dollars, youd get a printed ticket.
Now it just sucks. Venues add fees, ticketmaster fees double the price, printing fees, sometimes you cant even get the digital ticket until the day of and hope nithing goes wrong.
It all just sucks now.
I go down to my local dive bar and watch some local guys play rock and blues…for tips.
Any streaming service.
It’s not even about the money specifically, if that’s what it actually cost or if it was going to a good place. It’s the greed of constantly trying to find that line on how hard they can squeeze and at what price point people will keep taking it.
The main thing I’ve stopped buying is the lies.
PC parts
my nephew build a pc this winter. he paid like 2K for roughly the same spec that my older nephew built in '23 and paid like $800 for.
only thing that wasn’t a massive price increase was motherboard, case and power supply.
Newegg was bundling other parts with video cards to deter scalping. I got a Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT 16GB and 750W power supply for $630 a few months back. It’s now “on sale” by itself for $790. Months before that it was closer to $500!
The Seagate Exos 20 TB hard drives I paid $350-$400 each for over a year ago are now $793.
It’s absolutely insane.
Yeah, I think the only new part my pc sees between 2025-??? is the case.
You’re lucky to have kinda the opposite of my situation.
I used a second hand office machine with a low power graphics card added, because that came out quite cheap. Until about 2 years ago, when I saw that really good looking cases, with the glass and LEDs and everything, are quite affordable now, got one for 60 bucks, I think.
The problem was that that office machine was not made to be upgradeable. Power supply that delivered pretty much exactly what the current parts needed and no more, with custom connectors to the mainboard.
So I thought ok, I do it in steps, after all that’s the whole point that that’s possible. Start by getting a nice modern bequiet PSU, and finding a more standard motherboard, that fit with my CPU and RAM. In some obscure webshop no less, because stuff is old, I’m working with DDR2 here.
And the plan was that later I would look at upgrading motherboard+CPU+RAM, because I’d have to do those together.
And then the data centers happened.
I’m just lucky that the old machine was a beast for its time - the back then impressive 16GB RAM are still decent now. Battlefield the WW1 one ran fine, that game where you upgrade your jeep was too laggy - gotta be a bit more selective about what I run now, because my upgrade plans are on ice until we storm the data centers.
Oh, I need new cpu/motherboard/ram, I just can’t afford that. It’s not ddr2 old, but I have been running out of ram.
I want to upgrade, but i can at least comfortably play every game that is out so I can eait.
The assumption is that prices will come down again. I suspect not :(
Prices could come down during the upcoming crash of the economy. Trouble is, that means consumers won’t have money, and billionaires will buy it all up on the cheap.
Subscriptions 🏴☠️
Soda. Wtf are they even thinking at this point. Hell, I ran into a Dollar General to get carbonated water the other day and the only product they had was $9. For carbonated. Water. GTFO
Totally. I will only buy soda when it’s on sale for half off. Otherwise it’s like $1 per can and that’s too damn much.
You can pick up a used ball keg, probs $25-30, a cheap regulator, some tubing and a carbonating cap (you can skip the carbonating cap, which last I looked is some $25, just hook the CO2 line to the dip tube, it’ll take longer to reach carbonation saturation, but it works fine), and a hand faucet for $1 and rent a CO2 tank (last time I filled a 5lb cylinder it was $30 which includes the cylinder) and make gallons of the stuff for decreasing spend.
Upfront cost is moderately high, yes thats true, but the more you use it the less it costs per gallon. And no plastic bottles, no questionable water source, no shipping pollution. You just have on demand carbonated water. If you add fruit puree, you can make “Italian soda”, or you can buy the soda syrup businesses and such use if you want, though you’ll want something in a pump bottle and not a box that hooks to a big system…
One 5lb tank of co2 is enough for 5-10 batches, depending how heavily carbonated you like, and each batch is 5 gallons, assuming a standard 1/8 barrel keg, so the math is pretty appealing if carbonated water is a thing you like.
Yep, I’ve altered a decade old Sodastream to use a 20 lb Co2 canister. This is the way.
Italian what?!!
Please tell me more, I have tried lots of things in carbonated water (lemon or cucumber is good) but never fruit puree!
The way we made it at the place I worked was to puree fruit, then reduce it a bit over heat (no added sugar), then put like 2tbsp or so over ice and topped off with the carbonated water.
So it’ll only really work well with flavors that don’t degrade in heat, but you may also have luck with just straight pureed fruits like watermelon, not super sure how that’d turn out.
You can also use fruit syrups that you buy or make yourself, tons of recipes out there.
Thanks!
You can also get a soda siphon that takes co2 cartridges. I’m sure it’s more expensive but takes less space. Also you can feel all cool and retro.
Those co2 cartridges are like $30 for 20 16-gram charges. I have them for my ukeg (pressurized growler). They keep 2 gallons of beer pressurized and dispense it, but I’d assume they are only enough for about 2 liter to carbonate from still. So roughly 10 gallons for $30 vs 25-50 gallons for about the same price (only considering ongoing CO2 costs) with the keg setup.
So you can, yeah, but it’s substantially more expensive in the long run, and a 5 gallon keg plus everything else really doesn’t take up a lot of space. They are tall and narrow, and you need to put the soda syphon thing somewhere, too, and I assume that’s taking precious counter space, rather than sitting in a dead space corner behind a door, or tucked into a closet or something.
Really it’s just a matter of how much you’ll use. If you don’t go through 5 gallons of carbonated water in a reasonable timeframe, like monthly so you can clean everything out, it doesn’t really pay to make a big batch. You can get a 2.5 gallon keg if you want a smaller batch, but those are tough to source used and are thus pricier (place I’ve bought from before has them for $120, about the same price as a full-size keg of the same brand)
huh, i but carbonated water for like 50 cents a liter at the regular grocery store, and that’s not even the cheap shit.
Dollar stores are just large convenience stores. Very few products are cheaper than an actual grocery store.
A lot of items are more expensive per unit.
Like a roll of aluminium foin is half price at the dollar store, but only has 1/3 the foil.
That’s the poverty trap. Spend ‘less’ up front but way more over the long term whether we’re talking about aluminum foil or car loans.
its shrinkflationed to maximize the cost. and then larger chains started doing ti to. like with carbonated drinks 8pk vs 12pk, and fruit, energy, protein bars. 5 vs original 6-8. same goes with alot of toothpastes too. og is 8.2 to 5.4, and 5.1 to 4.6, and finally 4.3. i noticed that with foils too at the discount(grocery outlet) they used to have wafer thin for 200sqft, removed to 150max.
they play the same trick with TOILET paper too. try to trick people by reducing the ply and keeping the rolls the same, or the amount of paper the same.
target used to have very good instore brand thier up and up, i stopped buying it when they switched to"deal worthy"
They are great for cheap cards though. I only go there when Mother’s Day or someone’s birthday is coming up.
Yeah they do seem mostly exploitative, but I don’t have any experience going to them.
They didn’t exist where I grew up even when I was poor. We just went to the regular grocery store and clipped coupons religiously.
They used to be halfway decent, but the line must go up.
blessed be the line.
even the famous brands are cheap. and they often have sales/deals all the time.
soda is overpriced everywhere, people also stopped drinking them for the most part. i think some places have added tax too. i mostly drink sparkling water with flavours, of different brands. i usually dont mind stevia infused ones much. even in discount stores they are expensive asf. sparkling water is cheap compared to soda, like most of the time its half the price.
Sparkling water with flavours is soda with a different name, friend. And it used to cost less around me, but now it’s the same price as any other soda. We don’t have a special soda tax here.
Haha what, 1.5 L of store brand soda water is roughly 30 US cents here, and I live in an expensive country.
Soda at the movie theater near me costs $11 now. The entire place is also falling apart and looks like it’s on the verge of bankruptsy even though it’s one of the most well-known locations.
I have a small garden for a hobby and mental health. I spent $30 on 2 bags of fucking DIRT yesterday. What am I doing? Dirt was $30!?!? I guess I can’t even afford dirt anymore. 😭
Pizza. Getting pizza for the family shouldn’t cost over $70. Hell, eating out and fast food are exorbitantly expensive.
And yet the workers are still making shit wages. It’s absurd.
Welcome to capitalism.
Maybe you should tip more. /s
I hate this comment so much 🥲
I now just buy the large ready-to-bake supreme pizza at Aldi and just enhance it by adding mozarella and other toppings at home. $8 plus maybe $2 worth of extra stuff I put on it. Just like sushi, I really can’t justify paying too much for it when eating out.
Costco pizza is legit too
You mean from their food court, or their Kirkland brand freezer ones? I have wanted to try the food court ones, but if I get it home and it’s not good then I’m both frustrated and need to find something else to eat, so I always pass it up since I don’t know if it’s good or not…
The food court one. It’s $10. What have you got to lose other than $10?
For me, time, effort, and of course the $10. I’m disabled so take a standard costco run, make it take 4x as long and physically difficult. Add taking a gamble on dinner as I leave and it’s a make-or-break decision.
I’ll have to give it a go the next time I’m there. I’ve had their ice cream and it’s very good, but that’s not a meal :p
if you’re worried about it, just buy a slice.
they’re weird so they slice it into 6 but that makes it a huuuge slice. well well well worth the $2 imo, it’s certainly a loss leader for them (meaning the cost for them to make it is more than they charge you for it)
legitimately the best pizza I had in the years I spent living in Georgia.
the food court is a loss leader to get people to shop in the store, it works.
Ooh, I didn’t know you could get it by the slice. Nice!
remember the combo supreme.
Just get a slice next time you go through. Its $2, and you get a snack + qa. Imo, better than a lot of dedicated pizza shops, and cheaper
I didn’t know they sold individual slices, I only saw people with full pies or hot dogs. I’ll definitely grab one next time :D
Try the pizza while you’re in the store? It’s not amazing pizza, but it’s better than it should be.
The Motor City Pizza (if they sell at your Costco) in the frozen aisle is good too if you like deep dish. It’s too meaty for my taste, but will do the trick in a pinch.
Yeah, that’s the only frozen pizza that I like. It takes up a good chunk of the freezer for me though.
the freshly made one is so-so, not great but for its prices its pretty good.
Yet people will pay 10 times the cost of the ingredients to have food delivered to them cold and half-eaten.
I’ve paid $70 for the pleasure of driving and picking up myself. Shit’s ridiculous.
Oh god for me it was frozen pizza. I fucking love frozen pizza as an easy dinner night and used to be able to find Dr Oetkers for $4 a pizza. That shit is $13 now.
It kills me cause I still love it but I won’t buy it :(
A lot of my grocery stores have pizza dough ready to go thats about $2.50 and can be frozen. So if you buy your ingredients and a pizza stone, you can have some REALLY good pizza any time.
I like to put the sauce on, then toast the crust for about 4-5mins before putting the rest on. Keeps the crust crispy.
Also, a dough ball isnt as hard to fit in the fridge.
Wtf? That’s so fricking much…
Pizza in my corner of the world is still a reasonable price. First, there’s cheap but delicious Little Caesars – that’s a go-to that I’m not at all embarrassed to admit. Then my local pizza shop can get me a XL pie and cheesy bread sticks for less than $20 out the door. My family of three always has leftovers from that for lunch the next day for someone but not everyone.
Any of the bougy “wood fired” blah blah blah boutique pizza grift stills costs a fortune here. But my little local pizza shop is a good NYC style slice, with normal pizza shop ingredients.
First, there’s cheap but delicious Little Caesars
This is how I know you are full of it
Dude, if you were honest with yourself and the world, you’d agree.
try costco pizza. 9.99. costco loves you.
DNC excuses.
Beef, almost completely.
Red meat in general. Even pork has gotten out of hand.
My family is eating poultry two or three nights per week and entirely vegetarian the rest of the week just to cut spending.
Costco prices still seem reasonable compared to what I’m used to. regular grocery store prices for meat in any form are fucked. the prices they have on tiny hams or pre-packaged sliced meat are fucked.
Pork is still decent in my area. The most expensive stuff has gone up but the cheap stuff hasn’t. Beef it’s across the board.
red meat is super expensive, especially most of them(the good meats) tend to be imported.
i haven’t seen much of a price increase in poultry or pork or fish.
i’m still paying like 2-3 dollars per chicken, 5-6 for pork, and 10 for fish. same as it was 5 years ago.
Beef is price fixed in an illegal trust.
But, also, beef is pretty much the worst meat when it comes to environmental impact of producing it. So it probably should be the most expensive.
Beef is still to cheap IMHO, at least here in Europe.
I do not understand how beef can still be cheaper than chicken or pork, in some places (not basic giga farmed chicken/pork of course)
i can still get stew meat and sirloin tips for a decent price. but those were never nice cuts anyway. they are only abotu 8-10/lb though still.
i used to get strip streaks sirloin and now those are 20/lb+
I only get steak if it’s close to expiration and marked way down. Ironically it’s better at that point anyway since it’s been aged (as long as you eat it right away). Otherwise I’ll buy top or bottom round and hammer the shit out of it with a tenderizing mallet and flash-seer it; taste is quite good and you let the mallet do the work instead of your teeth.
There are deals to be found, for sure.
Fast food is hilariously overpriced. You pay about as much for a sit down meal at a restaurant for some crappy burgers. I remember the days when they had a true dollar menu. Now they just call it a “value menu” or whatever.
Used to be able to get two double cheeseburgers for $2 at burger king. Add fries and a drink and you were sitting at about $8 after tax. That same order today will run you about $19 before taxes. I’m not even that old, this all happened within the last two decades or so - prices literally more than doubling and all the while the quality getting worse and portion size getting smaller and smaller.
It’s probably better for my health that I can’t stomach the idea of paying that much for greasy unhealthy food, so it’s an occasional treat to let me have that nostalgic taste.
Burger King is the worst offender of Restaurantitus.
They forgot they are fast food, so now try to sell 10 dollar burgers and other ridiculous shit at sitdown prices.
McDonalds is the worst offender for just plain price gouging. Their 99 cent menu doesnt exist anymore, all the shit that WAS on the 99 cent menu is now like 4-5 bucks.
Which is what a fucking bigmac used to cost, and we’d groan about the big mac being 5 dollars.
I got lunch for my mom and myself at Five Guys the other day. Two burgers, one order of fries, two fountain drinks, $44. I wouldn’t even have minded the price if it had been, y’know, fantastic food, but it was just mid. Burgers were bland, fries were limp and greasy – so greasy that the bottom of the bag broke open when I got it home – and even the drinks were watery. For $44!
I tried Taco Bell yesterday for the first time in years. At least it was “only” $11 for a mexican pizza, two tacos and a large drink. Unfortunately it was utterly disgusting, everything tasted like stale wheat flour which was weird because I don’t think the food actually had wheat flour in it anywhere.
Never eat out without a coupon!
i was about to try a new shake shack that opened last year at a mall, because i never had it, noped, overpriced for what is. also a new “tea shop” opened, people were still flooding to it. thier lowest cost “Tea” was like 7$ minimum(im guessing because its near a convention center/ the income of that area.)
Shakeshack is mcdonalds with hipster branding, it’s extremely overrated, people just pay for the excuse to get an extremely unhealthy milkshake with their burger.
I have never understood the appeal of a teashop. You mean the same atmosphere as most coffeeshops, without the coffee? what
It’s been more than 10 years it feels like since you could just buy a raspberry pi for a little side project.
Now you better have a good use for it, since it’s a good chunk of money.
