PC upgrades of course, but also I refuse to pay for a coffee out these days. Sometimes I do it if I’m with someone but never alone. It’s very expensive.
Also burgers out, I never buy them, but also because they are not very good and the pride is ridiculous. Last time I checked, Burger King double whopper menu was 14 dollars in my country. Probably more expensive now.
Sit down places are over 20 where I’m at. I’ve seen a burger for $27. Fuck that. Ground beef is also pretty expensive but it’s not even close. I use my grill and it comes out better anyway.
How tf are those places still in business, are the majority of people in this area making six figures a year, or what
My mom for this last year had a home helper who was making around $21 an hour. She would order lunch every day through Grub Hub, usually $15-$20 just for the food and then another $10 for the delivery. She was willing to work for an hour and a half just to pay for her lunch. And she would always complain about how shitty and cold the food was. Even weirder is that she was a great cook herself, I provided whatever groceries she wanted, and she had plenty of time to cook whatever she wanted, and she still did the Grub Hub shit. I just do not get people.
People treat eating out as an activity/entertainment, I think. I think that’s how they’re still in business with a $27 burger.
That’s truly insane, 20 dollars… Wtf.
I guess they rely on the truly stupid and lazy to pay those prices.
Razor blades. Much better to go with a single-razor housing, even if occasionally the multi-razor shaves feel like a smoother result.
Quinoa
The ironic part is the people who ate it for millenia got priced out first because it was a fad diet…
Like, before we’d even really hard of it, they were already priced out
Other countries (like the Netherlands) are starting to grow it now because climate change means it’s much harder to grow things like potatoes.
Subscriptions 🏴☠️
Hard drives
This sucks… I wanted to upgrade my NAS but I guess I’m SOL.
Laptops or anything gaming after the jump 3k. Nope I’m out!
RAM sticks. This may sound cheesy but I have always upgraded my PC RAM. I Bought a laptop in jan. 2025 and told myself “okay I could buy these 64 GB RAM but I could also buy X instead, so I’ll buy X then in a few months I’m gonna buy some RAM to do Gen AI, it’s not like I’m in a hurry”. Well, I guess this was a mistake because I can only run a limited set of models on 32 GB RAM and prices have… well… you know.
The main thing I’ve stopped buying is the lies.
Most snacks. I only get them on sale because the servings get smaller and smaller
noticed that too. like a bag of the brand name pretzals(the flat ones), i could buy a larger size out a discount size, saving money
Coca Cola
Used to buy the 12 box from a local chocolatier that is absolutely fantastic. The owner was trained in France and Belgium and her creations are as good or better than anything I’ve eaten.
Six years ago, the price for a 12 piece box was $24. Today it is $36. I used to keep a box around almost constantly. Now it is only for holidays and birthdays.
Personal Computers: As an IT professional, I’ve always been a miser when it comes to computer hardware. I usually buy something 2 or so generations old and refurbish it myself, then use it for several years till it suffers a catastrophic failure. I’m not a serious gamer, so I don’t care if it can run the latest games at trillions of frames per microsecond. Now, even 4 generations back the machines are abhorrently expensive. Costing as much as they did when new, which is ridiculous. The manufacturing burn through due to AI is idiotic. When the investment into AI finally crashes, which I’m shocked hasn’t happened yet, these manufacturers are going to be scrambling to get back into the consumer market.
As much as I love them, I think PCs are starting to become a thing of the past… Cloud is what people look for, even in gaming.
That might work when everyone has fast internet. There’s a significant amount of infrastructure needs improving before that happens though.
My riend has a 15MBps internet and while it might not be enough for competitive games it’s perfect for BG3 and for him to play casual games.
That’s interesting - your friend is running the game on the cloud, not locally, and streaming to their device? Like google stadia used to do? I would have thought that would take much more bandwidth.
Yes exactly. He uses Nvidia’s services. I would have thoguht it would take more bandwidth But it works okay so it’s nice. I don’t think it would work on competitive games but if you’re just there to have fun I think it’s quite okay
Way too many things to go in to here. Starting with foods lets start with beef steak. I can buy a weeks worth of food for the price of a few decent steaks.
Not so much stopped buying but never bought, but these bags in Japan that kids take to school.
They’re stupidly heavy and way over priced. In my kids’ school, using one is optional, so we just went with a regular back pack from Muji. Such a stupid culture imo.
Oil change services for my vehicles. Despite doing tons of my own repairs, I hate dealing with the oil. It always gets on the outside of the container and my recycling locations are always full. The service (including oil) used to be about 50% more than the oil I could buy to do myself. It was worth it to me to spend an extra dinner’s worth of money ~4 times a year. But now a service costs at least twice as much as the oil alone, even at independent shops. Plus, I now get oil in slight bulk, so the service is 3x what I pay in oil. I treated myself to a nice catch pan and dedicated funnels as a compromise, still costing less than a service on my first DIY in a decade.
I’m planning on doing this myself now.
My last oil change was $116 with a $15 off coupon.
I can buy the oil from Costco for like $30. A good quality oil filter is 20 bucks.
Even if it takes me a full hour to do, which it will not, I’m getting paid $70 for that hour.
Honestly, it’s stupid easy. The worst part for me is shimmying on the ground to get under the car, but I have spondyloarthritis so maybe most folks aren’t even bothered by that. It has always been eyebrow-raisingly more cost effective to diy an oil change.
Brake pads are harder but not really all that difficult. Huge cost savings if you diy there too.
Not to mention a lot of shops run 55 gallon drums of INCREDIBLY cheap oil. You can spend less and be runing very high quality oil for ur car to help it last as long as possible 🙏 this guess for ur brakes and shit too most shops source the cheapest crap from local parts stores that they can, if you shoot around you can buy quality parts without breaking the bank and not have to repeat as many repairs or replace ur brakes because their rotted not worn etc.
I guess I’m lucky that every auto parts store near me takes used oil for free. I drain my old oil into the “pan,” set it aside and do the oil change, and then i pour the pan of used oil into the now-empty jug that had my fresh oil. I take a sharpie and write OLD on the jug. I set that aside in the shed. Then when it’s time for my next oil change, I grab that jug of old oil out of the shed and take it to the auto parts store where I dump it and then buy fresh oil and a filter – one-stop shopping. Easy peasy.
A lot. And it’s not limited to money. Netflix: The best series are getting stopped produced or go into the shitter. And then they rised the price for non-ad versions. Reddit: Deleted my account when they stopped giving API away (RIF my beloved). And now I can’t even read threads without an account. (Also: yay, finally made it here!) Facebook: Deleted my account years ago already and not looking bad. Bad and confusing algorithms, spreading of misinformation and conspiracies, fake globetrotter, stealing and selling personal informations to advertisers and whatnot… I don’t need that in my life. Twitter/X: It already got slightly bad, but Musks takeover was like 5 of the 10 nails in the coffin. And seeing how quickly it went down… Good riddance. YouTube Premium: I thought I’d give something back to content creators for all the years of entertainment. But Googles fight against smaller creators, Ad-Blocker and apparently it’s own user base made my back down, cancel my subscription and use Firefox instead. It’s bad that the only choice is an Android or Apple Phone, the choice between a rock and a hard place. Microsoft: okay, I didn’t fully transition. I took my gaming notebook and installed Linux CachyOS on it to try things out. It works great, and It feels better that using windows. But I guess for my PC, I’ll do a dual boot or something first.
About the microsoft thing : you’re absolutely right. Dual boot all you want, don’t go too fast and take your time. If you switch in five years so be it, if it’s sooner all the better. Don’t be afraid to distrohop to find what’s best for you. Oftentimes you start with a distro and end up with something else.
I started with Ubuntu in ~2006, never got to get my modem working with eagle-usb and had to abandon ship. Went back in 2009 with Fecora then OpenSuSE : was quite thrilled because it was way better than Win7 lite on an eeePC equivalent. Then switched PCs and against all odds really liked Windows 8.
I never quite got around Win 10 when it came out and slowly started looking at Linux again. Went through Zorin (best for starters!) then Mint, Debian, Ubuntu again, Fedora again, Pop!_OS, then quite find an interest in Manjaro but shit broke too often for me so I said “fuck it, it relies on Arch so how hard could it be?” (Spoilers : really hard when you try working with btrfs and LUKS and you’re quite a novice).
Finally I tried NixOS and thought that anyone who got time for that shit ain’t got life outside of that so went back to Arch.
Anyways I use arch btw and thanks for listening to my TED talk.
