I have a Tesla that, for financial reasons, I can’t get out of for another couple few months and while it is one of my favorite cars I’ve ever driven (and I’ve driven many), I can no longer enjoy driving it because Musk is a piece of shit that deserves cancer. Looking at Lucid and Rivian now.
I also used to believe America was a great country, but in my late 20s started to realize it’s bullshit (I’m in my 40s now). It was kind of a sad realization and it has only gotten worse since then.
I also used to believe more in people and their ability for empathy and, if presented the facts, they’d ultimately make good decisions. I now believe people are generally selfish and narcissistic, and that most don’t give a shit about facts and live entirely on off-the-cuff emotion. It doesn’t stop me from caring and trying to help (some) of them, but it’s definitely made me more wary and paranoid.
Felt this. I haven’t really ever felt proud of America. It was weird growing up with immigrant parents, proud of their new homeland, just for me to learn of all its atrocities across the world and be like: “y’all moved here for this? They murdered and raped your birth country!” I really want to be more optimistic and hopeful, it’s just so hard with everything going on and how overt the racists are these days.
Surely there can be some symbol or obvious modification to let people know when you own a Tesla but disown the talking head at the top.
I mean, I guess I could put stickers on it and stuff, but I live near Portland and the Tesla vanadalizing is pretty wild here. Not sure it’d do much.
I’ve actually been taking an old gas truck around lately just so I don’t have to be seen in it. But it sucks because the Tesla costs me like $20/month to drive and the truck costs like $30/week.
I also used to believe America was a great country, but in my late 20s started to realize it’s bullshit
Honestly I was 100% bought in when I was like 19. I’m still a big believer in what the Constitution stands for (at least as it means to me), but I fully understand that I got duped by the branding with that one. It has been exceptionally radicalizing and upsetting to see how few of my countrymen believe in the dream of America as I do. May we one day live up to our lofty ideals.
Your mom
Our mom. Why deny our Alabama living?
In this economy it’s nice to share innit
Two factor authentication.
Multi-factor authentication is a good thing. Trust me, you will regret not using it way more.
Unless you’re only using SMS MFA and get SIM swapped…or whatever it’s called.
People should just be using TOTP, its only a little less convenient in my opinion (or actually more sometimes, like when you don’t get the SMS MFA code for an hour!)
Twitter/Reddit.
I was all in. Quit Twitter around 2015 when it started getting ultra toxic. Quit Reddit when 3rd party apps were killed.
Doesn’t seem like you have to live with it…
I don’t regret my time on Reddit. I enjoyed it a lot, though it did kind of feel like I was in a bit of a backwater after development switched to the new interface and updates for the UI stopped coming in.
I also expected Reddit to shift to their monetization phase at some point. I just hoped that whatever they did wasn’t going to be something that I didn’t like. As it happened, they killed the third-party apps, which is something that I wasn’t going to put up with if there was any reasonable alternative. I have never used the official app, and don’t intend to do so. But I don’t think that I “fell” for anything – I got use of a service that made me happy for a long time.
I used to preach Reddit. Like the gospel. If you called me on the phone about an arbitrary subject, at some point I would have said, ‘Well, on Reddit…’
I was so in, there was a sub of one of my favourite tv shows I was hot on and I ended up being mentioned in a newspaper in the UK.
Renting. An inescapable financial burden.
Did you fall for it because it was hyped or because you couldn’t afford to buy?
Sometimes it is hyped because of the “freedom” aspect.
In some countries, it’s not even a bad idea because there are a lot more renter protections.
Not necessarily. All else being equal, mortgage + property charges + maintenance + tax is usually quite a bit more than rent. The issue is that renters almost never save or invest that delta, they spend it.
You’re missing the value of property going up over time
And the fact that those payments are technically going to yourself and the ownership of your own equity.
And the fact you need tens of thousands of moneys to buy a property, versus whatever rent is.
There’s these things called banks. And many states have first time homebuyers programs that will help with the down payment.
“Wait? The world isn’t the US?!”
Apple Vision Pro. It’s an amazing technical achievement. But they should be pushing out tons of immersive content to keep it interesting. It’s otherwise a great tech demo that isn’t ready for prime time. This might be different if I traveled a lot, but I stay home mostly and just use my Mac.
VR in general, there is no killer app, no thing that makes VR worth the cost. The peak of VR is probably Beat Saber. I have a quest 3 and I just use it to watch TV in bed without disturbing my wife. It’s nice having a giant video display but not useful for most people.
VR had such a bright future around 2014; between VRChat, tech demos of VR browsers, big players like MS and Sony getting into VR, and generic hacks to port old games to VR, it seemed obvious that companies were going to start re-releasing old games in VR (since you couldn’t run modern AAA games) and most every app would support VR and multiple users to make better use of the network effect.
Except instead 99% of games released for VR were just underwhelming tech demos and the only people who pursued creating a metaverse were short-sighted, rent-seeking, cryptobro parasites.
Foam mattress promising to be extra firm. It arrived in a convenient little roll, but 6 months later, it is absolute shit. Fell for the marketing and now my back is paying for it.
With foam mattresses, you need to look at the density of the high-resilience foam (HR foam) that they use. Generally the higher it is, the firmer the mattress will be and less prone to sagging.
It also means it will be a lot heavier and difficult to move around. If the density info is not provided, you can just look for ones they claim are for people who are heavier than your own weight.
Go hybrid
I pre-ordered Brink.
I’m gonna be wild here and say Brink actually was fun as hell to play, but what killed it was it being so jank and being lacking in content. The parkour and gunplay was a ton of fun
3D printer (FFF).
Didn’t start out too bad. I knew I was having issues but tried an upgrade I shouldn’t have done (because complexity). Upgrade was mostly done too, issue was fan wiring/firmware. I stopped with it there many years ago, so now it’s all dusty.
On top of all the variables/tuning/test prints, equipment/material cost etc. I also just don’t want to sell anything like I once thought I might.
It’s gotten a lot better in the last year or so. There’s a whole new class of machines that solved those issues and aren’t nearly as difficult to operate.
Prior to a year ago, I’d say 3D printing was a hobby meant for someone who was into robotics, and programming, etc.
I run a repair shop, and now I see all sorts of children printing stuff, and it’s easier than it ever was.
Sure, but that doesn’t help me now.
It doesn’t install a better auto-level sensor or tool-changing on my printer. It doesn’t give me a good print bed (one I bought was damaged by prints) or even just a newer control board. I’m not even going to buy a slicer key, I don’t want to spend more money on this nor do I want to think about it.
I’ve already acknowledged that some of this was my hubris and I would likely still be printing had I just stuck with what I had. Maybe someone could even help me get back there in exchange for/using my spare parts, but I live in nowheresville w/no car and don’t know anybody so that is not happening.
I’m really glad I couldn’t afford a Tesla back when the Model 3 came out because I probably would’ve bought one.
Things I actually fell for… mostly video games, but it’s not the end of the world. Mostly it made me much more discerning with new purchases.
I have this weird habit of buying the less popular but arguably better thing. I went with windows phone, a nook instead of a kindle, an zune mp3 player, and a Mustang MachE instead of a Model Y. That last choice might have been the only one that ultimately paid off.
I miss my Zune. It had a great trackpad for scrolling. I had the 8gb model that was about the size of a granola bar. It felt like amazing, futuristic tech!
I once got a ouya.
Ouya really got burned on that one.
I got the remake that Razer made after they bought Ouya. I still use the controller it came with…
Humble Bundle. Twice now, I’ve subscribed for a month and forgot to unsubscribe until after I got billed for the next month.
Done it successfully for a single month many times, so overall I’d still say I’m ahead, lol
america
I’m flopping what someone else said and goin with: buying a home in 2008. “Build equity! Stop renting”
Then the economy collapsed, I lost my job, moved to California for work after listing my house, could not afford Bay Area rent AND my mortgage, and the house got foreclosed on.
Fuck Chase fuck banks fuck the economy.
We lost our house. Bank bailouts vs. consumer bailouts even though the financial institutes acted in criminal levels of BS was a big wake up.
It’s very, very clear that the 99% are nothing but dog shit on the bottom of the 1% shoes.
It gets even worse for me.
Since I knew I couldn’t afford it, I tried to setup a short sale when I found someone who was interested. that’d mean chase would lose about 10k on the 120k mortgage.
So I went through the tedious process which took about a month, and just as we were ready to go chase changed my case handler. So I had to start over with the new person, for reasons that were not provided. So fine, I did.
Month later, THAT person switched off and I got a new case processor to take over, and when they told me I had to start over I literally said “you can fuck yourselves, in walking” and I never spoke to chase about the house again. Couple years later the foreclosure finally went through, and instead of 110k they got… 22k from the sheriffs sale.
My step mom worked at chase in the mortgage dept at the time, and later told me this was SOP for short sales at the time. They were uninterested in actually doing it, just jerking me around until I quit trying.
Motherfuckers.
Gold coins. I bought at the all-time high.
Isn’t the all-time high now?
The all-time high so far
