Netflix and Spotify almost ended Piracy by making it easy to access whatever you wanted for a reasonable fee. Then they got greedy and everyone else wanted a piece of the pie and now we are in a worse position than package bundle Cable TV.

I’m in my late 30’s and went back to the high seas. I used to sail the seas in my early 20’s when i was broke AF and didn’t have cable TV. When Netflix came around it sudden became easier and more convenient to just pay $6.99/ month to watch whatever I wanted. For years I got by with Spotify and Netflix and I didn’t even look back. Then, all of a sudden there were more streaming services than i knew what to do with and every few months they would all raise their price and reduce their libraries. Then they started putting ads in. Now I’m self hosting all of my media and using Stremio/Torentio for my one off TV shows and movies. I directly support creators wherever I can as well, whether it’s Patreon or Kofi or just buying their Merch.

Canadian here. I broke my leg in January. The only thing I ended up paying for was $25 for a pair of crutches. I did have to wait a significant amount of time to get seen, but its a small hospital and someone walked in with a stab wound right after me, so I was okay with it.

We do currently have a doctor shortage in my province and I myself do not have a family doctor, which does complicate things, but there are clinics around that I can still go to that are just less personal than a family physician.

We do have to pay out of pocket for prescriptions, but generally speaking the cost for most things are pretty low. There’s also a whole bunch of basic I also have 80% drug coverage through my employer, which is pretty common as well. In addition in my province a lot of diabetes medication is provided free of charge.

Well, that sucks. Now what?

I assumed it was a Patreon because of the name, but its still a for profit company asking their customers for donations in the form of a monthly subscription so they can sell you more games. You don’t get anything tangible out of it, just a private Discord and a badge on your name.

Its skeezy no matter how you spin it.

Gog has been my preference for a few years now, but there’s no way I’m subscribing to a patreon that gets me literally nothing. I honestly assumed at first you’d get something out of it at first, like a free game from the preservation program every month or something similar to Amazon Prime’s giveaways. Its honestly cause me to start to re evaluate how much I purchase from them. Its kinda skeezy.

Its not Foss, but gog.com is based in Europe. It offers DRM free games. Lots of old games, but also tons of new games as well.

Its the best way. Its cheaper, you have plenty of user reviews to check first, and you get a completed game, without bugs.

AAA games are just too expensive and many are just not finished at release now. I’m not forking out top dollar for a half finished game. Outer Worlds 2 is still $89.99 CAD. That is absolutely insane in my opinion. I enjoyed the first one, but I also bought it on sale. Indy games nowadays are generally a better bang for your buck anyways and theyre only $30-40 regular price and they are also generally at a finished state or at the very least very honest about the state they are in.

I’ll probably pick the game up in 2 years when its $20 on Steam or something.

Or not a teenager worried and stressed out about how and when to talk to their parents or something.

So my grandparents had somehow signed up for a free trial of office or 365 or whatever. They ended up getting locked put of opening documents because they didn’t want to give the computer their credit card. I was able to fairly easily convince them that Libre office was the was to go. They were pretty thrilled.

I’m thinking of giving them a linux PC to try out at some point as they mostly use it for Facebook and excel spreadsheets anyway.

I understand why he did it that way, but I completely disagree with the assessment that was all an end user should do after installing a fresh is on a new PC. Whenever I start up a fresh install of Windows or Linux I always make sure everything is working properly before I really do anything else. Is my GPU working properly, is my printer working, can I hear sound, etc. I just assumed that was standard.

Probably. Its most likely going to look like the steam machine except it’ll run on win11with an Xbox gui instead of linux. Probably be quite locked down in regards to software and store access as well.

Nope. Trust has been broken too many times. I don’t even buy anything anywhere near release anymore. I won’t buy anything anymore unless it’s either an indie game or its on sale and even then I deep dive the reviews and make sure I’m not wasting my money.

This is a much wider issue. So many people leave the default password on devices. I once installed an automatic gate with a pushbutton keypad at an airport and they wanted me to leave the default password of 0000 because it was easy to remember. I argued with them for 10 min, but they had the programming instructions and the airport manager straight up told me he’d just do it himself after I left, so I imagine that’s what happened because he seemed pretty thick and didn’t think that was an issue at all.

The regular price of Red dead 2 on steam is still the full release price even though the game came out 6 years ago. That way they can mark it 70% of and still overcharge.

I don’t know about other people, but I can barely smoke a whole joint in one sitting in a day. My wife on the other hand can smoke half a pack of cigarettes a day. I don’t really know many other people that smoke weed though. I actually smoke less now that I ran out of my home grown stuff I grew last year. The commercial stuff in Canada is way too strong for me.

Yeah, although electric heat is 100% efficient it takes a lot of energy to heat water quickly. You’re better off going with gas for hot water on demand. I imagine the unit price is more, but the install price will probably be lower.

400V in residential sounds exciting. That’s one way to cut down on wire cost I guess.

Yup. That’s why people use smaller heating elements and slowly heat up lots of water in an insulated tank instead. Just the difference in the cost of wire you need to run is massive.