I don’t stream much but being disabled, I can’t get to the store so I do order stuff from Amazon. What I’ve seen in the last few years is an influx of Chinese sellers with tons and tons of garbage and all of the reviews are completely worthless, of course.

I can just hear some people going, “WHAT? Are you crazy?”. I was a little tike in the early 60s and the only monitor my mom had was me screaming or the “THUNK” of me falling and hitting the floor.

There was no catalyst specifically but I deleted my shortcuts and uninstalled the app a couple of weeks ago because there just isn’t anything for me on Twitter, X or whatever. Have not gone back since.

The last time I saw a Wizard of id comic strip was in the early 70s.

As with most property management companies, they’ll just tell you, “Hey if you don’t like it, move”. I think they may have put a small blurb in the apartment complex newsletter a month prior but nobody reads those. Also, I had just upgraded to a phone that had mobile data, otherwise, I could not have used the machines because they no longer had coin slots and the app must connect to the Internet to use it. I also had a large bowl of quarters left over that I ended up using at the car wash… Which will soon be cashless also.

They put Bluetooth in our apartment complex laundromat and if you don’t have a smart phone or Internet service on your phone, you don’t do laundry.

I stopped watching network television because of ads, then I stopped watching free streaming because of too many ads (Pluto TV, Crackle), I get a basic subscription to Paramount through Walmart and I stopped watching that because of the ads. I have an Amazon prime subscription because I get it for one half off but I rarely use prime video an if they start showing ads, I won’t use it at all.

Understood. Whether or not we are replicating economic conditions from 1929 is another story entirely. Other than AI, there really isn’t too much of a stock market bubble. The S&P 500 P/E ratio is lower than pre-pandemic and the Buffett indicator(US stock market value divided by GDP) is still well within a safe range. 1929 was pre-globalization, pre-SEC and there were next to no banking regulations at the time. The Internet bubble of 2000 with its insane speculation more closely resembled the crash of 29 than does the current market conditions. The 2008 housing debacle was primarily too much leveraged mortgage debt.

I’m not a student of economics and haven’t studied much of it but I have owned stocks for quite a few years and have a basic understanding of how money works.

I’m not an economist but anecdotal evidence that I’ve picked up from a number of different sources in the last couple of years lends me to believe that consumer debt is pretty darn high. This is from the Federal Reserve and what else is an average schmuck supposed to look at?

You can look up delayed gratification all you want but the majority of American consumers will never actually understand it.

I am not going to click on this headli…fuck

I think the “invisible hand of the market” swats more people than it helps.

How do you know if somebody has Linux on their desktop?… They’ll tell you. I’m currently on Windows 10 Pro but have used a number of different Linux distros since the mid-90s. I also had to have Windows because of work requirements but now that I’m retired, I may go back to Debian or Kali.

People in the US scream about inflation but many of them have no idea how bad it is in other countries. Places where food products are sparse or imported are extremely expensive. There’s not that much stuff we don’t produce or grow in the US.

Grocery prices can vary widely depending on location. The absolute cheapest Walmart ground beef I can get is $4.50 per pound and milk is $3.62 a gallon. Pasta is a $1 pound and eggs are relatively cheap here. Produce has gone through the roof.

I thought that was an exchange between Nietzsche and God, or it used to be. Anyway, I was unaware that the double low-9 quotation mark was even a thing so thanks for that.

You will never find more wretched hives of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

Now they can steal all your data even faster

Had no clue you could sell a reddit acct…doesn’t surprise me though.

You have a point but there’s a pretty big difference between something like a statistics textbook and the novel “Dune” for instance. One was specifically written to teach mostly pre-existing ideas and the other was created as entertainment to sell to a wide an audience as possible.