I actually started with this chore list, and we eventually ended up tweaking it to better suit our particular living conditions:

I’m in House Ryobi; while it does the job, I needed to borrow a tool I didn’t have from our neighbour (wife’s rule; I can only buy one if I need to borrow it 3 times)… he had a set of Bosch Professionals - holy moly, those things are on a whole other level!

I downloaded the entire SNES catalogue when I was overseas; so glad I did that then as it’s become much more difficult over the past few years.

II recently tried to download ISOs of my PS1 & 2 collections so that I could play them on my Steam Deck, and found out that at it’s actually a lot faster and easier just to to them myself - as whatever sources I can find are either dead links, or download so slowly that the connection is likely to time out before the download completes.

I share your sentiment; but you need to remember that SM1&3 were both originally NES games, and even the All Stars remakes are largely hampered by the original consoles limitations.

That’s why both SMW and Yoshi’s Island are such better experiences overall, they didn’t have to emulate those same limitations in order to preserve an original playstyle.

Getting loans for things is part of the reason why it’s expensive being poor.

The average US credit card charges ~22% interest and there are a crap-tonne of sub-prime loans that prey on desperate people that charge a hell of a lot more than that! A ‘cheap’ $500 dryer will end up costing close to double that by the time the loan ends up paid off.

This isn’t a ‘have you tried just not being poor?’ comment; I’ve been in a similar position for the entirety of my 20s and a good chunk of my 30s, before I learned that there was nothing wrong with going against consumer culture and buying an older, quality second hand product.

Becoming financially mature is probably the most painful part of becoming an adult, in multiple senses of the word.

Bit of a straw-man argument there: firstly you don’t need to spend that all in one hit; the break even point is a lot sooner than 30 years; and lastly, paying to replace cheap shot that breaks quickly with more shit that breaks quickly is one of the traps that keeps prone living paycheck to paycheck.

My two examples below:

Samsung dryer died after 3yrs, out of warranty, broke in our 20s, couldn’t afford to replace it. Lucked out finding an ANCIENT Miele condenser dryer on Marketplace for $50. Not only did that thing last us another 3 years before it started tripping the circuit breaker, it was cheaper to run than the old unit and ended up saving us enough money that we were then able to invest in a brand new Bosch unit that’s still going today (7+ years).

LG refrigerator died in a little over 3 years, due to a known compressor fault; uneconomical repair even though it was still under warranty, so we got a full manufacturer’s refund. We bit the bullet, did our research and went with a Made in Japan Hitachi model. It’s always outlasted the LG, and is again more energy efficient that we’re saving a few bucks a month on electricity.

I will reiterate; it’s expensive being poor. Buying a better quality second-hand unit rather than a new ‘commodity brand’ appliance is just one of the small ways to make things a little less expensive.

I mean, having to replace a fridge every few years because it constantly breaks in a way that’s uneconomical to repair will cost you a lot more in the long run.

That’s the thing, it’s more expensive being poor.

You’d be better off getting a 2nd hand quality brand from a wealthy suburb when they remodel their kitchen every 5ish years or so.

Epson & HP stocks in free-fall following this revelation.

Check out Infuse, it’s a pretty good front end for a home media collection.

Is it the same muscle that lets you wiggle your ears? Because I can do that, and I get a similar roaring.

I’ve used similar services to this in the past; not because I couldn’t afford something up front - but because I wanted to amortise the purchase across a pretty short (8 week) period.

Why not just use a credit card? I did. As a semi-regular user of the service, it was set up in such a way that it would bill the first 25% of my purchase after 2 weeks, and again every 2 weeks after that.

So not only was I getting an additional interest-free time stacking the 2 week period with my CC’s billing cycle; but I was earning loyalty/rewards points with both programs simultaneously.

But your government will (try to) protect you from foreign influences That’s what this is, though.

Take a step back and consider for a moment the absolute mayhem TikTok was able to cause through one single push notification to their US user base (>170m, over half the adult population). That is not a power that should be wielded lightly, and definitely not one in the hands of a foreign adversary ready, willing and capable of weaponising it at their whim.

Think of the power that affords them to put their finger on the scale when it comes to the critical upcoming Presidential election, not just directly - but through slight manipulations of the algorithm to engage one political cohort and disenfranchise another.

We can agree that there is at least a slight difference in having your own (or a friendly nation’s) Government tracking you, versus allowing a competing nation to have direct access to over half of the adult US population (as per their recent push-notification stunt), as well as a robust collection of their interests and preferences.

There is a reason China has banned most US-based software in the mainland (Meta, Google, etc.); in favour of self-developed alternatives. This is just treatment in kind; it’s not an outright ban, rather a forced sale to prevent more of that user data falling into dubious hands.

Dividing something by 0.5 isn’t halving it, it’s doubling it.

I recently visited China, to meet my wife’s extended family.

Let me tell you, the sheer amount of single-use plastics that are consumed by any individual throughout a regular day in a metropolitan environment, is absolutely and mind-numbingly depressing.

Given that there are 1.3b people there, and that no matter how much we in the US/AU/EU reduce/reuse/recycle - we will never be able to truly offset that sheer amount of plastic pollution produced.

Now I’m not saying this to be a doomer, but more-so to say that individuals can’t enact sufficient change to save this planet, we need Government and corporate incentives to shift towards sustainable alternatives, and punitive policies to disincentivise plastic production globally.

I’m running a rusty old QNAP NAS (10+ years old), and access it via Infuse on my iPhone / Apple TV.

It provides a very Kodi-like interface, and requires near 0 set-up. Just point it at the root network folders and it’ll pull all the relevant metadata (movie posters, cast lists, series info, optional subtitles etc.).