My family will rotate Steaming services. We sub for a month or two when we wanna see a show or something, then cancel in favor of something else.

Do you have any information that could help me understand how to self-host my own music streaming using jellyfin? I’ve been meaning to learn this as I’m over Apple’s last increase.

I don't have that problem. I share netflix/HBO with my sister who is across the country with little to no issue.

but we never sub up more than two services at once.

my nephew build a pc this winter. he paid like 2K for roughly the same spec that my older nephew built in '23 and paid like $800 for.

only thing that wasn't a massive price increase was motherboard, case and power supply.

Yeah, I think the only new part my pc sees between 2025-??? is the case.

I want to upgrade, but i can at least comfortably play every game that is out so I can eait.

Totally. I will only buy soda when it's on sale for half off. Otherwise it's like $1 per can and that's too damn much.

You can pick up a used ball keg, probs $25-30, a cheap regulator, some tubing and a carbonating cap (you can skip the carbonating cap, which last I looked is some $25, just hook the CO2 line to the dip tube, it’ll take longer to reach carbonation saturation, but it works fine), and a hand faucet for $1 and rent a CO2 tank (last time I filled a 5lb cylinder it was $30 which includes the cylinder) and make gallons of the stuff for decreasing spend.

Upfront cost is moderately high, yes thats true, but the more you use it the less it costs per gallon. And no plastic bottles, no questionable water source, no shipping pollution. You just have on demand carbonated water. If you add fruit puree, you can make “Italian soda”, or you can buy the soda syrup businesses and such use if you want, though you’ll want something in a pump bottle and not a box that hooks to a big system..

One 5lb tank of co2 is enough for 5-10 batches, depending how heavily carbonated you like, and each batch is 5 gallons, assuming a standard 1/8 barrel keg, so the math is pretty appealing if carbonated water is a thing you like.

huh, i but carbonated water for like 50 cents a liter at the regular grocery store, and that's not even the cheap shit.

soda is overpriced everywhere, people also stopped drinking them for the most part. i think some places have added tax too. i mostly drink sparkling water with flavours, of different brands. i usually dont mind stevia infused ones much. even in discount stores they are expensive asf. sparkling water is cheap compared to soda, like most of the time its half the price.

Soda at the movie theater near me costs $11 now. The entire place is also falling apart and looks like it's on the verge of bankruptsy even though it's one of the most well-known locations.

Red meat in general. Even pork has gotten out of hand.

My family is eating poultry two or three nights per week and entirely vegetarian the rest of the week just to cut spending.

Beef is price fixed in an illegal trust.

i can still get stew meat and sirloin tips for a decent price. but those were never nice cuts anyway. they are only abotu 8-10/lb though still.

i used to get strip streaks sirloin and now those are 20/lb+

And yet the workers are still making shit wages. It’s absurd.

I now just buy the large ready-to-bake supreme pizza at Aldi and just enhance it by adding mozarella and other toppings at home. $8 plus maybe $2 worth of extra stuff I put on it. Just like sushi, I really can’t justify paying too much for it when eating out.

Yet people will pay 10 times the cost of the ingredients to have food delivered to them cold and half-eaten.

Oh god for me it was frozen pizza. I fucking love frozen pizza as an easy dinner night and used to be able to find Dr Oetkers for $4 a pizza. That shit is $13 now.

It kills me cause I still love it but I won't buy it :(

Wtf? That's so fricking much...

try costco pizza. 9.99. costco loves you.

A lot of my grocery stores have pizza dough ready to go thats about $2.50 and can be frozen. So if you buy your ingredients and a pizza stone, you can have some REALLY good pizza any time.

I like to put the sauce on, then toast the crust for about 4-5mins before putting the rest on. Keeps the crust crispy.

Also, a dough ball isnt as hard to fit in the fridge.

Pizza in my corner of the world is still a reasonable price. First, there's cheap but delicious Little Caesars -- that's a go-to that I'm not at all embarrassed to admit. Then my local pizza shop can get me a XL pie and cheesy bread sticks for less than $20 out the door. My family of three always has leftovers from that for lunch the next day for someone but not everyone.

Any of the bougy "wood fired" blah blah blah boutique pizza grift stills costs a fortune here. But my little local pizza shop is a good NYC style slice, with normal pizza shop ingredients.

I have three that I purchased prior to the insanity.

I might sell one and buy yacht.

I'm going to go on a rant here, but I was disappointed in the launch of the Pi 5 and even more frustrated at the lack of pushback by the tech community.

I'm forgetting the details now, but it launched much later than it was supposed to (they used covid as an excuse, but I'm not sure). That's not the issue; the issue is that it was only slightly more powerful than the Pi 4.

Given that the Pi 5 was launched 4 years later, it should have been more powerful. But considering it wasn't, it meant they were using cheaper silicon.

But the real kicker is that I think it had a $10 (like a 25%) price hike.

So more expensive for marginally better power...screw that.

That along with the locked down nature of arm, I was done with the company. Especially considering the strides x86 has made in low power applications.

It just sucks can't afford anything right now.

I have a super old model with such old connections it’s not even useful for anything.