Trucks (In the USA)

I’m in this FB group that does financial advice with a little sarcasm and jokes mixed in. Suggest that someone should downsize to a car or get rid of their gas guzzling truck they have no real utility for and it’s like you’ve insulted their religion. Never seen such a group of grown adults throwing temper tantrums like that in my life.

Sadly I don’t think greedflation is an official term. Stagflation was the closest I know about anyway.

Samsung isn’t on planet earth with their prices. I was avoiding them anyway because I believe TouchWiz is an inferior interface than stock Android. Just way too much bloat.

Good phones used to be around 400, taking me a few days to think about it and say yes. Now they are beyond 1000

I’m not sure what you mean by a “good” phone. Like yeah, they came up a bit. A Pixel 7a costs $499, and if one wants wireless charging and a better camera they can go with the Pixel 7 for $599. Regular non-Pro iPhones are around the same price.

Like yeah, folding phones are well over $1,000 in most cases, but personally I think that’s a gimmick, my hot take. But for me and 99% of the people I know, we’re sticking with our slab smartphones.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.

This is a sign of an upcoming recession if we aren’t already in one. People are starting to run out of their savings due to stagflation and are looking for areas to cut. Buying a new phone every year or every other year and replacing laptops every 5 years are among the first things to go in anyone’s budget.

So currently the only people refreshing their devices are the people who NEED new devices.

Capitalist economies always need spends out of desire and not just necessity.

Worst part is instead of reversing the gouging these companies will probably just go ham on the planned obsolescence.

I’m a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.

Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don’t recall one that’s not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn’t happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don’t work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn’t the same because I don’t have nearly the same amount of experience.

Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.

Some of it has to do with the audio equipment too.

Like I can hear the difference on my high quality headphones when connected to a decent USB audio interface device or my Denon home theater system with Technic speakers. Barely, while a difference is there. But can’t tell on my gaming headset or PC speakers.

And my ears are messed up. Had two sets of ear tubes when I was a kid and have some scar tissue on my eardrums which resonates with odd frequencies sometimes.

Now I’m even more glad to have ditched the streaming sub model to buy music instead. Of course new releases may follow and go up by $0.10 per song.