Kelsenellenelvial

There’s going to be some variance depending on how a person tends to listen to their music. I think the decline of CDs correlates pretty well with digital options being available, and people making the switch. There’s always going to be people at the head of the pack using the new thing and people that want to save costs by keeping what they’ve got. The accessory market affects that too, there was overlap when people would have portable digital music players, but still use optical disks for their home stereo and vehicles. But as manufacturers came out with solutions like iPod docks or Bluetooth streaming the digital devices were able to push out the physical media.

Sask also has our own network, and it seems to help things a lot. Been a while since I've shopped for plans, but there was a time when the big 2 charged about 25% less in Sask because they had to compete with Sasktel. They've also got their own MVNO now, Lum Mobile, which is the first to have a vastly different pricing structure than the other options. Buy 3 month/1 year plans up front, and the data bucket is an until you use it thing instead of being a monthly bucket. For about $450 (including all taxes/fees) I've got my cell service paid for the whole year, and will probably still have some data left to carry over then.

Supposedly there's been some big discounts coming around with the newer MVNO's, but its hard to gain traction when people are so used to just walking down to the nearest carrier store for phones/plans, and often choose an expensive monthly plan over buying their devices up front.

I always took a light jacket with lots of pockets. In line, transfer all your things to the jacket and put that through the scanner. After security transfer everything back and pack the jacket.

Looking for commercial type products and checking the website for parts/manuals can go a long way. Doesn’t always guarantee that those parts will still be available in a decade or two, but it shows the company at least making an effort to support those products. You’re paying up front though, that commercial product can be 5-10x the cost of the equivalent consumer model. Heck, sometimes people still buy those consumer models because it’s a lot easier to justify a $100-$200 price tag every, even if you expect to replace it every few years than $1000+ up front.

This is the real answer to me. Often, the premium version is still out there but people go for the budget version anyway. That’s not necessarily a bad thing though. When we can furnish a whole room for what a couple pieces used to cost, that’s a win for a lot of people even if some of those items wear out prematurely. It also depends if we’re talking about a mostly mechanical and utilitarian item, vs something that relies on modern software ecosystems. Toasters haven’t changed much in 40 years, but a 10 year old cell phone is pretty much useless, possibly not working at all with current network technology. Durability is less important when an item becomes technologically obsolete anyway.

There’s also smart chargers that will scale the charging speed based on the rest of the house’s demand. High power chargers are nice sometimes, but most of the time people’s cars are parked at home for 12+ hours per day and they’re only driving a few km to work and back each day.

I do wonder what this means for businesses that offer powered parking stalls. Having someone charge their vehicle at work could be an extra few hundred per year per stall.

I heard there was a process for requesting additional data, but you have to actually pay for the 5 users and they’ll bump it a few TB every couple months on request. That’s from people reporting their experience with support, so it might not be totally consistent.

I kind of get it though, people hear “unlimited storage” and then don’t even make an effort to be efficient with that space, and just want to keep everything forever. There’s a real cost to that storage, and it’s higher than many think since it’s not just a single HDD like many would have sitting on their desk but a series of arrays/pools and all the related systems to ensure reliability and uptime. They probably did some calculation where 99% of users would be profitable even with their “unlimited storage” and eating it on the other 1% was a reasonable advertising cost. Over time that calculation changed and they had to update the service.

Presumably it was GSuite/Google Workspace. While they advertised unlimited storage if you paid for 5 accounts, it wasn’t really enforced so you could pay something like $20/month and get unlimited storage on G-drive. There was a daily cap on how much data can be moved, but that’s fine for hosting incremental backups like many that took advantage.

Mine guest network is Free Public WiFi. Only one person at my place has gotten the joke so far.

It’s a shitty game. The worst part to me is that there’s a whole culture of avoiding credit card debt(which is good), that cut out credit cards altogether and many are never even aware that they’re leaving those rewards on the table let alone the other benefits (fraud protection, extended warranties, price protection, etc.) that are commonly available for credit card purchases.

I think the fee structure could be better, and that would change a lot. In many ways, the merchant fees are worthwhile as the transactions are easier to process than cash, there’s merchant side protections from fraud, it reduces crime(businesses having less cash on hand), etc.. The issues are that pricing is negotiable so companies that do the biggest volume pay the lowest fees, its percentage based which hurts companies that tend to have higher transaction values, and bigger companies get more benefit from being able to track customers by their card.

Hmm…. I’ve never heard about those kinds of limits here. It’s not too uncommon for 3-5 people to split a house(which may or may not actually have 3-5 legal bedrooms) around here, though the trend seems to be splitting those houses into 2-3 legal suites, each of which might have multiple bedrooms.

I don’t think a medallion system is a solution though, as I understand that was brought in to artificially lower supply and increase revenue for the cab companies by limiting the number available. I do like the idea of more proactive enforcement of regulations to ensure that housing is kept in reasonable repair, but that can also increase prices since I’d venture most people put up with poor quality rentals due to them being the lowest cost; at least in terms of rent, though utility costs can outweigh that. If there was safe, clean, and affordable housing available then people trying to market sub-standard units wouldn’t get renters and would be forced to either upgrade the unit or sell.

The other thing I didn’t think of is renting makes it a lot simpler to share accommodations. A group of 2-4 people can split the rent on a property that none of them would qualify for individually.

Agreed that the current situation parallels a lot of industries in that it’s concentrating wealth in the hands of those that are already ahead and it’s difficult for new people to become part of that system. Personally, I think the solution for any of these essential goods/services is crown corporations, which creates a standard of service that private industry has to compete with instead of being able to collude to maximize margins.