YouTube Shorts doesn’t even work properly for me. At least half the videos, that are suggested to me, I’ve already seen multiple times before. Boring, as you said. I’ve found myself staying off of social media or news sites more in the last couple of weeks. News’ll make me depressive, social media bores me. Then again, more time for hobbies!

I just went the ol’ VPN route and got a YouTube Premium family subscription in Turkey. It’s about 2€/month for 5 people; peanuts essentially. I wish I could avoid giving money to Google entirely but I’m mostly using Apple devices to consume YouTube content and my four friends who share the subscription with me do as well. So yeah, that’s the trade-off I can live with.

With how many B-52s that carried thermonuclear bombs and crashed, I’m glad the US didn’t accidentally nuke itself and other countries.

I can’t remember Skyrim or Fallout 4 releasing in that bad of a state and I’ve owned those games since release. Fallout 76 on the other hand… Yikes. I might also be completely wrong as years of playing with unofficial community patches may have clouded my memories. CP2077 had way more issues than just bugs at launch. Witcher 3 was buggy as well, but at least somewhat feature complete. I can kinda forgive jank in games if the product itself is compelling to me and I’m just a sucker for Bethesda-style RPGs. Will still be waiting for Starfield’s launch on GamePass before I buy it, Fallout 4 and Fallout 76 had awful writing and that’s nothing that a patch can fix.

Yeah, part of the reason cars back then were so serviceable was because they broke down all the time. A modern car with regular servicing can last very long mechanically. The amount of electronic creature comforts, safety devices etc. are often what drives up repair costs and lead to some cars becoming uneconomical to repair. Cracked windshield? That’ll be 1000 bucks because the rain sensor for your automatic wipers will have to be recalibrated. Dead headlight? $2000 because we can’t replace individual LEDs, have to take the front of the car of to replace the whole headlight assembly and calibrate the adaptive front lighting system so that it follows road curvature again.

Yeah, beef jerky, even when making it yourself like @[email protected] does, can be quite expensive depending on where you live. Thankfully beef jerky doesn’t require high-end cuts of beef. Round Eye is one of the preferred cuts and even in regions with relatively high prices for beef (e.g. Germany) it’s still quite economical compared to store-bought Jack Link’s.

I think, at least for non-savvy people, that buying individual stocks is not a great idea anyway. If you’re investing to have long term capital gains something like the MSCI World ETF would probably be the better choice. If you invested in that specific index fund in 2016 you’d have doubled your money by now, even during this economic downturn. Sure, you can make more money in a shorter time day trading but that shit is damn near a full time job and more risky unless you heavily diversify your portfolio (which you should do anyway).

Another poster mentioned stocks of the company he works for. My company for example distributes a good amount of their yearly profits to their employees. Meaning that once a year you can choose between a couple hundred bucks one-time payout or get a bunch of company stocks for a heavily discounted price, but they’re trade-locked for two years. At the beginning of 2020 I chose the stock option and the shares got bought right at the beginning of the covid dip. When 2022 rolled around I had essentially quintupled my initial investment in the discounted stocks. So that’s another great tip, provided you company offers similar plans.