Yo ho/All hands/Hoist the colors high
“Yo ho, fiddle-dee dee, a [REDACTED_DUE_TO_LEMMY.WORLD_POLICY]'s life for me!”
but also
“Having fun isn’t hard if you have a library card!”
I’ve been checking out so many good shows and movies from my local public library
The library feels like it should be illegal somehow. It’s SO GOOD.
I’m shocked they’re still legal.
There would be SUCH a revolt from authors if publishers tried to do something to legislate libraries away that I doubt any new books would be released for decades.
Oh no. Everyone knows The Party fears a revolt of academics and intellectuals more than anything. My man, they’re always the first ones to go.
“You can judge the degree of civilization by looking at who is imprisoned” / Dostojevskij
Who’s talking about imprisonment? I’m talking about another writer’s strike, leaving publishers with nothing to publish for months or years. With their margins already razor-thin, they have to know that they’d just be done if they tried any funny business.
Give them time
I love the two sides of “It’s about the price of a cup of coffee” like they’re not referring to a 30oz premium milkshake with a shot of espresso, not a regular black coffee.
Then the
“Your generation can’t afford anything because of your coffee addiction!”
Like companies aren’t just monetizing every single last thing and telling us “you’ll own nothing and you’ll LIKE IT!”
Also the price of a coffee has gone up considerably in the last couple years
Subscription is taxes
I pay for Apple Music Student ($6), a VPN ($2), and extra iCloud storage ($1). 100% worth it in my opinion.
So long as you have an exit plan.
The student price is a deliberate ploy to get reliant customers then jack the price up. (Not just Apple, but definitely Apple.)
Unfortunately, there isn’t really an exit plan. Buying the music outright is not worth it because of how many different artists I listen to so I will probably always be paying for Apple Music or Tidal.
It’s only 4 dollars more a month and I will have a real job to pay for it.
I honestly just don’t use these services, and never recommend them, entirely because they are subscription-based.
As a model, it is largely focused on trapping the user who forgets to cancel. Many also use sneaky ways to avoid a user cancelling in time, and give no warnings.
Fuckers wearing $2000 suits out here panhandling
Laughs in having my own Jellyfin media server and ad blockers for YouTube as well as using my server for file backups as well
laughs in 7 TB of media actively archived
just installed two 18TB drives, currently working on mirroring and swapping over to new drive sets. It’s a pain because i have limited sata, and need to do hotswaps unless i want to take EVERYTHING down.
It’s worth it though, wouldn’t catch me saying otherwise.
How… Uh… Would one get some of your media files…? Do we do like in the old days and do USB drop off sites mixed with geocaching?
Know me IRL. One of these days i do intend on properly preserving a lot of the content i host somewhere, that’s going to be an ordeal though. Most of it is YT content currently, considering it’s mostly what i consume that shouldn’t be a huge shocker.
Really though, if anything, just start your own archive and keep building it. Tailor it to your personal tastes and worry about it from there.
I don’t mind Xbox Game Pass when there’s a deal on it for $1 but I make sure not to auto renew
This is gong to sound nuts, but subscriptions aren’t a problem for me, auto renewals are. I like to be in control of my finances, so whenever I sign up for something I pick a term I can live with, 1,3, 6 or 12 months, I pay, and I immediately go to the account management screen and cancel.
I don’t care if it’s inconvenient to have to think about it every so often, but I’m in control of the spending and to me that’s what matters.
Is paying via credit card with auto renewals the only payment method companies provide you? That’s pretty bad, I’d say.
Because, considering what you are having to do RN, it means that they can simply change a policy and next time you pay, you might find out the “account management screen and cancel” becomes unavailable.
There has to be a way to pay without having to give your credit card details… e.g. The payment gateway sends a request to your bank; your bank asks you for confirmation for one time payment; you confirm payment; the bank sends acceptance to request; payment gateway captures it and gives you your bill.
See, game pass I’m cool with because it’s an up-front transparent deal that you are buying time to access this library, and the library also changes. There is no pretense of “buying a copy” or whatever.
It’s nice for modern games anyway. For classic stuff that I want to have access to forever, I alreadty have access to that stuff forever. It might stink for the kids who are playing their “classics” right now, though.
I only buy it with redemption codes, so it can’t auto-renew.
Wait… “limited ads”? Are there still some ads with Spotify Premium?
I have not seen any.
No, some podcasts still have sponsors embedded in the content but that’s not Spotify themselves.
Yes, a cup of coffee every 5 minutes
Honestly, if the service respects my privacy and isn’t littered with ads, I don’t mind paying at all. Like I wouldn’t mind paying a monthly fee for services provided by Proton, for example, for email, online storage, vpn, etc. I think it’s fair. There’s a lot of infrastructure behind it and employees. Things don’t just run by themselves for free.
But when I pay for a subscription and they publish ads as well for extra income, not only does it make my experience unpleasant, but it’s incredibly greedy. And when I get charged for a service that exploits all my private data to create a user profile that can be sold and used to push targeted ads and other fake information with the goal of changing my opinion on important democratic topics, then that’s when I start completely avoiding that service altogether.
twitter is the most embarrassing one on here by a thousand miles
Especially considering most Twitter bluechecks today are bot accounts doing chatgpt responses
Fuck Amazon but it is not like the others in the meme
Amazon lets you acquire physical items, of insane variety, delivered to your door, often for a price lower than you can find it in physical stores. Often delivered same day and almost certainly same week.
That’s an insane value compared to something like a game company that’s like “teehee you can pretend to own this until we get bored of hosting it and then poof fuck you!”
I did the math for me and even with the Amazon credit card the service wasn’t worth the price. It’s free shipping over ~$25(?) dollars anyway. “Prime shipping” hasn’t meant anything significant since at least 2020. It’s often the same as non-prime, maybe a day earlier.
If you care about the shows that maybe changes, but they have about 5 and anytime you search for something it’s a tossup whether it will be included with your subscription or only available for buy/rent or on some other platform. It’s even more fun when there’s ‘copy’ of a movie included with Prime, and another available for buy/rent and and buy/rent version is at the top of the search results and the one you already paid for access to you have to scroll to see.
Prime Video is changing at the end of this month. Ads or you can pay $3/mo.
I’m actually just canceling instead.
At least in my area prime shipping is insanely fast, but yes. My point was you get a physical item from Amazon where as the others are purely digital
Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.
No. You get to buy a shovel with faster delivery. You get the shovel, forever. Nintendo let’s you “buy” a game they could sunset at any moment. You possess nothing.
I only have Netflix, and it’s included with my t mobile.
I guess I also have amazon prime, but I just use it for the free shipping and it gets used a lot with the family.
How else are you going to get underwear?
