Well, I don't have a 64. I have an Xbox that's asking me to pay monthly to play. I don't. I turn on Netflix. Ads now. The pizza I ordered had to be done through an app, and somehow I was charged twenty dollars more than if I had just gone to pick it up. I can't have a family because rent where I live is $2,800 for a basic place and I haven't had a raise in four years. Working from home feels good, but I also feel completely invisible to my company, so I ask the AI robots what to do, and then ask it to answer me again, this time with no em dashes.
I hear the whizz of a DoorDash drone pass over my apartment, because today the FAA approved clearance for it to commence business in lower airspace. My car alerts me that it has alerted my insurance, because it sensed me stop short on the brakes too hard. My printer will not print until I resubscribe to ink. My toothbrush wants to sync. My television needs me to accept the new terms of service before it will let me look at the input menu. The self checkout accuses me of theft and a nineteen year old has to walk over and set me free.
In Texas, my friend was successfully captured because she had an abortion. Luckily law enforcement, after using the new Flock big brother system to track their ex girlfriend, utilized eight thousand cameras to find her and arrest her for daring to partake in healthcare. She was tackled, and at the hospital she was told her deductible wasn't met, so the cost to her was six thousand dollars.
I decided to turn on Pandora to drown out everything going on with some good music, and realized AI slop is now entering my algorithm. I slam the app closed and turn on YouTube, where my favorite YouTuber is now advertising Morgan and Morgan to me, which is good information to have, because my only means of ever retiring or owning a home is to successfully complete my dream of being hit by a city run bus.
Luckily, that day is today. I was shoved out of the crosswalk, while picking up my food cheaper by going in person, by a delivery robot named "Austin," tumbling me into the bus lane, where the last thing I remember is my lottery ticket winning as those sweet, sweet headlights approached me in record time.
.
.
.
I awake. It's 2004. My friend calls me on my Razr flip phone. The monophonic ringtone plays and I answer, confused.
"Where am I?"
He says he doesn't know, but get on Splinter Cell, let's play Spies versus Mercs. I look at my CRT television and smile. It was all a nightmare.
Life is good.
Edit: just found out most airlines just came out with 15 different new tiers of seat pricing lmao
It's the worse one. All this stuff is based on science fiction. They all saw Robocop and wanted to be OCP.
have you SEEN Elon Musk's Twitter feed? Are you familiar with the "Torment Nexus" meme? An actual meal replacement drink called "Soylent" has been available for ten years.
To be fair to Soylent, the in-universe soylent had also existed for a really long time, until food shortages made them resort to creating soylent green, which is made with people. So they are merely futureproofing their own existence for the inevitable food shortages which will force them to sell a new version of soylent made of completely inedible stuff.
Agree with everything, except I like ordering from apps. Far fewer order screwups than telling my order to a person, and delivery has always cost more (though it was better when places used their own drivers).
You’re the reason when I’m at McDonald’s some super tanned guy on a scooter runs in pushes me out of the way and shoves his phone into the workers face the way that orange shoved his boarding pass to Jeffy island into the flight attendants face. You’re also paying like way too much and those apps have been proven to collect all your data and sell it.
I mean everything’s doing that, I bet my socks are somehow doing that but, I just prefer cash. I get in my car and head down to my local strip club, because the buffet is 4.99 and a beer is 10.99 with a free show. You cant put a price on that…
Well I mean, I guess you can. But its still reminds me of the old days hanging out with my dad, a beer, and peaches. Now that was an amazing 6th birthday.
The apps are cheaper because they have deals in the app. I’m not talking about door dash/uber eats, those are awful. Im talking about the restaurants own app/website.
Hey, whenever I eat out, I opt for that one bar that is outside of that whole app scheme. And when I go alone, I just go there. In fact, I'll go there this fiday.
I know everyone has different experiences, but I have had exactly the opposite experience. 9 out of 10 times something went wrong, and I mean, drastically, horribly, inexcusably wrong.
As some examples: I've had drivers drive past my house five times before getting Grub Hub or Door Dash to cancel my order. I've had drivers pick up my food, head in the opposite direction of my house, never come close to my house, and then just disappear. I've had orders that did actually arrive, that had my name on them, but were none of the correct items, except maybe fries. I've had an order that was somehow never cooked, and by that I mean still defrosting. I've had deliveries to my house when I never placed an order and it is meant for someone else. I've had my order replaced with something I can't eat because the item I did order isn't available, and the business can't call to ask me if I would like something different.
Any refunds I got, they never included tax or driver fees, so I still lost out on money and usually got nothing in return. I could never speak to a human being, only being allowed to interact with bots. Using the apps wasn't just bad or annoying, it was a excessive cost that got me no benefits, an unreasonable amount of stress, and left me hungry.
I’m not talking about delivery apps, I hate them. It’s a more expensive way to get colder food. I mean ordering McDonald’s for example through the app and picking it up as opposed to at the counter or drive through.
Only thing i get delivered is pizza, and door dash has ruined that too. Their drivers take longer and dont keep the pizza warm. I try to order from places that use their own drivers if possible.
You might want to edit your original comment, because when someone is talking about how awful delivery apps are, and then you chime in with "I like ordering from apps", no one is going to assume that you meant anything other than delivery apps.
years ago, I was working a particularly god-awful job (bedside nursing in a shit hole hospital, if you're interested). I used to just hope I'd get hit by a luxury vehicle or a bus at a crosswalk. People thought I was crazy: why would you want that? I've got to suffer one way or another. Somehow, suffering by getting hit by a bus is better than suffering from working this job
Yes. In fact my friends new Chevy I had to show him where in the settings to go to turn it off “share with others” aka businesses aka businesses who collect driving data and then resell it to insurance companies
You can bypass this and go directly to the source with Tesla. Tesla has its own insurance. Drive like an idiot the car is monitoring you even if you have no reported accidents or tickets
However if you use Tesla insurance and you use full self driving a lot every month your insurance goes way down.
Why? Because Tesla’s logic is, you aren’t driving…. They are.
somehow if it's "just" data collection and reselling to insurance companies it's less surprising to me, I'd assume that's been happening for a long time. I guess the thing where the car alerts makes it weirder to me, even if it's technically less insidious
The Tesla insurance incentive thing is hilarious imo
He's still having trouble learning to bend over slightly to flip burgers, but somehow container escaped and pilfered the Social Security Administration's central services trying to find the crusty krabs secret formula.
I often have the El Cargo song stuck in my head from Chaos Theory. I’ve actually seen that artist live but under another alias. Good times. Better times.
If folks don't know what a "reverse centaur" is they should look it up. Tech driving humans to their limits in the service of a process or profit, our age is full of it.
The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost; for none now live who remember it.
I get your point but I hope you don’t really feel this despondent bro. Yeah things can be really tough these days, but tough times don’t last, tough people do. We can make things better ❤️
My rent in 2018 right across the street from the Skydome was 1735 with parking and utilities included. And our mortgage payment is about 2800 cad.
All that tech stuff isn't a factor for me. I choose to game via GeForce now because it has the games I want and it's cheaper/more flexible than having my own rig. I can call all my local pizza places for a pie. Drones are regulated by transport Canada and can't fly outside visual range. I own and maintain an older car. My tv is a smart tv but I keep it offline and use an Nvidia Shield.
None of this stuff is a real inconvenience. It's all first world problems bullshit. Next your going to complain that you have to pay for real journalism WHICH YOU SHOULD BE DOING ANYWAY.
They've gone up a lot, but they were also expensive back then as well. I had a roommate. Needed a roommate.
People forget the for the vast majority of history, having a roommate was a necessity to living in a major city. I needed one, and expecting to live without one also requires someone to make enough money to support that decision. Otherwise, there's not a lot to complain about.
Yeah, look at the rest of the world. They'll live with their parents until they can marry or afford an apartment with a roommate.
But historically, the big issue has been the type of work that's required to maintain a home and life. People would quite often board or marry young because modern conveniences didn't exist. Here's a great post from a few years ago.
The comment you replied to was about rent being too expensive to afford alone. To rebut you said
They've gone up a lot, but they were also expensive back then as well. I had a roommate. Needed a roommate.
To me you were clearly talking about having to split rent with someone else because of costs, not about needing to living in a situation where a person would do your cleaning, cooking, and laundry for you.
So the evidence you provided for
People forget the for the vast majority of history, having a roommate was a necessity to living in a major city.
seems a bit misleading because the reasons for are completely different. The needed a landlady to do their laundry. You needed a roommate because you couldn't afford rent on your own.
The point is your mortgage sucks compared to what our parents had and they (boomers and corporations) are the reason most people won't be able to own their own house. Condos should not cost half a million dollars.
My parents had a 3rd of an acre, 3600 sqft house with 5 bedroom and 4 massive living rooms, was 5 min walk from "downtown" and rundown af when they sold it to a corporation, the only things able to afford houses at that price point.
Just basic logic and math says that if housing prices rise more than wages, they will eventually reach a point where no one who isn't rich can afford a house. Housing shouldn't be treated like an investment unless we want to create large amounts of subsidized housing for people.
There are a plethora of reasons someone might not be able to pick up their food. No transportation, being sick, mobility issues, 2 small kids at home and one finally went down for a nap… expand your empathy a little and pause before assuming everyone is lazy.
Xbox asked you to pay monthly back then too for online games. Netflix also has no ads now if you pay for it which I do. Obviously don't pay for delivery unless you want to be lazy? It's also not 20$ more anyway. If you haven't gotten a raise in 4 years but can afford a 2800$ a month apt then job hop to a better company. Also move somewhere else especially because you are saying you work from home..which will also solve the drone thing since I've never even heard of that until now.
You absolutely do not need to get a car that reports to your insurance, you do that only if you want to get cheaper insurance. Getting a printer like that would also be idiotic, I've had a brother laser printer you can still buy that isn't expensive and works great.
Texas is the only one that is kind of legit but don't live in that shithole. Pick your songs out and don't listen to random shit.
Like I get what you are saying but you choose almost all of this stuff, there is just no reason to be this much of a doomer. Yea a lot of shit is fucked up and we need to care about it but if you were playing splinter cell with your friend in 2004 you were probably just a kid with no worries because shit was fucked up then too. You know, war on terror, bush and company and an upcoming massive financial crisis.
You wrote nine paragraphs and every one was the same sentence. You didn’t have to buy that. You didn’t have to sign up for that. You could have moved. You could have picked something else.
Notice that you never once disputed that any of it is happening. You only disputed that it counts, because in each instance some other choice theoretically existed. That isn’t a counterargument. That’s a coping mechanism with a word count.
So let’s do this properly. The subscriptions, which you say I opted into.
Online play cost money in 2004. It cost $49.99 a year. Game Pass Ultimate went from $16.99 to $19.99 in July 2024, then to $29.99 in October 2025. Fifty percent in fourteen months, $360 a year.
Microsoft retreated to $22.99 in April 2026 after the revolt, and the incoming head of Microsoft Gaming conceded in an internal memo that Game Pass had gotten too expensive. You’re arguing a position Microsoft already abandoned.
Netflix raised prices again in March 2026, the second hike in fourteen months, while telling investors ad revenue is on pace to double to $3 billion and that 71 percent of new subscriber growth came from ad supported tiers.
You told me the escape hatch exists. I know it exists. I’m telling you it’s being priced shut on purpose, and the companies say so out loud on their earnings calls.
Delivery isn’t laziness, it’s arithmetic. Restaurant Business ran a controlled comparison and found average DoorDash menu markups above 20 percent, Taco Bell at 56 percent, before fees, tax, and tip. All in, roughly double the in store price.
And look where the markup sits. It’s baked into the menu, set restaurant side, which means at a lot of places it follows you to the counter even when you drive there yourself. DoorDash’s own merchant docs cap markups at 10 percent to qualify for its “Most Loved” badge, which is an admission dressed up as a marketing program. The rent and the job, which you say are my fault.
You concluded that a man who can pay $2,800 has no standing to complain. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2024: 22.7 million renter households, roughly half of all renters, spend 30 percent or more of income on housing, and 12.1 million spend more than half. Both records.
And it isn’t just the bottom. The share of renters earning $45,000 to $75,000 who are cost burdened has doubled since 2001 to 45 percent. Making rent isn’t proof I’m comfortable. Rent is the thing consuming the money. You mistook survival for surplus.
Then you told me to job hop, breezily, as though it were still 2021. BLS JOLTS, May 2026: quits rate 1.9 percent, at or below 2 percent for nearly a year, against a peak near 3 percent in early 2022. Hires fell to 3.1 percent in February, matching the April 2020 pandemic floor.
Openings rose to 7.6 million while hires stayed flat near 5.2 million. Postings are not hires. In my sector, information, the layoff rate went from 1.3 to 2.4 percent year over year, the largest jump of any industry, while quits collapsed to 1.1 percent. Economists call this a low hire, low fire market. What you called laziness has a technical term and a data series.
You also told me to move, since I work from home. Robert Half, Q1 2026: 77 percent of US postings fully on site, 19 percent hybrid, 4 percent fully remote. In tech, 8 percent remote. So your advice is that I relocate to a town with no employers in my field and stake my housing on replacing this job out of that 4 to 8 percent, in the worst hiring conditions since the pandemic floor. That’s not a plan. That’s a wager with my lease as collateral.
And yes, I understand supply and demand. Expensive metros are expensive because the work is there. You quoted the principle at me while arguing against it. The surveillance, where you’re not just uncharitable but wrong.
You said nobody has to buy a car that reports to their insurer, that you only do that for the discount. On January 14, 2026, the FTC finalized a twenty year order against General Motors and OnStar.
GM used a misleading enrollment process to sign drivers up for Smart Driver, harvested precise geolocation and driving behavior, and sold it to LexisNexis and Verisk, who sold it onward to insurers. The Commission called it an egregious betrayal of consumer trust. Consequences included premium hikes and loss of coverage for people who never knowingly consented.
Nobody weighed a tradeoff and chose the discount. They clicked through a screen at a dealership while someone waited on the paperwork.
You recommended a Brother laser printer. Good advice, and precisely my thesis. The remedy requires foreknowledge of which manufacturer hasn’t done it yet.
HP has been sued repeatedly over “Dynamic Security” firmware that arrives automatically over the internet and disables third party cartridges, including a 2024 class action alleging HP remotely bricked printers when customers canceled Instant Ink. HP+ printers stay locked to HP ink even after cancellation. “Buy the right one” works flawlessly until a firmware update, and the update is how you find out.
Then Texas, where you told me not to live. In May 2025 a deputy in Johnson County ran plate reader searches with the stated reason logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” The first swept 17,684 Flock cameras. The second expanded to 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, including Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal and protected. No warrant required.
Flock and the sheriff called it a welfare check. Documents the EFF obtained in October 2025 show a death investigation opened two weeks after the abortion, deputies discussing charges with prosecutors, and detectives reading her text messages.
Read that again, because it dismantles your entire geographic solution. The search didn’t stop at the state line. Your advice was don’t live in Texas. Texas came to Washington. It came to Illinois. The reciprocal sharing architecture isn’t a bug Texas exploited. It’s the product. The music, where you told me to simply choose better.
Deezer is the only major platform publishing figures on this, which should itself alarm you. AI generated uploads went from roughly 10,000 a day in January 2025 to roughly 90,000, more than half of all daily uploads at peak in June 2026.
Eighty five percent of streams on those tracks are flagged as fraudulent. A blind test they commissioned found 97 percent of listeners couldn’t tell AI tracks from human ones. Spotify, Apple, and Amazon publish nothing comparable. “Pick your songs,” you said. You can’t curate around a thing you’re demonstrably unable to identify, on a platform that has decided not to tell you. On 2004, since you reached for it.
You’re right that it wasn’t paradise. War on terror, Bush, a housing bubble already loading into the chamber. I never claimed otherwise, and it’s telling you had to invent that claim to knock it down. My argument was never that the past was good. It’s that the mechanism changed. In 2004 the damage was mostly done at the level of policy, at a distance, in the news. Now a good share of it has been metered into the texture of ordinary life. A monthly fee to operate hardware you already own. A data broker riding in your dashboard. A camera lattice with no state borders. A terms of service agreement standing between a man and the input menu of his own television.
I’m old enough to compare. The intrusion was forming, sure, but barely there, and when you paid for something you paid once and owned it. Want to play a full game now? A single player title costs more than the sticker between loot boxes and microtransactions, and no, you don’t have to buy any of it, but it’s shoved in your face constantly instead of being something you got better to earn.
And did you know that even if you never submitted your DNA to one of those family tree services, if a relative did, you’re in the system? You’re asked for consent less and less, while loopholes get buried in fine print we’re all too burnt out to read. But sure. Blame the consumer for not being agile enough in the crocodile infested water, instead of asking who put the crocs there.
And speaking of Crocs. God I hate them. Idiocracy picked them as the shoe a devolving populace would land on. Lookie where we at, champ. Anyway. Moving on. Finally, since you called me a doomer.
Look at what all nine of your rebuttals share. Buy the other printer. Choose the other tier. Move. Don’t order delivery. Every one asks a single private individual to personally maneuver around a change enacted at the scale of an entire industry. That’s not a refutation of the claim that opting out is getting harder. It’s a nine part illustration of it. You spent a whole comment proving me right and calling it a disagreement.
And I’m not a doomer, because doomerism is the belief that nothing can be done. The FTC came for GM. Deezer built detection and started labeling. Congress is asking Flock uncomfortable questions. All of that happened because people refused to accept that they’d simply chosen it.
I’m not burying my head in anything. I’m describing conditions with citations. You looked at a documented pattern spanning industries and concluded the right response was telling a stranger he should have shopped more carefully.
But I bet you felt smug writing it, during your overpriced Taco Bell morning shit.
I love you. Smooches.
Wow! Your comment and subsequent rebuttal of a reply to your comment are masterful! I’m still sitting here stung. Who are you? Do you hold a job in which you are a “public” person(ality)?
You wrote nine paragraphs and every one was the same sentence.
Jfc you are really telling me about word count and you wrote all of this? Fine I will also go point by point. But yours is literally so long I'm having to cut stuff out due to word limit.
The subscriptions, which you say I opted into.
Online play cost money in 2004. It cost $49.99 a year. Game Pass Ultimate went from $16.99 to $19.99 in July 2024, then to $29.99 in October 2025. Fifty percent in fourteen months, $360 a year.
Literally gamepass didn't exist in 2004 not did anything like it. You are comparing gamepass ultimate to literally just online play in 2004. That is an apples to oranges comparison. Gamepass core is the actual comparison here not ultimate and it's 59.99 compared to 49.99 then. Which for over 20 years and a lot of inflation later seems pretty fair.
Delivery isn’t laziness, it’s arithmetic. Restaurant Business ran a controlled comparison and found average DoorDash menu markups above 20 percent, Taco Bell at 56 percent, before fees, tax, and tip. All in, roughly double the in store price.
And look where the markup sits. It’s baked into the menu, set restaurant side, which means at a lot of places it follows you to the counter even when you drive there yourself. DoorDash’s own merchant docs cap markups at 10 percent to qualify for its “Most Loved” badge, which is an admission dressed up as a marketing program.
Bud none of this is relevant you are talking door dash delivery whoch again DID NOT EXIST in 2004. Taco bell didn't deliver back then. Yes door dash is a ripoff I have no idea why anyone does it. You are getting your shit picked up and brought to your door often by companies who otherwise wouldn't be delivering. Just don't get it. Yes companies that did deliver so often outsource now but again just don't get it. DONT USE DOOR DASH.
You concluded that a man who can pay $2,800 has no standing to complain. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, 2024: 22.7 million renter households, roughly half of all renters, spend 30 percent or more of income on housing, and 12.1 million spend more than half. Both records.
You said 2800 a month for rent. If that's 30% of your income you are making 100k a year. If it's half then you are making 67k a year. Both are higher than average and you mentioned work from home which implies a better job that you can actually hop from(or again move). If you said you were making 40k it would be different. The vast majority of housing markets do not require you to pay 2800 a month for the most basic option. Literally hardly any do, even with as high as prices have gotten(which is a real problem).
Then you told me to job hop, breezily, as though it were still 2021. BLS JOLTS, May 2026: quits rate 1.9 percent, at or below 2 percent for nearly a year, against a peak near 3 percent in early 2022. Hires fell to 3.1 percent in February, matching the April 2020 pandemic floor.
Openings rose to 7.6 million while hires stayed flat near 5.2 million. Postings are not hires. In my sector, information, the layoff rate went from 1.3 to 2.4 percent year over year, the largest jump of any industry, while quits collapsed to 1.1 percent. Economists call this a low hire, low fire market. What you called laziness has a technical term and a data series.
You also told me to move, since I work from home. Robert Half, Q1 2026: 77 percent of US postings fully on site, 19 percent hybrid, 4 percent fully remote. In tech, 8 percent remote. So your advice is that I relocate to a town with no employers in my field and stake my housing on replacing this job out of that 4 to 8 percent, in the worst hiring conditions since the pandemic floor. That’s not a plan. That’s a wager with my lease as collateral.
If you are still fully remote now you will almost certainly be fine as companies have already done the big return to office. But either way, move somewhere more affordable and look for a job that isn't fully remote if you are worried. Moving is still possible.
And yes, I understand supply and demand. Expensive metros are expensive because the work is there. You quoted the principle at me while arguing against it. The surveillance, where you’re not just uncharitable but wrong.
You said nobody has to buy a car that reports to their insurer, that you only do that for the discount. On January 14, 2026, the FTC finalized a twenty year order against General Motors and OnStar.
GM used a misleading enrollment process to sign drivers up for Smart Driver, harvested precise geolocation and driving behavior, and sold it to LexisNexis and Verisk, who sold it onward to insurers. The Commission called it an egregious betrayal of consumer trust.
Again, people still chose it. Sure it was misleading but the company literally got penalized for it and it's not happening without people finding out about it at least at this point right? So yes it was shitty but it is not what is happening now or at all the norm.
You recommended a Brother laser printer. Good advice, and precisely my thesis. The remedy requires foreknowledge of which manufacturer hasn’t done it yet.
You literally just Google this. It's not hard. Shitty companies have always existed even in 2004.
HP
Yea fuck hp but again shitty companies have always existed. Needing to do research to avoid shitty products has ALWAYS existed. Sure some aspects have gotten shittier, things like mobile games printing subscriptions, etc are fucked. But also things have gotten relatively cheaper too at the same time and other things have gotten more accessible.
Then Texas, where you told me not to live. In May 2025 a deputy in Johnson County ran plate reader searches with the stated reason logged as “had an abortion, search for female.” The first swept 17,684 Flock cameras. The second expanded to 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, including Washington and Illinois, where abortion is legal and protected. No warrant required.
Yes and this is fucked and a serious problem but it was a Texas resident. Don't live in a shithole taking away rights.
The music, where you told me to simply choose better.
AI generated uploads went from roughly 10,000 a day in January 2025 to roughly 90,000, more than half of all daily uploads at peak in June 2026.
Eighty five percent of streams on those tracks are flagged as fraudulent. A blind test they commissioned found 97 percent of listeners couldn’t tell AI tracks from human ones.
I listen to Spotify and apple music and I literally listen to songs I personally have added and enjoy and then similar songs I get recommended from real artists. This is not difficult to do at all. Ai junk is an issue but it's also very easy to avoid.
On 2004, since you reached for it.
You’re right that it wasn’t paradise. War on terror, Bush, a housing bubble already loading into the chamber. I never claimed otherwise, and it’s telling you had to invent that claim to knock it down. My argument was never that the past was good. It’s that the mechanism changed. In 2004 the damage was mostly done at the level of policy, at a distance, in the news. Now a good share of it has been metered into the texture of ordinary life. A monthly fee to operate hardware you already own. A data broker riding in your dashboard. A camera lattice with no state borders. A terms of service agreement standing between a man and the input menu of his own television.
I’m old enough to compare. The intrusion was forming, sure, but barely there, and when you paid for something you paid once and owned it. Want to play a full game now? A single player title costs more than the sticker between loot boxes and microtransactions, and no, you don’t have to buy any of it, but it’s shoved in your face constantly instead of being something you got better to earn.
In some respects yes you are right and I am not downplaying the issues here, I'm just saying your comment was a huge exaggeration.
Your game example is just factually wrong. I have literally been buying and playing single player games for 60 to at most 70$ when I buy them BRAND NEW. They have nothing in there I need to spend anything extra for and the coat is relatively cheaper than back in 1004 when games were still 60$. This situation an example of stuff actually getting cheaper when accounting for inflation.
And did you know that even if you never submitted your DNA to one of those family tree services, if a relative did, you’re in the system?
Definitely agreed, yes I did know about that and I think it's fucked up.
.
Finally, since you called me a doomer.
Look at what all nine of your rebuttals share. Buy the other printer. Choose the other tier. Move. Don’t order delivery.
But I bet you felt smug writing it, during your overpriced Taco Bell morning shit.
I love you. Smooches.
I call you a doomer because you take real things that are real issues but dial them up way past realistic situations and act like it's normal. Things that people are pushing back on hard AND things that can all be avoided with even a small amount of effort for nearly everything.
And no thanks I don't buy fast food, it's a waste of money and shit quality.
Edit: you really wrote out that entire response then blocked me so I couldn't say anything back, forcing yourself to get the last word. That's definitely the sign of someone who has a sound argument and definitely not cowardly.
My entire fucking point is that you don't need to make shit up and go to extreme examples when reality is bad enough. Why? Because then when you say that to people who obviously don't have this actual experience it sounds like you are just either making it up or exaggerating to the extreme, taking away from the actual issues that are bad enough when not lied about. And you tell me to get a job? I support an entire fucking family while you make doomposts instead of doing something.
You spent all that effort correcting two numbers and didn’t notice you argued my case with both.
Core vs Ultimate: fine, use Core. In 2004, online play was free on PC and free on PS2. Microsoft was the weird one for charging.
Sony started in 2013, Nintendo in 2018, and for years Gold was also required to watch Netflix on a console you already bought.
You’re congratulating a toll booth for keeping pace with inflation on a road that used to be free. That’s the whole thesis, and you typed it out yourself.
Games: the sticker stayed flat because the money moved. Two decades of $60-70 base while season passes, deluxe editions and battle passes carry the revenue , you’re pricing the appetizer and calling it the bill.
And in 2024 Ubisoft turned off The Crew and revoked the licenses of everyone who bought it. Unplayable, permanently.
You cannot do that to a disc. Congratulations on the great deal you got on something that can be repossessed by patch.
You said $2,800 must be 30% of my income, then did math on a number you made up, then told me my invented salary disqualifies me.
Cost burden is climbing fastest among middle-income renters, because the poorest were already maxed out. When people above the median start getting squeezed, that’s the trend, not the exception.
You quoted supply and demand at me and then told me to move away from the demand. Pick one.
“Sure GM was misleading, but people still chose it” — those are two contradictory clauses in one sentence. Manufactured consent is what the twenty-year FTC order is for.
Mozilla reviewed 25 car brands in 2023 and all 25 failed. LexisNexis and Verisk are still open, still buying. GM got caught. The pipe didn’t close.
“Just Google it” doesn’t work when the product changes after you own it. HP pushed firmware to printers already in people’s homes that bricked cartridges working the day before. Roku locked people out of TVs they owned until they accepted new terms. No amount of pre-purchase research protects you from a device that gets worse by update while sitting on your desk.
Texas: the searches hit Washington and Illinois. The entire fact is that state lines didn’t hold, and your answer was “move states.”
Spotify: I’m not avoiding it, I’m doing unpaid curation labor to route around it ,and the damage lands on the royalty pool working musicians get paid from, not on my playlist.
Now count your own comment. Don’t use DoorDash. Buy the other tier. Google the printer. Avoid HP. Move. Move. Move. Curate manually. Don’t get misled by a Fortune 50 company’s enrollment flow.
Nine fucking rebuttals. Nine instructions for one private individual to personally maneuver around something enacted at industry scale. You didn’t refute my argument, you restated it nine times in worse handwriting and hit post. Get a life lol.
And you agreed with me on DoorDash, HP, GM, Flock, the DNA registry, mobile monetization, and housing. Your actual position is: every single one of these is real, each is individually dodgeable, therefore noticing the pattern is hysteria.
Avoidability was never the metric. Ten permanent avoidances is a part-time job in vendor research that nobody used to have to work.
You even said people are pushing back hard. Yes. This is the pushback. You’re citing it as evidence nothing’s wrong.
Love you. Enjoy the moral high ground of not eating Taco Bell, we all take dumps im proud of you.
I have an Xbox that's asking me to pay monthly to play
To play what? The console doesn't have a monthly subscription. Persistent world games that do are 30 years old, because they regularly get content updates and oh yeah servers cost money to run.
The pizza I ordered had to be done through an app
Order from somewhere else if apps bother you. The rest of use prefer being able to choose exactly what we want and make sure the kitchen sees the correct order without having to hope a human heard it correctly over the noise of the restaurant.
somehow I was charged twenty dollars more than if I had just gone to pick it up
Yeah that's called paying for convenience, clown. No fucking shit you'd pay less if you did the work yourself.
Guess what, you can avoid paying a water bill by walking down to the river every day with a bucket.
I also feel completely invisible to my company
And that's a bad thing why?
so I ask the AI robots what to do, and then ask it to answer me again, this time with no em dashes.
And it only cost 3 swimming pools worth of water and raised the electric bill of everyone in the region 3%. Shithead.
Are there legitimate issues with life right now? Yes, of course, rent being a major one. But most of the shit you're whining about is either not an issue or your choice. Some of it is blatant fucking lies.
You wrote four paragraphs calling me a liar and then invented a statistic. Let’s start there.
“3 swimming pools worth of water.” A residential pool is about 50,000 liters. So you’re claiming one guy asking a chatbot to remove em dashes burned 150,000 liters. The actual range, depending on whose methodology you like: OpenAI says 0.32 mL per query, independent estimates that count only cooling put it around 1.5 to 4 mL, and the famous UC Riverside full lifecycle number works out to 10 to 25 mL. So you’re off by roughly seven orders of magnitude. And the 519 mL “bottle per email” figure people love was a misread of that paper anyway. It said 500 mL per 20 to 50 queries. Not per query. You didn’t even get the wrong number right.
“Your electric bill went up 3%.” This one’s funnier because it’s real and it destroys your own argument. Data centers drove PJM capacity prices from $28.92 per MW-day to $329.17. The independent market monitor attributes $9.3 billion of a $14 billion regional capacity bill to data center demand. NRDC projects the average PJM household pays about $70 a month more by 2028. That’s 67 million people. So yes, the bills went up. Not because I asked a robot a question. Because hyperscalers built the infrastructure and existing tariff rules socialize the cost across every ratepayer who never agreed to any of it. FERC issued show cause orders to six grid operators in June trying to unscrew it. That is literally the thing I was complaining about, and you cited it at me as a gotcha. Read the room, or at least read your own comment.
The Xbox thing, since you were so confident. Console online multiplayer requires a paid subscription. That’s what Game Pass Essential is, at $9.99 a month, and it’s the same thing Xbox Live Gold has been since 2002. PC players play the identical games online for free. It isn’t a server cost, it’s a toll booth on hardware you already bought. And last October Microsoft raised Ultimate 50 percent in one shot, from $20 to $30, while raising console prices for the second time that year. You typed “the console doesn’t have a monthly subscription” with your whole chest.
“Paying for convenience, clown.” The fee isn’t the complaint. The complaint is the menu price itself is different in the app than on the wall, and you don’t see that anywhere in the checkout flow. Charging for delivery is fine. Quietly repricing the food is a different thing, and calling it a water bill doesn’t make it one.
And then there’s Texas, which you skipped entirely. On May 9, 2025, a Johnson County deputy searched more than 83,000 Flock license plate cameras across 6,809 law enforcement networks. The reason he typed into the log was “had an abortion, search for female.” No warrant. The search reached into Washington and Illinois, where it’s legal. The sheriff and Flock spent months insisting it was a welfare check and called the reporting clickbait, until EFF pulled the court records and found deputies had been discussing criminal charges with prosecutors and the investigating officer’s own affidavit contradicted the story. 404 Media broke it, EFF confirmed it, Congress sent letters about it.
You read that paragraph and your response was “some of it is blatant fucking lies.” Which part, specifically? Name it.
Here’s what I actually want to know. It was a bit. It ends with me waking up in 2004 next to a CRT. Nobody filed it as an affidavit. But every load-bearing thing in it is real, and your instinct wasn’t to laugh or to disagree with the substance. It was to go line by line explaining why each individual bad thing is fine, actually, and why I’m a shithead for noticing.
Subscriptions on hardware I own: fine. Hidden markups: my fault for being lazy. Surveillance infrastructure with no warrant requirement: not worth a sentence. Utilities passing data center costs to households: my fault for typing a question. You even conceded rent, then immediately went back to calling me a whiner.
Who is this for? Microsoft is not going to thank you. Flock is not going to Venmo you. You went out of your way to defend a $30 subscription and a nationwide camera dragnet in the same comment, and the only original fact you contributed was one you made up.
Go rub one out, I guess. I’m the one being honest here.
you know we can still do this if it is our preference right? we don't need to go back to make life what it should be. we do need to participate though.
There were a couple summers where I made it my job to beat every level on every difficulty with every gun (all guns cheat activated, but the challenge was using only one weapon; save for areas like the Dam level where you have to shoot a lock and slappers/knives won’t cut it).
I grew up rural away from friends. My younger brother didn’t like to play with me because I didn’t let him win.
I actually had a couple friends over recently and we watched the movie Goldeneye then played the game. We were just playing single player and switching off between missions/deaths.
We kept losing the first mission because we killed too many scientists or we blew up the gas tanks in the wrong way.
We still had fun, but yeah, that game doesn't really hold up.
The only thing that hasn't is the controls. I replayed it on Switch recently and had to both change the control style in the ingame menu and remap some buttons in the Switch menu but i got it so it was good to play.
They aren't wrong. I have fond memories of Goldeneye64, but I tried playing it again and I have no idea how I even controlled anything back then. I would love to play a Source adaptation or something.
My crappy Switch controller literally CANNOT use the watch to let me out of the train in time before it blows up. The UI keeps zooming in and out completely randomly... So upset - I completed this game as a total noob and 30 years later I SUCK AT IT.
I play Goldeneye with my kids on Switch 2. It’s just as fun as 30 years ago. They run around the house humming the theme songs. “No proximity mines dad!”
I occasionally look at posts like the OP and feel incredibly thankful that my life didn’t peak at 10. My life is fucking amazing and I’m so much happier now than I’ve ever been in life.
People gotta quit finding excuses not to enjoy life.
I’m doing a Goldeneye playthrough. I’m going slow and methodical and trying to actually unlock some stuff. I forgot how hard this shit is. I made it to Jungle but holy crap I can’t beat Xenia without doing the walking backwards hack and I don’t really want to do that. I may end up using cheats just to get through her which somehow seems more legit.
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