I was going through my Wal-Mart+ subscription plan that I got for free and I saw their offers. One of which was EMeals, that was a 60-day trial. I thought that this was like Blue Apron or other meal delivery services so I thought I’d take a crack at it and hope that it would get me on a path to eat better.
Turns out, it’s just a meal planner. And it’s absurd to me why and how would anyone pay for something when there are countless and countless recipes and meal planners readily available for free. Who’d the fuck would want to pay for a planner? That’s like paying for a calendar app.
Water
As somebody who grew up with perfect tap water and then moved to Detroit, I used to think this.
Edit: I guess I should say I still think this for a lot of places. When I got my parents house the first thing I do is drink a big cup of their amazing tap water.
Hear hear. When I rented the water was great, didn’t use a filter. Out where my parents live, their water is brown occasionally.
Where can you get free water? Unless you have a well or something.
Where I am the cost of water is rolled into the local authority tax. It’s not metered, so it feels free. It’s pretty good water too.
Tap water is so cheap it might as well be free, and it’s probably included in the rent in a lot of places.
I guess it’s not free in places that need to have a revolution first?
Slightly more expensive in places with local water scarcity, like the American southwest. But yeah, we still need a revolution
I think this persons means bottled water.
Gray market license keys for software. The money you’re paying for these will never make it to the developer, so you might as well pirate.
It’s more convenient to have a license. I only buy those when the developer is being scummy
On that same idea, camrips sold out of the back of a car. I knew someone who bragged about being able to get them and I always thought they looked like ass. They just liked acting like they had hood connections.
A lot of them don’t even lie about it as much if you read between the lines. GreenManGaming, HumbleBundle are the exceptions to that.
But places like CDKeys, G2A .etc yeah you can’t be assured that anything you buy from them is going back to the developer. If the developers so much even hears the existence of these kinds of sites, they’d be protesting to have them shut down.
Then there’s people paying for pirated software in CDs/DVDs
Streaming services esp for millennials considering most of fnem have the know how for sailing the high sees.
I agree but also you’d be surprised how many actually piggy backed off a friend. I know because in my circle of friends-acquaintances of about 60 people in high school only 1 other besides me was actually competent enough with technology to the point of trying to pirate. Everyone else just got burnt cds and usb sticks from us.
To this day when I meet other millennials there’s honestly more tech illiterate than not and I think it’s the small but vocal minority that exist on places like this and reddit that carry the stereotype that all millennials are good at technology.
Porn
If you have specific interests it’s sometimes helpful.
Vr porn makes it worth it
If you want to be reasonably certain it’s ethically made, you kind of have to pay for porn.
Edit: also, if you want something specific that free sites don’t cater to. Like lesbian porn that isn’t obviously only meant to appeal to men.
Just because you’ve paid for it doesn’t mean it’s been ethically made.
It didn’t say that. I said the opposite: you can’t be sure it’s ethical when it’s free, because it’s much less transparent then.
ethically made
lesbian porn that isn’t obviously only meant to appeal to men
freeGirls Out West
- Books
- Porn
- Streaming Services
- Bottled Water (if you have access/the means of purchasing a filter)
- “Buy now, play later.” Just buy it later and avoid the fees.
- A lot of “Courses.” There are so many free resources online.
Yes, porn is free, but the companies that host it are utter garbage. They pay next to nothing, claim ownership of the content, and don’t care if a person is being exploited. Finding a person that you think is awesome/sexy and supporting their content means custom tailored and personal fun-times; that the adult content creator is the one who gets paid; and that it’s unlikely they’re being forced/pimped/trafficked.
Free porn is perfectly cromulent and there’s a lot of variety; but if you can afford it, supporting a person is better overall. I used to create erotic cosplay photography for a living, so I’m all too familiar with how screwed up things are for sex workers.
Antiviruses
WinRAR
WinRAR is legitimately a great program and whomever made it deserves some compensation
Maybe it was good 10-20 years ago. What’s it got to offer today? Why should we use a proprietary format when there are faster and more space-efficient open formats widely available today?
I compare features, speed and compression ratio’s of a bunch of options about twice a year. Up until now, winrar kept coming out on top, at least for my dataset
Interesting. Mind sharing which compression algorithms you compare and how?
winrar, (almost) all options available in peazip, I explore the options available in the then latest tar and zip commands under debian, and I look around to try some novelty stuff or if there’s anything experimental.
I go one by one, setting up scripts to compress a directory with a particular algorithm and compression configuration. (and to record timstamps, check integrity, etc). Then collect a reasonably representative set of files from my ssd’s.
Writing those scripts takes a few hours, but after that I hit run, and usually just screen record to a seperate ssd. After (usually) about a little over a day I can look back and see how long things took, and also have a video of all of them. I scrub it just to make sure nothing glitched out.
I have to say though, winrar’s lead had shrunk a lot in my last test. Despite the new rar5 thing. Perhaps the next time will be different.
When is the next time? When I feel like it. After all, this is just a weird hobby I really enjoy.
What are the results?
7-Zip has long replaced WinRAR, for me.
I just cannot stand the 7zip UX
You mean you can’t figure it? It’s solely the best compression tool around that you can think of.
(Conditionally) journals, studies and some books. And, for that matter, most television, film and music.
Particularly when paying is not supporting the creator, only the publisher.
As an American, Turbo Tax. I’ve been using FreeTaxUSA for almost 20 years with no problems, without paying for filing software.
But if I weren’t American, my answer would probably be: tax software.
Do they do imports from like betterment and vanguard?
How are they at dealing with investments?
For my simple needs (mortgage, 401k, couple different IRAs, and a managed investment account) it did great.
It’s funny that the IRS has now been offering their own tax-free service. Intuit thought they could strong-arm people but even the IRS thought “no bruh, you’re crazy”.
I just never saw the appeal of paying for tax software/services, well maybe I can see it in services because there’s still a lot of people that have trouble with filing taxes and they may be in unique tax situations that they don’t understand.
But Tax Software makes it stupid easy to understand so it should not be something we pay for.
In many other countries (such as mine) you dont use tax software. The government figures out what you owe or overpaid. Because they have all the info they need to know that.
Most countries don’t have tax software.
They have a website usually. A free one, from the government. That calculates their taxes for them. You just have to check if it is correct from your side.
Bottled water to drink at home.
This drives me insane. The 5 gal jugs are so cheap to refill and keep using. I used one of those with a hand pump and a thin 1.5 gal jugs for my fridge for constant cold water when I lived where tap water wasn’t doable. It was like 10¢ a gallon to refill the jugs and I always had delicious cold water at the ready. There is absolutely no need to create so much waste
Becareful, because if you don’t clean the jugs, they will eventually not be safe to drink out of
When you put tap water in a bottle and put it in the freezer, so you’d have a cold bottle of water for an entire summer day, the water from the tap tastes “saltier” for some reason, while bottled “spring” water doesn’t. The “saltier” taste is kinda unpleasant 🤷♂️
Also my city has some chemical spill into the river where the city gets the water supply from, they gave out a emergency alert very late, and the city wasn’t really transparent about that whole ordeal, some people in my city are already doubting the safety of the tap water, reminds me of Flint, Michigan, so I kinda just don’t like the tap water 😖
Undersink filter with a dedicated drinking water tap. Removes the chlorine taste that is probably what makes you think salty. You can get the whole setup for $75 and install it yourself. The filters are $40ish and last 6-12 months.
Some fridges have cold filtered water taps built in.
Not every country has safe tap water
Even Los Angeles tap water isn’t safe to drink, as I understand it. Flynt, Michigan, too.
Ok, so: bottled water to drink at home in countries with safe drinking water.
Much better)
I have a worst example, people who showered with said bottled water when we had a water supply issue in my town…
Not every home in countries with safe tap water have safe tap water at home
Not even every state, look at Flint, MI …
And even if it does, it might taste horrible.
Adobe. Someone said they pay $60 a month for it, and are locked in for the year, which they didn’t even know about! All for editing photos. Just editing photos.
Holdup. It’s $60 a month for the adobe suite, which give you access to like 30 aps, including a video editor, DreamWorks, illustrator and a whole bunch more. It’s only $20 a month for thw photo suite, which gives you lightroom, photoshop, and bridge. The $60, a month for the suite is absolutely worth it depending on what you are doing.
It amazes me the amount of people that think theres no alternative to adobe, just for their casual use. I know that for professional it has some features that no other has.
I recently purchased Affinity photo, which did most of what I used to use Adobe for. No subscription, one time purchase, and I’ll likely never need to worry about that again.
I tried gimp a few times and found it frustrating to use.
I do not get people who still pay for cable tv. My dad pays like 120 dollars a month for it and the programming is horrible, the ads are insane, all the best sports shit is on streaming services now, I do not understand it at all.
How technical is your dad?
Also honestly. Sometimes it’s a lot nicer to just push a button and have something come on.
One of the main reasons I use Plex is their random feature. “Wanna watch a syndicated episodic show and don’t care which ep? Press random” vs other streaming services you have to actually choose an episode.
I’d like to see a clever implementation of one-button “channel surfing” in an app like Plex.
Not very at all
deleted by creator
Inertia?
Or is there some local channel that they like that doesn’t have a youtube presence?No. And they also have Netflix. So they understand streaming shit. It boggles my mind
Online subscription models, gacha and AAAA price tag games.
Not everyone wants to be a cybercriminal, god knows I’m one of them, but every person has a backlog of games, an old classic that they want to experience again or community favourite that has gotten a lot of mods. And even if you want to spend money on something, why would you spend it on this year’s hyped up game when last year’s is still just as playable and at a discount?
That being said, I did buy Balatro full price, so I ought to know the answer.
My problem is that I wait 20 years to late to play games and they cost more second hand than they originally did. GameCube fan problem
The Youtube channel made a video about gacha and I still don’t get it. I hate collecting junk, even more when I can’t choose which junk I get.
I’ve never played any of those games myself, but here’s what I have gathered from a video essay:
You just begin to play it somehow, you get introduced to the Gacha mechanics, and then it’s one of 2 ways: Either you spend a lot of money in the game because they are literally designed like Casinos to fuel your gambling addiction, like clouding your judgement how much a round of gambling is actually worth with many in game currencies.
Or you spend time in the game to grind premium resources, and your brain rewards you for it with the thought “at least I’m not spending money”, not realizing that the
housedeveloper also wins if you do that. An example i giving rewards for players who write strategy guides, something they otherwise would have to pay real money to a developer for.We really have to hate more on those regulators who failed to protect gambling addicts from candy crush on crack.
My coworkers will walk into work with Dunkin or Starbucks lattes… we have not only free coffee at work, but access to an espresso machine with milk steamer.
If I worked at a restaurant I would take advantage of free espresso.
It’s not that odd that they have a preference, even if it costs them. My work provides tea bags and milk, but I bring my own because I like them more.
I think the problem is that some Starbucks fans are pretentious. There are better and cheaper coffee everywhere but some of them will just choose the more expensive one and flash their premium membership card to you.
Yeah, but Dunkin for coffee??
It’s like the yuengling of coffee. Nothing special but it’s cheap and inoffensive.
Really depends on the workplace. I will not drink coffee and I’m no longer drinking hot chocolate even from my work. Mainly because a lot of my co-workers are slobs and everything is unsanitized. I had just witnessed last night, someone from day maintenance, had their gloves still on (presumably from touch dirty trash bins, scrubbing toilets .etc) just go about touching some things before realizing he needed them off.
And I ended up vomiting last sunday because nobody checks expiration dates on what we have and I ended up drinking hot chocolate that might’ve been expired. So, it depends on the workplace.
So at my work the coffee is shit because it’s a fully automatic coffee machine and it is also not properly cleaned. I usually make my own at home and bring a thermos.
Yes, but I work at a restaurant.
Streaming services. I’ve been balls deep into piracy since I was a kid but I remember once I was house sitting and my friend had netflix and I Was drunk and wanted to watch He-man. I turned on their netflix and it didn’t have it. I was like, why even pay for this shit whats it good for? I have been morally opposed to paying for streaming ever since. Ive been taking some classes recently and some of the Gen Z kids are like, baffled I don’t have spotify. I am baffled they can’t pirate songs. My friends, you dont have to pay for that single. I can download it during the span of this conversation with my phone.
Also on that note, any of WotC’s D&D tools. I remember the D&Dinsider debacle. 4e was a cool game but basically unplayable without some automation. They tried downloadable software but found people had way too easy a time hacking it. So they launched a constantly crashing version behind a paywall that ran on silverlight (so it couldn’t run on Mac. As a webapp.) And hackers still kept up the downloadable character builder with updates. It was more consistent, didn’t crash, and is still functional to this day. I ban D&Dbeyond from my games. I encourage everyone to use 5e.tools (if they must play 5e).
I default to piracy too, but I’m guessing you don’t listen to a lot of new music. The thing a music service offers isn’t just access, it’s discoverability. It didn’t replace my FLAC collection, it expanded it. What it replaced was listening to the radio to find new stuff.
For video I’m more with you. I’m happy to rely on word of mouth. Especially since the streaming services drop movies all the time and discriminate against watching in a browser. Getting a good rip means you can watch it anywhere, anytime, and not have to worry about it disappearing.
While this might have been true for a while, but payola is alive and well. My spouse has Spotify and still has to listen to music podcasts for real discovery. Otherwise she’s one more person swatting down Espresso playing over and over.
For dnd, so you have a character creator that is as easy as dnd beyond? I’ve looked at some open source versions, but nothing come as close for ease of use. Thanks!
Have you tried dungeonmastersvault? It is really easy to use and with like half an hour on searching you can get all the source material in there
Just do it manually?
