From a european perspective, eating out is a luxury. Eating out once a week is considered spendy where I live.

I live in an European capital and a decent enough meal at an ok restaurant for both me and my gf costs about 25-27 euros (no wine, just sparkling water for me and in most cases some tea for my gf). I don’t find that terribly expensive, Europe is a big place.

Usually I hear people say that they shouldn't have luxuries like cheap $300 TVs, smartphones or fridges. These things are only for the rich after all. I once tried to figure out how much money I can save by changing my lifestyle. What I found out is that there are a lot of minimum price floors under which what you're buying is complete junk. In other words you're not saving money. By paying $1 less you're also getting $1 less in value or often even $2 less value. Want a cheap computer? How about a raspberry pi? No screen, accessories, no case, no input devices and for people who aren't computer savvy it runs that weird linux thing. If you buy all that stuff you could have gotten a refurbished thinkpad which offers a better experience. Don't want to spend $1000 on proper machine tools? You can hack something together for $300 that doesn't do the job well at all. And the savings aren't even that great. You're maybe saving 40% compared to just getting the real stuff but since you're not buying much stuff anyway and therefore are primarily spending all your money on rent and food it doesn't matter at all, unless you're willing to have a room mate. This again isn't saving anything, you're getting worse quality in exchange for less money. Your "financial management skills" didn't help you out, the problem wasn't that you made a bad decision, you simply don't have enough money. Someone with enough money isn't even going to spend a single thought on buying a used computer, let alone a raspberry pi, they will straight up buy their 16 core workstation with 128GB RAM for $5000 and then be done with it, never using their "financial management skills" at all. What all these poor people need is to increase their earning potential, which obviously isn't easy.

The comparison to a $1000 laptop isn't a raspberry pi - it's a second hand ThinkPad that's three years old. It will be slower, but can do pretty much all the same things for most people, and could still cost 300 dollars.

I don't know the MTTF on ThinkPads, but the wear and tear on a three year old laptop is usually considerable.

I bought my first laptop in 2010 for about €630 and after three years switched to the current one. During that time two out of four USB ports became too loose to function properly in all circumstances. I have more anecdata like this from my friends and coworkers.

Usually the older ThinkPads last longer than 5 years, or at least long enough for the tech to become obsolete.

Except for children and the infirm nobody is owed food prepared by others, but I find it hard to reconcile the need to live as frugally as people who went through the Great Depression with the idea that we're in an age of unmatched prosperity.

(I'm not American so I might be missing some nuance)

We're in an age of unmatched credit creation, not prosperity. If you start thinking about it that way, it should solve the mental dissonance.

It is not super fair to tell people having enough food all the time is a luxury they cannot afford.

Where exactly is the line when it becomes entitlement?

For me, it’s somewhere well short of regularly eating food that costs 5x (or more) what the equivalent, nutritious meal prepared at home is.

As far as I can tell, the primary fault there has been our failure to teach basic life skills (home cooking), learning skills (teach yourself how to cook), or problem solving skills (realize that you have a problem that can be solved by teaching yourself to cook).

You can teach yourself basic cooking (from zero) in less than 10 hours. Maybe even less than 5 hours.

It's insanely easy.

Teaching common sense and making the right decisions? Superbly difficult, probably impossible - at least at scale.

Before we can even get to addressing making the correct choices, we need to expand the universe of potential solutions that people even bother to consider. That’s the hard but doable task of counterbalancing the widespread consumerist propaganda (advertising) with awareness and practice making and repairing things, and working against learned helplessness.

We need to ensure that people consider cooking instead of going to a restaurant, changing a flat tire instead of calling roadside services, using a screwdriver to tighten up a wobbly chair instead of replacing it, repairing a ripped seam instead of throwing out a garment ...

None of these things are particularly challenging, but they’re so far outside many peoples’ experience that they may as well be impossible. Many people will still decide to have a professional do these things for them, but it’ll at least be a proper choice instead of being forced into it by circumstance.