Re:Big Macs and the Cost of Living Crisis
by mschuster91 on Tuesday August 06, 2024 @10:13AM
(#41171044)
> I... can't relate. This is entirely a choice, one that advertisement tell you is the right one, but a choice nonetheless.
Well, you need a phone and a computer these days to be part of society, no way around that unless you're willing to live like the Amish. And manufacturers do everything they can to force you to
upgrade at least every three-ish years - Microsoft keeps upping the requirements for no reason at all (e.g. TPM requirement in Windows 11), and lots of smartphones on the budget end only come with two years worth of firmware updates after which these devices are up for grabs for malware authors and you're being a bad netizen by keeping these devices connected to the internet.
Cars are a different thing, but planned obsolescence is the norm there as well. After the manufacturer warranty expires, the repair bills come due for all kinds of shit just to keep it safe for traffic. Cars older than five years tend to become massive money sinks, even if you are capable of repairing them yourself which becomes ever more difficult and expensive as modern cars are datacenters on wheels with tons of failure modes requiring very expensive and difficult to operate tools.
And then there's the rent extraction that is paying for things. You all but need a bank account these days, depositing checks and cash costs money, cash acceptance is going down, and there's only Visa/Mastercard/AmEx left over, which extract absurd amounts of money from everywhere in the transaction chain - merchant fees that the vendors add to the price of goods, and interest on the customer side. And credit providers for all the "shiny things" and necessities of life also extract huge amounts of interest. And all of that siphoned off money ends up in the hands of the very rich.
Well, you need a phone and a computer these days to be part of society, no way around that unless you're willing to live like the Amish. And manufacturers do everything they can to force you to upgrade at least every three-ish years - Microsoft keeps upping the requirements for no reason at all (e.g. TPM requirement in Windows 11), and lots of smartphones on the budget end only come with two years worth of firmware updates after which these devices are up for grabs for malware authors and you're being a bad netizen by keeping these devices connected to the internet.
Cars are a different thing, but planned obsolescence is the norm there as well. After the manufacturer warranty expires, the repair bills come due for all kinds of shit just to keep it safe for traffic. Cars older than five years tend to become massive money sinks, even if you are capable of repairing them yourself which becomes ever more difficult and expensive as modern cars are datacenters on wheels with tons of failure modes requiring very expensive and difficult to operate tools.
And then there's the rent extraction that is paying for things. You all but need a bank account these days, depositing checks and cash costs money, cash acceptance is going down, and there's only Visa/Mastercard/AmEx left over, which extract absurd amounts of money from everywhere in the transaction chain - merchant fees that the vendors add to the price of goods, and interest on the customer side. And credit providers for all the "shiny things" and necessities of life also extract huge amounts of interest. And all of that siphoned off money ends up in the hands of the very rich.