Trucks (In the USA)

I'm in this FB group that does financial advice with a little sarcasm and jokes mixed in. Suggest that someone should downsize to a car or get rid of their gas guzzling truck they have no real utility for and it's like you've insulted their religion. Never seen such a group of grown adults throwing temper tantrums like that in my life.

Sadly I don't think greedflation is an official term. Stagflation was the closest I know about anyway.

Samsung isn't on planet earth with their prices. I was avoiding them anyway because I believe TouchWiz is an inferior interface than stock Android. Just way too much bloat.

Good phones used to be around 400, taking me a few days to think about it and say yes. Now they are beyond 1000

I'm not sure what you mean by a "good" phone. Like yeah, they came up a bit. A Pixel 7a costs $499, and if one wants wireless charging and a better camera they can go with the Pixel 7 for $599. Regular non-Pro iPhones are around the same price.

Like yeah, folding phones are well over $1,000 in most cases, but personally I think that's a gimmick, my hot take. But for me and 99% of the people I know, we're sticking with our slab smartphones.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

This is a sign of an upcoming recession if we aren't already in one. People are starting to run out of their savings due to stagflation and are looking for areas to cut. Buying a new phone every year or every other year and replacing laptops every 5 years are among the first things to go in anyone's budget.

So currently the only people refreshing their devices are the people who NEED new devices.

Capitalist economies always need spends out of desire and not just necessity.

Worst part is instead of reversing the gouging these companies will probably just go ham on the planned obsolescence.

One of the electricians in my town has a minivan and I've seen him use it to bring an entire 5x14 enclosed trailer full of gear to a jobsite a few times.

There's one guy around town I see sometimes who has some sort of thing that goes on the hitch receiver of his minivan. If I see him around I might be able to ask him where he got that if I remember to. Saw him use it and it too was a non-folding power chair. He pulled up to it with the power chair, pulled ramps down, drove up onto it, pulled himself to his feet using the rear windshield wiper, stowed the ramps and leaned against the van to get to the driver's door. I'm guessing he has some sort of spinal injury.

I agree that most craftsmen don't need the truck on the left, a few that I know need to tow a trailer with about 3,000 pounds of shingles for some roofing jobs. I'm pretty sure the one on the right might struggle with that kind of weight.

One of them I know do drive a Ranger which is somewhere between the two in size at least.

I'm a client-side technician working in a predominantly Windows environment for the last 8 going on 9 years.

Out of all the issues I have seen on Windows, filesystem issues is rather low on that list as far as prevalence, as I don't recall one that's not explainable by hardware failure or interrupted write. Not saying it doesn't happen and that ext4 is bad or anything, but I don't work in Linux all that much so me saying that I never had an issue with ext4 isn't the same because I don't have nearly the same amount of experience.

Also ext came about in 1992, so 31 years so far to hash out the bugs is no small amount of time. Especially in terms of computing.

I guess that's a different perspective than I was looking at it from. Thanks.

What kind of school did you grow up in to not have the nerds vs athletes click battles?

I'm involved in technology and race mountain bikes on the side. Other than the occasional "it must be nice to be fit" comments from the neckbeard techbros, they're not as openly hostile to me as they are to women who are in tech. There is definitely a strong sexism part of the equation.