I think colloquially people have begun expanding use of the word to include anything where features or product are removed but the price stays the same.

Maybe there’s a better word for that, but I understand the parallel.

12k is upgrades is both enough to potentially have the landlord owe additional taxes if they are assessed and not enough to be able to increase amenities enough to meaningfully raise rent.

The real issue here though is that you don’t go altering someone’s property without their consent. I don’t know how that isn’t the obvious answer here. The amount spent doesn’t even really matter (although I’d argue more spent is even worse, considering it implies greater alterations without consent).

Landlords can be and very often are terrible. But on a base level if I own a piece of property for which I am ultimately responsible, I see no justification for being ok with someone else making thousands of dollars of changes to that property without getting my ok first. It seems incredibly basic that I as owner should have a say in it.

Meanwhile I’ve bought a few and they are all trash.

I can’t charge my phone while using them. They cut in and out. I hate them.

This is great advice. The other advice I would give is to make sure the household is prepared for the impact of routing everything through a pihole. There are quite a few things out there on the internet that will simply stop working with the default block lists. Yes, that is obviously the point. But it is helpful to prepare everyone with how to do temporary allows, and have a strategy for what type of things you might want to whitelist and which you’re content with leaving blocked. Otherwise it can be very jarring especially at the beginning.

Frankly that stuff is already a huge problem and people should be louder about it. So many large companies want you to wade through 30 layers deep menus if AI chat bots before they’ll let you talk to an actual human to get assistance with a service you pay for. It’s just going to get worse and worse.

Yeah I mean, I am not paying to own it, you know? I don’t think of it in those terms at all. I’m paying for access to Spotify’s library. The product is the access. It removes a ton of decisionmaking overhead for someone like me whose primary enjoyment comes from listening to a huge variety of music and listening to as much new (or new to me) music as I can get my hands on.

I wasn’t buying an album per month before, but that also means I wasn’t discovering music at anywhere near the rate I can today. Before I had to make the decision to spend 10-15 bucks on an album that maybe I wouldn’t even like. Now the barrier to giving a new album a shot is essentially zero. For me that is just so cool.

So I think it comes down to what you enjoy and what your music habits are. If you’re confident in what you like, don’t find music discovery to be something worth paying a fee to improve, and want to listen to a few albums a year on repeat… Then yeah it’s a bad value proposition. But for me, it’s an astonishingly good value. And to be clear, I still do buy albums for bands I really enjoy because I want to fully support the artists. But there are lots of bands id never even have given a chance if I hadn’t been able to first discover them as part of a service I already pay for.

Convenience, pure and simple.

I used to maintain a gigantic Google Play Music library and used that to listen to music. I also had a hard copy locally and used Winamp.

Then Google killed GPM and there was no real good alternative at the time so I picked up Spotify and got easily hooked on the ability to listen to anything I wanted at any time. No ripping, no uploading, no buying, no hassle, no nothing. I’ve discovered so much music through the recommendation engine. Some are bigger bands I just hadn’t listened to, some are obscure.

But the point is, for the cost of a single CD per month I was able to listen to any CD from any band whenever I wanted. It was an extremely easy decision to sign up.

Hulu does this shit too. I swear every other day it’s some new horror show or naked people as the main banner when we log in. I don’t want to look at any of that! Jesus christ, I should be able to log into our live TV app without having to tell my kids to turn away. We’re not prudes, I’m not offended by nudity, but my kids are in early grade school. They are easily frightened and they’re not old enough yet for me to be having “the talk” with them because Hulu can’t be bothered to keep their banners PG.

Which is why you use them together to give you the best shot you can have.

Cameras should be used in conjunction with your mirrors, not exclusively. It makes more sense to me to learn to use safety features rather than ignore them.

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Scores will continue until morale improves!