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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
14 years ago when I was thrifting, I used to get excited about movies I'd find, season sets I'd find, a couple toy figures, maybe some games or hey, there's something I could use. Fucking awesome!
14 years later, I've been waiting until a thrift store at least puts up an office chair I'd like to have that's better than what I got and if the appliances I get are going to be useful.
I can understand that.
Our fridge blew. I'm pretty handy, just too many damned issues. Fuck it. What can a new one cost?
I work at Lowe's, best we got is $900 for the very bottom of the line. Got on FB Marketplace and we have the nicest fridge I've ever owned, $200.
Washer crapped out a week later. Same exact story and prices.
And don't start me on appliances people hunk out because they can't fix a minor problem. Found a dryer on the road needing a $14 belt. Sold it for $125. Upgraded 2 ceiling fans to super nice ones by bypassing the crappy voltage limiter (it's a legal thing in the US.) I can do this all day.
tl;dr: Shit's expensive. Stop burning the planet and your wallet.
I got laid off and within a few days our dishwasher died. Had to wait for months until I got a new job to pull the trigger on a new dishwasher, all the while our stove was threatening to die on us. All this after our furnace died on us within a year of buying the house just a few years earlier, and then our AC just died last summer (not the end of the world, but insult to injury).
My wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative:
My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.
I feel that
The full story there is that we were at an Orthopedic urgent care. My wife has danced Ballet since she was 4. A bad jump resulted in a 5th metatarsal fracture, commonly referred to as a "dancer's break" and a severely sprained ankle. She was in a boot and crutches for 5 weeks. Her ankle literally had all the colors of a sunset. The Orthopedist took her shoe an sock off and actually gasped.
Christmas as a child: "Oh man... socks."
Christmas as an adult: "Oh man! Socks!"
Everything hurts and I'm hungry all the time.
Yup. Get injured easier, and takes longer to heal. I got a Covid-ish (never tested positive) respiratory infection back in Oct, have had breathing/coughing issues ever since, this led to blood pressure issues, leading to issues in my eyes and just overall quality of life issues. Now that I'm on a laundry list of daily meds I can finally live a somewhat normal life :P. I wish I took my grandfather's advice and never got old.
I got covid last year. It triggered an autoimmune response and now I have rheumatoid arthritis. Lovely as I just had an lrti on my thumb for osteoarthritis. Being active is good, but some days it's hard to get out of bed knowing how much my feet are going to hurt as soon as I stand up.
How 50-80 years ago winning an appliance on TV used to be a big deal, like all the sudden the winner's household gets a massive jump into the space age because the appliances then must have been expensive.
What do you mean back then? Appliances are expensive now.
Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.
Here's a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.
By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.
Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.
Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That's only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.
So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month's rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month's rent.
The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
Back in the late 80s, a friend of mine went on Wheel Of Fortune, and won pretty big. Back then, you won "money," which you then spent at the end of the show in the big showcase of products.
My friend went with a strategy, and bought stuff like wall-to-wall carpeting and a fridge, but also a couple things like a gaudy gold watch.
When he got home, he was getting his haircut, and his barber said "I saw you on Wheel. That was a nice watch you got." My friend sold it to him. That was his strategy - buy stuff for the house, but also buy some stuff that would be easy to sell, so he could pay the taxes out of his winnings.
The winnings are taxed?
Of course. All the prize money you see on Jeopardy, Wheel, Family Feud, etc. is all taxed.
If someone wins a car or vacation worth $20K, they will be expected to pay income tax on that value.
When Oprah gave away all those expensive cars years ago, she saddled many in that audience with a significant tax bill. A lot of them probably had to sell the car, just to pay the taxes, and then just have the remaining cash in hand after that.
It's not really an "of course"
Some countries don't tax lottery winnings, Canada for example. Though for Canada game shows are a bit more nebulous.
Don't you know that the US is the standard by now?
I'm inclined to disagree.
I'm fortunate to have everything I need and a fair bit of what I want. I lost 140 pounds five years ago and my body's functioning really well too.
Getting old is way better than I anticipated.
I'm proud of you. Enjoy your hard work paying off.
Same. As I got older, I feel like I am winning. I celebrate 10+ years at my career (jumped three jobs). I no longer drink myself to sleep, instead I drink casually. Im married and secured in my relationship.
My legs feel a bit weaker and my body isn't at its peak. But I have a lot of successes in so many other directions.
To be fair, aging tends to involve gathering objects over the years. So unless you hit really hard times, you to end up collecting a lot of what you "need". Age also makes most people care less what other people think you should have, so you don't feel that you have to buy many things outside of what you actually want and need.
Shit, I like getting old. I never thought I'd make it to 50. Glad to be here.
I'm happy to win anything
I won $100 Wendys gift card from a tweet. I cheered like I won the lottery.
Proudest day of my life. Oh and I guess the birth of my children.
I won the "lunchbox contest" when I a was a kid. The school teacher just gave a soccer ball to one random kid for having a healthy lunchbox, once of week for a month, and I was one of the winners. I still think about it often.
Don't even get me started on that solid wood Broyhill dinnette set!
Me 30yrs ago: Solid wood? Are we calling 50% sawdust and binder "solid wood"? Lol...
Me now: it has like real wood mixed in, like from an actual tree? WTF, I that is way out of my league...
Oh wow, windows! I don't think I can afford this place.
I'm 32, I still think it's ridiculous. You have any idea how many perfectly functional appliances are sold on the second hand market (usually because the previous owner doesn't know how to change a fuse)?
however the previous owners are much more likely to pay a junk company to haul it to a landfill than they are to try to sell it
Probably a lot. But I'm one of those people who doesn't know how to change a fuse. But I do tend to call repair people or use the warranty when I can.
I'd still rather have the car or the trip to Aruba.
Knowing I have to pay the taxes on that shit, I'll take the dinette set.