I work hybrid and had my car totalled by a dear not long before I landed my current role, and my wife’s a stay at home mom. We stopped looking for a car because my wife can either drop me off if she needs the car on one of my in-office days or she can walk with the kids. We save a good chunk of change by sharing one car!
With time I’ve learned that video games are probably the cheapest hobby I have. I literally had a minor crisis when my computer died and I started crunching numbers on switching hobbies temporarily and found the cost of a new computer was cheaper especially once I took into account the already sunk cost of my game library
I’ve had quite a bit of fun using VCV Rack to make horrible noises that make every animal in the house wince and whine at me (Philistines) I also found you can use Midinous as a MIDI input into VCV Rack and it’s especially handy if you use all 24 MIDI channels to pass activity back and forth
At some point I might invest in a modest rack to supplement my software rack, or maybe not. Who knows?
In the US the student loan debt crisis stems from tuition costs rising significantly over the last 50 years, faster than inflation and faster than wages. The reason tuition costs have skyrocketed at public colleges and universities is because the federal and state governments have been slowly reducing grants and funding of colleges and universities.
I have a friend who’s trying to pay for college entirely out of pocket, and he’s working 40 hours a week while going to school, gets free student housing as an RA and lives extremely frugally but still struggles to pay tuition
I saw a tier list meme that some teenager made on Discord of every game they’d ever played. You know what didn’t appear once on the list? Not a single Grand Theft Auto game nor a single Elder Scrolls game. I asked them why and they said because GTA5 and Skyrim are “old”
They’re taking so long between releases now that they missed an entire generation of gamers
Like, make a series of games that are low budget, relatively short, and easy to pump out very quickly, but with a distinct series identity and maybe a consistent writer/artist across games. Then make a lot of them and get people hooked on the series instead of on 1 mega game.
Urban Games currently does this with Transport Fever. They flat out said while hyping the release of Transport Fever 2 (which was their third transport tycoon style game) that their goal as a development studio is to make the best transportation tycoon game they can. So they intend to continuously iterate.
N3V Games, who developes the Trainz simulator game was literally formed to buy up the property and talent from its original developer Auran and continue the franchise
There’s a third example I was going to give but got distracted while writing this comment and forgot
I read somewhere that Self Storage is absolutely booming right now. People buy cheap crap, find they have more cheap crap than they can realistically keep, then look for effectively someone else’s garage to store it in. From the business side you literally just have to build some storage units, collect payments and keep it clean enough for people to want to store their shit there
Lately I’ve been seeing CBD and vape products get added to the shelves of small local businesses that are otherwise unrelated. Like a small consignment store that specializes in kids clothing (i love that place because I can replace my kids entire wardrobe when they hit a growth spurt for about $100)
There’s a small bar in a town near me that has really good food. Their prices are insanely low but you pay for every single thing you add, so a plain hamburger might be $7 but each topping you add 50¢ or whatever. Basically they know their customers and manage to offer both cheap and premium food.
Anyways point is, they have two different prices listed on their bills, one for cash payment and a slightly higher one for a card payment, so that’s how they walk that line
This was how many famous jazz stars were able to become famous. They played in clubs owned by the Mafia as fronts and then the clubs became popular because the shows were genuinely good.
The Mafia actually engaged in some level of patronage with black jazz performers who otherwise never would’ve been able to be professional musicians. For example, Al Capone’s gang once kidnapped a musician, Fats Waller, to play for his multi-day birthday party, and paid him extremely generously for the performance
In the town I live in one of the worst kept secrets is a small hundred year old mixed use 2 or 3 story building. The Laundromat at the bottom with a handful of old washing machines and dryers is always locked and never actually open. Former tenants have publicly stated it’s purely a front because the landlord doesn’t want to bother with a commercial tenant but because of the zoning it needs a commercial space on the ground level so they maintain a fake laundromat
I play a ton of simulation and strategy games (and some that I would hazard to classify as virtual railfanning/model railroading, like Railroads Online and Transport Fever 2) so I crank up the prettiness, download as much custom content as will load and enjoy the scenery at 20-40 FPS