Mine was yesterday, I bought a papa john’s pizza of medium size and some garlic knots. I was feeling like shit because my job and store is very good at that, so I stress ate. I contemplated in the car which would’ve been more valuable for my buck to dine with. I picked pizza.
$20 (more like $27 but I took away the price of the knots) was what it cost for a meats-based medium sized pizza from there. The problem I had with the pizza was that it didn’t look like a medium, it looked like the smaller-end of a medium. Secondly, the person cutting the slices did a shit job, because I had two smaller slices than the rest. And I felt there wasn’t enough meats spread evenly.
I honestly should’ve picked a chinese buffet because at least I would have variety and I could eat as much as I wanted. Plus saving a few dollars.
This is the first and last time I’m ordering something out of my comfort budget.
Got an expensive leather jacket as a kid, for far more money than I’d paid for cloths before or have since. Assumed it was indestructible being leather. It was not that kind of leather jacket, and I managed to tear it wide open in maybe a couple weeks.
2012 Indian Scout. The price was decent, the miles were low. It was my first motorcycle, and I was sure that I wanted a cruiser. It seemed perfect for me.
It had some pretty major issues. The stator failed in the rain; it got fixed under warranty. Then a coil pack failed, stranding me two hours from home. That took about a month to get fixed under warranty. It wouldn’t start in cold weather worth a damn; anything under 50F, and it was a bitch to start. To top it off, I live in the mountains, and once I got past my initial trepidation of riding without anything but skill and luck between myself and the pavement, I was out-riding the capabilities of a cruiser. It’s really unpleasant to drop into a corner and get your foot knocked off the foot peg because it’s dragging on the pavement…
It turns out that the way I ride is much more suited to a sport bike.
I did a title swap with someone that had a '12 CBR600RR that needed some work; I took about a $5000 bath on that trade, but I got a bike that I loved. I ended up putting 80,000 miles on it before I wore the engine out, and then bought a '16 Triumph Speed Triple that I rode to work today.
Oh boys, there are too many. The most recent is the iPad though
2011 Jetta TDI. Newly married, my husband has a weakness for shiny new things. He had a 2008 Jetta and wanted to sell it and “upgrade” to the more efficient and environmentally friendly (er, about that) TDI. A few years later we bought a second TDI.
If you’re not familiar with Dieselgate, well, yeah, we got defrauded basically. Long story short, we ended up selling both and replacing them with…
Teslas. Sigh. Fuck me.
Well, that’s some luck you’ve had.
I’ve actually thought about looking for an old TDI, since it’s a bit different, more resistant to American trade issues and possibly in my budget. If you’re in a rural area it actually is greener, too.
Many years ago I paid 170 dollars for a forever license to what was essentially a VPN that only worked for netflix.
The company got shut down several months later and I could no longer see netflix from around the world.
Now days I don’t even have netflix though
I took a similar risk with Bean (a Lemmy app for iOS). It was all good for the lifetime of the company. Turns out, it wasn’t very long.
lol I got burned by that one too.
Ah well we live and learn, I’m still very anti subscription though.
I always prefer one time purchases
Same. I already have two lifetime memberships with other companies, and they work just fine. No regrets.
Hm, no, I can’t imagine that I’ve ever experienced a worse purchasing regret than the one you described there with the pizza.
An Intel Atom notebook with 2GB RAM and 32GB storage acquired for $200 on Black Friday. Despite many attempts to optimize it, it was practically unusable 4 years in. If I had the foresight to buy a used ThinkPad for the same price instead, it could have been my daily driver to this day.
Also a faux leather wallet. The “leather” started turning to goo and powder about a year in. Some of my cards and my wallet photo still have some of those decayed fake leather bits stuck on the edges or rubbed in.
I got a saddleback wallet for Father’s Day 10 years ago and it is gorgeous. If it ever dies and they still exist they’ll replace or repair it for free
I have an irrational hatred for faux leather I won’t touch anything with it that melty And peely texture is so awful
My spouse and I were broke grad students with a baby on the way. We needed a car. Someone in our tiny town was selling a 1992 Accord for $1000 (this was in the early 2010s). We bought it and put in another $1000 to get it to run.
The only problem? It was a stick shift. I didn’t know how to drive standard; at the time, my spouse didn’t drive at all. I tried to learn, but I was so nauseated from my pregnancy that I nearly puked every time the car lurched… which was often. I never did get the hang of it. Eventually we bought a newer automatic car and traded the Accord in for a whopping $250.
These days we could weather a $2000 mistake without too many problems, but back then… yeah, that one hurt.
My brain is too scattered to think of biggest, but most recently was ordering anything from the cheap Chinese food place! Cheap! Mostly tasty!
Also gave me something that made me so sick for 2 weeks and unable to keep other food down I had to get an xray to make sure everything was okay! Ultimately it was but man! Bad two weeks!
Airport Sandwich €12 and it tastes like gas station sandwich.
From the hitchkikers guide:
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins they are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.
If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chef’s hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone, among his cats on a back stair in Stepney. The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.Airport prices are on a whole other level
I thought 18€ for 2 ham & cheese croissants & coffee in the Netherlands was excessive until I paid for (my son and my lunch) 80$ for 2 burritos & 2 beers at SeaTac…fucking insanity.
They have sucked out all the joy of the beer at whatever time your bodyclock says.
Yeah it’s just extortion. They know you can’t go anywhere so they set those ridiculous prices and get away with it
I took my car into the dealership for a full work-up and diagnostic in January, roughly $1k… mentioning the light and the recall I had heard about. Well, they said everything was good and unless I brought the car in with the light on they couldn’t do anything about it or the recall. Days later, the light came back on driving home early from work. So, I head right there, while the engine is stuttering and fighting to make it across town. There isn’t any availability until end of the following week…
I go across town to a hole in the wall mechanic and get seen immediately. They diagnose a cracked head gasket and blown radiator pretty quickly, order a new engine because it’s like $375 and under $2k to install. Done by Monday.
I originally went to the dealership. I explained the problem, the cars keep a warning light log that they can access… and they missed the obvious issues but still charged me $1k for work that didn’t matter my more, because I got an entirely new engine and radiator.
Sounds like a stealership
1k is excessive for looking over your car.
That’s because dealerships are scammers. I used to pay $108 for a simple synthetic oil change. Wal-Mart did it for $71.
My dealership wants like $1,000+ for brake/rotor pad service. Other places around charge at least a few hundred dollars cheaper.
I learned that going the mechanics route is better and that’s not saying there are no scammy mechanics, because there are. But once you find someone who’s fair and knows their shit? Give them your business.
We had an excellent mechanic before he moved cities. He would only charge what he said he would even if it took a bit longer and I heard he had fixed a few old peoples cars for free.
Honda dealers near us are now like $165-180 an hour and parts are ridiculous. I just do the work myself. $25 part online and 5 hours my free labour, instead of the $2000 Honda quoted
I take my first experience at a motorcycle dealership as a baseline. To work on my bike they charged £55/h labour for the two of them. So I just think, minimum wage x 3 per person is a good price for mechanics. Now it’d be about £75.
Rent every month. The scam eventually ends so at least it won’t be forever. It just lasts the rest of my life.
$1500 on an all new parts DIY PC complete with a Windows license. Nowadays everything’s outdated and these same parts would be like $800 max. Even back then I could have saved at least a couple hundred just by swallowing my pride and buying used.
I haven’t bought brand new tech since, and I have not regretted it yet.
Buying computer parts is one of those areas when buying high end is usually cheaper in the long run. My 5800X3D / 3090 build is still extremely relevant despite being two generations behind the latest hardware. I have no desire to upgrade and I’ll probably be able to push it for another 2-4 years easily.
Never bought a Windows license though, and I’ve been building PCs since 1998.
Buying just slightly below highest end (so 5700X3D/3080) is the best bang-for-the-buck of all, IMO.
I just upgraded my seven-year-old 1700X/Vega 56 system to 5700X3D/9070 XT, and I expect it to be good for probably another seven years at least, give or take failure of the original motherboard I’m still using.
I used to do the same, and for stationary PCs, that’s still my recommendation. Sure, some might actually need bleeding edge stuff for for some specific niche high performance thing, but for most people that’s a waste of money.
The only exception is for laptops. I rely on laptops as I’m often on the go, and I’ve generally had better results when going high end (within reason) than going mid-tier.
I’m thinking of buying my next set of PC parts used, but i’m scared of the reliability. Which is weird because i buy absolutely everything else scond hand
My workplace has an e-waste bin we can rummage through and I’ve scavenged many an upgrade for my machines. If it weren’t for that, I’m not sure I would have the same confidence troubleshooting used parts. Making a couple of assumptions here, but upgrading with used parts one by one would be a good starting point. I’ve had good luck returning eBay items that were described as working but were in fact defective.
Yeah i don’t have that kind of experience, so me troubleshooting parts would drag on forever. And then they could break months down the line.
In my experience, when buying second hand you trade time and effort for the price; being able to fix things means more time and more effort for even more savings. That’s what this really is.
I guess there’s something to how little i understand computer hardware making me imagine it as more fragile than it is
Of all the e-waste components I’ve tried out, the one used part that should not give you any trouble is the CPU. Except in the case of 13/14th gen Intel CPUs degrading, the CPU should be either dead or alive with no surprises.
It is actually a good filter to have. There are some things you can get second hand and no problem. But you don’t know how much wear and tear something has gone through like PC parts.
Samsung A03.
After years of buying the cheapest phones possible, i got really tired of it and spent more money to get a better one, hoping to finally be free of all the bullshit.
It’s the worst phone i’ve ever owned.
Cost me 100€ second hand instead of the ususal 50€. I am so disgusted
If you still are using it, try this:
- Disable RAM Plus under Battery and device care > Memory
- Reduce transparency and blur under Accessibility > visibility enhancements
- Disable the home screen media page, if it’s there
- Use 3-button navigation instead of gestures
Got just a bit more performance out of a friend’s A03s that way.
Oh wow, i wasn’t expecting helpful advice for that specific model. Thanks!
I sympathize. The A0 line of Samsung phones, holy shit they suck. I have an A02s but it’s not my main phone, thank god. It’s sluggish, takes 3 whole minutes to finally boot up, everything on it runs slow, the keyboard interface takes 10 seconds to finally pull up. It’s technically not even that old when I got it and a year after, it did this.
Oh and it’s battery goes from 100% to 94% in a few minutes with NOTHING running.
The fingerprint scanner never worked properly, i had to register the same finger 3 times to make it kinda usable. Now a few months later it doesn’t work at all.
Those Samsung earbuds which had a proprietary connector from back when every phone manufacturer refused to use 3.5mm plugs to push their own breakable standard.
