Christmas as a child: "Oh man... socks."
Christmas as an adult: "Oh man! Socks!"
this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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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)?
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.
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.
I've misread "Getting olds sucked", thinking it was a meme about getting blowjob to old people.
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.
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?
Yeah, it's income
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
I mean yeah, can be pricey, especially if you want all the features. But you can go bottom of the barrel bare bones basic shit and have it be not too much of an ordeal.
I bought my washer and dryer new and it totalled less than I paid for my cell phone lmao. They function just fine. I actually specifically didn't want extra fancy features because it meant more ways to potentially break.
I've had so much luck with used appliances, the trick is to go to appliance shops that are able to do repairs.
We've gotten two different sets from two different used appliance stores. The first set lasted about 9 years and survived several moves. When they finally died we found another (refurbished) matching set, $400 at a used appliance store, they even took our old set away (which I'm sure and hope they refurb'd and sold again). We used them for about 4 months, when the washer suddenly stopped working. We called the place we got it from and they actually came out and repaired it for free due to a 6 month warranty we didn't even know about, they were super apologetic. It was a pretty positive experience.
We've been pretty lucky I guess. You might have to shop around a bit but you can definitely save a ton of money if you're willing to forgo bells and whistles.
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.
And they don't last as long anymore.
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.
My fridge just broke down tonight.
I was doing some electrical work and when I flipped the breakers back on it started chirping from its speaker like it was trying and failing to start.
This will be the second time I've had to fix this fridge now. The first time, it's teensy little mains power connector shorted itself out with a loud bang.
I started fixingy own stuff out of necessity, but now I just do it out of spite. I paid good damn money for these things and I'm going to run them till they are withered skeletons, then I'll strip from for parts and recycle the rest.
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).
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Everything hurts and I'm hungry all the time.
Also, if you don't eat when you're hungry, it's not simply a grumbling stomach you have to deal with. Now hunger comes with lethargy, headaches, irritability, and more. I used to be able to fast most of the day without any issue, but at some point in my mid-20s, it was like a switch got flipped. Now when my body senses low blood sugar, it basically revolts against me until I eat something.
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.
I'm happy to win anything
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.
I won a feature phone once when feature phones were normal. I won it from a radio contest.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
As a kid i was terrible at guessing the prices because im Canadian and didn’t know about exchange rates, and also as a child i had no concept of what a car or a dishwasher cost
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