Gaming

I never quite got the idea of music streaming. Maybe I'm just too old (yells at cloud), but I listened to radio shows (online) to discover new music, then downloaded it. In the era of mobile data, this seems to have been a solid choice.

I struggle to hit my 5GB data limit by a large margin ... adding a streaming service and then having to upgrade my plan because of it sounds like throwing money away when I spend less a month on new tracks than Spotify costs.

There's been some weird conditioning going on over the years with younger generations that it totally makes sense to just throw a lot of money every month at things that have cheaper, easily accessible one-time solutions. Just because you can't buy a house doesn't mean you should rent everything else.

Hell ... I was born in the '70s, and the last time I had cable was when I lived with my parents. "Let me get this straight ... you want me to pay usurious prices because there's no way to avoid ESPN being bundled in and then trump it with ads?"

As a rule, if it has ads, I won't pay for it (I was fine with it back in print days, as they were paying my salary on the other side of the hairline). That's what the advertisers should be doing. You're charging the customers too much and the advertisers too little if this is the equilibrium that makes line go up while taking money that customers could have had to spend on the advertised products.

Let's say cable prices dropped to $20 per month. I'd imagine you'd get those ads in front of far more eyeballs, so increased ad rates would actually be beneficial. But let's not bring logic into capitalism.