Books.
Most librarians are knowledgeable and love helping you find something, or getting it in from another library.
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
198 points (99.0% liked)
Asklemmy
44338 readers
604 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Not everyone has access to libraries. However anyone with internet access and a device capable of reading ebooks can read for free with libgen, zlib, and sci hub.
load more comments
(6 replies)
Every book I try to check out has a 3 month to 3 year wait-list. Not exactly a convenient way to read.
load more comments
(4 replies)
I like owning my own stuff.
By that proxy you could also just rent your home instead of owning a living space.
That's a crazy comparison. If I could rent a home for free from the library I would feel like I'd won the lottery. I absolutely would do that. Is renting from the library not free where you are?
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
Water
As somebody who grew up with perfect tap water and then moved to Detroit, I used to think this.
Edit: I guess I should say I still think this for a lot of places. When I go to my parents house the first thing I do is drink a big cup of their amazing tap water.
Hear hear. When I rented the water was great, didnโt use a filter. Out where my parents live, their water is brown occasionally.
load more comments
(7 replies)
Bottled water to drink at home.
Not every country has safe tap water
Ok, so: bottled water to drink at home in countries with safe drinking water.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Not even every state, look at Flint, MI ...
load more comments
(3 replies)
In my area in Greece, the water is not safe, my brother who used to work in the water containers says it's full of rats. We all buy bottles. It would be nice to be environmentally conscious about it, but there's no choice about it.
load more comments
(6 replies)
The meal subscription services strike me as premade salads on steroids. You're paying a premium for all the labor, ingredients, (excessive) packaging, shipping, their profit, etc and you still have to put it together and cook it. It really isn't that hard to look up a couple of recipes, buy the ingredients (you'd probably be going to the store anyway) and prep for 30 or so minutes a night. If you make full recipes you'll probably have leftovers so you won't even have to cook the next day.
I was actually enjoying Blue Apron for a while, mainly because it was stuff that I'd never thought to try making before, but the amount of trash generated from each box delivered was too much for my conscience. I wish they didn't use so many plastic wrappers and had some way of returning the boxes with the insulation.
And it's way too much charge for the quality of the meat and produce. They give ground pork at beef steak prices and the produce isn't as carefully selected as I would have picked.
The insulation alone with them and Hello Fresh had me hang them up for good after a couple tries. It was nice to try recipes I wouldnโt think to search online for but yeah, that packaging situation was god-awful.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Microsoft Office and satellite radio.
I'm still waiting for a proper excel replacement. No, google sheets and libre office don't cut it. I literally have a copy of office 2019 that I have to finagle to install only that app and nothing else.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
YouTube premium.
Just get uBlock or revanced.
Okay, to preface I really hate giving Google money, but I hate ads more, and paying for Premium also removes ads on YouTube apps across platforms. It also in some minuscule way rewards the creators I watch, but real support comes from Patreon.
load more comments
(11 replies)
load more comments
(15 replies)
Gray market license keys for software. The money you're paying for these will never make it to the developer, so you might as well pirate.
On that same idea, camrips sold out of the back of a car. I knew someone who bragged about being able to get them and I always thought they looked like ass. They just liked acting like they had hood connections.
It's more convenient to have a license. I only buy those when the developer is being scummy
Then there's people paying for pirated software in CDs/DVDs
load more comments
(1 replies)