Private jet aircraft. They are very expensive to buy (say from US$ 5 to 70 million), but also shockingly expensive to operate. It’s hard to put an exact number to operation costs since it’s a mix of fixed and variable costs, but a fancy jet like a G650 is likely gonna be a few million a year in op costs (fuel, maintenance, management, crew salaries. training, hangar fees, facility fees, and so on. Also, few people actually buy aircraft directly. Rather they pay a management company to set up an ownership entity that owns and manages the aircraft for you.

It’s tempting to think of a jet as a vehicle, but really it’s more like paying people to do all the work and waiting for you so that the time you spend waiting is as minimal as possible. When most people fly, you buy a ticket, you book a ride to the airport, you go through security, customs, immigration, ticketing, baggage handling, and so on. Then you wait to board, wait for everyone else to board, wait for other planes to take off, maybe fly to a hub location enroute to your destination, and so on. If you’re in a plane like a G650, you pay other people to do all of this for you so that you can show up to a plane that’s fueled and ready to go, with the cabin AC at the temp you like, and your cocktail already poured sitting at the table by your seat. You get in, they start the roll.

It’s lavish, opulent, and wasteful in the extreme, but still a damn nice way to travel.

I was gonna say the same thing. Never had a death threat sent to me, but I have had guns pointed at me a couple of times, so I guess that is a death threat of sorts. Been threatened with violence a few times, and even an attempted carjacking once. Not a damn one of them was conscientious enough to put it in writing though.

Yeah. I’ve heard good things about Ente. For me, I was at a storage tier where i was over 100gb of docs & photos, and between 1 & 2TB when you include video. Most hosted services get kinda pricey at those storage tiers.

I didn’t really set out to self host, but since in needed to solve for docs, photos, and videos, I just went with self hosting. I’m happy with it, just acknowledging that it’s not for everyone

His do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.

I was the same as you. Got Gmail way back when. I’ve left pretty much all google services at this point except YouTube.

For me, mail and cal were the easiest things to switch switched to mailbox.org. I tried Proton first, and i like using Proton quite a bit, but opted for Mailbox because my my wife (who wants to keep Gmail for personal) can get IMAP for mailbox and her remaining google in a single app. Proton is more polished, but Mailbox suited our need better. Tuta is good too.

Switching away from Google docs and Photos was harder. I used google docs extensively, and it was harder to find a good replacement. Same for photos which used since it was Picasa. I opted for self hosted for those (Paperless-ngx, nextcloud, and immich). I like paperless a lot. Its tons better than google drive for static docs. Immich is pretty promising, and has some great tools. But you do sacrifice a bit of polish and simplicity. Still worth it for me.

Price of self hosting is probably a wash compared to paid storage as long as you ignore the cost of your labor to learn and set it all up.

You’re right… it does go a lot deeper. If you’re in the USA, your local community college might have classes. Consider starting with some formal instruction. The problem with YouTube is that you (the one lacking knowledge) has to decide whether the YouTuber knows what they’re doing. There’s a lot of great stuff on YouTube, but there’s plenty of wrong and unsafe stuff too.

Also, avoid super cheap tools for the tools that interface with screws, nuts, and bolts, like wrenches, sockets, screwdrivers, hex and torx drivers. Cheap tools make it wasier to damage screw heads and bolts.

Training courses and apprenticeships; there are a lot of specialized tools, techniques, and diagnostic procedures that aren’t obvious. Self guided usually results in doing a lot of things the wrong way.