I would argue that gambling sites and gacha games are much worse.

That’s exactly the reason it exists, because you need to start somewhere and eliminating cost can help drive business growth.

I’m convinced he just has a vendetta against the American system. He’s been raised with the connotation that America is out to get him. Failed businesses, failed casinos, failed non-profits. NO! It’s the system that’s fucked up, not ME! A tyrannical dumbass that can’t accept failure and realize his own issues. He instead blames it on everyone else. Well guess what, he’s in charge and going to game the system in his favor now, or take it down trying.

Not sure if you’ve de-googled yourself or not but there is a Google Drive Addon that has a whole slew of options for backing up your HA config. I’m sure there are alternate HA add-ons. This may require HACS but not certain.

I’ve had two QNAP NAS fail on me, never again. The first failed shortly after the 3-year warranty expired and was MSRP $600. The second failed right before warranty expiration with MSRP $1200 thinking a better unit would be less prone to fail, but alas.

Thankfully I was able to RMA to get my data back (proprietary RAID), and while waiting on RMA to return, built a custom TrueNAS server I can service all parts on myself for around the same cost of a new NAS. Sold the RMA unit on eBay to recoup some cost as well. All I ever ran on those units was Plex and Samba\NFS file shares. Never again.

As a parent with kids who are starting to dip their roles into the digital age, I would also say this is mainly a parenting issue, but the economic “squeeze” is the other part.

There are so many tools available to manage the content your kids consume - ad blockers, family accounts with monitoring and management, ect. I may be biased as I’m in the IT profession, but if you live in this digital age and claim ignorance on anything technology related then it’s no wonder we are on the state we are in.

Many of the responsibilities the US government agencies used to take on themselves have been eroded to be handled by the individual, coupled with a subscription society for the or day to day appliances and tools we use. After working a full time job M-F, and if I don’t have after hours tasks to handle I get maybe 1 hour worth of family before it’s time to pack it up for the night. Weekends are typically house work or chores. I consider myself fortunate to have that much. Squeeze in management of my kids content intake and that’s just more time taken away from everything else on the list.

I’ll do it though because I’ll be damned if my kids grow up like these kids are now.

Proton is amazing though. I got Lego LotR working on my steam deck by installing some DirectX 9 dependency to fix a graphical glitch with the game. Runs like a dream.