I’ve been in similar situations while renting. I ran ethernet cables along skirting boards and around doorframes and hid them inside adhesive cable raceways.

Singapore’s public transport system is fantastic. I lived there for 2 years and never felt like I needed a car. You only get one as a status symbol.

My guess is this is mostly support payments for people who are unable to work.

The problem with (almost) all social media platforms is they need a LOT of users. Because each individual users brings in such a small amount of revenue.

So these companies (running on investor money) go through a deliberate early “growth” stage, where their singular goal is to get as many users as possible. They usually do this by…actually making something people want to use. Plus some addictive tricks thrown in to keep people “engaged”.

Once they have their 100 million users, or whatever number they’re targeting, then the processor of turning it to shit begins. Because now they have the users they need to extract revenue from them. The problem is that growth stage often kills off competitors as well. So now you have a near monopoly tightening the screws on users, who have to just accept it because the cost of moving to an alternative is too high.

But eventually it hits a breaking point. Users jump to something new, and the cycle repeats. The users who stick around with a shit product are the ones who ultimately pay the debts that early users got to enjoy.

Is this for movies and tv shows? I fix it at the output level and leave my rips unchanged. Check your TV or AVR for a “night mode” or “dialogue enhancement” or use the “reduce loud sounds” system setting if you’re playing back an AppleTV.

If the issue is specifically quiet dialogue and loud action scenes, get a dedicated center channel and boost its volume by a few dB.