| Hey y'all, it's Austin in Los Angeles. Welcome back from a three-day weekend in the U.S. I'm going to share some tips about personal finance in the pandemic, but first… Today's top tech news: The trouble started when my wife noticed we were seemingly paying twice for Peacock. Neither of us were quite sure when we began subscribing to NBC's streaming app, or why—perhaps for binging The Office or catching the Olympics—but in the digital gluttony of the Covid-19 era, who could keep track? Like many folks, we spent a lot of time and money on digital entertainment in the last 18 months. The dollars added up as the lockdown dragged on. Then, as vaccination rates rose and mask mandates faded in the U.S., it seemed like IRL escapism would replace pixels and screen time—until the delta variant surged. So now we're inside again and have nearly exhausted our supply of television shows. We're using this time instead to do an end-of-summer cleanout of the digital baggage that'd been piling up since early 2020. What we found was expensive. Predictably, streaming TV and movie subscriptions caused the most self-flagellation. Our cord-cutting wasn't as economical as we'd hoped. Every month, there was a new charge from HBO Max, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube Premium and two from Peacock (which, it turns out, splits its bill into a pair of payments: one for the content and a $5 surcharge for removing advertising). Then there were the sports distractions, including MLB.TV and Formula 1 TV. Accounting for every app was a game of whack-a-mole. Disney+, at $8 a month, was hiding in our Verizon Wireless bill after a free promotion ended last month. Same with Discovery+, which we discovered in my wife's Apple Inc. account, because she signed up through her iPhone. We realized we'd been paying for ViacomCBS Inc.'s Paramount+ after another forgotten free trial. We said goodbye to Peacock, Discovery and Paramount, and I may have to give up on the baseball and auto racing apps next season and watch them on YouTube TV (which, at $65 per month, isn't cheap). It went on. We calculated roughly $175 a year for various cloud storage subscriptions, which we're now trying to consolidate. We killed our $10-a-month Seamless+ food delivery plan after determining we were getting more value out of groceries from Hungryroot and Amazon.com Inc. I briefly used PlushCare for tele-health during the pandemic but not enough to justify a $15 monthly fee. And since we've been traveling way less, we gave up our Zipcar membership. With a heavy heart, we cancelled our $16-a-month Squarespace Inc. subscription, which we'd been using to host our wedding website. Covid-19 forced us to cancel our plans, but we kept the site alive, in the hope we could plan a post-pandemic celebration with friends and family. Alas, that won't happen for a while. The list goes on: Audible, AllTrails, Spotify, Microsoft Corp.'s Office and Xbox, a slew of newspaper and magazine apps. All of these survived the culling. One takeaway from our digital cleanup is that value is king. The extensive content library of HBO Max was nearly impossible to sacrifice, whereas Ted Lasso did not justify $5 a month for Apple TV+. Although I prefer Zoom Video Communications Inc., the many free video-chat alternatives replaced my $15 Zoom subscription. A second takeaway is that bundles proved to be a strong cancellation deterrent. Amazon Prime, with its free delivery, streaming content and other benefits, is perhaps the gold standard of packaged deals. Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate membership combines online multiplayer access with a buffet of games and cloud benefits that are hard to beat. Cutting the fat from our credit card bills was easier than I thought. It was satisfying, too. For many apps, the longer we paid, the more likely we were to question whether they were justifying the escalating costs. Soon, we'll have enough money saved to cover nine more Peacock subscriptions. —Austin Carr Last spring, a Tesla owner was killed in a fiery crash that sparked scrutiny of the carmaker's Autopilot driver-assistance technology. Police and autopsy reports obtained by Bloomberg News shed new light on what may have led to the fatal crash. A federal judge ruled that a computer using artificial intelligence can't be listed as an inventor on patents because only a human can be an inventor under U.S. law. Dyson designed a robot that could open drawers and clean stairs, according to patent filings. (The inventions are credited to human inventors.) The former head of PlayStation blamed the ballooning cost of game development for the industry's overreliance on sequels and other less risky fare, according to an interview in Bloomberg's Game On newsletter. | 
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