Not really. It's an iPad + iPhone. That's hardly exotic. Both of those product categories sell very well. People who own an iPad mini and an iPhone have every reason to consider this for the merged cost.
I've just remembered whichever version of Sim City I played as a kid used to have the option (and encourage?) to take on debt. I found the interest a killer.
I don't envy politicians having to run a country, knowing that 10% + of all government spending is just going towards interest payments for past spending.
As with all debt, you hope that it was used to buy assets that are earning more than the interest cost, and not just on a consumable.
Thinking about it, I wonder if this doesn't capture the whole picture. It is the percentage of spending, but doesn't capture whether that total spending denominator is itself more or less than the government is earning. Suppose one year, a government spent twice as much as it earned. Even if the interest payments stayed the same, wouldn't the "interest payments as a share of expenditure" halve that year?
I agree this dichotomy exists and find it useful to ponder for balancing your life.
But there is another more specific one in your context: objects are to be respected vs objects are to be useful.
My mother takes a lot of care of her objects. Her stuff lasts for very long.
Mine don't, but my life is much easier than hers because I don't think twice about making something dirty or worn. It's not alive; it's meant to make my life easier, we built it for it.
Again there is a balance: go too far and you get bad ROI out of your object.
But books fall very much into that category for me. I write on them, cut pages, turn them into a mess. They get a wild life, and then I discard them.
They are not trophies or decoration. They are not sacred.
And yet I may buy the same one 5 times for many friends, or just because I messed one up.
That’s mostly where I’ve wound up as an adult. I think a lot of it comes down to financial stability. I spent a lot of my own money on books when I was younger. They embodied that cost in perceived value. But I learned that they might have more value than their cost if you’re willing to make them more useful.
There's the program called Starshield, that's part of the miltech side of the program. One of the military uses is using the starlink constellation signals as a passive SAR for the whole planet with millimeter scale accuracy.
> One of the many legacies of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is the government-wide shift from targeted surveillance—such as individual wiretaps or pen register/trap and trace orders—to mass surveillance techniques—such as tapping into the internet backbone or mass collection of telephone or internet metadata.
In other words, we gave the terrorists the victory by accepting being terrorized at the country level from a single act and destroying a lot of our freedom. Yeah us.
There’s lots of questions around who was actually behind 9/11, looking at who benefited the most is helpful. We may never know the truth but we know who the real “terrorists” are, because they’re terrorizing everyone now.
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