really quite amazed. the folks on this site seem to have access to unlimited piles of cash...
As expensive as any of this stuff is, it's still on the order of magnitude of $100s of dollars. That's pretty much in line with most consumption electronic goods.
That's true, except you don't buy consumption goods every few days. EG my TV is 7 years old now and still going strong; my main monitor is 4 years old. This desk I'm using is over 20 years old; the atomic clock (now a normal clock since there's no atomic signal here) I'm looking at is 16 years old. Seems as though some of the folks here report buying or winning a new keyboard for $200 or something every few days.
But then again, this is America. In Asia it's common for people to spend 45% of their pretax incomes on housing loans for 35 years, so Asians really don't have money to spend like the Americans do.
To make things even more ridiculous, in China all residential property has a 70 year leasehold. And people have been taking on loans that are like 300x their yearly incomes. I don't know how it will end, but although it should theoretically end badly, it hasn't yet.
Yeah, come to think of it, it's the Americans living within their means. Industrial SSK at $800 is pretty cheap; about 0.1 square meter/ one square foot of Chinese low end property. And it's a freehold collectible guaranteed to increase in value. Your Chinese property will be confiscated by the government in 70 years.
