So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm\u2026and the notion I\u2019ve recorded a third of my life here is a whole lot of \u201cOf Which More Later\u201d), but it took very little time for me to turn around and hand that cash over to American Giant for a fleece zip-up and three of their new Everest T-shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The fleece has been on my list for a while since it was announced. My employer has given me damn near half a dozen fleeces in the last four years, and I have given them all away to the homeless wherever possible. But this one is American made and does not come with any branding from an employer with whom my relationship is charitably described as \u201ctroubled\u201d. I did enjoy the North Face fleece that was my first garment from them, and the last one I disposed of, and I think that\u2019s why I took the plunge to buy this one. Good extra layer, goes under the M-65 or can be stashed in the trunk, whatever. That\u2019s not the big thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Everest T was advertised in the paper catalog months before it became available to order. It is a loosely-cut crewneck T, optimized as a main shirt rather than undergarment later. But the unique selling point of the Everest T is that it is 15.2 oz cotton. By comparison, a typical \u201cheavyweight\u201d T is about 8 ounces per square foot. The super-hardcore manly-man \u201ccotton armor iron wear\u201d sort of work T generally tops out at 10 or 11 ounces. Fifteen ounce cotton is usually associated with terms like \u201ccanvas\u201d. It is, hands down, the heaviest T-shirt I have ever owned and arguably the heaviest shirt by fabric weight I have ever owned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it is magnificent. The white one – which I bought when I thought no other colors were on offer – looks like something off the cover of a Springsteen album. I only need the one; the other two in a sage green and a light rye color are far more suitable for daily use. They wear like a weighted blanket for the torso. It feels like the T-shirt that\u2019s been missing my entire life, the final replacement for those couple of American Apparel Vermont Army T\u2019s bought back in the Apple days and jealously guarded ever since. It sounds insane to pay $60 for a t-shirt, but when it feels like a T-shirt you can genuinely wear and have for the rest of your life\u2026there you go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that\u2019s been the metric for quite some time. I don\u2019t have any problem spending money on something I plan to have and use for the rest of my days. It\u2019s what makes me antsy about buying the Nokia 2780, no matter how tempting it is to have a modern LTE flip phone – because it can\u2019t possibly last more than four or five years until LTE frequencies start getting replaced with 5G, and it\u2019s a random gimmick. It would make more sense to save that $90 and put it on an Apple Watch Ultra, which would have a bigger screen, a bigger battery and the kind of cellular connectivity to use it as the shutdown-night phone\u2026which would itself only be good for what, five years? Tops? My Apple Watch Series 6 is not particularly long in the tooth, and a battery replacement would see it working well for the foreseeable future, so how can I justify dropping that kind of cash? Against that, $500 for a custom lightsaber seems less frivolous than $800 for a five-year watch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And this is what made me think about Star Wars, and how Star Wars is basically a scarcity economy. Things get repaired, get mended, get used for decades or centuries. They have advanced technology, but they don\u2019t have plenty, and it shows. Rey is using a lightsaber her mentor\u2019s father built fifty years earlier. Han and Leia are honeymooning on a three hundred year old starship. I can\u2019t buy a damn phone without being required to replace it in five years because I either can\u2019t get the frequency coverage I need or can\u2019t plug it into the new laptop or because it\u2019s not getting operating system updates any longer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now if someone wants to give me a flip phone with a removable battery and a replaceable cellular module to keep up with 5G, 6G, whatever it takes, and it could be made up-to-date for shutdown night for ten, fifteen, twenty years as the phone of last resort? Then we could talk. But for now, that\u2019s money that could go on another Everest T that will last me the rest of my life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So there is a research firm out there that was willing to pay me $400 for four and a half hours of opinions on electric vehicles. These people are fools, because I have opinions for a lot longer than that for no charge whatsoever (as the almost 17 years of this very blog will confirm\u2026and … <\/p>\n