The Last Quiet Thing

I have a couple of Oceanus (fancy Casio) watches that adapt fine, to whatever DST is. Not sure how they would do in Arizona, though.

I also have a Junghans (more expensive), and it’s stuck in old DST.

I don’t wear any of them. My Apple Watch (cheaper than the others) does fine. It has a GPS-informed time setting. I don’t really use it for a lot of its fancier features, but I like that it allows me to keep my phone on silent.

I am “in the middle.” I don’t pine for “the good ol’ days,” but I also don’t get all hung up on futurism.

WFM. YMMV.

If you want to disconnect, there are many cars that have GPS but no way to transmit data (and also no internet connection) GPS by itself only requires receiving signals after all.

You can buy one. People still make clothes, pencils, cutlery, automatic watches, furniture — more than they ever did at any point in the past. Automation, electrification, motorization has allowed considerable wealth that has made making all those terminal products that much cheaper, reliable, and easy to do the little maintenance that they do need.

Regretting that there is an alternative to a Casio F-91W is missing that there are more of those made today than in the 90s. Billions more people can afford it now than they ever could, because, among other things, the farmer who collected the latex to make the bracelet can check, on their Android phone, the weather, or whether the bug they found on one of their tree might wipe out their plantation; the driver who delivered a shipment of those watches to the harbor can call the factory admin to fix a paperwork issue.

Like the author, I have some nostalgia about that exact watch: my dad still wears it every day, like he did throughout the 70s, after his dad gave it to him as a present for going to work abroad (in a humid country where a mechanical watch would not have been reasonable to bring). I don’t know how much my grand-father paid for it, but it couldn’t have been cheap given how my dad talks about it.

The parallel stories put both of our family in a minority who were privileged then and are privileged today. We could afford that watch then, when it was the pinnacle of technology, and we can afford the latest iPhone now because we are privileged. $21 is a lot for a lot of people; a second-hand Android can cost five times more. That’s also a lot for people who need more than the time and a beeping alarm to work, pay their taxes, keep their paperwork handy, etc.

Those need more updates because they can do a lot, which means bad people are trying to hack into those, and about their power. Incredibly smart and generous security researchers have been able to find ways they could do that, fix those and share that with us. That’s as much a burden as pulling the ribbon around a birthday present.

Lifetime is the most valuable asset, and protecting it from leaking through infinite scroll, TV, screen time, and meta products is not optional anymore.

On the positive side, I have more time to spend with my children, as they deserve my attention much more than a phone screen.

If tomorrow the internet connection were downgraded to 33.6k, I perhaps wouldn't notice this immediately.

Index funds are almost always better than house appreciation over long periods of time; if you discount leverage - because it's "normal" to be leveraged 80% on a house, but you can't margin your index funds that high, and the government doesn't protect you from gambler's ruin on margin.

Owning usually tends to win out the longer you want (or have) to remain in the same location and same house, renting tends to win if you move relatively often (location or changing home type/size, etc) or if you're in a rental inversion (which much of the coasts are in).

At the extremes nobody suggests you should buy a house instead of renting a hotel room or AirBNB in a city you're visiting.

And it's not strictly a financial decision; it's also a personal one and people may choose the "financially non-optimal" because of other reasons.