Sometimes Ric I feel like Australians should be voting in the USA elections as we get more coverage of them down here than you do up there.
As for bucking the tred, it is worthwile, if you value the world you live in and the life you lead.
The world has finite resources and wasteing these for very short term goods because some one can do it for you cheaply is a false economy.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a tree hugging leftie, I just hate to see waste and resources being squandered is the worst waste you can get.
It takes only a small amount more resources to make a top quality product that will give you many years of good service, or some one else many years should you like to upgrade, than it does to make junk that will only just outlive warranttee.
In most cases there is little to no tangiable benefit to having the lattest piece of kit. I am responding to you on a 15 year old Mac. It may have cost $ 1,000 more than the my wife's PC but it has lasted 3 times as long as any of her PC's and to date actually cost about 1/2 as much when looked at the annualised costs. I use an I phone 3 that I inherited with the business when I bought it from Bert. I can not see any reason to spend $ 700+ on an I phone 7 that will not make me 1 cent more than the 3 I am currently using. My principal work vehicle is a 1994 L 300 so its annual cost is about $ 2000 in maintanance which is less than the interest others pay on the lease of their new trucks and again a new truck will not generate a single cent of extra income and cost substantially more.
I am not ant-technology. I bought a cheap bore-o-scope to see it it might be a usefull piece of kit, it was and I upgraded to a USB one that cost near $ 1000 and am currently looking at some in the $ 5000 range because it will make me more income and am also debating weather to allocate $ 5000 to some new battery kit or a new wider trailer as more of my cusomers are going to 60" + decks which currently get serviced on site.
At some point in time this squandering( and at times I have been just as guilty ) will start to cost you, me and every one else real money as some form of carbon tax is introduced globally.
And if the scare mongers are 1/2 right, it will cost thousands of people their homes if not their lives.
If you remember back to your schol days and if you economics or commerse you might remember that when free market & capatilism was taught there were a lot of assumptions it got based upon, like a level playing field and an informed market, neither of these have existed for a very very very long time if at all they ever did.
Which gets us back to where we started from.
Every time you & I open the wallet, there are consequences weather we are aware of them or not, but it would be a lot better if we thought about just a little.