| It feels like you are pushing a political agenda. It seems to me that you are not responding in good faith. > tows, but you could hire a car for the weekend. I already commented “hiring a car instead, which is ridiculously more expensive and extremely inconvenient (at least where I live).”. I gave examples where hiring a car doesn’t make sense (urgency, emergency, optionality). There is no local car hire, so getting to and from a car hire would cost me significant time. I think your point is that sometimes people just go with the easiest option, without thinking of “cheaper” alternatives. I own a car, but I can’t use it at present, so I am currently forced to use alternatives. I can categorically state that the costs of other options are extremely high for my situation. The real costs are not financial, they are the things I can’t easily do because the alternative options usually have constraints that suck. Edit: Hiring a car to do a load of wood makes no financial sense: I would be better off just buying wood instead. Moving wood with my own car makes financial sense because the marginal cost of using my car is low, and the wood and it’s transport mostly only costs my time. Converting my time to wood makes sense in my context for some friends and family. > So you do the 'cost per use' calculation No. My original comment is that looking at costs alone is silly. The value you get also matters - in my case the high value of things that my own car gives me that alternatives do not give me (or alternatives could, at a stupidly high financial/time/other cost). The example I gave is the ability to rush out to my parents or help my friends after midnight, which has a very high optionality value to me. Uber is expensive, incurs delays, and causes my precious time to be wasted. Perhaps you could suggest I hire a car for 365 days to cover that /sarcasm. I just don’t understand your condescending tone. I think it is obvious that many people use cars because the value they get far outweighs the costs, and many people have looked at the alternatives and found they don’t stack up for them. I am one of those people. Why persist on suggesting alternatives to me. Essentially I think the original article is a really flawed way of looking at things. I use my T-shirt for 16 hours a day, so I should pay thousands for the perfect T-shirt? |
Not if it (as it won't) doesn't make it correspondingly better, but I think it is a good example, because yes, if you're anything like me we probably shouldn't balk at the price of basic clothes so much given their utility.
I think the times I've most successfully applied this line of thinking was to cutlery, and to bedding.