The price of fish

I did study economics at Uni and Tafe, but I was always of the opinion you could just about argue anything, back it up with valid points, and hold two totally opposing views in the head whilst sincerely believing both of them (George Orwell eat your heart out).

For instance we have the economic stimulus being strongly promulgated now by Kevin Rudd et al, in order to give the economy a boost along, and we have the Reserve Bank gradually pushing up interest rates to slow the economy down and attempt to rein in inflation.  Doublethink if ever there was such a thing.

I have also noticed (especially today) pricing anomalies.  You know what I mean.  The classic example is if you're at the supermarket you can buy a big tin of baked beans for LESS than the price of a small tin.  Surely it is crazy to buy something and chuck half of it out, but pay less than buying the correct amount.

Tomorrow I am off to buy a big SATA hard drive.  (See yesterday's post for why). I have checked out several large technology retailers on the Central Coast and I can buy an external hard drive, in a case, with a power supply and with a USB interface for less than I can buy a naked internal hard drive.  In some cases the saving is 50%.  So I will buy an external one, rip it out of its case, and use the hard drive itself in the video recorder. I will then also have an external case, power supply and USB interface as a bonus, which may well come in very handy to retrieve data from dead-ish SATA HDs without having to mount them inside a computer.

Another amazing thing about this is that quite often, a 500 gigabyte drive is actually MORE expensive than a 1 terabyte drive.

As the late Julius would say: "Why is it so?"  I guess it's all to do with the economics.  IE you can argue anything you like and still be right.

PS: The hard drive in the personal video recorder has been officially pronounced dead after I connected it up to the computer in the 1 terabyte external drive case I have.  It was tricky to get the thing open, but finally it gave way, I took out the working drive, replaced it with the one from the PVR, and can declare life extinct.  I've had computers for nearly 30 years, and this is the very first hard drive I've had that has died on me.  Problem is I have lost 200 gigabytes of data (albeit video files) which is more data than I've ever lost in an entire lifetime to date.