This assumes (and I don't know) that fast charge can be done with a gradient of speeds, rather than all-or-nothing, which might be the case as it uses special cords and jacks with dedicated additional power wires.
It can and is done with a gradient of speeds, without "special cords or jacks with dedicated additional power wires".
The USB power delivery spec allows device and charger (or device and device... you can charge one device from another) to negotiate both voltage and amperage within a fairly broad range, up to as high as 20V @ 5A for 100W. For the higher power delivery rates you do need all three of source, cable and sink to be capable of whatever it is that you're trying to do, so in that sense I suppose you need "special cords or jacks", but they're not actually special, just conformant to the newer specification. You'll notice that many USB-C cables are somewhat thicker than older USB cables, this is so they can handle the higher amperages.
Within the range of what is supported by source, cable and sink, there's also room for dynamic adjustment. This is mostly done by the sink, device being charged. The phone must take responsibility for protecting the battery, slowing the charge rate if the battery is getting hot, or for any other reason that the battery or device might be damaged by continuing to charge quickly.
Hey, how about they just make them LABEL these new and exciting foods for being gene-edited, and let the consumer decide?
Okay, but make sure also to label all of the foods that were bred with the use of mutagenic chemicals and radiation, which is a more random and dangerous process than carefully-targeted editing.
Of course, this would require labeling nearly everything in the grocery store. Including nearly everything that is labeled "organic, non-GMO".
I use my shoes more than either my phone or desktop. But I don't spend $1000 on my shoes either.
You spend more time with your shoes on your feet, but very little actively interacting with them. Unless you don't know how to tie shoelaces very well, I guess.
Having a shitty vocabulary and trying too hard to compensate: Priceless!
I thought it was a great word choice, nice poetic imagery. Obviously the train station doesn't sleepwalk (just as a "sleepy" station doesn't drowse), but the word evokes an image of someone going through the motions while not actually awake/alert. Plus the word has a nice rhythm and sound to it. I liked it.
I live in farm country and often discuss these issues with farmers, many of whom have graduate degrees in agriculture. I'm far from uneducated on the topic.
Pollinating insects are an issue for some crops, but not for the ones that provide the bulk of our food. Corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats and soybeans are all wind-pollinated. Alfalfa (the major non-corn feed for cattle) requires insect pollination, but a specific variety of bee developed for the purpose, the alfalfa leafcutter bee, is used. The bees are raised and managed by humans. Some fruits require pollination, but many are self-pollinating or wind-pollinated. There is also research going into mechanical pollinating solutions as a hedge against the loss of bees (which are at risk, but not by warming).
Destruction of the microbes would be problematic, but rising temperatures aren't going to affect microorganisms much. At worst we may need to do soil transplantation, or even breeding and seeding of microbiomes.
We definitely have the ability to live on a planet that's 5C hotter. But it will require global dislocations of nearly all of the population which will disrupt commerce, disrupt agriculture and cause famines, provoke wars... it will be hellish
Just because we CAN doesn't mean that we WILL.
Meh. This is true regardless of this particular issue.
Who knows if that decimated ecosystem will be able to support a top predator like homo sapiens?
We don't really depend on the ecosystem that much. I like nature and would hate to see much of it destroyed, but we don't really depend on it any more.
I didn't say anything about money. I said "our economy", meaning the goods and services produced, moved and consumed. If you like eating, staying warm (or cool, depending), and being able to buy things you need or want, you depend on motorized transport.
It was never a political argument, it was a reference to the book "Animal Farm".
I didn't catch the allusion and just took the words literally -- "from a political perspective".
So that will get you to all of 12% of Android phones. https://developer.android.com/...
You need to go back to 3 year old OS to capture 2/3rds of the potential market, 4 years to capture 4/5th of the potential market. What a mess.
The problem can't be fixed retroactively. It required a deep refactoring of the lower layers of the system and imposition of compliance testing at those layers. There is no way to get OEMs to go do all of that work for old devices. But if it works well, then 3-4 years from now, when the old Android upgrade process (which is largely driven by device obsolescence) would have led to the S release being only on a tiny number of devices, it will be on approximately 2/3 of them. A couple of years after that and we should (hopefully) be to where new releases go to almost the entire user base.
We also need to spend trillions of dollars and euros to improve living conditions in high birthrate countries so high birthrate countries can have even more children.
Increasing standard of living and reducing childhood mortality reduces birthrates, it doesn't increase them. If you want to reduce birthrates in high-birthrate countries, spending billions to improve their living conditions is exactly the right thing to do.
Yeah thats kind of what frusturates me about the "Its been super hot before and things lived!" talking point. Sure it has, but unless your a serious misanthrope that doesn't want people to exist, it really does well to remember that life also exists around sulphur plumes at the bottom of the ocean, but not people! Hell, theres a good chance we could bio-engineer primitive life that'd cope on venus, maybe even mop up some of the atmosphere a bit so in a few thousand years we could live there. But for the time being, bad for humans.
I don't think there's any evidence that humans couldn't survive on a planet that's 5C hotter. We're good at surviving in an extremely wide variety of conditions, because technology allows us to modify our local environment. In fact, technology is the only thing that allows us to live anywhere on Earth. And there's no need to catastrophize about human extinction, because the realistic effects are bad enough. Seas 10-60 meters higher means that at least 2/3 of the population will have to be relocated. Weather patterns are going to change dramatically, making agriculture very difficult until things stabilize, and likely requiring us to redesign our houses and buildings.
Think about the pure economic cost of rebuilding all of our housing, warehouses, factories, etc., in different places and with different technologies to adapt to the changed environment. This will absorb a large part of our global productivity for generations, likely all but halting progress on solving any other problems.
And while extinction isn't likely, megadeaths (maybe gigadeaths) from war and famine are all but guaranteed. There's a good argument that ISIS was a direct result of famine in Syria, dislocating large rural populations and leading to millions of angry young men with no prospects. And the cause of the famine? Global warming likely played a role -- but even if it didn't, the coming warming is going to create lots and lots of that sort of thing.
We definitely have the ability to live on a planet that's 5C hotter. But it will require global dislocations of nearly all of the population which will disrupt commerce, disrupt agriculture and cause famines, provoke wars... it will be hellish. And don't fool yourself that the hell will be concentrated overseas. The wealthy, industrialized world will be hit just as hard. We have more resources, but we also have fragile and complex supply networks.
The USB-C standard is anything but standard with a mixed bag of features and compatibility from device to device.
Bah.
That article talks about the ways in which USB-C is insufficiently standardized and what is says is technically correct, but irrelevant in practice for phone charging and connectivity. All of the problems are around super-high data rates and using USB-C for display. Charging works great. There were some problems early on with non-compliant cables, but those have largely been flushed out (note that both of your links about this problem are from 2015 -- there's a reason you didn't find recent ones), and these days as far as I can tell every USB-C device, cable and charger can be mixed and matched without trouble. Also, data rates aren't a problem unless you need 5 or 10 Gbps; not all devices and cables can manage those rates, but if USB2 rates are good enough, you can just not care.
For phone charging, USB-C is the solution, and it works very well. Apple and Samsung should suck it up and get on board.
A $1000 phone that you replace in 2 years is costing you $42/mo.
Or $0.001 per use. You seem to have missed my core point, which is that how much you use something also factors in. Monthly cost is far from the whole story.
Of course, if you can't afford $500 per year for a phone (less resale value), then you can't afford it. But for something you use as extensively and intimately as a smartphone it's easy to justify spending as much as you can afford. I know lots of people who make far less than $100K per year and feel the money they spend on high end phones is well worth it. And I'm not going tell them they're wrong about the value of their own money.
If you don't have a Pixel phone, you won't be getting Android Pie for a while (if at all).
... but there's reason to think that should be significantly less true than with previous releases. Android Oreo included Project Treble, which defined a hard boundary between the system and device-specific components that didn't previously exist. This only applied to new devices launched with Oreo, but on those ones it should be possible for device makers to simply drop a Pie system image on them and expect it to work. This should make O -> P upgrades smoother and faster than any previous pair of releases.
Of course, the devil is in the details. There is a tremendous amount variety in the Android world, and OEMs have traditionally had almost unlimited ability to modify the system as long as the app-level APIs continued to function correctly (as validated by the Compliance Test Suite). So Treble represents a sea change and there will undoubtedly be lessons to be learned and problems to fix. Also, OEMs who like to customize the system heavily will want to port all of their customizations to Pie, and that will take time, in proportion to the amount of customization they do. Devices that ship stock Android, or close to it, however, should be easy to upgrade.
Should. Over the next few months we'll start to find out how successful Treble was in achieving its goals, and how much more work remains to be done. The relatively large number of devices that ran the preview releases is a very positive sign, but time will tell.
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
How would walking turn you to poverty?
Motorized vehicles are essential to our economy. There's no way to conduct the large-scale trade that underpins our wealth without using them. And there's absolutely no way to do it with purely human power (no four-legs -- domesticated beasts of burden dramatically increased human productivity).
I choose to not use the car, I have a healthier lifestyle as a result. Please explain.
Now you've changed your argument from one about politics to one of personal health. Getting exercise is clearly good for you, sure. This can be done by walking or in any of many other ways, many of which are more time-efficient. I prefer rowing and cycling, myself, especially rowing because it's a whole-body activity.
if we didn't have the US military we would certainly have another country's military.
I don't think this is as true as you think it is. Consider the apocryphal quote attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto: "You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass." While it's unlikely that Yamamoto ever said it, it was also very true in the middle of the 20th century (modulo the hyperbole, obviously). The notion that a heavily-armed populace was the best deterrent to invasion was the Founders' primary strategy for national defense.
It's debatable whether a purely volunteer militia-based defense (plus a navy) would be sufficient to prevent invasion. But even if it isn't (and I think it isn't), the US military is clearly not a defensive force. The goal and focus of the modern US armed forces is force projection, not defense. In fact, the primary US military doctrine for decades has been that the US military should be capable of conducting two full-scale foreign wars simultaneously.
So while it's probably true that without any US federal armed forces the US might be or have been at risk of invasion, it's clearly not true that the current US military is actually necessary to prevent invasion. Something much smaller would also do that job.
Of course, you can argue that America actually wants to be able to project its military power around the globe. There are, in fact, lots of good arguments for that. Many -- even outside of the US -- argue that US military power has been a tremendously beneficial stabilizing force in the world that contributed to our current unprecedented global peace and prosperity. But that's not the argument you made.
Very few people are shelling out $1000 straight up for the phone.
True, but I don't think that's the core reason people are willing to pay so much.
I think the core reason is that what people are willing to pay is driven by the value they perceive, and that in turn is closely related to how much they use a thing, and what for. To an increasing percentage of the population, their phone is their sole computing device, and society is increasingly organized around connectivity and computation. To put it another way, look at what people use their phones for, and how many times per day they use them.
I'm something of a luddite (as are many slashdotters, I think), in that I prefer to do most of my online interaction on a physical keyboard, either my laptop or my big, multi-screen desktop with its funky ergonomic keyboard. But most people don't. So nearly all of their non-local (and sometimes local) interpersonal communications for work and play, news, entertainment, banking, information retrieval, etc., etc., etc,. is done on that one device. When you spend so much time using one object, it makes sense to spend whatever you can afford to get the best one you can.
I used to sit on $40 office chairs in my home office. Then one day I thought about the sheer quantity of time I spend with my butt planted in that chair and realized that I would get more value out of money spent on a better chair than many other things I could spend my money on. So I "blew" $600 on an Aeron-style (not actually Herman Miller, but similar, and with a high build quality) ergonomic chair and it has been money very well spent because it eliminated a lot of minor annoyances. Little stuff, like how the mesh seat and back allows airflow so I don't get sweaty, and how it has enough flexibility of positioning that I can always get comfortable. I not only don't regret the choice, when this one wears out (which it shows no sign of doing), $600 will be my price floor for a replacement and I'll be looking for what is available at higher price points.
I get my phones for free so I don't really have to make this decision. But if I did, I suspect I'd have no trouble dropping $1K on a phone that I replace every other year. I'm sure I use it 100 times per day, 365 days per year. A tenth of a penny per use? Makes sense to me.
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This assumes (and I don't know) that fast charge can be done with a gradient of speeds, rather than all-or-nothing, which might be the case as it uses special cords and jacks with dedicated additional power wires.
It can and is done with a gradient of speeds, without "special cords or jacks with dedicated additional power wires".
The USB power delivery spec allows device and charger (or device and device... you can charge one device from another) to negotiate both voltage and amperage within a fairly broad range, up to as high as 20V @ 5A for 100W. For the higher power delivery rates you do need all three of source, cable and sink to be capable of whatever it is that you're trying to do, so in that sense I suppose you need "special cords or jacks", but they're not actually special, just conformant to the newer specification. You'll notice that many USB-C cables are somewhat thicker than older USB cables, this is so they can handle the higher amperages.
Within the range of what is supported by source, cable and sink, there's also room for dynamic adjustment. This is mostly done by the sink, device being charged. The phone must take responsibility for protecting the battery, slowing the charge rate if the battery is getting hot, or for any other reason that the battery or device might be damaged by continuing to charge quickly.
Hey, how about they just make them LABEL these new and exciting foods for being gene-edited, and let the consumer decide?
Okay, but make sure also to label all of the foods that were bred with the use of mutagenic chemicals and radiation, which is a more random and dangerous process than carefully-targeted editing.
Of course, this would require labeling nearly everything in the grocery store. Including nearly everything that is labeled "organic, non-GMO".
I've not see a lot of other high visibility channels on either side of the spectrum that were as bad if not worse than AJ get booted.
You apparently have no examples of high visibility channels that are as bad as AJ and didn't get booted. This does not surprise me.
I use my shoes more than either my phone or desktop. But I don't spend $1000 on my shoes either.
You spend more time with your shoes on your feet, but very little actively interacting with them. Unless you don't know how to tie shoelaces very well, I guess.
I won't even buy a desktop computer for $1000.
That makes sense. Most people use their phone a lot more than they use a desktop.
Any system that allows you to check if you voted correctly allows a third party to coerce you into proving how you voted.
Not necessarily. End to end verifiability is possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is very, very difficult to have both.
But possible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I've not see a lot of other high visibility channels on either side of the spectrum that were as bad if not worse than AJ get booted.
Got any examples?
Let's not forget that only 13% of cardiologist are female. This may have a dramatic influence on the statistics.
This is about ER docs. You won't often find a cardiologist working in the ER. Almost never.
...somnambulant train station
Having an extensive vocabulary: Impressive.
Having a shitty vocabulary and trying too hard to compensate: Priceless!
I thought it was a great word choice, nice poetic imagery. Obviously the train station doesn't sleepwalk (just as a "sleepy" station doesn't drowse), but the word evokes an image of someone going through the motions while not actually awake/alert. Plus the word has a nice rhythm and sound to it. I liked it.
I live in farm country and often discuss these issues with farmers, many of whom have graduate degrees in agriculture. I'm far from uneducated on the topic.
Pollinating insects are an issue for some crops, but not for the ones that provide the bulk of our food. Corn, wheat, rye, barley, oats and soybeans are all wind-pollinated. Alfalfa (the major non-corn feed for cattle) requires insect pollination, but a specific variety of bee developed for the purpose, the alfalfa leafcutter bee, is used. The bees are raised and managed by humans. Some fruits require pollination, but many are self-pollinating or wind-pollinated. There is also research going into mechanical pollinating solutions as a hedge against the loss of bees (which are at risk, but not by warming).
Destruction of the microbes would be problematic, but rising temperatures aren't going to affect microorganisms much. At worst we may need to do soil transplantation, or even breeding and seeding of microbiomes.
We're really not that dependent.
You're trying to claim that it takes more manpower to protect the country than it does to project power around the world? Really?
in addition to underestimating the propensity for a domestic defense force to be opportunistically used against the populace.
Why would a smaller defense force be easier to turn against the populace than the larger and more powerful force that we have?
I don't think you've thought this stuff through.
We definitely have the ability to live on a planet that's 5C hotter. But it will require global dislocations of nearly all of the population which will disrupt commerce, disrupt agriculture and cause famines, provoke wars... it will be hellish
Just because we CAN doesn't mean that we WILL.
Meh. This is true regardless of this particular issue.
Who knows if that decimated ecosystem will be able to support a top predator like homo sapiens?
We don't really depend on the ecosystem that much. I like nature and would hate to see much of it destroyed, but we don't really depend on it any more.
Is money the only thing that you consider?
I didn't say anything about money. I said "our economy", meaning the goods and services produced, moved and consumed. If you like eating, staying warm (or cool, depending), and being able to buy things you need or want, you depend on motorized transport.
It was never a political argument, it was a reference to the book "Animal Farm".
I didn't catch the allusion and just took the words literally -- "from a political perspective".
So that will get you to all of 12% of Android phones. https://developer.android.com/... You need to go back to 3 year old OS to capture 2/3rds of the potential market, 4 years to capture 4/5th of the potential market. What a mess.
The problem can't be fixed retroactively. It required a deep refactoring of the lower layers of the system and imposition of compliance testing at those layers. There is no way to get OEMs to go do all of that work for old devices. But if it works well, then 3-4 years from now, when the old Android upgrade process (which is largely driven by device obsolescence) would have led to the S release being only on a tiny number of devices, it will be on approximately 2/3 of them. A couple of years after that and we should (hopefully) be to where new releases go to almost the entire user base.
We also need to spend trillions of dollars and euros to improve living conditions in high birthrate countries so high birthrate countries can have even more children.
Increasing standard of living and reducing childhood mortality reduces birthrates, it doesn't increase them. If you want to reduce birthrates in high-birthrate countries, spending billions to improve their living conditions is exactly the right thing to do.
Yeah thats kind of what frusturates me about the "Its been super hot before and things lived!" talking point. Sure it has, but unless your a serious misanthrope that doesn't want people to exist, it really does well to remember that life also exists around sulphur plumes at the bottom of the ocean, but not people! Hell, theres a good chance we could bio-engineer primitive life that'd cope on venus, maybe even mop up some of the atmosphere a bit so in a few thousand years we could live there. But for the time being, bad for humans.
I don't think there's any evidence that humans couldn't survive on a planet that's 5C hotter. We're good at surviving in an extremely wide variety of conditions, because technology allows us to modify our local environment. In fact, technology is the only thing that allows us to live anywhere on Earth. And there's no need to catastrophize about human extinction, because the realistic effects are bad enough. Seas 10-60 meters higher means that at least 2/3 of the population will have to be relocated. Weather patterns are going to change dramatically, making agriculture very difficult until things stabilize, and likely requiring us to redesign our houses and buildings.
Think about the pure economic cost of rebuilding all of our housing, warehouses, factories, etc., in different places and with different technologies to adapt to the changed environment. This will absorb a large part of our global productivity for generations, likely all but halting progress on solving any other problems.
And while extinction isn't likely, megadeaths (maybe gigadeaths) from war and famine are all but guaranteed. There's a good argument that ISIS was a direct result of famine in Syria, dislocating large rural populations and leading to millions of angry young men with no prospects. And the cause of the famine? Global warming likely played a role -- but even if it didn't, the coming warming is going to create lots and lots of that sort of thing.
We definitely have the ability to live on a planet that's 5C hotter. But it will require global dislocations of nearly all of the population which will disrupt commerce, disrupt agriculture and cause famines, provoke wars... it will be hellish. And don't fool yourself that the hell will be concentrated overseas. The wealthy, industrialized world will be hit just as hard. We have more resources, but we also have fragile and complex supply networks.
You need to read the rest of my post.
The USB-C standard is anything but standard with a mixed bag of features and compatibility from device to device.
Bah.
That article talks about the ways in which USB-C is insufficiently standardized and what is says is technically correct, but irrelevant in practice for phone charging and connectivity. All of the problems are around super-high data rates and using USB-C for display. Charging works great. There were some problems early on with non-compliant cables, but those have largely been flushed out (note that both of your links about this problem are from 2015 -- there's a reason you didn't find recent ones), and these days as far as I can tell every USB-C device, cable and charger can be mixed and matched without trouble. Also, data rates aren't a problem unless you need 5 or 10 Gbps; not all devices and cables can manage those rates, but if USB2 rates are good enough, you can just not care.
For phone charging, USB-C is the solution, and it works very well. Apple and Samsung should suck it up and get on board.
A $1000 phone that you replace in 2 years is costing you $42/mo.
Or $0.001 per use. You seem to have missed my core point, which is that how much you use something also factors in. Monthly cost is far from the whole story.
Of course, if you can't afford $500 per year for a phone (less resale value), then you can't afford it. But for something you use as extensively and intimately as a smartphone it's easy to justify spending as much as you can afford. I know lots of people who make far less than $100K per year and feel the money they spend on high end phones is well worth it. And I'm not going tell them they're wrong about the value of their own money.
The summary says:
... but there's reason to think that should be significantly less true than with previous releases. Android Oreo included Project Treble, which defined a hard boundary between the system and device-specific components that didn't previously exist. This only applied to new devices launched with Oreo, but on those ones it should be possible for device makers to simply drop a Pie system image on them and expect it to work. This should make O -> P upgrades smoother and faster than any previous pair of releases.
Of course, the devil is in the details. There is a tremendous amount variety in the Android world, and OEMs have traditionally had almost unlimited ability to modify the system as long as the app-level APIs continued to function correctly (as validated by the Compliance Test Suite). So Treble represents a sea change and there will undoubtedly be lessons to be learned and problems to fix. Also, OEMs who like to customize the system heavily will want to port all of their customizations to Pie, and that will take time, in proportion to the amount of customization they do. Devices that ship stock Android, or close to it, however, should be easy to upgrade.
Should. Over the next few months we'll start to find out how successful Treble was in achieving its goals, and how much more work remains to be done. The relatively large number of devices that ran the preview releases is a very positive sign, but time will tell.
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.
How would walking turn you to poverty?
Motorized vehicles are essential to our economy. There's no way to conduct the large-scale trade that underpins our wealth without using them. And there's absolutely no way to do it with purely human power (no four-legs -- domesticated beasts of burden dramatically increased human productivity).
I choose to not use the car, I have a healthier lifestyle as a result. Please explain.
Now you've changed your argument from one about politics to one of personal health. Getting exercise is clearly good for you, sure. This can be done by walking or in any of many other ways, many of which are more time-efficient. I prefer rowing and cycling, myself, especially rowing because it's a whole-body activity.
if we didn't have the US military we would certainly have another country's military.
I don't think this is as true as you think it is. Consider the apocryphal quote attributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto: "You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass." While it's unlikely that Yamamoto ever said it, it was also very true in the middle of the 20th century (modulo the hyperbole, obviously). The notion that a heavily-armed populace was the best deterrent to invasion was the Founders' primary strategy for national defense.
It's debatable whether a purely volunteer militia-based defense (plus a navy) would be sufficient to prevent invasion. But even if it isn't (and I think it isn't), the US military is clearly not a defensive force. The goal and focus of the modern US armed forces is force projection, not defense. In fact, the primary US military doctrine for decades has been that the US military should be capable of conducting two full-scale foreign wars simultaneously.
So while it's probably true that without any US federal armed forces the US might be or have been at risk of invasion, it's clearly not true that the current US military is actually necessary to prevent invasion. Something much smaller would also do that job.
Of course, you can argue that America actually wants to be able to project its military power around the globe. There are, in fact, lots of good arguments for that. Many -- even outside of the US -- argue that US military power has been a tremendously beneficial stabilizing force in the world that contributed to our current unprecedented global peace and prosperity. But that's not the argument you made.
Very few people are shelling out $1000 straight up for the phone.
True, but I don't think that's the core reason people are willing to pay so much.
I think the core reason is that what people are willing to pay is driven by the value they perceive, and that in turn is closely related to how much they use a thing, and what for. To an increasing percentage of the population, their phone is their sole computing device, and society is increasingly organized around connectivity and computation. To put it another way, look at what people use their phones for, and how many times per day they use them.
I'm something of a luddite (as are many slashdotters, I think), in that I prefer to do most of my online interaction on a physical keyboard, either my laptop or my big, multi-screen desktop with its funky ergonomic keyboard. But most people don't. So nearly all of their non-local (and sometimes local) interpersonal communications for work and play, news, entertainment, banking, information retrieval, etc., etc., etc,. is done on that one device. When you spend so much time using one object, it makes sense to spend whatever you can afford to get the best one you can.
I used to sit on $40 office chairs in my home office. Then one day I thought about the sheer quantity of time I spend with my butt planted in that chair and realized that I would get more value out of money spent on a better chair than many other things I could spend my money on. So I "blew" $600 on an Aeron-style (not actually Herman Miller, but similar, and with a high build quality) ergonomic chair and it has been money very well spent because it eliminated a lot of minor annoyances. Little stuff, like how the mesh seat and back allows airflow so I don't get sweaty, and how it has enough flexibility of positioning that I can always get comfortable. I not only don't regret the choice, when this one wears out (which it shows no sign of doing), $600 will be my price floor for a replacement and I'll be looking for what is available at higher price points.
I get my phones for free so I don't really have to make this decision. But if I did, I suspect I'd have no trouble dropping $1K on a phone that I replace every other year. I'm sure I use it 100 times per day, 365 days per year. A tenth of a penny per use? Makes sense to me.
From a political perspective, yes, 4 legs good, 2 legs better!
Not unless your political perspective is that we should turn the clock back two centuries and all live in what would now be considered abject poverty.