Re: [Pan-users] Re: Advice on other lists

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:18:53 pm Ron Johnson wrote:

> > All of this is about convenience.  I have over 4,000 CDs.  A
> > high-storage player matters a lot to me, too, for the reason above:
> > the higher the capacity, the more likely I am to have with me what
> > I want when I want it.  Of *course* that's simply convenience, and
> > of course I could get by without it.  But if I don't have to forego
> > that convenience, why in the world should I want to?
>
> Doing without exactly what you want, exactly when you want it, is
> *not* the end of the world...
>
> http://www.ted.com/talks/joachim_de_posada_says_don_t_eat_the_marshma
>llow_yet.html

Delayed gratification is irrelevant to the issue being discussed. Nobody 
is suggesting that Chris would have better CDs and more of them if he 
waits to get home and listen to music. Sometimes the reward is the 
ability to eat the marshmallow *now* -- delaying gratification is 
meaningless, irrelevant or even harmful (consider a book called "Don't 
have that life-saving operation yet"). Or think of Cat Steven's "Cats 
In The Cradle" -- sometimes you can delay gratification so long that 
you miss out. While de Posada is saying "Don't eat the marshmallow 
yet", and telling us to work for the future, others remind us of the 
importance of living in the now: eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow 
we die, and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers.

I'm not being critical of de Posada's talk or his general idea, but I am 
questioning that it's the slightest relevant to the question of iPods 
with a million CD's worth of songs on them.


-- 
Steven D'Aprano