$2,000 Robot Dog Sent To "The Farm"

---by Micheal

Sony just announced that they will stop production of their $2,000 robot dog, "Aibo." You may recall that back before Christmas I was railing about our culture's apparent excess disposable income with Sony's Aibo as the posterchild for pointless expensive consumer goods.

Sony sold over 150,000 of the yappy-dog sized little robots. At $2,000 a pop, that's over $300,000,000. Three hundred million dollars spent by consumers on a product which no one needs, and which does very little beyond making your friends say, "Gawww-leee". You could wad up and swallow a hundred dollar bill in front of them and get pretty much the same wide-eyed reaction. BUT, you'd have $1,900 left with which to do something practical.

So, was Sony's decision to send Aibo to "the farm," a resurgence of common sense? Sadly, no. New management decided to cancel some of its product lines in order to concentrate on their core business. They want to concentrate on different expensive consumer products.

And, as if to prove that common sense is still locked in the basement, Aibo fan clubs (there really are such things) are up in arms that Sony dared cancel their product. How dare Sony take away their outlet for absurd extravagant spending! Now where are these thousands of people (with waaay too much money) going to squander all that extra cash? Will they get a real dog?

Of course, two thousand dollars would buy a very nice computer for a local public library. Two grand would buy a ton of groceries for a local food pantry our soup kitchen. That much money would buy some financially-struggling college kids a lot of books.

Why is it, that when we have excess disposable income, our first impulse is to waste it on self-indulgent foolishness? If not Aibo, we'll just find something else. Maybe microchipped climate-controlled butter dishes.

Someone needs to let common sense out of basement. There's waaay too much stupid going on up here.