This has influenced my entire idea of spending money:

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

Net is £2 a month for 6gb data and unlimited calls and texts from O2, although I never use those really. It should be £6 a month, but I get £4 discounted as two streaming services I would buy anyway I buy via them so I get a discount for each.

Most places I use my phone I have WiFi, data is only really used for background services and maps otherwise. You can purchase data add ons from them for reasonable fees for a month if I ever did need it for travel. Although I am more likely to get a local sim as it’s far far cheaper than roaming outside the EU normally.

The main reason I use O2 is that it also doubles my home broadband speed for free to 1gb up and down. That means having their phone line actually costs me -£6 a month.

I am looking to move my partners phone over later this year to O2 and thst should double the speed to 2gb up and down for the same price.

There is a darker secondary element to that time period, freedom of choice for women. 70 years ago if a young woman wanted to leave home and setup on her own she really needed the financial support of a husband or other male relative, even if to just cosign agreements. You were properly tied to having a husband, expected to as well. The pressure from all angles to marry meant women would settle for some pretty shitty men in much larger numbers, and for longer as it was much harder to divorce.

As time has gradually removed this pressure, women no longer need to marry to get independence in the same numbers, so shitty men no longer luck into marriage. The rise of no fault divorce as a valid choice, and even not having to be married to have kids or live together as a socially acceptable choice further squeezes them out.

The whole trad wives movement is founded on restoring the power back to men in relationships.

Lost went on far too long and they backed themselves into a corner by saying that the big secret was what nobody had guessed, but this was right around the Internet getting popular to talk about tv shows, so everything good had already been suggested. If it had been me, I would have just picked the best one and gone with that…