For context, I saw these these two stories practically one after the other in my RSS reader.

From Futurism:

Scientists Design Huge Spacecraft That Could Carry 2,400 Colonists to Alpha Centauri

Futurism devotes a lot of space to chronicling the failures of tech fads and the shittiness of tech bros, but once in a while it’ll surface a cool science or engineering story like this one. If a team were to follow up on that concept and overcome the problems of fusion power generation, shipbuilding-scale construction in orbit, and an AI that could actually be trusted to manage a colony ship, those innovations would be a huge payoff, even before a hypothetical space colony was founded.

But that would take effort, and our captains of industry would rather innovate new ways to make a quick, dirty buck. Which brings us to the other story, from The Verge:

Even the lowly canister vacuum now wants access to your Wi-Fi network

It’s a short and not particularly hard-hitting story about the Miele Guard L1 Electro, a $1,499 vacuum cleaner (!??) with an LCD touchscreen status display (shrug). And it’s supposed to connect to your smartphone (for all the times you need to read the vacuum cleaner’s status messages when the vacuum isn’t within easy reach, I guess) via a wifi connection and an app, which will advertise replacement bags and filters at you.

The failure points are numerous. Will the vacuum prompt you to replace the bag more often than needed, so you spend even more money? Will the bags be pricey? (Signs point to yes.) And as a few Verge commenters pointed out, how usable will this thing be in a few years, when Miele’s servers get turned off?

…none of which will matter to anyone gullible enough to buy one of these in the first place, because the sunk cost fallacy is a potent force, and spending enough money to buy a separate, ordinarily priced vacuum for each room and hallway in your home would be one hell of a sunk cost.

And that’s why I could probably find a new “overpriced and shitty appliance” story weekly, if I wanted to depress myself even more than my regular news diet already does, and why I’m unlikely to see something like the Chrysalis ship in my lifetime.