Consumer electronics advisors are in full force this time of year offering up wisdom on how and what to buy this holiday season.  Usually these bits of wisdom involve specific models or technologies to avoid or what’s hot to buy.  Advice will always teach.  One can learn even from bad advice, you just have to be wary of the lesson you’re taking away.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.  -Tao Te Ching

Consumer advice that can be quantified by models or specific technologies is not the eternal advice.  Knowing your place on the consumer technology curve of product planned obsolescence and sticking with that place is the eternal way.  Now your task becomes learning the difference between what technologies are bleeding edge and which are last years.  Stick with your area and do not be tempted to deviate from it by slick marketing or even the threat of future obsolescence.

Someone who writes tech advice columns like this one at PC Magazine might have an easy time advising against CRT technology this holiday season for their own purposes.  It’s true there are newer, smaller, lighter and more efficient means of producing images in your living room.  But advice articles like this assume newer, smaller, more efficient (and more expensive) are the reader’s goal.  If you step outside the mindset of a tech professional like Lance Ulanoff one may see a variety of reasons for buying a CRT based (even a non-HD) TV this Christmas.

Do not be ashamed of the CRT because it is old.  A well used CRT TV is a hundred times more valuable than a Plasma panel that languishes in a household with no appreciation for fine films.

In his column Mr. Ulanoff advises us against gadgets using the 802.11b wireless networking standard because the standard is being replaced by the much faster 802.11g. 

I would counter that the existence of 802.11g simply makes 802.11b accessible to a population that heretofore knows not the hands-free caress of wireless.  Those who choose to save money by riding the back edge of the consumer technology curve will appreciate newer technology for the affordability they create in existing technologies that now need to be cleared off store shelves.

Tangible assets make a thing desirable.  But like an empty cup, it is what is not there that gives a thing its value.  Seek that empty cup, my friend.