• Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 months ago

    USBs nowadays are a dime a dozen basically for 16GB sticks

    They can literally be bought in 10 packs for less than $30.

    If they don’t give one back nowadays so be it.

    Back in the day it was a terrible loss though

    • key@lemmy.keychat.org
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      5 months ago

      I wonder if you applied inflation from the time that idiom was first popularized what the modern price would be.

      • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        5 months ago

        I had to look into it because once you mentioned that I was curious.

        So the saying originated sometime before 1930 when it first appeared in print and likely in the 1800s. (Source)

        And when I went to an inflation calculator the earliest date I could select was January of 1913. Which I couldn’t help but share the results of.

        About $3.20.

        Source

        So yeah, about a dime a dozen… 111 years ago lol.

        • Vespair@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Which is interesting, because the point of the phrase is to imply something is so commonplace that it practically has no value. It’s so commonplace you can get a dozen of them for a dime!

          So technically while the relative value of the dime in this phrase decreases, the relative value of the phrase itself increases as the dime’s value ever further approaches negligible, ever better emphasizing the point!

          Words are fun.

    • viking@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      I stopped bothering with sticks the moment you could get 1TB SSDs for less than 100 bucks. They are hardly larger than a stick at this point, and with USB-C 3.2 also pretty damn fast.