You should be very reluctant to get into anything without an exit strategy, you could get trapped. I’ve talked about optionality before as something to prioritize highly. From what I’ve seen, people automatically think about optionality and value it highly if they keep optionality for the short term. They don’t seem to value it very much if the costs rack up and the optionality slowly disappears over years.
Pets
“Free Puppy” is an oxymoron; any adult would see that. Pets are very expensive, not just financially. At first, it’s just food, housing, and vaccinations. What about the enormous time spent caring for the pet? And what about taking a vacation. Who will care for the pet then? Big expenses tend to be backloaded towards the end of their lives when medical needs increase. When you obtain the pet, you need to count, not just the initial costs, but a lifetime of time, food, medical attention, and the enormous grief you’ll feel when the pet dies.
Reference: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/children-who-have-second-adoptions/575902/
Software
Oracle is a paragon of benefiting from switching costs as a factor forcing organizations to pay enormous, on-going licensing fees. They make a great product, but they don’t just charge a bundle to buy it, they keep charging higher and higher prices to let you keep it. If software is written to depend on Oracle, you are really and truly stuck with Oracle. Every day you get more dependent, and the cost of leaving is enormous. (I wish my employer had chosen PostgreSQL years ago)
Reference: http://news.morningstar.com/classroom2/course.asp?docId=144752&page=4
Nuclear Power
A nuclear power plant is enormously expensive to build, but once they are built, they provide low-cost, carbon-free electricity for decades. (Better than that, their electricity isn’t intermittent and doesn’t depend on weather.) But is that the true cost? Absolutely not. Older plants come with very small, on-going potential for enormous catastrophe, think Fukushima and Chernobyl. Given the long lives of the plants, that risk is very significant. Newer plants can reduce that risk, but tail-risks like this are very important.
Another big (bigger?) problem with them is that they produce radioactive waste that remains dangerous for millennia! Building a nuclear power plant is asking hundreds of generations who will not benefit from it to pay a share of the price. Can you imagine if the Pharaohs of Egypt had produced problems that people of today had no choice but to deal with? How grotesquely immoral to do that! Reference: Nuclear reprocessing – Wikipedia
802701 A.D. 