Do it do it do it do it do it dooo eeeeeeeet! 
That is kind of the defense of other luxury goods, like yacht builders in the US. And historically the āserviceā industry (which once meant actual house servants and butlers rather than fast-food workers) ā that these things provided good stable employment besides helping the rich show off. But wouldnāt it be better if these people were employed making something useful? Especially given that we are beginning to realize we have finite resources on Earth that probably shouldnāt be squandered.
G-Shock canāt be beat, but these mechanical devices are incredible. I just look and imagine the genesis of design over hundreds of years, the brilliance and logic cast in there.
When all is said and done, when my kids are taken care of and I have no reason not to have a cool widget like this, Iād love one. Whatevs - gives some people a job building them!
But how do you define āusefulā? Iāve spent most of my career making microchips and the equipment that makes microchips. You could say this is a useless waste of energy and manpower since all it does is allow those (comparatively) rich people in the developed world to have fancy toys to do stuff like debate online what constitutes a useful use of resources. Or, you could say itās an important industry that provides a valuable product that changes the way we do everything. Is medicine useful? All it does is prolong the lives of massively resource intensive humans rather than letting them die quickly as nature intended. And so on.
So what is āusefulā? If you strip everything thing down to just what is useful by the strictest of definitions, weād all be subsistence farmers, or maybe even just hunter gatherers. Humans can live like that just fine. We did it for a very long time, and in some places we still do. The fact is that one of the problems the developed world faces is too many people with too many productivity enhancing manufacturing techniques, and therefore not enough things to do with their time. Socialism, at least some measure of it, is an answer, and I think one that we need more of, but building of high value products is a good answer, too. I think itās definitely more viable than a service economy, since at least it creates material wealth which persists.
In any case, though, I donāt want to live in a world where the only things humans do are ones deemed āusefulā by some relatively arbitrary standard. I want to live in a world where we do crazy, wonderful, wasteful things, like send people to the moon, send robots to Mars, put a trailer park in orbit and call it the āinternational space stationā, build shiny baubles and clever widgets, make art, write books, and trade strange things with each other to create this weird consensual fiction we call an economy.
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I get the $10,000 dollar part of the post, but the watch movement shown is basically similar to all watches, only a very expensive version. I know watchesāused to be a watch parts counterman, and I know baroqueāthe watch has no intricate detail, only useful components, and I canāt see the connections between the two.
By the way, itās a pretty accurate demonstration of dismantling and reassembly of a watch for thorough cleaning. The guyās got all the correct motions down, which makes it so relatively easy. He is probably at the same time analyzing the running of the movement to see whether it may need adjustment or repair.
The point that a $100 quartz watch has greater accuracy and just as much durability is key here.
In this era, a Rolex is more than ever a sign that youāve got money to burn.
Still, the video makes good mechani-porn.
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