This passage from J.D.'s post on Get Rich Slowly today struck me:

Last fall I was talking to a friend who worked at the corporate offices of The Sharper Image. He told me that the company's stock price had fallen, but management was certain they could turn things around. It was just a passing remark in a much larger conversation, but it made me think.

The next day, I bought $3,500 worth of Sharper Image stock at $3.14 per share. This was a bulk of my Roth IRA money for 2007.

This was dumb. (And it was a repeat of a similar stupid move I had made - but survived - earlier in the year with Countrywide.) I didn't research the stock. I was gambling, plain and simple. And I lost. The Sharper Image declared bankruptcy recently, cutting the value of my investment from $3,500 to around $200. There's a chance it will drop to zero.

J.D. never says so, but I'm guessing he dropped that $3500 on Shaper Image via an online discount broker.

Nothing wrong with that, except it made me think that for all the wonderful things the Internet has brought to us, one of its downsides is the ability for immediate gratification, i.e., spending money any old time we feel like it. It used to be if you wanted to drop $3500 on a stock whim, you had to work a little harder to do so. Which often gave you the time to come to your senses: "What the heck am I doing?"

There's a certain someone in our household who has fallen in love with a certain online retailer that offers good discounts on a range of casual/outdoorsy clothing. I'm all for 50% off, except when you're getting 50% off of 10 things you would never buy otherwise. But it's all sitting there on the screen, just waiting for us to indulge! "I can't pass up those shoes at $37.50! They're normally $120!"

And the online retailers are getting better and better at the photography they use to show their products, with multiple angles and the ability to click different colors to see how each looks on the model. It used to be you got photographs that looked like those poorly-lit sandwich photos outside of cheap tourist trap restaurants. Not anymore.

I love the Internet. It has done much to improve the quality of my life, both in my work profitability and time convenience. But, like anything else, it has its potential downsides, and the ability to throw away your money quickly is one of them. (Webkinz is another one, but that's a different post.)