We allegedly live in an age of plenty. Is that limited edition toy sold out? The manufacturer will make more. Grocery store out of your favorite brand of yogurt? Wait a day, or if you are impatient, go to another store. True, the air is getting dirtier, our oceans are full of garbage, and much of the country is in a drought, or suffering from long-term effects of polluted surface water and underground water. But aside from shortages of air and water, limits are things that humans overcome; we’re quite good at it, when we devote the effort.
Some limits, however, are ill-timed. When you are on a trip, taking photos of dragons and samurai and alien spacecraft (honest), you do not want to run into limits:
There I was, thousands of miles from home, with the air full of smoke, surrounded by very polite people (not really; at the time, I was a couple of hundred miles from the nearest city, in a very empty part of the world). And, if I’m reading the language correctly, I had managed, on my own, to completely fill Apple’s iCloud storage service with my photos, videos, and whatever else I was putting in iCloud Drive (cumulus? cirriform? cirrus? cirrocumulus? cirrostratus?).
Fortunately, I could apparently solve Apple’s iCloud crowding by simply pushing the link at the bottom. I could upgrade storage, eliminating Apple’s congestion. Exactly why I would want to move Apple’s storage uphill was not immediately clear; weren’t clouds pretty much uphill already? Or possibly this was an indirect reference to Sisyphus, forever pushing a stone up a grade.
Then I thought: an upgrade traditionally means more work. When your car encounters an upgrade, the engine must work harder, and you burn more gasoline. If you are walking or biking up an upgrade, you tire more quickly, and may give thought to turning around and finding a nice chair to sit on. Why would I want to make storage more difficult?
Ultimately, I did not press the link. To be honest, with all the forest fires in the area, the sky was saturated with smoke. It is entirely possible the clouds were not full, but simply blocked from my view. I will think about this; I’m not a meteorologist.
