> But what if someone steals your Amazon package off your front steps? Well, what if they do? I guess you would have to get a refund. I guess you might suffer an extremely minor inconvenience. I guess it could be an opportunity to reflect on the painful predations of poverty under capitalism, which creates economic desires, renders people unable to satisfy them, and then taunts them with constant visions of abundance in which they cannot share. True, it is a tragedy of unimaginably small proportions that someone has stolen your box of paper towels. Would you let them steal your optimism, as well?

One of the things I do actually like is not being constantly stolen from. It's a pretty nice improvement to my life to see that something has been delivered and know that it will be there when I'm home. I don't have a Ring camera or anything, but I can see why people would rather have the Christmas gifts they send each other (even if small in monetary value) than some insight about the "painful predations of poverty under capitalism". The latter might actually not be as valuable to others as it is to the author.

When I lived in India many decades ago, it was quite routine to have anything not latched down taken from you. We'd lock our bags to our train seats and so on, and if you had an expensive thing delivered you'd have to make sure you were home or you'd have to go acquire the thing and escort it home yourself, and you wouldn't do that with an expensive item at a time when people weren't around. If I'm being honest, I think I would much rather have my present life where I am confronted with such "tragedies of unimaginably small proportions" rarely at the cost of the "opportunities to reflect on the painful predations of capitalism". I actually really like not being stolen from. Here, in my wife's Taiwan, I can even forget my phone on a table and it's probably still going to be there. That's somehow even nicer, though I do admittedly reflect less often on "the painful predations of capitalism" because of it.

I don't specifically know for a fact that a Ring camera would help me achieve this goal of mine to be not stolen from at the cost of reflecting on capitalism, but it is presented in the article as if it would and that giving up reflections on capitalism for safety from theft is not useful. Given that I have found such a trade useful, I think this speaks more as an advertisement for Ring than anything else.