We were talking about this just yesterday, in relation to car crime. There's very little that's left in a car that's worth stealing these days: everyone already has a radio, CDs are worthless, phones are turning into the, "Get an upgrade before I mug you next time, kid" joke.

So crime turns from theft to fraud. Identity theft & impersonation, eBay fraud, duck housing. None of these are about theft of physical goods any more - even if handbags are stolen, it's as likely for their information content as the physical goods.

Incidentally I heard just recently that there is a national helpline for identity theft which will help combat the problem that many police forces don't see it as a priority crime for them.

Yes, this is fairly accurate.

A case in point is the decorating stuff I got from my Dad. It was saved because originally it was expensive but nowadays I could buy whatever I want and throw it away without even bothering to clean it. (At least I could).

There is an interesting technological parallel. Relatively speaking disk space was cheap and getting stuff from a network was hard and "expensive". So we stored lots and downloaded rarely. Nowadays it is the other way round. Yes disks are still cheap but the network is cheaper still. Why bothering storing stuff when we can just download it again? It is very hard to give up the electronic hoarding just as much as the real life habit.

My parents drilled into me the value of stuff as we didn't have much when I was a kid. And now I have loads of books, CDs, comics and other things. And it feels *good*. Like fat Elvis when he found he could afford all the burgers he never had as a poor kid :-)