Swiss watch industry survival via quartz and luxury bifurcation

Used as Tom's framing case for "what makes something expensive" — at the low end, Swatches sold as fashion; at the high end, titanium-cased, ceramic-bezeled fifty-thousand-dollar luxury watches. The titanium watch becomes the segue to the broader discussion of why titanium is even available as a metal.

So in the continuing series of what I've been reading in the newspaper — last night I was reading The Economist, I flip through it on the weekend if I get it on Saturday. They had an ad in there for this watch, and I guess it was telling me LeBron James has a watch like this, or by the same people. It's a fifty-thousand-dollar watch or whatever.