"For a 50-inch TV set," Mr. Wilner said, "you could spend $85,000 for a period frame and $30,000 for a replica".
Officials and experts estimated that a 20-story co-op could spend $16,000 for faucets in a laundry room, and more than $100,000 for backup lighting that could last many days.
The F-35 is a radar-evading fighter, and the Pentagon could spend $380 billion for 2,400 planes over 25 years.
You could spend $250 million for the Devils, and the truth is, there will never be a mass appeal for that sport.
"There's no way a Deutsche Telekom or a Verizon could spend $1.5 billion for half of a small game company in Finland," said Serkan Toto, an independent technology analyst in Tokyo.
His wife, Kym, 38, a travel agent, said she would find it difficult to explain to her clients that they could spend money for a flight and hotel room, but not have a glass of wine with dinner.
You could spend miles for magazine subscriptions, donate them to charity or, in a few cases, purchase merchandise in an exchange that often doesn't quite add up (17,000 miles for a coffee maker?).
"I could spend $50 for a three-hour experience in a movie theater, or I could spend $2 to enter a Proveit Movies tournament that gives me the opportunity to compete for several thousand dollars in prize money," says co-founder Nathan Lehoux.
In other words, we could spend billions for a showy short-term Apollo-style touchdown, or we could invest billions in long-term infrastructure that could lead to meaningful dominance in a number of fields.
In contrast, an iPhone owner on AT&T could spend twice that for Unlimited Text/Data, with all of 400 minutes packed in.
