This is why when I got my first motorcycle my buddy told me "lets find a beater on craigslist thats been in a crash". I paid about $2k for it, and that yamaha

This is why when I got my first motorcycle my buddy told me "lets find a beater on craigslist thats been in a crash". I paid about $2k for it, and that yamaha had seen a hell of a dump at 50mph and had scratches that looked like a banshee had its way with the left side because it insulted her mothers size or whatever. But damn if he wasn't right that when I inevitably had it fall over whle practicing in the parking lot that I didn't care much. Plus after riding that (not quite a) beater I was much better prepared for stuff with more zoom to it. I think buying cheap/refurb/broken and learning from that is definitely the way to go when starting/learning. You learn how to appreciate the good stuff later on. Just like how now I can pretty much use unix to a large degree after using them for ~20ish years, I tend to stick to osx+nix to get me up to speed. I keep my configurations portable to open/freebsd and linux as well on the off chance I need to move around, but other than that I tend to not be too committed to what I'm running.