RE: Castles in the Air — When All Falls Down
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I came for the castles in the air. I enjoy watching them fall in slow motion. Well, it is slow motion to me. To others it is calamitous and sudden. I am definitely one of those realist / pragmatic types, that approaches a great deal (Well, almost everything) with cynicism and a "where is the exploitation happening?"
Because to me, that is what I have always seen business, finance, and economics as - in order for someone to make money, they are taking value from somebody else and collecting it for themselves.
Learning even the tiniest bit about industrial design, manufacturing or how business inefficiencies allow them to be profitable (so long as their margins are wide enough) has made me approach every single market offering, every single product, and every single price tag with incredible levels of caution and interrogation.
It is rife at "local markets" - "hand made" cutting boards being sold without the disclaimer that they were not made by the hands of the merchant selling them - but they're still correct in the claim that it is was hand made. Perhaps even made at the "hands of a machine".
Deception and business walk down the same corridor, and a cat would be wise to return to the food and water bowl again and again, just as I return to the fridge again and again, hoping that its contents have magically changed since the last time I opened its doors.
It would be a fantastically entertaining world if the things in the fringe re-arranged themselves in my moments of absence from it, for me to be met by a new surprise each time I opened it.
Sadly, yes. It invariably ends up as a zero-sum game. For every winner, there's an equal and opposite loser.
Providing actual value — as in taking an unused resource, turning it into something usable, marketing it in a way where people GAIN from having its utility while the maker GAINS from production — is unsettlingly rare. At best things tend to be no more than value added, and even that feels like the exception, rather than the norm.
I approach things with a great deal of caution and cynicism. As an entrepreneurial sort, my first thought tends to be "how is someone ELSE with better resources going to copy this and leave me hanging... again?"
Society seems to have placed increasing emphasis on copying, shortcuts and exploitation, rather than original thought and creativity. But maybe that is more about human nature than about a current cultural trend.
=^..^=