crap — I got so preoccupied making a clever image that I struggle to remember my point. I’ll add that I asked for an image of a man bowling… why in the hell is he standing on the lane, tossing his ball away from the pins??? I’m trying — like a bowler — to focus.
I think my post was (yet again) gonna be a lamentation about how so much of the US economy currently incentivizes deception. It’s stupid and disgraceful.
In an ersatz free market, a degree of deception is inevitable, if not incentivized. However, nowadays, it seems dominant. I think about this a lot, because I, myself, have a pretty significant background in web tech. However, I have always seen web tech as an outgrowth of civilization as I knew it in like 1999. I was under the impression we wanted to go from there and make things better. For reasons that elude me, it seems like folks are routinely degrading what exists so they can “improve” (aka privatize) it.
I particularly feel bad for people who are kids today. What exactly are they supposed to do? Particularly if they weren’t born rich? And, not to put too fine a point on it, but not even a lot of money can save them. The fact is, there is a lot of technology but not a lot of vision. And that basically means civilization has produced more gadget waste. That’s a little pathetic.
And so now, back to the title. It’s true that prices for most physical goods are rising. Absolutely. And I’ll skip the diatribe (this time), but I’ll mention that the thing that bugs me is that a lot of people seem to want a lot of money for no clear reason. Like, people aren’t clamoring for money to like do amazing stuff. Rather, it’s to like buy more junk. And to way overpay for stuff. And it’s hard to not overpay, for sure — dollars aren’t really worth anything intrinsically. Even gold — wtf is gold for anyway? It’s shiny? Ooooh. At least silver has industrial value. But like… as far as I can tell, fungibility is what’s valuable, which means value can only be precisely measured in terms of energy. Everything else is built atop that.
This all gets me to thinking about people’s stated desire to be rich. Do people seem to simply want more and more because they’re bad at basic math? Is the stated desire “to be rich” essentially shorthand for “I have no idea what I’m talking about?” Have people been convinced they have rapacious desires because they ultimately worry their essential role is to consume. Surely there’s more to life than buying stuff.