Growth might be impossible, but a steady and “boring” amount of profit should still be possible selling plain-ole-dishwashers. Yet … for some reason, we don’t see that.
God yes this bothers and fascinates me.
Instead companies throw everything into growth and we get the retarded bluetooth enabled dishwasher problem everywhere, and I’d like toknow more about why.
I think it’s alluded to in the article:
They found a way to make consumers spend more money on dishwashing. The line goes up, for one more year. But it’s not enough. It has to go up every year.
Digging deeper: why must the line go up? Pesonally I see it as a deeply emotional, human thing.
When you read those annual financial reports from big companies, they will do anything to make sure things look rosy. Bullshit terms like “negative growth” are used because “loss” or “shrink” sound bad. So what if it sounds bad?
Confidence. Trust. It’s emotional. These are deep in our psyche. It’s how governments get elected, contracts are won, and investments are made. It’s what makes us human. If that line goes down… will it go back up? What’s going to happen? Alarm bells! Uncertaintly. Anxiety. People abandon you. Money, power, influence fades. You could find yourself replaced by the up-and-coming who “show promise”.
Our social emotional species has hundreds of thousands of years (millions?) of years of this stuff hardwired into us. Trust let us cooperate beyond our own individual or family interests. Would we be human otherwise? (I found the article Behavioural Modernity interesting).
Hm. Some views from other Lemmy instances…
some Australian one: https://aussie.zone/post/6544997
some Dutch one: https://feddit.nl/post/10144806
Big ol’ lemmy.world: https://lemmy.world/post/11512187
Mastodon:
Seems… OK…? Apart from lemmy.world (but that’s running a previous release of Lemmy).
PS from Mastodon (hachyderm.io): https://hachyderm.io/@ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org/111866487723645951
No replies or anything because nobody subscribed to mechkeyboards from hachyderm.io. I just subscribed, though :)
It’s that pesky root
user, right? There’s loads of their files on my system. I can’t edit any of them. Don’t know why they are so protective.
A very gifted programmer I met from Iran had to do the same. Originally from Iran, he wanted to marry a girl from Myanmar. This was forbidden for some reason so they said “fuck it, let’s go to where there is loads of tech jobs”. I was working in the Netherlands at the time when I met them. He’s now flourishing in the open source software space over there. Brain drain 100%.
Link to the YAML spec, for the (very) brave: https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/