Are You Grateful for the Products That Make Your Life Better?
A young corporate executive paying penance for an obscenely profitable quarter.
“Profit” is a dirty word in our modern discourse, reviled as a necessary evil at best and sure evidence of corruption otherwise. Mission statements flee from the word, describing all manner of corporate penance in restitution for making money. Consider the mission statement of Starbucks:
to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.
Nothing in there about making money, it turns out. Of course, if they fail to remain profitable, their mission to inspire will soon end.
That’s not to suggest that a coffee company cannot “inspire and nurture the human spirit.” To the extent Starbucks customers find such inspiration in a cappuccino, they are willing to part with some of their hard-earned money in trade. While some may describe the prices which coffeehouses charge as theft, in truth nobody holds a gun to anyone’s head.
Why then the penance? Why the need to justify profit-making? Why must it be cloaked in missions to inspire the human spirit or foster sustainability or enrich the community? Aren’t the companies (and, more fundamentally, the individuals) who provide us values like smartphones and premium coffee earning the profit they make? Aren’t they providing us with something we’d rather have than the money we exchange for it? Why else would we agree to the trade?
Pondering such questions takes us beyond simply tolerating profit to fostering gratitude for the products in our lives. The feeling is one we intrinsically express every time we shake hands and say “thank you” upon completing a transaction. What are we thanking each other for? If one party is stealing from or exploiting the other, is thanks the proper expression? Of course not. The reason thanks is given is because both parties believe they have come away better off than they were before. The magic of the market is, they are both right!
Not only is gratitude an appropriate response to trade, it is justly owed. Yet our culture has devolved to the point where producers of value are derided rather than thanked. PJTV’s Bill Whittle expertly demonstrated the absurdity of this circumstance while speaking at last year’s Restoration Weekend.
People should be aware of this poster from the WWII era.
I don’t own a smart phone or a cell phone. I don’t care to. My wife has one attached to her hand at all times. It doesn’t appeal to me. There are apporoximately 2 times a year when I need one (lost in the big city and need a map or something) and the feeling passes pretty quickly.
My computer screwed up for the ga-zillionth time last month (one of those INTENTIONAL scew-ups where it’s one tech corporation refusing to work with another tech corporation) and I said, “What is this damned thing? It’s my typewriter, my stereo and my newspaper. I think I was happier with a typewriter, a stereo and a newspaper.”
Send me back to 1970. I could get by without a complaint.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line.
Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Etc.
Are you reading PJ Media in a newspaper? Did you mail your response to your newspaper? Can you listen to every type of music and talk there is on AM and FM? Can you get thousands of books free or dirt cheap in a bookstore? If your car breaks down in the country, can you use your landline to get help?
Gratitude is the key to happiness.
Technology is the one arena where things appear to keep getting better.
My self employed peddler my iphone enables to look up things on fly as I go about selling my wares. I put all catalogs of all the factories I represent on my iPad so I no longer have to run out to the car to get more information.
If I walk into a business for a cold call, I don’t tip them off by carring a bunch of catalogs. I just carry my innocuous iPad and can spring whatever I want on them. ‘
Thank you Wozniak. Thank you Jobs — wherever you are. Also thanks to Google that lets me do spreadsheets for free.
Technology empowers a street guy like me to compete with large companies, and they are not happy about it.
I finally got a smartphone, but I don’t like the model I have. I will probably upgrade to an iphone next time. I like my phone, but it’s not glued to my hand. I don’t text, and I don’t feel the need to constantly talk, talk, talk. My apps are useful to me, and I am choosy about the ones I use.
I treat my phone as a tool. I use it, but I don’t allow it to use me.
To answer your question – am I grateful? – two words. Yes. Very.
In Karl Marx’s time, religion was the opiate of the masses. Today, it’s electronic gadgets and mass media.
I thought it was EBT cards!
My smartphone is a “low information” smart phone.
I want to be able to post comments from speech to text. Typing comments is so prehistoric.
I’m working on my PhD in engineering, and only recently have I seen first hand how much it really takes just to make a microchip, even ignoring the screen, memory, battery, etc the chip itself, just that few square mm of silicon is a marvel of human ingenuity and determination in and of itself. Then I see occupy wallstreet types chanting and waving around their iphones and complaining about how underprivileged they are and I see the other side of humanity.
Overall I think modern electronics are a very mixed blessing. Yes smartphones can be used for some wonderful things, but they also permit your location to be tacked and recorded at all times, without consent or warrant. The microphone in a cellphone can also be turned on and used as a remote listening device or “bug” even when the phone is “off”. Most people don’t know that. The truth is that the power that these electronics place in the hands of potential abusers is enough to be deeply unsettling at the very least. Do any of you know about the ANPR system in the UK? Look it up, learn about it, then do whatever you can to try and stop it from coming here. It’s a system of cameras that use a computer to read each license plate as it goes by, then logs the plate number, date, and time to a central database. The authorities there know in real time where every vehicle in the country is and can access a several year thorough record of its movements. If that kind of power in the hands of anyone, especially the government, isn’t enough to trouble you then I don’t know what is.
Thank you for pointing out the downside of those smart phones, and why I refuse to have one. I’ve got a low-tech TracFone instead. Both the phone and the minutes are paid for with cash, so everything private and anonymous. Also, I’m not forking over $50 or so every month or stuck in a multi-year contract.
I now realize how lucky I was to have left the military in 1987, before there was any such thing as e-mail or cell phones. No doubt service members today are deluged with BS e-mails from their unit or higher up, and are required to have cell phones (at their own expense, of course) and carry them around whenever they’re not at home.
And what about those apps that say. We have this amazing free app but you have to let us track you. N’kay? (I always say yes by the way.)Juxtapose how easy it is to track you and have all of your records for government perusal with Obama’s records. He has no records. We can’t see his university records, his law school records, his selective service records, his medical records, his passport/VISA, his incorrect (wrong state) social security number, etc. I love my new Windows 8 cell phone too. After 25 years on the Apple orchard I was ready for something new.
“…Products That Make Your Life Better?
Is it possible perhaps, you meant easier?
Granted there are technologies in the arena of medical disciplines that ‘contribute’ to a better life — sometimes life itself. Other than those, most of the consumer technology gizzmo’s find a way to be destructive to society.
” The notion of carrying around a phone in my pocket sounded a lot like putting a leash around my neck.”
Of all God’s creatures there is only one that can not be made slave to the leash and that one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man but deteriorate the cat. – Mark Twain
I salute your courage in publishing a photograph of the Goddess of Greed,
whose worship got us into our current socioeconomic mess, and your insight
into how the technology used to create the toys she demands as offerings
may get us out of said mess.
The Samsung smart phone and tablet products are mostly stolen technology from Apple. There are legal cases now dealing with this. Samsung essentially copied the look, feel and touch screen control ideas from the iPhone, which was derided when it first came out because it did not have a physical keyboard. I applaud Steve Jobs and Apple for their great products. I same “shame on Sanmsung” for stealing intellectual property without paying for it. Consumers should avoid Samsung and reward the American company that did the innovation.
I agree that samsung and apple should dissolve their long standing relationship in both R&D and mfg. All they do is stay in court battling each other in public and then in the back room they depend on each other. Actually, across the board of products apple benefits more than does samsung. Separate and then people won’t have to pay those humongous legal bills when they purchase either of their products.
I bought a Amazon Kindle when they first came out. I started telling other people about it and all of them said that they would never give up on paper and ink books. Now near all of them have some kind of ebook reader which they carry around everywhere.
It’s more and less than you say. Much profit is earned by rent seeking, increasingly crony capitalists. On the other hand, innovative entrepreneurs often don’t get the win in “win win” but have to leave that for the next guy. They take on risk, spend capital, give us things to be grateful for, but lose their business before it is profitable.
“The notion of carrying around a phone in my pocket sounded a lot like putting a leash around my neck.”
Agreed, especially when tower triangulation and government-mandated GPS-determined “location services” broadcast one’s location continually… which is the one thing I loath about iPads and iPod Touches in addition to idiot-phones.
“Yes [idiot]phones can be used for some wonderful things, but they also permit your location to be tacked and recorded at all times, without consent or warrant. The microphone in a cellphone can also be turned on and used as a remote listening device or ‘bug’ [or 'tap'] even when the phone is ‘off’.”
THAT’s what I’m talking about!
“Can you get thousands of books free or dirt cheap in a bookstore?”
Yes, as a matter of fact. $2 for unlimited refills of coffee used to get you about 15-25 chapters, as much as or more than most people can read in a day.
“If your car breaks down in the country, can you use your landline to get help?”
Yes, they’re called pay-phones, formerly for a nickel, then a quarter, then… and the device was not linked to the identity of the purchaser of the device or service, which is why power-mad government thugs hated them. And then there were hospitable country folks who were happy to call emergency help for you or let you make a call in their homes. But, in most ways, it was a better country then.
“spreadsheets…”
Spread-sheet programs are very inexpensive, and, unlike SAAS scammers like Google, you don’t have to give away your personal private data to people with evil intent.
“Technology empowers a street guy like me to compete with large companies…”
Yes, prototypers/additive manufacturing tools/3-D printers are good that way, especially since they build on the CAD/CAM/CAE tools we developed back in the 1980s.
“EBT cards”
and kkkredit kkkards, and university ID kkkards, and debit kkkards, and medical kkkards… evil evil evil! And the corrupt B-school bozos believe they deserve to scrape off $1 or $2 for every transaction that costs them only about 12 cents.
” only recently have I seen first hand how much it really takes just to make a microchip”
hrmph. Whippersnappers! Didn’t learn tubes (triodes and diodes) in analogue circuits, then digital circuits, bread-boards to circuit-boards. Probably think the hideously kludgey Intel-style CPU is the cat’s pajamas. No wonder there’s been such a hold-up in development since about 1980.
Obummer’s “incorrect (wrong state) [socialist insecurity number, SIN]”
You can get a SIN from whatever state you happen to be residing in at the time you apply; it doesn’t have to be in your state (or territory or military base) of birth. Of course, the power-mad feral federal government is demanding that every new subject be spindled, mutilated and numbered at birth.
Re: cats unleashed. That’s ironic considering the US feral federal government (USDA) is trying to control the descendants of Hemingway’s polydactylic cats in/at the Key West museum. They’re claiming that a couple dozen cats living around what was his home and being cared for by the museum volunteers is “inter-state commerce”, FCOL.
“All they do is stay in court battling each other in public” over extremely minor features that are “established art”, instead of using the funds and efforts to create new and better features (and giving potential customers the option to remove evil ones).
“ebook reader”
Yuck! OK, I do, occasionally, read an e-book, grumbling all the while about eye irritation and how much more difficult it is to gauge my progress, how much harder it is to work with a dozen volumes open and visible at the same time, etc. And besides, PDFs are resource hogs.
“Much profit is earned by rent seeking, increasingly crony” socialists getting unconstitutional hand-outs from corrupt congress-critters and executive branch bureaubums, i.e. friends of Obummer.
I generally prefer separate devices with designs specialized for each purpose… ever since someone gave me one of those folding “knife” thingies with the spoon and fork, knife-blades, cork-screws, etc. When I first got my lap-top I used it for programming and listening to music and watching movies on DVDs, but separate devices are better, and less expensive. This also gives hope for better replacements for the government’s “space shuttles”.
ICEM/DDN and ICEM/Surf from Control Data Corporation — easy to use, powerful, but hideously expensive (from the 1980s through the 1990s, at least).
“Gorilla glue” is a kind of nice, relatively new product, for a few applications.
OTOH, there was a Borden’s glue/caulk that came in an over-sized “school glue” bottle, was inexpensive, did a great job for numerous applications — adhered well, set tough, resisted mildew… and disappeared over a decade back.
Weed-Whackers, invented circa 1970, are still great.
Leaf and dust and other pollution blowers — evil; inventor should at least be indicted.
Door closers that supplanted the simple spring to close doors without slamming… good but still needs a little work.
Black boxes in cars — evil.
On-Star — evil.
Intelligent transportation systems — evil.
ObummerDoesn’tCare — evil wicked mean nasty evil.
nail-guns — fast, easy, convenient, but???
fiber-board and stranded-board and composite flooring substituting for real wood — evil, cheap garbage, some of it giving off toxic formaldehyde.
Tilt-meters that newer video-games use to allow more physical interaction, and let tablet computers adjust and otherwise make use of orientation and movement — OK but needs some improvement.
Edison bulbs — OK, provided adequate light and heat.
CFLs — toxic, evil.
LED lights — OK but they have a long long way to go in price and amount of light delivered and color of that light.
Absolutely!
I have recently been amazed by 3 Hose manufacturing companies. Swan, Flexon, and Apex NeverKink.
Also quality Levels from Johnson, Stabili, Empire, Swanson, Checkpoint, Kaypro, and Mayes!
Great Outodor Antennas from Winegard, Digitenna, Antennacraft, Channel Master, Blonder Tongue, and Delhi!