What could be a better business model than to have a way to make you depressed and unhappy, then to sell you products to make you feel better?
The Perfect Business Model
Category: Capitalism
The Myth of Meritocracy
Successful people often like to think they made it by virtue of their talents and hard work, choosing to ignore the huge contribution of luck and serendipity.
If you are interested in this topic, The Atlantic has an interesting article, Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think, which includes a section where the author Michael Lewis describes the chance events that helped him become a famous author. If you are interested in the computer modeling that shows the importance of fortunate events, here is a video called A Shadow on Meritocracy.
Getting Attention
As you pay attention to advertisements, whether in print or on a screen, you’ll notice that advertisements often feature attractive women.
The Curse of the Internet
The creators of the Internet had such high hopes for it. The creators of social media also had high hopes, but money and profits eventually quashed hope.
People Keep Voting For Us
Companies are given more and more power over the lives of people, yet those same people keep voting for politicians who give the power to the companies.
Multiplication and Division
Social Media is allowing our enemies to weaken us by sowing discord.
Facebook used to be Friendsly
Facebook started by making it possible to see what your friends were doing. But that was never going to make much money for the company.
The Goodness of People
Are people basically good? Trump has pulled aside the curtain allowing another side to show, but are there underlying reasons for that other side?
Communism Bad!
Capitalism is much better than communism. Except sometimes.
It’s Tax Day!
Or at least it should be Tax Day. But COVID-19, combined with our crazy, complicated system for filing our taxes, has caused Tax Day to be delayed for three months.
A great article about the miserable annual ritual of filing your taxes.
The NPR program from which I got this conversation.
The numbers about hours and dollars come from here.
Here’s an article about the 20-year effort by TurboTax (Intuit) to keep tax filing complicated.
Cat World 