Destructive Consumption – the consumption of goods, services and industries in such a manner it destroys a culture, economy or country.
Future truth: Historians and economists will look back and declare the period of time Bill Clinton’s second campaign through several years, possibly a decade from now and declare it the Era of Destructive Consumption.
I really like to read Malcolm Berko’s column. They appear twice per week in the Illinois Republican Tabloid which is otherwise filled with soulless creatures pushing alt-stories and alt-facts in a hopeless attempt to defend the indefensible – and I say that as a Republican. They are the only inches of ink worth consuming in that pile of shredded trees. He has some great advice when it comes to dividend paying stocks and ETFs, but in this weekend’s column he had a major miss with Amazon. So much of a miss it prompted me to send him an email and after pondering more, create this post.
Yes, he did present a good short treatise on Joseph Schumpeter and past technological revolutions, but, he missed the point. Those previous technological revolutions were all about building something. We built the steam engine to make things both faster and easier, then we found it could be used to build bigger things and placed in trains to haul those things farther and quicker. The same was true of the combustion engine. Trains, trucks, automobiles and mills it ran so we could make better things faster and make more of them. Workers could get back and forth to work faster and other industries sprouted from that.
Bill Clinton gave us the Era of Destructive Consumption when he sold the public a bill of goods about the Information Super Highway and how it would create a Global Village. He politically skipped creating a Global Village Council to regulate it before it became a train wreck because nobody would have invested.
Ah, and investment was what drove the election. During the DOT-COM go-go days an average schmoe could throw a dart at a listing of Internet stocks, invest in that stock today and be making a profit before market close of the same day. Profits happened in Internet time. As we all learned when DOT-BOMB happened, those profits were fake.
Out of those ashes rose two companies which epitomize the Era of Destructive Consumption, Amazon.com (AMZN) and Google (GOOG.)
At first Google was just “1984” on steroids, gathering each and every bit of your personal information to force advertising in front of you. It even provided you a free email account so it could scan through your emails to refine its advertising feed even further. Personally I don’t believe anything you put on a Google drive or in a Google cloud is private. As invasive as the company is, the won’t be able to resist crawling it for meta data.
Then came Google Books. The largest blatant copyright infringement in the world. Scanning without copyright holder permission, allowing visitors to view 20% without the copyright holder able to restrict that amount or make it a fixed 20% of non-rotating content, all under the guise of “public good.” Even telling that to a Federal Judge with a straight face, knowing full well when you are on an Android device using the browser you cannot stop it from foisting advertisements at you, means you spend a lot more time on Google Books trying via various connections and they make a lot more money selling ad impressions.
RCA Viking Android 2-in-1
Before you go tut-tutting me, keep in mind I actually own the above device.
So, in theory, if you get 5 friends to help you and one can locate a table of contents or index, you can connect from different ISPs perform a strategic set of searches to acquire the complete content. One wouldn’t go through this effort to get a $4 paperback for free, but they would for a $40+ computer book or some other trade text which could increase their earnings potential.
Odd the pages Google chose to “exclude” too. I wrote this book and know the page which is missing is the copyright page.
Zinc It! from Google Books
So, as a first phase of Destructive Consumption, we take all of the books, put them on-line for free to make money selling ads utilizing a floating 20% based on keyword search, thus ensuring even more ad impressions while neither publisher nor author makes a dime.
Next we can move onto Amazon.com. Yes, they toot their horn whenever they open a new warehouse and the few jobs it creates. Whatever number they create, it pales when stood against the tens of thousands of jobs they have eliminated across the country and the financial toll it takes on the communities which once had those retailers.
I have already posted a treatise on Amazon on this blog. Before you visit it I hope you visit this link to view one of the many shopping malls which provided local jobs, local taxes and a sense of community accomplishment to a biological entity known as a city.
Amazon has become such a malignant tumor, consuming anything and everything it can that both Walmart and Google fear it enough to team up.
Please take time to read the Amazon post before continuing here.
Somewhere along the way in our evolution as a country some greedy little bugger decided they could bamboozle the government into believing moving from a manufacturing/industrial economy to a consumer economy was a good thing. The upper 1% off-shored all of the factory jobs and marketing sold people on the idea they had to have everything even if the cheap North Korean knock-off with a Made in China sticker only lasted a day, they had to have it.
This created another booming industry with a low employee count, storage sites. Garages, attics and basements have been stuffed beyond the gills with junk we shouldn’t have purchased in the first place and can’t bear to part with even if we can’t remember the last time we used it. The consumer economy is so out of control one of television’s more popular shows is “Storage Wars.”
Oh come on, I live not far from a town of under 2,000 people and even it has a storage business. You living in various cities and suburbs probably drive past half a dozen each day. I used to drive past a farmer who had some kind of dairy/livestock operation. He got rid of the livestock then cleaned up his barn and corral. Why? He has a boat and RV winter storage business. Why go through all of the work a livestock operation requires when you can make even more money selling winter storage to people who have more money than brains?
If we want to turn the country around we have to do 3 things:
- Convince every other country in the world they need a consumer economy (the worst idea we ever had.)
- Sell them all the shit we have in our storage lockers.
- Start manufacturing things for them to put in their storage lockers.
