Shareholder value
Menthol cigarettes were first promoted to soothe the airways of “health conscious” smokers. Long used as an analgesic, menthol evokes a cooling sensation that masks the harshness of tobacco smoke. In the competition to capitalize on the growing menthol market, the industry’s marketing experts “carved up, segmented, and fractionated” the population, exploiting psychology and social attitudes to shape product preferences.
[emphasis added]
Regulatory subventions
Pluralistic: 02 Jun 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Uber’s main project has always been regulatory, not technological: that’s why it funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into passing California’s Proposition 22, a law that legalized worker misclassification and banned unionization.
The irony? Uber is a “bezzle” – JK Galbraith’s name for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” Uber is a scam and it will never be profitable.
Resilience and sustainability
Hack the Planet: Tega Brain on Leaks, Glitches, and Preposterous Futures
This quote is actually from an article about washing machines, water supplies and ‘wastage’. But it just reminds me of the technical and intellectual debt that is drowning health care and the NHS
That balancing act reminds me of something engineer and professor Deb Chachra wrote in one of her newsletters. She wrote, “Sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.”
No mothers’ milk here
Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy | Financial Times
Nestlé document says majority of its food portfolio is unhealthy
An internal company presentation acknowledges more than 60% of products do not meet ‘recognised definition of health’.
No surprises here, then.
Nicely put
Capitalism on the way up, and socialism on the way down is cronyism.
From this week’s Economist | Breaking through
Yet nowhere too little capital is being channelled into innovation. Spending on R&D has three main sources: venture capital, governments and energy companies. Their combined annual investment into technology and innovative companies focused on the climate is over $80bn. For comparison, that is a bit more than twice the R&D spending of a single tech firm, Amazon.
Market and state failure may go together. Which brings me back to Stewart Brand’s idea of Pace Layering
Education is intellectual infrastructure. So is science. They have very high yield, but delayed payback. Hasty societies that can’t span those delays will lose out over time to societies that can. On the other hand, cultures too hidebound to allow education to advance at infrastructural pace also lose out.
Pace Layering: How Complex Systems Learn and Keep Learning
I won’t even mention COVID-19.