Destructive Tightening

I've come to realize that this is what people do. It doesn't matter if it's tech or shipping or livery or donuts. They start with something special. Something that tastes great or is ultra-convenient or just neat and squeeze the profit out of it until the product is no longer desirable.

This is what happens when our addictable human brains and capitalism collide. We look for every way to get value from something - reducing costs, increasing price - and apply them to maximize profit because money is the macgiffin that stands in for motivation. In the end the people making the product are underpaid and the product is just good enough that the right number of people buy it and everything that was special about it is gone with the exception that a small group of people are gleaning all the remaining profit from the thing. This is the ideal state of capitalism. Make as much money as possible with the least concession to labour and consumer as possible. It has already started, but the new frontier of optimization is to socially/legally lower the bar of labor concessions and convert the purchase to a subscription where the consumer is paying even when they aren't using your product. Changing the rules instead of playing the game better.

We will need a better system if we're going to support our populations in the future. Optimization of this one is basically removing competition which leads to fewer possibilities of things to market.