Generating profits is about the most tasteless thing one could do, yet it underpins all of our professional efforts.
The paradox is baked in, and some of us do our best to navigate it.
Absolutely not. Profit simply means other people find it valuable enough to compensate you to use whatever you’ve made.
Art is rarely profitable for its own sake, but that doesn’t mean everything that is profitable is intrinsically devoid of taste.
Not a single user finds advertising valuable, and yet it’s the focal point of profit maximization nowadays. Welcome to late-stage capitalism.
By looking them up when they need them
Chances are, you found out at least some of those due to advertisers. No man is an island.
Word of mouth: fine
Product on a shelf: fine unless you made a deal with the manufacturer/distributor to put it prominently rather than believing it deserves to be there
Taking money to give an endorsement: Bad. That makes you a liar.
It's the dishonesty at the heart of almost all advertising that makes it bad (well that and the often accompanying implicit push for people to frivolously consume).
It's tracking, micro targeting, retargeting, and trying to sell me a fridge that I literally just bought while I'm off reading about sailboats that's intrusive.
Advertise shoes, cleats, sails, and charters in the Bahamas while I'm doing that, not singles near me and bicycles because I posted in a Facebook group.
Presumably the advertisers do.
There were times were advertising was useful and desirable, e.g. Small Ads pages.
There was also a time when ads were a single unintrusive scrolling line, curated by the website owner so as to be relevant to their audience. Those were fine.
Reasonable profit is necessary. Something needs to put food on the table, both for your own family and that of your workers.
What you don't need is a 3 million dollar jet on the table at the expense of both your workers and your customers.
I highly recommend The Century of the Self for a great documentary on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
That phrase has always seemed a bit wishful to me, like when Christians describe our era as the end times or when crypto people say "it's still early days".
I don't think that's particularly controversial. Profitability doesn't imply tastelessness, but profit motive certainly does.
wait - I though I was arguing for consensus here and everyone else was calling me wrong
Its value comes from agreement by a large number of humans that it is valuable.
A stack of Benjamins would be nigh-valueless to people from 9th-century China.
And to be clear, I don't think this is a bad thing. It's necessary to keep civilization working.
The violence, once enacted, is an objective fact.
The threat of violence is still there only due to the collective subjective agreement that countries exist.
The IRS would have no functional power if Washington, D.C. and other major US cities were destroyed in a nuclear exchange.
I could imagine many citizens still choosing to pay taxes of some sort and/or respect the value of physical dollars in such a scenario, but it would likely not be due to fear of the federal government. Possibly fear of local police, though.
if I inherit $44 million dollars because I happened to fall out of the right vagina the only thing it symbolizes is that I got lucky -- I could be a fat, degenerate bastard underserving of anything.
ditto for lottery winners.
If all I have is a yardstick, and I'm trying to measure weight, then I would probably be much better served using a qualitative method than by trying to use the yardstick.
not sure if that's a popular opinion. In which case it would be tasteless.
That's why making profit is sometimes seen as greedy, because it's money that could have been reinvested in the product.
Amazon in its early expansion phase never made a profit, because every cent was reinvested. And they didn't need to pay a cent of tax for that reason.
When music production was tightly controlled, the competition among labels produced some really, really great songs. Timeless type stuff.
I dont hear anything of that quality anymore.
Tradeoffs. They exist.
Great logic.
In the spherical cow in vacuum market maybe. In practice there is rent seeking, profiteering, corruption, nepotism, etc ...
Apple Ferrari Google Porsche Smaller companies like Yeti or Braun Etc etc
Once they use design to achieve dominance yes they do the rent seeking you are talking about.
Why is this a bad thing? Personally Id rather have an Apple monopoly than MSFT for instance. I really love using my Apple products. I never enjoyed using a single MSFT product.
remember folks 20-40% of social media is bots -- this is just a low-hanging fruit
This is a mixup that the author of the article makes as well:
>Copying and pasting code without understanding it.
>Sending resumes and emails that aren’t proofread and edited.
>Asking others to review code without giving it a self review.
>Noticing a quality issue and failing to document or fix it.
These are not issues of taste.
Why's that? Profit, of course, is just the measure of how much trade is undelivered.
The old: I give you my corn to feed your chickens, and at some point in the future you will give me chickens in return once they are fed and grown. The amount of undelivered chickens are my profit. But eventually you will provide the chickens as promised, theoretically. Fair trade doesn't seem tasteless.
And if I forever hold on to that profit and never expect you to give me the chickens in the future as you originally promised, then I literally gave you the corn for free. How could it be tasteless to help someone out by giving them something for free?
Perhaps you are actually thinking of something like regulatory capture that is oft associated with profit? I can see how that becomes quite tasteless and certainly the tech industry in particular loves to exploit that. I am not sure that underpins our professional efforts, though. The tech industry would still exist even without all the insane laws that surround it.
However I would wager the argument many people have is that they view their professional life as not utilizing their taste and that is reserved for decisions in their private lives (for those who still keep the two relatively distinct). For those who have truly merged professional and personal and gone all in profit -- original point probably stands. Thats pretty tasteless!
Should an entity strive to be profitable? of course. How else will it be self sustaining?
The problem arises when entities maximize for profit with no non-financial values that underpin their decision making.
Speak for yourself, not everyone works for the paycheck.
This needs some justification. Profits are what you get when you can do something for less than you charge for it, and be competitive. To not be good enough to make profit you need to be able to force money out of people e.g. with taxes.