Once upon a time in America long ago, inventors and famous businessmen were held up to schoolchildren as great benefactors of mankind. I wonder if that is still true today.
Businesspersons still become celebrities today, but the nature of their success is different than in the past. Can you really compare Facebook to the Model T Ford? Industrializing agriculture, transforming electricity and magnetism into motion, building an electrical grid, inventing countless products out of petroleum -- all of these triumphs seem so much more important than the latest buzz in tech-fashions or social media trends.
Even a great modern success like Amazon doesn't really contain much that is new compared to a Sears Roebuck wish-book, drooled over on the porch of a farmhouse in the 1890s.
Surely there are still many innovative businesses being born today. But they may be small enough or mundane enough that they haven't become household words.
I would like to suggest a mega-success that is sorely needed: somebody like McDonald's or Walmart needs to take over the laundromat industry. What a piece of crap the average laundromat is! I just got done using one -- I hated every minute I spent there, and of course, I was ripped off by one of the dysfunctional dryers. (It's always the dryer -- never the washer.)
Of course, in fairness, this discomfort is self-inflicted by the customers. Any laundromat could hire an attendant if we, the customers, weren't so cheap.
And please don't join up with Kunstler and tell me that it is wrong to wish for a corporate Goliath to come in and rub out small-town-Davids. Perhaps every Ace Hardware should have a public laundromat in a corner of the building. Or Family Dollar?
Businesspersons still become celebrities today, but the nature of their success is different than in the past. Can you really compare Facebook to the Model T Ford? Industrializing agriculture, transforming electricity and magnetism into motion, building an electrical grid, inventing countless products out of petroleum -- all of these triumphs seem so much more important than the latest buzz in tech-fashions or social media trends.
Even a great modern success like Amazon doesn't really contain much that is new compared to a Sears Roebuck wish-book, drooled over on the porch of a farmhouse in the 1890s.
Surely there are still many innovative businesses being born today. But they may be small enough or mundane enough that they haven't become household words.
I would like to suggest a mega-success that is sorely needed: somebody like McDonald's or Walmart needs to take over the laundromat industry. What a piece of crap the average laundromat is! I just got done using one -- I hated every minute I spent there, and of course, I was ripped off by one of the dysfunctional dryers. (It's always the dryer -- never the washer.)
Of course, in fairness, this discomfort is self-inflicted by the customers. Any laundromat could hire an attendant if we, the customers, weren't so cheap.
And please don't join up with Kunstler and tell me that it is wrong to wish for a corporate Goliath to come in and rub out small-town-Davids. Perhaps every Ace Hardware should have a public laundromat in a corner of the building. Or Family Dollar?
Comments
Parkway Laundromat
105 E North St, Rapid City, SD 57701
I think that technology has a cycle to it like everything else, I am so grateful for technology.
One of my favorite organizations, The Weston A Price Foundation for Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, https://www.westonaprice.org/mens-health/
They have a phrase for the philosophy they follow,
Technology as Servant
Science As Counselor
Knowledge as Guide.
Today Technology has become the master, Science has become a dictator or worse, gatekeepers, and knowledge has been lost to the majority.
Good thing there is a cycle to all in the Cosmos, including the majority believing stupid wrong things, and it is about to change...again, after a whole lot of hurt.
You know things are about to change by how people behave. The weather has been crazy cold and wet and windy, winter was long and spring seems to have not really begun, food crops all over the world are being destroyed by all this crazy cold weather, the second year in a row, next year will confirm the cooling trend, so expect higher food prices here in the west, crazy plagues in 3rd world nations, starving people always get sick, of course the crazy global warmist will blame man and plant food, and ignore the facts that their paymaster, the government who borrows with out end does not want people to hear because we are evil carbon sinners who must pay the carbon tax to fill the coffers of the unfunded pensions and social security plan for surely we can do nothing about winter but prepare.
Technology as Servant
Science As Counselor
Knowledge as Guide.
Hope your preparing. If you have no clue what I am talking about, Ben Davidson of https://www.suspicious0bservers.org/ says,
Eyes Open, No Fear
This is a great primer on the Solar Minimum and what to expect https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxGBoTLzrOk&list=PL51TAr4gmxRDqcaOSD5bo80E-saMH3QRf
Does it make sense to just ignore winter and how to prepare for it, especially as van dwellers?
For me, the main problem hasn't been the losers, but rather, the bar-coded scenery tourists.