Profiteers are watching you. Always.
David Cain:
I do encourage you to become a millionaire, if that’s something that interests you. If it’s billions you’re after, I’m a bit suspicious but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. Aspiring to trillions, though, is the domain of the wicked alone and we won’t be able to be friends any more.
The big money isn’t in creating products, it’s in creating customers.
A single, lifelong customer who lives his life spending the way you want him to is worth six or seven figures. A single one. Creating millions of these is the only way to make trillions.
You can make millions by selling a great product to people who need it, but you make billions and trillions by conditioning an entire nation of people to react to every inconvenience, every whim, and every passing desire or fear by buying something.
It does take some capital to get it going. You won’t be able to manage it with 5-dollar-an-hour overseas virtual assistants, but like I said I’d prefer if you didn’t strive to be a trillionaire, because it’s not so good for the rest of us.
While were at it, who’s the most loathsome in America? #1 is you:
Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority.
You’re not in control of your life.
You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time.