A thought occurred to me as I was fuming about the reduction of chocolates of my seasonal pot of gold chocolates as well as their blatant move of removing both cherry flavoured & orange flavoured chocolates. It seems to me as if neither makes any economic sense, that is until I stopped to consider a bigger picture.
With the increasing economic & production capabilities of growing economies worldwide, such as China, India, and Brazil, major companies such as Hersheys perhaps think it wise to get in on those growing markets. Now to do this requires a lot of cash and far more monetary bribery is needed than these corporations ever had to pay out in the West. Not only this but this time in history gives big companies the ability to slowly shift all, or nearly all, forms of production from the West to the East and South. Now these companies need not even product their own products, they merely need to market a brand to the woefully uninformed Northern rich nations, thereby decreasing lawsuits and other customer interaction costs, let the makers in Asia answer in broken English to infuriated customers.
As I thought about the scenario in question, I also imagined a time where most of the economic interest of the biggest businesses actually were within foreign markets, and not with where they are located. But utilizing this great distance of both culture and place, both populations may be manipulated by the center, thus the settings of beginning industrial evolution, the abuses to the working class, becomes a reality yet again.
If you switch the position of the poor labourer in say China, etc with poor people in England several centuries ago, displacing workers and worker’s power in the major cities what you have is reversion to the extreme forms of worker abuse that fomented rebellion in many European capitals, a near miss for the English upper class.
I wonder what bodes for the future. Will there be no rebellion from the growing nations of the world, nor from the rich world? Or will those of the rich world decide to move their purchasing online, perhaps increasing entrepreneurial endeavours as smaller businesses. Perhaps we will build less, sell and buy used more, I dread the growth of contractual services into our lives, thus taking away ownership of our property. Essentially more of what you “own” will belong to formal associations, in fact much of what most people “own” is actually owned by a major business-your house & property, car, cell phone, furniture, appliances, good name (ie:credit rating), et al.
We are more and more now losing the ownership of our world in order to acquire more things, which really aren’t our own. The thing is, when they become ours, they are either dead to use, require major repair (houses are built horribly these days), or are so out of functional date that it makes more sense to go back into a contract.
It would be much different if in supporting these business financially,they would actually give something back or contribute to scientific progress, but I don’t really believe that multi touch screens and texting tweens represents a great leap forward in any aspect of human progress.
Or thinking on this, could this be a new way to manipulate the populace into supporting technological development merely by enshrouding new technologies within shiny new user interfaces? I firmly believe that if society can figure out a way to use the human instinct to acquire junk,to finance great endeavours,then who knows what could be accomplished in the future. As an example, you give people placebo type drugs to help with slight ailments, thus using the profits of such “wonder drugs” to focus on the task at hand of creating cures and vaccines. As such great achievements as a cure for cancer may be, they still require far more resources than what “charitable” humans would ever donate on their own.
So if you want to cure cancer, figure out a way to banish acne faster, and use the billions earned there to fund your real research; I believe this was the real reason behind creating viagara, men need boners, but they do not (subconsciously) care about AIDS victims, because a cure would not help that normal, bonerless man. So give them a boner, and they will help cure AIDS.
