Hey TS:
Have you noticed trends like this? I went into a Best Buy this holiday season and I saw a nice little inkjet printer for less than $10!! Wow, I thought. That's a twentieth of what I would/could have paid a year or so earlier for comparable technology. Neato!
As I checked out a little more, I learned that the ink refills were more than $40 and would last for only a couple of reams of paper. So owning one of these beasts meant that my upfront costs were spectacularly low, but the ongoing care and feeding costs were much higher. (I guess I should have bought 20 of the printers and scavenged the ink cartridges...another story) The manufacturers were protecting their investment.
How about this: the new Napster compares $10,000 to have a new ipod full of songs to $15 for a flash mp3 gadget with the same quantity of music. How can they do it? Well, it turns out you only rent the music, and the $15 is an ongoing monthly subscription fee. You're not buying the music, just paying to listen to it, certainly a different spin on the conventional thoughts about portable music.
These are just two examples where a company takes an idea for a product or service and ac-sen-chu-ates the positive and eliminates (rather, hides in plain sight) the negative. You want color print? Buy me. You want to roll with the Rolling Stones? Buy me. In both cases the real cost comes later. Yah, I know, caveat emptor. Fine, point taken. But these are well established business models, for things that are clearly discretionary. But things like soybeans and cotton do not fall into such categories.
When a company makes the investment,
major investment, in a product technology like GM crops, it has a corporate imperative to seek a return on that investment. When that imperative is obscured and ingnored by the glare and blare of the front-end benefit, (70% increase in crop yields, 20,000 songs for $15, etc) I see a conflict coming,
this kind of conflict. And
this and
this and
this.
I tried not to compare this to a drug dealer and have conceded to my baser instincts. "Hey man, first taste is free!" Just today I saw an ad for "Bad Credit Refinancing of Second Mortgages--4 offers in 60 seconds". What about America's long term (no end in sight) petro-chemical dependency issues? Don't get me started on Global Warming... This whole behavior of low cost, low pain right now -- high cost, high pain later is pervasive and NOT in our long term best interest.
I do not want to curse our future generations with the prospect of being enslaved to the corporations that could/should/would withhold their daily bread. That is Not Right.
Don't misunderstand me, I am no luddite (although I have on sunny summer days been inexplicably unable to find batteries for the kid's GameBoy or the PS/2's power adapter...) There are real, tangible, desirable benefits to most technological advances. Unsurprisingly, that's why they call it Progress. But to march onward without consideration of what lies ahead is not progress, it's just mileage. To discard inconvenient data, to ignore context and disregard consequences while pressing the technical accelerator to the marketing metal is like riding along with Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman. You
might not crash and burn right away, you will need clean drawers right away, but you've got to stop and let someone who can see take over the driver's seat if you want to get safely to your destination.