Adam’s Reviews > Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture > Status Update

The poor treatment of workers abroad translates to poor treatment of workers here.

The watered milk vendor analogy is really interesting and relevant today.

“Creative destruction“ is a popular economic term referring to how capitalism supposedly keeps a zero sum game of industry concentration, for example when manual laborers lose their job jobs to machine machines, machine operators and engineers replace them.

Small profit margins restricts creativity as it forces manufacturers to only make products that can economically compete rather than unique ones.

Nations with unskilled, impoverished citizens will always excel at the game of cheap manufacturing, inherently.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1910 in New York helped kickstart the labor rights movement and develop Unions for manufacturing workers. Unions fr peaked in the early to mid 20th century...

Failures in infrastructure and economic obsession with cheap leads to country’s citizens starving while mass amounts of food are exported. There has been enough food to go around for likely a century now.

Most food goes unchecked by the FDA or USDA meaning you mostly get the Consumer Risk nonconforming food products that are ignored by exporters. Shrimp and pork especially differ from their organic counterparts.

Craftsmanship down, industrialization up!

Rebate redemption rates are on average around 15% lol.

Ikea uses deals with villages near forests for totally legal logging practices for their wood.

The nucleus accumbens is involved in suspense and anticipation for good or bad situations, and the prefrontal cortex more in decision making and rationality, whereas the Insula mainly is activated when feelings regarding fairness come into consideration, especially perceived unfairness. The former being activated meant deal, the latter no deal.

Alfred Hitchcock discussed the idea of suspense being more important...

Big companies invest into neurological studies of human behavior, counting quantities like fractions of a second spent looking at a certain color, etc.

Emotions critically drive decision-making. A study suggests people with significant pre-frontal cortex damage often are utterly incapable of making a decision due to endlessly being able to find a reason to and a reason not to do something. Damn me fr lol.