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Tag: BS
IT WAS ALL BS
Getting beyond the packaging
Getting beyond the packaging (marketing, labels, image)
Slick marketing and branding are in full force these days. But getting beyond the packaging should be in everyone’s best interest.
We’ve noticed this more often as of late. Almost ALL things (food products, gadgets, doohickeys, you name it) have high-end packaging. Well-designed logos and GOBS of “feel good” marketing mumbo jumbo plastered over every product on the shelves.
Maybe it’s time to STOP paying attention to this garbage once and for all. Entirely.
If Your BS Detector Is Not Screaming, It’s Broken
Guest Post by Charles Hugh Smith
Wishing it was true doesn’t make it true–it makes you a chump who fell for the con.
Once upon a time in America, no adult could survive without possessing a finely tuned BS detector. Herman Melville masterfully captured America’s fascination with cons and con artists in his 1857 classic The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in The Con in Confidence (October 4, 2006).
An essential component of the American ethos is: don’t be a chump. Don’t fall for the con. And if you do, it’s your own fault. The Wild West wasn’t just thieves shooting people in the back (your classic “gunfight” in the real West)–it was a simmering stew of con artists, flim-flammers and grifters exploiting the naive, the trusting and the credulous.
We now inhabit a world where virtually everything is a con. That “organic” produce from some other country–did anyone test the soil the produce grew in? It could be loaded with heavy metals and be certified “organic” because no pesticides were used during production. But what about last year? And the year before? What’s in the water used to irrigate the crops?
The employment/unemployment statistics are obviously BS. 93 million people aren’t even counted any more–they’re statistical zombies, no longer among the living workforce. If the unemployment rate were calculated on the number of full-time jobs and the true workforce (everyone ages 18 – 70 that isn’t institutionalized or in prison), the unemployment rate would not be the absurdly delusional 5.6% claimed by the bureaucratic con artists.
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