Although I generally think organic is silly, it does have a pretty clear definition. Organic agriculture is the sort of farming done without “chemical” pesticides, antibiotics or fertilizers. In theory and in marketing, it’s all happy plants being fertilized with manure from cows fed those same happy manure-fed plants. In practice, there’s a whole list of “organic” pesticides that aren’t really better for the plants or consumers at all, and in some cases are more indiscriminate and poisonous than the chemical stuff.
Organic food products are just things made from the products of organic agriculture. So organic yogurt would be made from milk from organically raised cows and organically raised fruit. Same for cookies- organically grown wheat, sugar, chocolate, eggs, etc…
In general, it’s chock full of woo and nonsense, and is the kind of thing that well-to-do housewives buy because they’re afraid of “the chemicals” and other similar nonsense.
Not everything about organic farming is bad, but people wind up paying a lot more for organic produce and meat, when health benefits are lacking and organic’s ecological impact can be worse than conventional farming.
“…there are over 20 chemicals commonly used in the growing and processing of organic crops that are approved by the US Organic Standards. And, shockingly, the actual volume usage of pesticides on organic farms is not recorded by the government. Why the government isn’t keeping watch on organic pesticide and fungicide use is a damn good question, especially considering that many organic pesticides that are also used by conventional farmers are used more intensively than synthetic ones due to their lower levels of effectiveness. According to the National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy, the top two organic fungicides, copper and sulfur, were used at a rate of 4 and 34 pounds per acre in 1971 1. In contrast, the synthetic fungicides only required a rate of 1.6 lbs per acre, less than half the amount of the organic alternatives.”
High-end wines. Double-blind taste tests show again and again that people can’t tell the difference between expensive and mid-priced wines (and sometimes cheap ones).
The amount of pesticides have little to do with organic. In fact some non-organic pesticides are better because you don’t need as much. I don’t thing organics is a scam but I don’t think it helps the environment. I wish it did; I consider myself an ardent environmentalist and would love an easy decision like buying organics.
Oh yeah. I worked at a company that was trying to get its ISO9001 certification. Why? Nobody ever said, but it seemed to be very important that we get it. Anyway, from what I could tell, it boiled down to three steps:
State what you are going to do and how you are going to do it.
Document what you determined in step 1.
Follow the instructions in step 2.
And every year or so, the company paid a lot of money for a bunch of “auditors” to come from overseas to make sure that we were doing all three steps. Not whether our products were any good, or worked as promised; just whether we were following the instructions that we ourselves wrote for the products we ourselves made.
Most premium pricing targets emotions, rather than performance. You will very rarely get something ten times as good if you pay ten times as much for an item. There are some major exceptions (Foodstuffs can very easily vary over an order of magnitude) but in general the trade off between quality and performance becomes marginal well before that point.
Insurance, by definition, is more costly than simply having money set aside to accurately gauge risk. Extended Warranties and Service Contracts are particularly wasteful.
Debt Consolidation often consists of nothing more than people preying on unknowing victims and charging fees for things that could be done with intermediate knowledge of financing options.
Casinos are literally bluff and bull feathers; the whole thing is a fantasy front from simply losing money on the installment plan. Now, the low end of Casinos could potentially be a ‘pay to have a good time’, but beyond that, the key concept is illusory winning. And point of fact–people who are actually beating casinos will get thrown out.
But I think the true winner is conspiracy theories for profit, a clique that includes the US President. The great appeal of these theories isn’t the useless and bogus facts, it’s finding large numbers of stupid people who can still afford to pay for electricity, or at least take it out on their credit cards. Homeopathetic medicine, Anti-Vax ‘remedies’ are targets for baseless shilling, a connection that makes crystal clear that ignorance is a virtue because it directly leads to those stupid people buying useless stuff.
Edit: There are a lot of things that people and businesses have to do for social reasons. If your competitors advertise, you need to advertise to maintain the same level of awareness or advertising more can increase your position. This does indeed lead to large numbers of parties throwing money away. If everyone agreed not to care, a lot of effort would be saved. Instead, having an accreditation can give advantages over competitors.
If society decided it was very important to use silver cutlery to carve meats, there would be demand caused by that social pressure, even though this is expensive and completely unnecessary. I’m not sure social pressure on its own makes things bull feathers so much as it’s a keeping up with the Jones’ fallacy.
I assume you’re talking about “life coaches”? I was going to offer “Any product offering whose existence doesn’t make sense” and life coaches certainly fit the description.
IMO, anyone qualified to be a life coach would be successful enough they don’t need to work anymore. They’re not toiling over a website and customers, they’re lying on their sailboat with a margarita.
By the same token, anyone who actually knows how to “get rich quick in the stock market” sure as hell isn’t putting the secret in a mass market book. If such a thing exists, they’re keeping it quiet and reinvesting their returns for their own profit.
No skill, of questionable fame types, like Monica Lewinsky, Kardashians, Ivanka Trump and unending starlets, all…suddenly, and with ZERO qualifications are instantly deemed ‘Designers’ or were integral ‘contributors’ to that perfume/makeup line. Yeah, right.
But the media give them air time, put mics in front of them, lend them credibility, and are complicit in selling billions and billions of such products for these hacks, without shame.
And consumers never seem to get any smarter sadly.
Yeah, in my first job out of college, we were getting ISO9001 certified, and I recall asking what that meant, and got a whole lot of propaganda about quality, etc…
Then after about six months, I asked HOW we actually did that- where were the process improvement experts, where were the time and motion study types, etc…? And I got told that it was essentially Spoons’ 3 steps. To which my 24 year old response was “Ok… what prevents us from documenting a low quality process in steps 1 and 2?”
The 80/20 rule (or something similar) absolutely applies with consumer products. You only get what you pay for up to a point, and then above that, the incremental improvements don’t scale with the amount of money spent.
I think casinos are generally not viewed as ways to make money, except by the very ignorant and/or stupid, or maybe professional gamblers. Most people tend toward the idea of going to a casino for the food, the shows, and to gamble a limited amount of money. The idea that they might win is exciting, but not the actual reason they go.
Perhaps. I would bet a significant percentage of people spend more than they planned. The casinos are run by intelligent and experienced people who are good at offering cheap and desirable incentives to those who pay back more. (I personally do not much enjoy gambling.)
I would include most of the Interior Designer “industry”. I can select and place my furniture without help. Ditto any decorations on the walls.
There might be some part of the field that deals with customer flow and display arrangements for retail stores, but that seems more like industrial design.
Honestly, I’ve always been suspicious of consulting in general. At some companies where I’ve worked, I’ve seen some problems and suggested fixes but was ignored. But then they hire a highly-paid consultant, who advises the same thing, and all of a sudden, the changes are made.
I used to order materials for a plant that made organic fertilizers. If people were aware of just how many ingredients that are OMRI certified (Organic Materials Review Institute) that almost anyone would point to and say, “that is a chemical”, they would quit buying organic produce.
This sulfate of potash is not organic. This other one from the same company is organic. The difference? The company spent the time and money to have the second product OMRI certified. That’s about it.
[quote] For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.
Most are choosing the latter.[/quote]
Most of the plastic you put into your recycle bin, ends up in the landfill.
Sure, and to some people’s eyes, I bet it looks like crud. That’s why some people hire interior decorators/designers- they want someone who supposedly knows what they’re doing to choose all their decorations, furniture, etc… and arrange it just-so, in order to have a space that’s in-style. The trick there is “in-style”- if you don’t care about that, then interior decorators seem up there with telephone sanitizers as epitomes of frivolous jobs.
“Quality” was such a trendy buzzword in the 1990s that it eventually because an industry. I was (still am) in the engineering/R&D world, and everyone at the time was talking about Deming, Juran, the Malcolm Baldrige Award, ISO 9000, SIx Sigma, etc. Every company had their “quality guru” who would roam the halls and babble bullshit buzzwords all day. “Quality” books were required reading, and many engineers were given the title “quality engineer” regardless of what they did. There was a cult following for it, especially among clueless management types, so you didn’t dare criticize it.
It wasn’t just ridiculous… it was, for the most part, a huge waste of time and money. I say “for the most part” because there was a little bit of good that came out of it, and some of those things are still practiced today. But thank goodness the nonsense has mostly subsided…
