Service is promoted as a virtue by those who are being serviced and those who serve. Look around, and you will see that the service sector is thoroughly dominating. This is a sign that people are so rich that they have nothing better to do than to go around and do things for each other and get paid to do so. To put it more bluntly, convincing someone that they need you or your services is pretty much the only way to make money these days.

This can be done either directly by promoting specialization and professionalism which is a simultaneous promotion of general incompetence either for lack of skill or for lack of time of all other areas, which thus is a brilliantly sneaky way of keeping the middle class consumer on the hook; or it can be done through shoddy products that break in rapid order and need to be replaced—high depreciation costs are essentially a form of service cost as it is a current liability; or it can be done through a combination buy-in by selling cheap assets but tying them to a service plan like the people who are bonded to their phone and cable services.

Yes, with your college education, your career, your 9-5 job, and you various plans and poorly built environment, you, my friend, are caught!

Originally posted 2009-06-22 02:25:37.