Eccentric Flower:199812/gas drugs lodging this exit
From Eccentric Flower
«December 1998 «Eccentric Flower
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two twelve eleven gas drugs lodging this exit After muttering about Mobil and Exxon in the business section for several days, the Globe finally moved it to the front page today. Whoop-de-do. You may wonder why I'm so concerned about AOL and Netscape but could care less about the potential creation of the largest corporate entity on the planet. Here's why: 1. It's not the late 30's anymore. 2. John Rockefeller, an all-time finisher on my list of Top Ten Evil Magnates (you'll know how bad this list is when I tell you that Bill Gates is not on it - yet) is long dead. 3. The merged entity (let's call it Bilxon) will not have anywhere near the dominance of the entire American petroleum market that Standard Oil did. 4. So they get together and squeeze up gas prices unfairly. Big deal. Crude prices are in the cellar right now. When gas gets cheap, people forget it's a non-renewable. They go out and buy lots of SUVs (the most useless, wasteful, ego-gratifying vehicles known, unless you count those stretch limos, which probably get better mileage) and take needless car trips and so on. If I were ruling the world (and aren't you glad I'm not? Me too) gas would be heavily surcharged, you would take mass transportation to work, because it would be there to take and would be safe and reliable, and if you had a car at all you'd only use it to schlep groceries and visit the relatives in Weehawken every year. Oh, and we'd all live in castles made of spun sugar and fairy cake. - - - Two new candidates for the Thinking Aloud ring have been contacted. Stay tuned for details. Thanks to everyone who sent their favorites! - - - Been thinking about drugs again. Partially this is because I've been sick, of course. One of my favorite Stay Tuned pieces was about cold medicines. All cold medicines are made of the same four or five basic drugs, in a mix-and-match sort of system where the packaging deliberately obscures what you're getting and how much of it. Unless you read and compare the backs of the packages, and arm yourself with a little advance knowledge of the chemicals involved (i.e. which drugs are secretly stimulants, and therefore allow packagers to say "non-drowsy formula" on the package, et cetera et cetera) you're probably getting swindled a little bit on cold medicines. If you don't buy generics (they all use Exactly The Same Drugs) then you're definitely getting swindled. I didn't get a lot of comment on that essay, back when, and it was one of the few times when silence has really disappointed me. I'd love to write a book about the kinds of things Stay Tuned was supposed to be about - the many ways that marketers try to deceive you, and how to be a smarter consumer ... but here's the problem: By definition, I am preaching to the choir. In the same way that a person who read and loved Stay Tuned was probably already the kind of person who looked at the back of drug packages, a person who'd buy a smart-consumer book is the kind of person who is least likely to need the advice. That's rather discouraging. So I don't preach anymore - I just take notes quietly for myself, and vent here every now and again. © columbine |
