The Titanic owners thought that marketing was all that was needed. If you picked out a feature of the design and said that it made the ship virtually unsinkable, then the job was done. But the job was the same job that the fair-ground carny does.
Other facts were ignored. Plus the steel used was not of merchantable quality. It was flimsy and inferior. Such an approach is not to do with honesty and integrity. It is to do with making the customers happy UNTIL the test of the con trick brings the dawn of reality.
Privatized, and almost unregulated, manufacturing and service industry of the late twentieth century is the same deal. And, guess what? The merchantable quality of members of parliament, and of local council officials is equally flawed.
The so called surf reef by Boscombe Pier was never going to work in sheltered waters of the English Channel, and on top of that Poole Bay. But £3 million was paid to the carnies. They have just tootled off back to New Zealand, saying that the weather makes it impossible, until next summer, to repair the bags of sand of which the worthless device is comprised.
It is pointless my repeating here the exact comments of the pro and the con this project. It can all be read via the Daily Echo link on the Sumpnado Sidebar under Bournemouth links. The ugly device is garbage in the sea. Its indirect effect of promoting development of the nearby seafront facilities is no more than a part-success. Hardly any of the units (which are merely storage lockers lacking any services) have been sold.
BIG ISSUE was 20 years old a couple of weeks ago. It is very difficult to wrap my brain around the fact that it is two decades since I noticed noticed a young man selling the mag at the north-east corner of the intersection of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, in London, near the steps down to the tube.
I am bitterly disappointed that NHK (TV news from Japan in English) has gone HD without a plain version remaining on the Eurobird (including Sky) satellite. I valued the NHK coverage of the recent earthquake and tsunami above all other channels.
SF writers of the 1930s and 1940s sometimes supposed a future culture where the term “video” was used rather than the later term television. So I loved it when the word video was used in the record “Video Killed The Radio Star”. Of course, the word video has still come to mean, in the minds of later generations, a moving picture coupled with a record, aka song.
I had no idea, prior to Star Wars, that SF could become (and it DID become) the MAIN GAME in fiction feature movies.
Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not [necessarily] an honest man. This quotation is from Richard Whately 1787-1863. He was an English philosopher and sky guy fan who became Archbishop of Dublin in 1831.
Similarly, profit potential makes manufacturing and service industry attractive to people with capital to invest, but the capitalist who values maximizing profit as the most important goal is not a worthy man. He is a vile and vulgar creature who should be awarded zero esteem from any gentleman or lady of true quality.
As it happens, even those of us low quality, but a modicum of clear visions, like me, can see enough to despise the and detest the loathsome legalized mega-spivs putting out fancy fakery and glossy garbage, without honorable substance.
Sumpnado Shadow 