[nicoco]

>None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us.

I have recently been given a $2500 toy by $EMPLOYER$ and I still don't need it.

Personal anecdote aside, is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?

[kibwen]

> is this post seriously advocating for creating needs from scratch?

What do you think the vast majority of marketing and advertisement is concerned with? Using psychological manipulation to trick people into believing that they're missing out on something and then selling them a solution to the fabricated need is par for the course. The perverse monetary incentives create an inevitable race to the bottom where human desire itself is manipulated in order to increase corporate profit.

[mikkergp]

I do wonder how "needing things" has changed personal finance. This is obviously alot more complicated then I'm going to describe here, but there's the common trope of "don't eat that Avacado toast and buy an iphone and maybe you could afford a house." And this is obviously laughable given the rise in home prices, but at the same time, I think it gets at a certain idea that there are so many more expenses today than you had in our grandparents day.

Also, I think it's more vogue in modern times to charge for things that used to be free. My friends just went camping and it was $40 a night. What was that cost in the 1920's and how has that changed as a percentage of income over time.

[balsam]

“None of us knew that we needed sexual intimacy until we s-tumbled into porn.”

[zelphirkalt]

Let me translate that: "None of us knew that we needed privacy until it was taken away from us by Steve's devices, Facebook, Google and others."

[PeterisP]

And now this can be a new profitable market to sell some privacy back to you!

[eagleal]

Wouldn't that make this market zero-sum?

[waynesonfire]

Meh, I don't buy it either. Why would anyone ask me what features a nuclear power plant should have?

The only frame of reference that I can speak to is I'd like cheap, safe, and clean electricity.

If I were a nuclear engineer I'd have more opinions about what could be done to make it cheaper, safer, and cleaner.