[sourcepluck]

Excellent, agreed. Nothing is sacred except "the grind", it appears, yes. No value exists outside viewcount, or listenercount, or whatever metric the media uses.

Your comment reminds me of something I read yesterday, an allusion that mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota made to what he called "Kultur", in this remarkable interview https://sgp.fas.org/othergov/doe/lanl/pubs/00326965.pdf. The context is different, but I think your usage is in line with his in the interview.

[tptacek]

You can write as many paragraphs of this stuff as you like but I don't think that's going to get people to retain long-term 7-8 figure liabilities on their books. If there's even a notion of a system of "noblesse oblige", everybody has been defecting from it except for King.

[sourcepluck]

When you say "everbody", you're referring to a modest percentage of people, and even for those people, it's only true some of the time.

The real world is full of people doing stuff that is not explained whatsoever by notions like increasing profits in account-books.

People do economically disastrous things like have dogs, go on holiday, they get their nails done twice a month, waste half their Sunday doing their Gran's hedges, and etc etc. They have babies, and often someone stays at home with the baby, losing boat loads of money in many cases if you calculate what they could earn if they worked full time and put the child into a cheap daycare.

Not to mention all the hours spent in amateur sports clubs, and ukulele groups, and pipe bands, and sometimes, they even run radio stations, and blogs, and maintain software, and make little robots, just for a laugh.

The notion of everyone going around calculating everything to maximise income all the time is a fairytale certain people tell themselves to convince themselves they're the real mavericks, the hard ones who don't flinch from reality. The motivation for the deception is clear, but unfortunately, it's patently false.