There's a separate Veblen positioning, and Apple own it.

Same with personal matchmakers for high net worth individuals. They charge tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They're not necessarily any better at match making. But the users are paying a lot of money to reassure themselves of their superior status. And to filter out some of the more obvious riffraff.

In fact, a huge driver of practical pricing is narcissism. You're either selling it as a service ("luxury branding") or using it as lever to cynically extract money from those you consider inferiors. (Most corporates.)

Or both.

"More for less" and enshittification are both driven by narcissistic greed and devaluation of customers.

Some businesses start out like this. Some start out with good intentions. But generally once you get past a certain size many businesses become a competitive sociopath farm, with more and more sociopathy the higher you go.

Most internal and external interactions becomes an expression of dysfunctional values where the object of the exercise is to assert superior status and power and to deny quality service.

There are very few areas where it's physically possible to live like that.

And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.

At the time, many people. Death stalked the land, children were lucky to reach adulthood, women were lucky to survive childbirth, and almost everyone experienced grief and bereavement.

It's all in his music - the manic passion of trying to master a craft against that background, a burning faith in a better future, against constant reminders of the horrors of the present.

It's not just four part counterpoint. There's a lot more going on.

Max Martin is a stand out talent.

You can take a thousand people and give them baseline technical skills for any medium. If you're lucky a few people out of your thousand will have a special kind of fluency that makes them stand out. from the rest.

Even more rarely you'll get someone who eats the technical skills alive and adds something original and unique which pushes them outside of the usual recycled tropes and cliches.

Martin is somewhere between those two. He's not a genius, but he's a rock solid pop writer, with a unique ear for hooks and drama, and stand-out arrangement skills.

Lisp machines, Transputers, Transmeta, even RISC were all academic-driven bubbles. They were spun out of university research projects. (Transmeta went indirectly via Bell Labs and Sun, but it was still based on academic ideas.)

The culture was nerdy, and the product promises were too abstract to make sense outside of Nerdania.

They were fundamentally different to the dot com bubble, which was hype-driven, back when "You can shop online!" was a novelty.

The current AI bubble is an interesting hybrid. The tech is wobbly research-grade, but it's been hyped by a cut-throat marketing engine aimed at very specific pain points - addictive social contact for younger proles, "auto-marketing team" for marketers, and "cut staffing and make more money" promises for management.