The Concrete Club.

About 50 years ago, when I left the stalag my parents called home for points south, then college, I was all alone in the big city.

Worse than all alone, I quickly lost a filling.

I needed a dentist in a hurry.

I had no idea how to find one, so I went to the yellow pages. And I found one not far from my dorm room with the last name of Tannenbaum. That method of finding someone probably makes at least as much sense as looking at someone's reviews on whatever platform they choose. 

In any event, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, turned out to be fine. He did the job. And I paid my bill. That was that, but as I was leaving his office, Dr. Tannenbaum, DDS, said something to me.

"Floss," he instructed. "You should really floss everyday." 

Floss in those days was about as unheard of as eating raw fish. Why?

But on my way back to my dorm room, I stopped in a drug store (there were no big drug store chains in Manhattan at that time) and I bought, I suppose for about 99-cents a small plastic container of 30-yards of waxed dental floss. Mint.

I've always had a weakness for mint.

In the roughly 18,000 days since I started flossing (I've seldom missed a night) I've probably bought 300 containers of floss. Not one of those containers has lasted to the end of the floss. Something always breaks. Either the floss, or the container, or both.

I'm rounding into a point.

If the collective genius of the world can't make a floss container that works, how can anyone possibly think we can make anything that works.

Every agency these days seems to have more UI or UX or USuck people than you can shake an unemployment check at. Yet every e-commerce site sucks. Confusing. You can't go backward. You can't correct a mistake. And you can't find anything. You certainly can't find anything twice.

Of course, search, no matter what mechanism you're searching from, google or amazon, is now a land grab. Your search terms have very little to do with your search results. Search has no causality; it's been sold to the highest bidder.

If you search for "best pastrami" in the little gingham town I'm currently housed in, you get a Chinese noodle place and a curry restaurant. 

Search is equal to the promise of precision bombing. There's more collateral damage than real targeting. They just want you to think it works.

When I was a kid, I remember driving into the city with my mother. Even more chilling than that was hearing on the car-radio that the mafia had so taken over New York's construction industry that the cement in our roadways and our bridges was defective. It was too sandy and would soon crumble.

And it's been crumbling ever since.

This is another of my all-too-regular "O tempore, o mores" posts. Commentary on the way things are.

But the world has been turned over to a higher and deeper level of malign corruption than ever before, and because of the technological sophistication and spread of that corruption its impact is greater than crumbling roadways.

Everything is for sale. 

And ad agencies, rather than telling their clients people are getting pissed at being strip-mined, are complicit. I remember back in 2015 I said that IBM should not retarget people. I was rebuffed by someone telling me that retargeting yielded a seven-percent "lift."

(So, if you have a click through rate of 1.5-percent, on 10,000 impressions, you'll have 150 clicks. If retargeting, aka stalking people, lifts that by seven-percent, you'll see 160.5 clicks per 10,000 impressions. That is deemed a worthwhile expenditure.)

Somehow as an industry, we no longer chastise clients for bad behavior. It's the acceptable norm to buy valentine's chocolates for $22 and get three emails/week for the rest of creation.

There's no avoiding this filth.

Corruption.

Dirt.

You're being butchered by the highest and most-corrupt bidder.

Everything is crumbling.

Everywhere.