We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are profitable and useful. People prefer something that's expensive and useful over something that's just expensive. For some reason though it's only the people who are making useless things who are making anything at all. Nobody else tapped into the Cybertruck market segment at all.

I'm not really sure I'm understand what you're trying to say tbh. Though tangentially what even is the Cybertruck market segment to begin with?

On profitable products though; sure as a general concept, but the rate of return, opportunity cost and market competition factor into the profitability equation too. You could go waste your time building a desktop app for a chatgpt clone and make some "profit" in the same time your competitor threw similar resources at making a claude code and that makes 100x your profit. That would mean you actually lost despite the profit. The opportunity cost isn't only in building the wrong thing, but also in the human resources you allocated to the task that deprived other areas. I see no world where the 6 dozen copilots we got from Microsoft have any good ROI beyond diluting a brand and making them more of a laughing stock.

Hell no.

We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are beneficial to society as a whole. Not "profitable." Profit just means more money going from the many to the few. That's what's gotten us into this awful situation.