76. Services

(knowledgeable value-added manipulation/treatment of materials: for example, wine is hardly only grapes, it is the vintner's art that makes the wine; there is an art in the many steps of preparing coffee or tea for consumption--it's not raw coffee or tea; can you make your own paper or bookbindings? mine and refine your own metals?; there's a dangerously fine line between delicious alcohol and a mix that lees you blind or dead)


This is another social commodity category of use that is different than mere 'energy/labor', as it goes toward specific uses of selling an experience or expertise instead of selling a commodity, per se, or at least a particularly treated commodity experience.

I'm just attempting to be accurate and refine the utility categories of uses of human commodities--in how they are socially different.

I originally was thinking about merely sexual services (like prostitution (in its worst cases a form of female/male slavery) as well as inert sexual toys) in competition with each other in the same category here.

However, it occurred to me that a number of other services are equally specialized and experiential/expertise driven forms of commodities (and equally subject to computerization or mechanization to demote knowledgeable labor competition in the category) so it was hardly a general issue of sexual services that could be justified in a category by itself, since there are a number of services.

It's still somewhat unsatisfactory to me to lump all services into a singular category of 'services' because it goes against one principle of the categories themselves: do they compete with each other for the same position? On the one hand, there are so many kinds of services that they hardly compete with each other in the same category. On the other hand, I suppose they could compete in many ways though--in terms of prioritization expenses of the purchaser.

Therefore, the general category of 'services' are included. It would be a mistake to ignore a category of expertise, selling general knowledge expertise and handling 'refinement' in human history. Issues of knowledge and technique are general to any service instead of 'services' meaning only one service.

The theme here is the selling of knowledge, experience, and expertise in a hired performance or commodity creation.