Yet another shipment from Amazon (textbooks this time) has left me one again staring at a long string of bags or air. I've long been fascinated by these things. Not so much that wallet-sized plastic balloons exist, but rather that they are a product, to be branded, marketed, and sold. Someone has gotten rich on a patent for bags of air. A significant group of people down at Sealed Air's Fill-Air™ ("Our Products Protect Your Products") plant are putting their kids through college with the profits on bags of air. Modern science is helping to make better, faster, more efficient machines for the creation of bags of air.

Somehow, this has struck me as even more mind-boggling than the current trend of taking fresh water from the Swiss Alps, bottling it, shipping it, in a boat across the sea, to the United States, then having people pay a premium on it.

We, as culture, are not only selling air and water. Selling air and water isn't really a big deal, I think; a man in the desert will pay well for water; a farmer may buy it in bulk. However, we are also packaging air and water, marketing it, advertising it. We are attempting to achieve product differentiation of our air and water. We are attempting to seize control of the air and water markets from our competitors. We're worried about the amount of self space our air and water gets.

Myself, I'm going to go back to my parents house and start digging. I figure I can be first to market with packaged dirt, and corner it. I'll have to ship it of course. But surely some young California professional will pay to wake up in the morning and walk on 100% Pure East Coast Soil!