Money is fundamentally a representation of the hours of people. When people give you money, they give you their hours. Sometimes they do this directly by exchanging their work hours in the form of spending money and sometimes they do this by giving you their hours directly which you then let others use, basically showing them ads. Spending money is basically therefore spending hours. But there are market anomalies, some of which come from us representing these hours with pieces of paper (which the government is free to print more of). These market anomalies happen when the person spending the hours is not the person whose hours they are. One obvious example is government spending. The government spends hours of other people by taking them through taxation and printing more money. Taxation takes a percentage of people's hours. One point to note here is that corporate tax is a misnomer. Companies don't create hours. The hours that companies are paying as tax actually come from the customers of those companies. We sometimes see people mistakenly say that companies should be taxed more while individuals should be taxed less but the fact is that it's the same thing. Individuals are the ones actually bearing that tax. A corporation is a fictional arrangement. It has no hours of its own other than the hours it gets from the customers. The more hours a government takes, the more hours the corporation needs to extract from its customers. And this extraction is unavoidable unlike one that the company does for itself. A private company that tries to extract too many hours for itself will go extinct over the long term because it will be replaced by newer companies who provide the same value by extracting fewer hours from customers. This is the benefit of the free market. Whatever a private company does, in the long term the customer gets lower prices. But this does not happen when these hours are extracted as a tax by the government. Increasing corporate tax ratio by the government means things become more expensive for the people and the customers are the ones worse off in the long term and not corporations. This is why government spending on anything other than infrastructure is not a great expenditure. Because we represent the hours worked with money, we sometimes forget that money is a means to an end. And sometimes people will be in a position to pay us to do things like attending meetings that no one wants to pay for but because it is a market anomaly where the boss that did not build the product that the customers gave their hours for but is part of a group that made that thing and is now in a position to pay you with the customer's hours. This is something I try to take into account when I'm working on something to determine what to do and what not to do. But these market anomalies are usually short term. A company where people spend their customer's hours on things that don't matter to customers will go bust in the long term and will be replaced by smarter companies. And it's not just bosses and meetings. Everything that starts to focus on the means as ends in itself is an anomaly that goes bust in the long term. An example of this is people who start obsessing over UI or UX of a product as an end itself at the cost of working on improving the value that the users want which is usually part of the PMF of that product. In product, people start obsessing over things like estimation meetings, story points, excessively long PRDs that actually add negative value for the customer by slowing down all development. This only happens because people are either temporarily in control of customer's hours or hours that were given to them by an investor. But these companies also go bust in the the long term. This anomaly also sometimes shows up in situations where you can make money from something that customers get no value from at all. An example is a customer paying for something like a gym membership but not using the gym. You can make good money by convincing customers to pay you on New Year's Eve for the entire next year knowing that customers won't actually be able to get any value because they'll themselves be unable to go to the gym. Someone I was working with once said "Our customers are going to churn before they get the value from our product but it won't matter because they would've already paid us" and I can honestly say that I have never been more tempted to punch someone in the face. It finally brings us to the question that if all of this is a means to an end then what is the end? And the answer to that is to make something people want. You'll know whether they want it by how eager they are to give you their own hours.