I will spare you the details, but years ago a friend and I considered starting a company that engaged in, shall we say, less than savory sales techniques and approaches.

These days what we were planning to do back then seems tame, anodyne and not all fraudulent since the economy itself has largely moved into full-on scam territory. Now absolutely horrible rackets and ripoffs are the accepted way to do things and people cannot even imagine anything else — so much so that what we had planned to do seems positively beneficent in comparison.

This is a shift that has occurred over 25 years or so. Hard to believe when you think about it and how quickly people accept the “inevitable” that was very different not all that far in the past.