The Idle Gossip of Future Cobblers

I have just been handed a most peculiar dispatch, supposedly a glimpse into the commercial affairs of the year 2026. If this is the future of American enterprise, I am thoroughly appalled. It speaks of companies with nonsensical names like Rack Room Shoes, Genesco, and Polygiene, prattling on about executive shifts, board updates, and leadership continuity. Not a single mention of a patent. Not a word concerning a new dynamo, a superior filament, or a centralized power network. They speak of retail and footwear as if peddling boots has become the zenith of human ingenuity. What a monumental waste of capital! I have spent ten thousand hours testing fibers to make a bulb burn a fraction of a cent cheaper. I measure a man's worth by the sweat on his brow in the laboratory and the ironclad patents he secures, not by his title on a corporate letterhead. This dispatch reads like the gossiping of idle clerks. If these haberdashers and cobblers of the next century think shifting vice presidents around a mahogany table constitutes innovation, they are ripe for ruin. Give me a workshop, a direct current generator, and a hundred men willing to work through the night, and I will render their entire executive board obsolete. Let them play at governance. I deal in the tangible: copper, glass, carbon, and the almighty dollar earned through practical application. If this H&M or Genesco possesses a machine that stitches leather faster by electric motor, I will either buy the patent or build a better one to crush them. But if their only triumph is a new chief executive, I shall sleep soundly knowing the future is run by paper-pushers, leaving the real conquest of nature to men of machinery.