Image is everything right? Google has been the golden boy for a few years now, but the dogs were ready to jump on any scent of weakness. When analysts hinted that the souring economy might make Google slip, their stock plummeted for the first time since their great incline.

It's all turned out to be nonsense, hasn't it? Google's Q1 2008 profit report is in a word, exceptional.

This is an example that makes me feel our world has gone insane, that our economy and day-to-day well-being is based upon stock markets, corporate culture and trademark / logo appeal that are all just one step away from disfavour from the mob. It's not enough these days to be an upstanding business that maintains healthy sales and employs a solid workforce: Each and every quarter report must show leaps above the last, else stock tumbles.

Does anyone else not see this as insane and unsustainable? It's inflation at every step of the way, any hint of a ceiling = dropped stock.

It's not like our markets are filled with savvy economic engineers, instead it's become a culture-wide gambling addiction. This is the supposed great free market. And it has very real-world consequences. We even gamble on the very land that we live on.

We've created a very strange culture for ourselves, where the dictators are some sort of wagering mob playing with numbers that I'm more and more convinced they don't truly understand. Sure, they see and craft arcane patterns, but they clearly don't relate to reality, it's far more about perception.

I don't mean to pick on Google in particular, if anything they represent a possible change in business, where the directors of a company hold to values above the dictation of shareholder value. Or at least I hope so.

Yeah, I know... I'm in a heavy-handed mood.