Now more than ever, what is treasure today is likely to be dross tomorrow.
Seemingly overnight, Amazon turned those big bookstore powerhouse assets into anchors of lead and dross.
As Mr Anderson's book acknowledges, there is an awful lot of dross in the tail.
Inevitably, there is a lot of dross, but there are gems too which can be downloaded free.
So turgid dross is great, because it offers the same sort of resistance as wading hip-deep through molasses?
Many are dross, but a thriving industry can afford to experiment and a few are real artistic triumphs.
But there's something else going on too: a burning away of dross in our personal and working lives.
Lawyers try to sift through all this dross in search of the smoking gun that can determine the outcome of a case.
As you find when trying to take a really good photo, in trying to crack wise the ratio of dross to gold is really high.
It really does seem to me that adopting this system for patents would clear a lot of the dross out of the US legal system.
FORBES: The Shield Act Tries To Kill The Patent Trolls. But Does It Go Far Enough?
When we do visit a sterile movie set, it is as part of the storyline - to watch local moguls churning out the same old dross.
He used his deep knowledge of complex financial instruments he was part of a group at the bank that pioneered credit derivatives to steer the investment bank away from the mortgage-backed dross that destroyed others' balance-sheets.
In 1986 Mr Hindery went to work for the Chronicle Publishing Company, a San Francisco newspaper-owner that, like many old-fashioned publishers, had made some useful acquisitions but could not separate the gold from the dross.
His reputation was forged in the refiner's fire of Sept. 11, which burned away the dross of what had been a successful but contentious two terms as New York City's mayor, a guy who reduced crime, yet picked fights with squeegee men and jaywalkers.
FORBES: As a businessman, he's been mixing with a sketchier crowd.
But Big Data can also be an enormous waste of time and money if that mountain of raw data consists of only dross, or the only patterns that emerge from all of your analysis are those you could have discovered with a couple hours of simple observation.
FORBES: Do you really want to get aboard the Big Data train?
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