Amazement (dopamine rushes) confuses us.
Biologically, we respond to amazement as part of the learning process. But all too often, we receive these dopamine rushes simply as a consequence of the amount of resources and effort someone (or a group) puts into something.
e.g. You can go to Las Vegas, see thousands of people running around topless in gorgeous outfits and be amazed, yet what's the actual value to you?
I see this ALL too often in art. People get "amazed" by things that require a great deal of effort/resources (look how many transistors in this CPU!), but this temporary narcosis blinds us to evaluating /whether it's a good idea/. So many art projects are simply the result of an ordinary person commanding extraordinary resources from a corporate entity to construct a large number of instances of a single, mundane object or a single, large-scale version of the object. In these cases, the art is not in the sculpture, but in the conning to get the resources. I see budding artists respond to this amazement and trying to get huge funding.
Internet bloggers (Cory Doctorow comes to mind) abuse the word "amaze" all the time. I just checked boingboing.net right now and saw amazing used to describe wallpaper (no dude, this is /natural history/ wallpaper).
edit: I guess, I did though.
I can't help to reply to the adwords question - although you can argue that advertising/marketing is soulless, at least it creates real world value. Someone makes a product, someone else buys it. Exchange of goods happens.
Derivatives are uncontrallable in the my humble opinion. Especially if regulated by uber greedy people. And it makes me sad sad when I see the highest skilled people go and put their talent in something that is pretty much useless, apart from making a few, selected people even richer than they are. But I guess, whatever pays the bills.
But that's not why I made my comment. I made my comment, because what I find even more sad, is people going numb to injustice and admiring this situation and the people who are making it possible.
If HFT produces nothing else (and I generally agree with your economic view of it), at least it'll have financed the next generation of low-latency networking gear.
Or maybe you are worried they would buy less? In that case, would the world really be a worse place? People only buying what they need...
What's wrong with the word amazed?
If I said I worked at Google and I continue to be amazed at the tech behind how they served up ads would I still get the same remark from you?
Maybe I could be doing more with my skill? I don't know but I really love the learning curve I'm on working with cutting edge technology and pushing the performance envelope.