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In a World Where Profit and Shareholder Value Reign, Everyone Loses
The tyranny of profit costs lives and destroys people’s wellbeing
We have lost the ability to build products that last a lifetime. Everything we buy has become short-lived. Here, one minute, in a landfill the next.
Working in the tech industry, with its obsession with finding the “next big thing” to sell and then throw away, I wonder why we have lost the skill (or is it the will?) to build things that last.
Things that we can cherish, keep, and pass on to the next generation.
Things fall apart?
Millennia ago, humans with less sophisticated tools than our modern machines could create things we can still see and experience today.
Buildings were built for eternity. People drove one car their entire life. Goods and clothes were produced to last for years.
In my country, you can stay in inns built hundreds of years ago with walls that are more than a meter thick. The furniture in some of these places has survived centuries.
Not long ago, ordinary people owned three or four sets of clothes for each season, a change of clothes for every day, and a “good” one for church and festivities.