I'm not buying into all this pessimism. They used to make heaps of highly lethal crap compared to what's sold today. Things we would take one look at today and scoff at how it's a blatantly bad idea. We just romanticise and get fooled by survivorship bias. A lot of things are a lot cheaper than ever and also many times more reliable.
My cynicism has nothing to do with survivorship bias; it has everything to do with the sickening manner in which the corporate mindset has infiltrated our everyday lives. We used to understand on a visceral level the monster that corporations are; an artificial construct designed to do one thing: accumulate money unto itself with no regard for the consequences. The very nature of the Articles of Incorporation makes this inevitable; they are designed to insulate those at the helm from any personal liability for the decisions they make.
We understood this, and we were ever-vigilant, but we tolerated corporations as a "necessary evil" because of their role as an employment engine in our economy. The way things are now, they have by their very nature become an unemployment engine; mindlessly seeking the cheapest labor cost at all cost, whether those doing the work are competent or not, and expecting one person to do 3 people's job at pretty much every level below senior management. They are now no longer "necessary"; only the evil remains.
You're wrong about "how much cleaner" our production process are. I've worked in some of the US plastic manufacturing plants that still exist; in fact, I'm surrounded by them here in Houston. They're not any cleaner; we just don't hear about the accidents because they own the media and the general public doesn't know the true level to which they are poisoning the planet with every product we take for granted because they own the people who are supposed to be protecting us from their toxic waste. It is much cheaper to pay the token fines that they lobby (read: legally bribe public officials) to lower numbers year after year than it is to clean up their manufacturing processes. They only want rules so they can break them.
So no, I'm sorry; it is not my imagination. The corporate model is that of a virus; it consumes its environment with no regard to the consequence, seeking only profit and refusing to pay the cost of what it profits from, even though that is ultimately us and our children. If we don't abolish them, they will be the end of us.
The real terror is this; we in America have been here before. 100 years ago almost to the day we faced this very same existential crisis; the players were even mostly the same few dozen families. It wasn't until they'd squeezed every drop of profit from the populace, plunging us into the Great Depression, that they lost their stranglehold on our government... no money to steal from the common folk means no money to bribe government with.
The big difference now though is numbers; there are exponentially more of us here now than were then and our once-great reserve of natural resources has been plundered to a fraction of what we still had back then. When the next Great Depression hits us it will be tenfold, a hundredfold as horrifying as what my grandparents lived through. And it's not a matter of IF; it's a matter of WHEN.
So yeah; in the midst of all this, it's really not a surprise that manufacturers have abandoned "Quality For its own sake". It is not in their best interest; in fact, it would hurt turnover, which is bad for their profit margin.
And that, of course, is all that REALLY matters.
mnem
Time is your most precious resource; the one thing money cannot buy. Live accordingly.
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