#commerialism

I've spent this week entirely at home, I've become several shades lighter due to the lack of contact with sunlight and perhaps if possible... gone quite more socially awkward. But hey, I haven't been obligated to wash the dishes for the past week due to "studying". But now now, what this tangent was meant to be centered upon was the most thrilling documentary I watched on day time TV  This is not laced with sarcasm!

Its called "The Light Bulb Conspiracy" and it centers upon the fact that engineers actually design their products to fail! Shocking ain't it! Now I'm not talking about building engineers... if their products failed... well I would hate to be them (though there is a guy on the news lately who faked his qualifications and has built several building which may be deemed as dangerous.. ah tangent.. getting on track)

But yes this program went into detail how engineers of TV's, refrigerators, printers, are instructed to plan obsolescence into their products (which is the deliberate shortening of the product life span) so that the companies may have a guarantee consumer demand. An example that was shown was how a printer has a chip installed in it that will count the number of pages that is printed and when that number has been reached, the printer is programmed to shut down!!! (imagine how long your printer would last if that chip were taken out!)

This is extremely wasteful of the limited resources. Apparently in the past the engineers did manufacture items designed for the long term use. In fact they did such a good job, jobs were lost because no one needed to buy anything new since the item was so efficient.