Yes, corporations can get out of hand, but much of what one instinctively feels going on isn't the case. For instance, the feeling that airline safety is being compromised by corporate greed. You'd sure think so, but the MIT News, August 7, 2024 says not only is that not true, but for essentially my entire life, airline flight has grown exponentially safer, i.e., it becomes 1/2 as dangerous every ten years. It's actually the opposite--commercial flight was twice as risky in 2014 as it is now. Likewise your husband's intuition about old equipment. Perhaps it's true of a few things, but the reason that repair shops have essentially vanished from the earth is that modern manufacturing produces goods of such quality that it doesn't make sense to engineer them for repair. To make them repairable would cost so much that it would dwarf the overall cost of simply recycling them. In 1970, a Buick that had 80,000 miles on it, and was still running, was something to brag about. Today, cars with 300,000 miles are unremarkable. Given all the years it takes to put those miles on a car, who knows how far a car built today will run? It will take a decade to even find out. Look at the computer you are typing on. It's so reliable that its physical life expectancy is longer than generations of progress in both hardware and software. It would make no logical sense to try to engineer it to last even longer, because the power of machines is growing (again) exponentially. In ten years, machines typically become app 32x as powerful!