10.26.2021

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 We continued watching the corporation today, and we dove deeper into how institutionalization has affected the environmental crisis. The first topic we covered was the impact of fines on multi-millionaire companies. It was surprising to see the ineffectiveness of imposing fines on enterprises that already benefit more from maneuvering the penalizable scheme than the loss from compensation itself. By past knowledge, I've understood that fines could be devastating for a company's image as well as financial stability. One way the UN does its peacekeeping is through economic sanctions, so I had assumed that such regulations are effective and harmless physically. However, now that I understand the diminutive damage it has on large companies (and probably likely to be called for crossing lines), I found this method severely useless. No wonder there are reoccurring incidents involving corporations committing detrimental actions towards the environment. This all comes down to the prioritization of profit for corporations. Mr. Paterson pointed out that some have argued that corporations do not need to worry about the environment, as it does not lead to economical gain. But I believed this notion to be absurd because environmental damages may be consequential towards business locations and suits for huge compensations, filed by externalities of the company's crimes. I wonder if courts could up the recompense and personalize for each business case in order to prevent them from pulling the trigger for environmental doom.

Another issue that was new to me was planned obsolescence, where companies deliberately outdated products and review/edit them for maximum profit. An example involved Japanese housing. When I heard that Japanese houses hold up for typically 30 years, I was astonished at how short and halting it was. I remember living in a house during my Ibaraki stay, where I was told that this would only last for 30 years or so, for the purpose of mortgage. Now that I reflect, I've realized that Japanese housing is also a preying business that needs clients.  As such, they pose tactics that could benefit the recurring profit of housing, by inevitably building low-quality houses that could break during that span. I wonder if there are similarities of planned obsolescence for apartments. Currently, I'm living in an apartment and have lived in the building for more than 8 years. According to my parents, this apartment has been existing for more than 40 years or so and seeing as it hadn't turned into rubble, I can tell that planned obsolescence doesn't work similarly for rental spaces. Perhaps as apartment owners need to clean up their rooms every time someone gets evicted or moves out, they may try to keep tenets for longer periods of time, so that any severe marks they make, they could compensate for, therefore lessening the burden of apartment owners. The idea of planned obsolescence was very refreshing for me, as I got to see corporation truths from a new perspective. This lesson truly opened my eyes to the realities of profit-prioritizing businesses, and the intricacies behind them,


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