I encountered more evidence of humanity, or at least Texas state legislators, jumping the shark this week: a state law making it illegal for construction workers to have mandated water breaks, negating municipal laws requiring such breaks. Why? Because such laws are anti-business. This is in the summer, in a hot state, targeting a trade in which 12-hour days are common, not that anyone doing manual labor in 120 degree heat for only eight hours shouldn’t drink water. Iron workers on NPR, doubtless coached by freaks eager to end business as we currently suffer from it–no, not that, anything but that!–claim they have to watch each other for evidence of dehydration, such as not sweating.

I have no commentary on this; I am….scriptless? Miggy, a character in James McBride’s new novel The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, may offer some insight into the source of my silent despair: Their illness is honesty, for they live in a world of lies, ruled by those who surrendered all the good things that God gived them for money, living on stolen land.

On a lighter note, though still in the approaching-armageddon category, are notes from a New Yorker article about returning items, both to stores and online. Basically this article says that the practice is common and that most of this stuff was thrown away until recently. The clothes and other cheap returns are still thrown away, but an industry has grown up around refurbishing and reselling the commonly returned higher-end items.

Vacuum cleaners are returned when their bags are full–I mean, it was working and it stopped, right? Pressure cleaners, the second most popular suburban power tool after the chain saw, are returned because you have to connect them to a water source before you turn them on to avoid burning out the motor–I mean, it never worked, right? Personal printers are returned because a lot of us struggle with connecting things to wifi; resold with printer cables, return count plummets–I mean, if Mammon meant for it to have a cable, it would have come with one, right?

Full disclosure: My husband and I, holders of four technical degrees between us, are currently managing without a printer due to wifi connectivity issues. We own a cable but are not ready to stoop.

Industry goes to “stoop” quickly of course, so many of these items are constructed in hard-to-repair ways, such as using glue in place of screws. Consumers are hardly standing erect though; in addition to the dumb-friend returns mentioned above, intentional use-once-and-return is common. An amazing number of artificial Christmas trees become defective in January. I’ll have a slice of landfill with a side of fossil fuel, please.

Fifty MBAs at a Georgia Tech seminar on the growing returnables market were asked if they would purchase a high-end computer for the same price as their current one that was 50% lighter, 50% more durable, with 50% more memory and a 50% faster processor, but non-returnable. Zero were interested.

I think I see a stock play here. I just hope it has time to pay off before the Doomsday Clock strikes.