Today I invited people to suggest words to Acrossticize, but so far nobody seems to dare enter any suggestions. Never mind, as Facebook passed by my awareness a few times, the word FUNCTIONAL popped up in one of the ads or suggestions it showed, and that same inescapable feeling surfaced: this one would be the next Acrosstic to come forth!
Although the above is true Acrosstic is true for the current world we live in, it need not be: we are conditioned to believe in lack and scarcity, and as such we cannot image products being so well designed they last a lifetime. That is by (badly intended) design: the business world needs us to discard our products, so they can sell us new ones. But it is not impossible to have properly designed customer products: I am still using the set of stainless steel cooking pans my parents bought when they got married. I am now 57 years old, so those pans are probably like 60 years old already, and they look like new!
OK, so this is probably more difficult to achieve for more complex items, but the competitive nature of today's business world has made us go for the cheapest options, even though that is by far not the cheapest option indeed. For instance: rather than scrapping an electronic device because one part of it fails, any somewhat technical engineer will be able to determine which module failed, and thus also which modules are still in working order. Rather than tossing the entire device into the recycling process, such working modules can be used to repair other devices of the same type that just happen to have a different malfunction. All it takes is a network of passionate engineers with a reasonable storage space each, and we could set up a worldwide net of replacement parts...