@Rob Y, you speak out of sentiment for old good times. In IT, the "business" is primarily the development (e.g. e-store) and only in some 20-30% it's the actual application area like banking, clothes store or manufacturing. Also, the pre-agile development style (12 mos. - requirement collection, another 12 mos. - development and finally realization that business had changed a lot over these two years) has its problems. The current model of shorter cycles (like 2-3 mos.) I'd much more effective. Even if it's not called agile. Still, I do agree with you @Rob Y that the drive to develop for cheap and for yesterday is not leading to quality and maintainability. However, the 5 years of life for a system is a lot. You need to rewrite it anyway, hopefully by the team that is familiar with the previous generation of the system, at least party of that old team. Your new system gains from the lessons learned and is more nature. You should do this even, if the business doesn't force you to.

I don't think it is true that technological progress ever reduced the number of jobs. I guess, except when the slaves were not needed anymore to power the oars when the engines took over their role to pull ships. To me, it seems that progress requires a change in qualifications rather then making people not needed. Look at the number of people needed (and that number growing quickly) to design, program and maintain the smart devices of today (fridges, washing machines, etc). In Poland, the undestanding is that 30% of the IT jobs are vacant because of not enough people ready to take them despite the sallaries in IT being well above the median sallary. I wonder what is this number for US. It's true that people already having a job, may need to gain new qualifications. But this happens over time with jobs unrelated to the technological progress just as well. See, how much fewer people with degree in biology, history or georaphy are hired now than they used to be? Migration yes. Jobs going away - I don't think so.

Your approach is self deluding. Not much different than burrying a dead mouse or a dead cat in your garden. And then the next owner of the property has a nice surprise. Only the surprise is many orders of magnitude larger. Unless you shoot the waste into a star (and do it safely), there is no safe place for it. OK, you could say I exaggerate. Well, not really. How do you know a place safe today, is still safe in 50 years? And if someone decides to build a space terminal like X-Space build one recently in a desolate area, someone not knowing that 100 years earlier some cosmic jerks burried highly radioactive wastes there?

...than we're using now. Examples? Oregon, US is inhabited by about 4-5 million people on the area of 80% of the area of Poland that has over 38 million people, and still Poland is not really densely populated. We're learning as a hummanity how to find them all the time. We get scared and indoctrinated so easily...