And so the world ends. Sadly, I don't think the title was intended ironically.

This kind of destructive local thinking creeps in all over the place. For example, Athabasca University is in financial trouble, so individual departments are being charged with reducing their own costs. Our IT Services department's approach is to remove customizations and custom-built applications that everyone uses, buying in baseline systems to replace them, thus (in theory, not reality) eliminating a large chunk of its support burden. Unfortunately, exactly the same tasks that used to be performed by fast, reliable, error-free machines are now therefore performed by slow, unreliable, mistake-prone human beings instead, at vastly increased cost (millions of dollars) and vastly decreased efficiency. It's killing us, increasing workload while decreasing agency, productivity, creativity, and organizational intelligence. Though only destroying a university rather than the whole world, it's just as dumb as building air conditioners to combat the effects of global warming.