Drove by an old powerhouse the other day. It had been converted into a retail mall because it was a good sized powerhouse despite the relatively small size of the river–enormous compared to the two little hydroelectric powerhouses I own. It got me thinking about the pace of technological change. At some point in history it made sense, from a business perspective, to build a very large and sturdy powerhouse on a relatively small river, and this was true all over the country wherever people were harnessing the power of rivers. Most of these powerhouses, despite their hazardous siting in a floodplain, were built to stand for generations, even centuries, because the value of that energy source was deemed to be so permanent. Technological change in the form of cheap fossil fuels overtook the old powerhouses and now some of them have been converted to other uses, their attractive and industrial elegance repurposed. These days technology changes so rapidly that no one making a business calculation has any reason to think that what they build will last a generation much less multiple generations. And at the same time, one of the undying truisms about business is that business likes predictability. What has it done to businesses and the mentality of business people where nothing is permanent or worth building for the next generation?