Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman.

Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.

Chances are, whatever it is won't be found in a regular residential property.

So "the reason it originally exists" and "what breaks if you take it away" aren't necessarily the same thing.

As with, say, digestion, or an major organ like the liver, it's reasonable to think that it does simple things in simple animals, and more complex things in more complex ones.

Take out an animal's liver, it's not one process that stops working, it's dozens. There's one or two that will kill it quicker, so those are the ones it dies of, but artificial livers are hard to build as they implement so many vital processes.

You do at the bottom of unregulated markets. For dishwashers and ovens, safety regs generally impose a high floor on the market. There is no $40 oven, because it's physically impossible to make a safety-compliant oven for $40. If it weren't for market regulation, $40 death-trap ovens would be a thing for sure.

The very cheapest compliant unit isn't _much_ worse than a mid-market unit, it might be a bit flimsier and wear out sooner; high-end luxury units aren't much better than mid-market units - because there's not much innovation driving progress at the top end. AEG and Bosch are still generally solid engineering, but there's not much point in paying more than that unless you like the aesthetics.

Mercedes and BMW - small-volume performance models aside - are like the big fashion brands, Vuitton etc., they're selling the idea of luxury to people who aren't even nouveau-riche, more like borrowing money to cosplay loudly as nouveau-riche. Compare old 1970s Merc convertibles with today's, the modern ones are just kind of ugly, aggressive and sad.

ADAM Audio loudspeakers are pretty good or were last time I bought a pair. They're designed as studio monitors but great for listening too. Perhaps they've gone downhill since being bought by a listed company a few years ago?

In that there are a dozen shades of grey between "fully-automated, no humans assembly line" and "person using only hand tools maintained by hand". Tools _are_ machines, are technology, they've just been around so long we forgot that industrially forged steel needs an industrial steel forge.

Probably the best quality product you'll get is from a person who cares, sourcing materials they care about, working with it using their expertise and discernment, and using the most effective tools to get the job done - most, but not all of which will be power or machine tools.

But the point is that the human needs to direct the machines - sometimes that's just a thinking task, and sometimes it's a bunch more physically hands-on.

Regardless of what underlying trait it's actually measuring, the habituation factory is a big component of its supposed bias - that is, has your background taught you the kind of problem-solving habits that will help you to post the best possible score?

An animal that doesn't have some kind of pair bond or social arrangement, and doesn't raise its young, has a lot less need for some of this emotional hardware than we do.

Whereas K-selected species that raise their kids have broadly the same need for it as humans.

That doesn't categorically mean it evolved with the first pair-bonding K-reproducer, or that birds have parallel-evolved emotional hardware like ours, but there's plenty of behavioural evidence there - the last common ancestor of birds and humans was small-brained and primitive, but investing in individual children probably evolved around the time of amniote eggs, just because they were so much more biologically expensive to produce than amphibian or fish eggs.

Maybe you live somewhere that's possible, or not too far from such a somewhere. Rare to find such places within 50 miles of a big city though, unless you're in Germany and have the autobahn.

I suspect most premium cars get to spend a tiny fraction of their mileage doing the kind of driving where they'd measurably beat a mid-market model.

Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.

Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.

Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.

What fat stores?

Alzheimer's isn't a single-point-of-failure disease, more like a dysregulation of maintenance. So there are lots of things that can tip the odds one way or another, and we may get a lot better at prevention - to the point of reducing incidence maybe five-fold, or delaying its symptomatic onset to beyond the relevant lifespan - but the idea that there might be a single "cure" seems like wishful thinking.

It may also prove to be that, like a spinning-top, once things start to go off-axis it may be very difficult to restore the original stable state, and at most we can just slow it down a bit.

Perhaps more uncomfortable, if most of the effective interventions, risk-reduction-wise, are social/lifestyle related, that has implications for whether people have the agency to access those things.

(Time/energy/facilities/resources for exercise/active lifestyle being an obvious case in point, which is already well known to have a moderate protective effect).

Think of it like brushfire in an ecosystem, or species population imbalances leading to catastrophic breakdown. These are better understood in terms of system state and preconditions, as opposed to a trigger event.

Infectious disease, at least in the classic acute form (whether that's bacterial and fast - cholera - or viral and slow - HIV), is a more mechanistic process which can be halted by blocking a single step in its pathway.

Systems that remain healthy and balanced via dynamic processes are harder to reason about and fix, because the root cause of a disease state can be dozens of little things adding up to the system losing its ability to maintain homeostasis.

The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.

Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.

It's not fine if that choice denies other people the choice not to.

And there seems to be a lot of the latter.

For example, when shopping facilities or hospitals are built so as to be, de-facto, only accessible by automobile, that locks people out of the choice to say no thanks.