Lazy, yes. Bright, no. If you can't trust the average person to figure out that bread that's loaded with salt and sugar isn't healthy, then you can't trust the average person to figure out what a healthy balanced meal is.

The evolutionary pattern was created because food was unreliable and energy demands were unpredictable - but high, due to the large brain. (Possibly larger than it is today, but there seems to be conflicting data there.)

Now, rationing extreme energy foods is certainly one option, but it's not a particularly satisfactory one as the energy demands vary by profession and by time within a profession. You simply can't predict what people will need and there's no way to standardise this.

There is a second option. Intense focus is impossible for beyond about 45-90 minutes at a stretch, or for more than 3-5 hours in a day. Meetings degrade intelligence, according to psychological research, so you want to minimise those. After about 7 hours, work will mostly have negative value. If you increase the amount of high physical activity for at least an hour a day (and potentially longer if the amount of soft work is minimal in the job) then you will improve physical fitness and general health, without having to substantially alter diet. However, that still only gets you so far, because a poor diet still impacts physical and mental health, and can lead to brain decline. (It's a big factor in poor brain health in children in schools.)

A third option, then, is to actually improve meal quality in schools and for workplaces to work with the food industry to provide cheaper/easier access to high quality foods that actually taste good, not merely sensible energy foods. This would seem to be target solution, with in-work exercise to supplement it.

If that turns out to be the case, we get to find out something about what reshaping the brain means.

Whilst that is perfectly true, it is questionable as to whether it is useful or necessary. If a rocket is being tested, then logically it should be heavily instrumented. If it's heavily instrumented, and the instruments are themselves competently designed, there is no obvious reason why the engine can't be auto-cut when problems start to arise. And they will have arisen long long before the explosion.

The values may have independently been "within permitted range", but if the pattern of those values doesn't make sense, then something has gone wrong. There may well also have been subsystems that were insufficiently instrumented.

"They're the experts" is often an irrelevancy - we lost TWO shuttles and crews to political decisions, when the experts on the ground were ignored. DeHavilland lost endless Comets to basically the same blunder, when political decisions by management over the reality of metal fatigue overrode analysis by actual experts. Improper monitoring and inadequate computer controls will be from a burden of costs and time (both political constraints, not engineering constraints). As, indeed, will improperly manufactured parts, improper software (anyone rememebr Arianne IV's mishap due to buggy software?), improperly-defined constraints, and inadequate quality controls.

The experts are usually either well aware of mistakes or afforded no means of detecting them.

I see no reason not to think this was anything other than a management blunder.

If you're willing to settle for only $30 million, that should be enough to obtain a birth certificate and proof of residency in some remote village.

He told his Ferengi superior that he could keep the latinum.

This raises a very important question. If the CIA are taking shortcuts and making assumptions about anything, we should not be making assumptions ourselves that the CIA aren't doing the same elsewhere. I am, however, still waiting for biolabs and WMDs to turn up in Iraq - something for which they appear to have ALSO taken one person's unsupported word for. They also ratted out their own officers in retaliation for questioning the existence of "yellowcake" (that turned out not to exist).

I'd be wary of claiming there was a pattern, but... They do seem awfully incompetent.

Agreed. Deliberate adding of surface roughness (and even multiple surfaces) have been used in racing yachts for many decades. I think they started doing this in the 90s.

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Well, technically that is the entire point of some of the major sports in the world, and it would be problematic to say that deliberately causing brain damage for competition is ok in one sport but not in another.

On the other hand, I am not altogether convinced it should be openly encouraged in any sport.

This is a tricky one, because I would also argue that I should have no say in what a person does to their own body for their own reasons, that my firm belief that people should have bodily autonomy when it causes no actual harm to others does not permit me to condemn others for doing stuff to their own body for their own reasons when it does no actual harm to others even if it's a context I don't agree with.

Given that (ethically) I cannot condone wilful irreversable damage but (ethically) cannot condemn personal choises that harm nobody else, the obvious conclusion is that I don't believe such sports should be actively promoted or encouraged, but that what individuals do in the privacy of a private sporting event should not concern those outside until or unless actual harm outside of those events occurs.

Treadmill? That can be optimistic.

One place I worked for, I was hired to do DB and coding. Sped their database up by a factor of 60, and resolved tickets efficiently.

Another place I worked for, I was hired to do QA. Found numerous performance issues and dangerous security holes.

Didn't last in either, because politics are more important than people, and revenue is more important than wages. Once all the factors that seriously impacted profit were removed, keeping me would merely have meant a better product, not more cash. The market is only so big, and once you've taken all the share you're going to, being better won't increase it. Companies don't think beyond the next quarter.

Two other places I worked for, the CEO was using it to scam money off investors and get cheaper healthcare. They never intended to produce a product.

If you're forced to treat employees well, these things will still happen but they'll happen less often. Because the risks are higher, the payoff is lower, and penalties for getting caught are a whole lot worse.

That's how it works in a coupled system.

Agreed. There's deliberate undercounting for the long-term unemployed, and a failure to account for the fact that firing seasoned workers with acquired skills isn't the same as hiring inexperienced yoofs who have no meaningful experience in producing robust, high quality products. Although, to be fair, corporations don't seem keen on producing those.

However, there's another factor to consider. The number of retirees is smaller than the number of people entering work for the first time. Due to Covid, a LOT smaller than usual. This means that the markets are expanding. If the markets are expanding but the numer of people being added is only keeping pace with job circulation and retirement, then the job market (as a percentage of those who can work) must be smaller relative to both the markets and the work that needs to be done.

This is the most misleading part of employment statistics. Whilst total unemployment is important (but only useful if not deliberately undercounted), you also need to know the employment:activity ratio and the employment:expected employment in a fully functional market of that size ratio.