Venerable? I think you mean dogshit.

I'm so ready to stop even talking about it.

engineered these crazy locks I would joke that since they don't work then I doubt any engineering went into them at all. But I know that isn't true. So I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by "crazy locks"? I did a lot of work investigating the manufacturing equipment and their use, so I remember a bit about their components, design, and assembly; but I did not work with those directly so I could be missing something entirely. I don't remember there being anything groundbreaking about the mechanics of the door locks. But the general build always felt... "thinner". Most manufacturers stay away from minimum standards by at least the standard deviation or two, so if the required gauge was 18 ± 1, a typical mfr would use 20+. Tesla would use 18. On the nose. That was a lot more common in automotive but even hyundai/kia used wide margins for safety. All that to say, I have a hard time believing the door locks were so complex that a sizable investment would be anything other than reinventing the wheel, but even moreso that it was even worth the superfluous cost. One of the last jobs I had there was a machine that they picked up third hand and cobbled together with some very sketchy safety systems that wildly failed requirements. I was there for days and it was one of the more extensive reports I've ever made on a single installation. The control system was designed by the onsite engineers and passed flawlessly. But they had a lot to do to get the equipment usable.

It's much more likely that they don't know. Look at the DOGE staffers hand picked by musk, they are completely incompetent but hyper confident. If they're indicative of the software engineers working at Tesla, then they most likely assumed their code was perfect. Keep in mind it's all running on LLM code now.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right? Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn't an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns. Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn't special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc. I'm not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

Sure, I just don't trust results from subjective studies, unless it's tracking trends over time. So maybe if they had opinion polls like this before smartphones were a thing in classrooms, while smartphones were a thing, and after they were banned I'd trust the results somewhat. But if we're just tracking an after-the-fact poll, it just feels like confirmation bias. I believe teachers have an incentive to overstate the impact of policies that give them more control, because they want to encourage more such policies, even if they aren't effective at achieving tangible results. So yeah, I distrust this type of study. I don't think it's necessarily worthless, I just don't think many conclusions can be taken from it.