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I hope you don't take pride in that sentence because I'm still not sure what it means.

Also, automation and pride can go hand in hand. Pride doesn't mean "make it by hand," that would be silly.

To put it another way: an apocryphal businessman took something that people took pride in and gradually optimised everything so much that all the logging, transportation, graphite work and combination resulted in a perfect pencil that costs basically nothing almost anywhere in the world.

Pencils here are a bit like grains. The market works for them because they fall into such a niche that economic "laws" works there.

But it's a fallacy to apply it elsewhere and there are millions of examples where the free market failed to optimize a product.

I don't agree. Loads of things are like this. Cars, microchips, hard drive storage, monitors, TVs, laptops. All either much better than they used to be, or much cheaper, or both.

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