Reminds me of how I had to take feeder roads and turn off the freeway during bad traffic when my shitty old toyota would overheat if I couldn't get good airflow into the radiator :P

Oh terrible flashback. I had an '87 Jetta with a similar propensity. Stuck in traffic in the summer, I had to run the heater on full. Brutal. Handy that the heater core is a mini-radiator, though.

My first car was a beaten-up old hunk of junk. I knew it was time to get rid of it when I realised that every time before I drove it, I was planning my route so that I'd be least inconvenienced if it broke down at any point along that route...

"mechanical sympathy"

It is amazing how folks have to plan when their vehicle is ‘non-optimal’. For the almost opposite effect, I had a Ford Ranger (passed unwillingly to me) that even with 700lbs of weight on the back axle and good winter (non-stud) tires sucked in winter. I was very careful about my route anywhere.

Allow me to extrapolate wildly: progress considered harmful ?

Well, progress of time considered harmful. Also, poor design will accelerate that quite a bit.

heh, don't get me started on this.

To go back to the first point there are issues with too much progress. It makes us lazy. Not enough and we might suffer. The balance is important.

I remember one anecdote about Northern African culture. They don't mass produce tech, instead they go with the flow and find solutions on the spot, by the means of a few tools. They say it's smarter to do it this way (maybe, maybe not), surely it keeps your mind creative.

Also, in dev circles, having too much compute power makes your solutions bad. Because you can just ignore the innefficiencies. Plus it's self feeding through the hardware market (more bloat, more sales)