Some people will tear down Chesterton's fence because they don't want to feel limited, others won't approach because they want to be safe. Few ask why it was put up in the first place.

With nothing but a piece of paper and a pencil you can draw an alley or start building an imaginary world.

Too many of us turn boundaries into chains to hold us down.

Your original comment was what to do about those people whose labour does not equal or exceed the minimum wage value.

In everything I have read and all the people I have talked to about this, after sufficient questioning, the answer always seems to end up being murdering the poor. Oh, it's never going out and killing them personally. Oh no, that would be terrible, it's always destroy support systems and flooding the market with cheap but eventually deadly substances of varying sorts, so it's always at second hand.

Yet on the other hand I have seen so many companies damaged and even destroyed by someone whose economic value is extremely negative, but somehow spins it as a good thing and so walks away with big paychecks and fat bonuses and go on to another company to do it again.

I saw a PM so thoroughly mess up that they made it impossible for the company to provide software licenses to their customers. Managements response was not to fix the broken spreadsheet, oh no, that would be the smart thing to do. No, it was to lay people off because revenue was down. It was like selling cars but never giving the customer the keys to drive off. Who would actually finish the transaction?

But hey, he's are an executive, so it's fine when he destroys tens or hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customer revenue. Now, that teenage girl trying to feed, house and transport herself, now she deserves to have her every action, interaction and off-duty thought scrutinized at the nano level because how dare she want to live a life worth living when her parents aren't already rich?

I remember when a fast-food place was staffed with a dozen people and the food was good and was actually delivered quickly. Now it's just a couple and it takes forever to get through the drive-thru to get food that poisons you. At least corporate is posting record profits again.

It's not that the girl at the drive-thru isn't generating huge profits, she and all of them very much are. It's that someone else has decided that she doesn't deserve to participate in the rewards of those profits.

I always get the feel that they are so disappointed that slavery is mostly illegal. So many systems have been put in place to suck all the money off the table so it becomes more and more expensive to survive, minimum wage was an attempt to protect people, that is what a functional civilization does.

So back to civilization, people come together to share resources, so people can support each other. Some people think they are special. They treat people as things and that is the problem. When people are things, they become disposable, and that is wrong.

The whole point of civilization is to help people.

If a business cannot support civilization, then why should it continue to exist?

I would also use it if I was doing a really deep dive in a fiction work.

For most fiction that I am reading for entertainment, the first 50ish pages will tell me if its worth finishing.

I've been at this long enough that yes I know that just getting something out the door so we can make money is important.

But this just creates another kind of technical debt that comes back to bite you.

WordPerfect was great for doing lots of formatting it was so easy to make a signature for printing a booklet or zine.

I've been using Scrivener as my creating space. It is great at taking down words and organizing research. It just does RTF which is completely fine for my needs, but it is not a word processor or page layout program but that is not what it needs to do.

I'd rather use Word (ugh) or InDesign for layout. Separating the data from the display keeps things focused on what's important at the time.

The proposed site is twice the size of Manhattan, NY and sized for 9GW of energy which is more than the entire state uses yearly. We literally do not have the water to support a data center that huge.

They just enacted a fireworks ban because the weather people just had to create a whole new category for how dry and dangerous it is. Air quality is a constant problem because all the pollution from regions West of Utah collect right against the mountains. A few years ago we woke up to what looked like heavy fog, but it was smoke --from Siberia.

I get that. I used to be able to overhaul a VW beetle on the side of the road with regular tools. A couple of years ago my car's transmission's computer went out on the interstate. I couldn't even get a useful error code. The shop down the street didn't have a high enough end device to talk to it. While the dealer was able to figure it out; it took nearly a month to get the replacement part. I'm car semi-literate.

I also worked at a university and that was concerning because some students would just give up whenever anything didn't go right the first time. No troubleshooting skills at all. We were moving from Google to MS and they needed to use Takeout to backup their stuff locally, just in case something happened. But we got a lot of calls because it wasn't ready to download immediately. I've heard it's gotten worse.

I can make How-to's that can assume they had gone through at least one of the tutorials, but even then I put links to the appropriate tutorials so they could refresh or learn if they needed it.

But lately it seems like people are getting more computer illiterate. So how low do you go? I am getting tempted to add a link to some basic computer literacy.

It's kinda like people complaining about Space Launch System, why aren't we using Saturn V or an improved version of it. We have the blueprints and schematics and everything but it appears there's a gap between what's written down there and what's in the textbooks. A lot of in-between experience has evaporated because shop classes and manufacturing were shut down.

I am realizing that a lot of experience was never written down and turned into institutional knowledge that could be used later. The AI companies would love this but it's gone because it was more cost-effective not to.

Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.

Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.

When I was in tech support I wrote down the solutions to tickets, it took training the other support techs to read the knowledge base. It took 6 months but support call duration dropped 40%.

It also took training to get customers to read the knowledge base. That reduced calls by 60%.

Documentation has been disregarded by management since the 70s. Now suddenly it's important and its costing them a lot to try to play catchup.

Though I did notice last week lots of unique ads for a while. They were wildly inappropriate to me. It was actually funny to get ads for wheat seed by the ton (I don't live in a wheat compatible location), followed by private plane time-share(don't travel that much). How those are supposed to go together stump me.

Some things that I have learned from of them:

Write for yourself first and get to the end. Rewrite to add in all those things you didn't put in the right place the first time.

Speak at least the dialogue out loud. Spread the description around.

Read some of the worst to remind you that even they got published. Copy the greats for practice on dialogue, or description or whatever you want to work on as deliberate practice.

Try different things like write your story as a game, or a puppet play, or stage play, or screenplay, or radio play. Draw a storyboard or animatic. Go to the park and write what you see. Have your characters in a room together and eat a pie.