Ignoring the hypothetical nature of your second paragraph, I think you miss the incentive to all "work", which depends on how much the worker thinks his work is worth.

Take my friend the farmer, who happily works on a tiny organic farm (hard physical work) for very little pay, because he feels his work is sustainable, and productive (helps others, provides food).

Also take my friend the construction worker, who would love to build houses for the rest of his life despite low wages, but won't, because he is unable to find employer that will enable his labor to bear fruit. Sure he could build mansions, and commercial monoliths to no end, embedding stone chipped from the Italian coastline into German upper class house-fronts, or build shopping malls. But he's not an idiot, he won't waste his life pouring his talent into luxury products and consumption infrastructure that won't help anyone in the end. He wants to build sustainable housing for people to live in, houses so cost effective everybody can have one.

Depending on coercion to motivate a work force, implies that the work to be done is actually detrimental to society.

What you suspect of other people tells a lot about you, and very little about other people. I would be careful with that.

He gave a very clear way out: massively reduce consumption.

The sad thing is this won't happen. Given the traction I suspect there will be broken, incompatible Markdown implementations 100 years from now. Markdown really has the potential to become the worst universally popular standard in computing history.

What bothers me is that its not one guy (Gruber) who made a mistake and designed a language without a formal grammar (hey, mistakes happen), its that armies of developers wrote broken parsers for a language without a formal grammar. This is an impossible task, why did they not refuse to create something fundamentally broken, by definition. Now there are apparently people who want to standardize Markdown, without a formal grammar. How can they not realize that it will be impossible to ever implement the standard? How do they not see that what they are doing is professionally unethical?

So I will give the opposite advice: Rebel. Be a pain. Skip class. Don't get into college.

If you're unlucky that might close lots of career gates, but at least you got your sanity, and that's the most important thing. A healthy mind is worth a bunch.

> If you need the company/paycheck and don't have enough of a background to command a change in the standard employment contract, then you have to sign away all rights.

You're not signing away your rights, your signing away everyone's rights. What about the person who doesn't like to sign his rights away, but is now expected to, because some other poor person lead the way? Accepting this kind of bondage from employers means either setting a very bad precedent, or following a very bad precedent. Either way it hurts the workforce.

Sure its completely understandable, and not a big deal to put fake information there, but no, thanks. I will get the knowledge elsewhere eventually.

Why are restaurants and traditional craftsmen considered “low-productivity?” That really strikes me as odd, I have the opposite connotation. I.e. the former being only sustainable as long as they serve a direct demand, while the latter spends most of the time for leviathan’s sake, and is more focused on generating demand (advertising budgets) than solving problems (leviathan can’t be sustained when there are no problems left).

When compared with big housing companies, private landlords require bigger profit margins, leading to low quality maintenance of existing houses and ex-orbital rents. Especially in crowded cities, rent regulation is non existent and its a sellers market, inflated by wealthy students that rent expensive micro-flats during university.

You or your parents don’t own houses, and are self sufficient on a regular job? Well, you are shit out of luck then. As much as 70% of your income will go towards your rent, effectively financing the better-off and the further expansion of their inefficient renting businesses.