Being physically fit past your 30s is a series of building habits and making hard choices that obviously is a challenge of its own that many in sedentary jobs have skipped or fallen away from. OP may be fit, but yeah for average office worker (especially in locations that are car-bound on long commutes) I’d bet there is indeed more going on than just autism.

Having to select self care and breakfast every morning (and meds on some routes) is a good reminder for me of the importance of those things in the long run of a whole day. I don’t think I’m any farther on the spectrum than the average software developer, but it’s still a daily decision to be made. (Of course for those people with different breakfast patterns - you still have a best approach for yourself that you must decide to follow every morning.)

Similarly for the masking meter, I don’t know what it feels like exactly to have mask. However isn’t it hard, in varying degrees, to constantly determine and go through with the right forward-looking choice in real life? My guess is what’s a challenge for some is also a heavy toll on others.

Habits help with much of the daily decisions, but are of course their own challenge to implement and maintain.

Fiction still has ideas to get across and internal consistencies it needs to maintain to be enjoyable and get those ideas across.

When characters do things that beggars belief built upon their previous actions, it can ruin the whole story.

Even poetry has some truth and concept inside the poet to which it’s bound.

Imo, that quote is clearly a train metaphor. But to your point, I do vaguely recall being unclear plenty when I read Moby Dick decades ago.

True, this quote is just one of my favorite from the book and I wanted to share it. There are definitely other more difficult lines in it.

> to see what an individual is working on, what they’ll be working on next, *and what they done recently.*

This last bit is useful, but tricky to get reports on in a single assignee system. Say it’s the end of the week and I want to show off myself or my team. The system would need to track assignee at resolution or at re-assignment, or let me filter all of one user’s activities down.

Does any single-assignee system handle this well? I’ve always had to manually take note of bug IDs mentioned in standups to achieve a good list of who did what when only using one assignee at a time.

Charity events have always had a suggested donation amount for this reason. If a project doesn’t suggest a donation amount then they intentionally or unintentionally ignoring conventional wisdom.

Disturbing a donation pool is interesting but not far off patreon.

Now we’re back to the opening comment: who’s job is it ethically to ensure people receive a living wage? The companies that employ some people or all of us?

Most people don't have leverage to negotiate a fair compensation for people to do it on their own. So you're presenting a a false dichotomy. "all of us" includes the companies that employ "some people". For better or worse, America seems to reject the idea that "all of us" means the government should help people out through taxes. That therefore leaves that companies must do it.

I don’t understand how UBI forces you to stop working at your job. Wouldn’t you potentially be paid even more if everyone who does that job but hates it stops? And the compensation to do it increases to compensate?

UBI means that the empathetic people subsidize the vain and the selfish.

In my experience, empathy has an inverse relationship to your position on the org chart.

Vain and selfish people probably aren’t going to sit around and live on the basic level. It’s more about providing for the ignored, the sick, and enabling people to take risks in the market without putting their family’s lives at stake.

Those examples save us minutes but don’t make humans more free or happier or safer. Better examples would be increased lifespans and lower infant mortality. Stuff that ties into the standard of living definition. Which is the point: our standard of living has not increased at the same rate as productivity.

Modern cars are a heluva lot safer.

Expected lifespan is quite a bit higher.

You can't expect it to increase at the same rate as productivity, because it asymptotically approaches a limit.

Whether you're happy or not is up to you, not society. People, regardless of their status, tend to be at about the same level of happiness.

Are you saying that right now the quality of life for all Americans has reached a its asymptotic limit in regards to productivity?

Lifespan asymptotically approaches biological limits, i.e. the rate of progress inevitably slows.

> all

I wish people would stop adding such qualifiers to construct strawmen.

Ohhh by “it” you mean lifespan not quality of life or standard of living which are the relevant measurements of what we should be gaining from productivity. I didn’t realize you were going to nit pick a couple of very specific examples among many.

p.s. also didn’t expect you to nit pick examples I gave that I thought would better serve your original point: big life changing stuff has improved. I expected us to move on to discuss what is of major value that we should expect from productivity.

A monthly reminder for a person is great. A monthly reminder within a business organization is what? A calendar event for everyone in IT? For the whole company? The nice thing about monthly billing is it comes from the outside and would get bounced around until it found the right desk.

There are plenty of outside reminder services that send reminder emails. Are you saying that the company has a physical address it will always answer but not an email address? Or that it will ignore regular emails to this address unless they contain a bill? (If bills do get reliably paid, why not just make them every 10 years?)