mrottenkolber

To me it seems you imply that its OK to coerce certain people into taking certain work. I view the second paragraph as an attempt to justify that position, despite its conflict with basic humanist ideals.

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.

They can afford to leave because of 500+, they are leaving because they don't want to work there.

These people quit their shitty jobs because they are no longer forced to do them for the sake of survival, and now have more time to spend with their family, which–I guarantee you—is more valuable than whatever they were doing at work. Why do you think wanting to quit your job is anybodies fault, but the employers?

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

Do you have a source on that, or do you think lawmakers might also be concerned with the well being of children, mums, dads, single parents, young parents–no matter how many children/parents there are?

If the question would have been "what would you do?", would your answer have been the same? If not, why do you think little of us other humans?

Since we are speaking in anecdotes, have you considered they might have just disliked their particular workplace?

You're not being fair to the OP in saying "it's even easier to do nothing if you throw up your hands and say it won't work anyway."

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

I'm baffled. Without a formal grammar CommonMark is useless. Who implements a parser without a formal grammar?

CommonMark has not published a formal grammar.

The best decision would be to drop Markdown from everything and pretend it never existed. Then design a similar format with a formal grammar, and use that.

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?

I know a lot of people who did what you recommend and it broke them all mentally. Its really hard to regain self respect and adjust back to reality when you obey for 10+ years.

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.

I agree with your critique, but I disagree with this line of thinking:

> 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.

According to the comments in this thread google expects you to notify them when you hack on things off the job, and feels entitled to deny you those activities. Sounds quite hostile towards creative people. Nightmarish, even.