Potassium

I've gone. Not one for goodbyes, I thought it best to slip out quietly. Love to you all, Giles.

"is it cheaper than the workers?"

"it is right now"

"ok everyone's super, super fired. now what"

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

Certified skydiving instructors know way more about safely falling from planes than I do, and are way more likely to die that way.

But over the years I’ve slowly decided to try to understand people better instead just assuming that they’re stupid.

And some people are idiots. But they’re rarely stupid.

It takes work though to think like this. Like I said, I understand the impulse to just assume that people are stupid. It’s easy. It involves a lot less research and connecting the dots and listening to people who annoy you or even people who actively dislike you.

But it’s like. No I don’t think that they are. I think that they’re lonely and most of them are fully self aware about what they’re doing. And even if they’re not, the bad guys here are the companies profiting off of their loneliness and stealing their data. Not someone that’s so starved for human connection that they become attached to a chatbot.

1. Care for the parent. If the parent is upset, they are likely going to upset the child, even if they don’t mean to. Give mom or dad a hug or some time to calm down before they have to jump into parenting again.

2. Related to part 1, offer to solve the problem without you ever disciplining the child. (It’s straight-up not my place to discipline children in front of their parents without explicit consent — only a few members of my village have told me that it’s acceptable for me to observe and correct their children.) This could be as simple as “hey it seems like the girls have a lot of energy right now, want me to watch them outside so they can run around while you finish what you’re doing?”

3. Talk to them in a calm moment if you see a pattern and see if they need long-term support. “Hey, I’ve noticed it’s really been a struggle for you to transition Della out of dance class and into the car. Is there anything I can do to help you and her with that transition? Does she need some extra time to pack her things or say goodbye to her friends?”

4. Relate to the child. Some people have forgotten what it’s like to be a kid, or they have a kid who is radically different from themselves. I was a kid who was often “naughty” myself and I remember my reasons (good AND bad) for behaving that way. Many parents genuinely don’t see the logic in children’s behavior and sometimes an outside adult who can say “hahaha I do that” is actually a weight off their minds.

And, to add in support of OP, part of the conservation work of accredited zoos & aquariums (AZA in the United States, for example) is to participate in breeding programs that go on to increase native wild populations, and even restore native species that would have otherwise gone extinct in the wild.

Accredited zoos and aquariums support the natural world.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.