Red Star Falling

Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.

That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.

Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.

And easier the next.

On top of being scammed, receiving accurate medical treatment relies on you knowing how to do your own research, and too many doctors take illiterate patients less seriously.

If you become a victim of a crime or are accused of a crime, you need to be able to read the papers a cop or lawyer puts in front of you. They can happily take advantage of your ignorance if you give them a chance.

This list goes on! Landlords, real estate agents, accountants, car mechanics, bankers, phone companies, customer service, contractors, childcare workers, e.g. any other human you rely on just to live your life will expect you to be literate and capable of making smart decisions. It is not their job to supplement your ignorance. It is not any well-meaning individual's job to make sure you paid attention in the same classes they did. And most of them know this and will not wait for you to figure things out.

Here's the problem with that, cheap and well-constructed are mutually exclusive. They simply are. As long as you have an economy where people are paid for work, even with a robust safety net or even universal income, all costs eventually boil down to labor.

Yes, there's raw materials and such, but those are then converted into usable materials using, can anyone give me the answer? That's right, labor.

Simply put, money is a physical representation of labor. This isn't a controversial stance, this is extremely basic baby's first Marxism. Like, you say you go here, but you don't seem to understand this.

The reason things like LCD panels and disposable LED lights and hard disks are so cheap is because their production has been opitmized to produce the most of a specific item in the least amount of time. An electron tube for a radio takes a skilled technician an hour or so to make and costs you $30. Transistors can be made by the thousands on a fully automated production line in the same time and cost you less than a buck each.

If you want a laptop computer that you can service, repair, and upgrade, you have to engineer it to be serviceable, repairable, and upgradeable. That means someone has to be paid to do that. You have to use more materials in order to make it large enough that you can access the servicable parts, which means you have to pay for more materials. You have to provide quality control for all the various extra connections that make servicability possible, someone has to be paid for that. You have to be willing to reject products that make it to final assembly and do not check out for quality control, which is incredibly expensive.

Scientist bakes sourdough bread with yeast derived from 4500 year old Egyptian pottery

is a sourdough boule