Right. But a ticketing system doesn't solve this problem either.
A pre-paid ticketing system could make this problem worse because there is no "cue" as it were. At least a bill being placed on the table, paid, and then picked up later by the server. Having the bill picked up by the server is, ostensibly, the last interaction aside from refilling the water.
Of course, tickets could get handled in some special way like being redeemed at the end of the meal, or the ticket pays for the core meal, and a separate bill is given for drinks and extras not handled by the ticket.
The question is whether or not to ban lobbying is not a reasonable one, if only because lobbying would not be able to be banned just on a principle of free speech alone. People have a voice—good, bad, whatever—and lobbying provides an efficient means of communicating that voice. The question is rather how to reduce, if not obviate, the damage caused by the role of money in lobbying without violating free speech rights.
You can't paint all lobbying with the same brush. There are beneficial lobbying groups out there helping to bring a voice to issues in an arena where they would otherwise normally be drowned out. We just focus on the bad ones because they tend to have greater influence. Absolutist positions such as this are rarely true and sensible.
Each use case—typesetting and word-processing—have enough standardized tools to fill an entire application's interface. I think making the compromises needed to do be able to do both adequately would be too much to make either task worthwhile. Maybe that wouldn't necessarily be true for digital, like ePub, but I think that would quickly become true for print.
I don't feel a typesetting interface/context is amenable to writing long-form documents. When I take into consideration multi-column layouts, running headers and footers, art wrapping, page flow across multiple pages, there are what appears to be a lot of potential distractors from the writing process. Word processing documents, when I hide as much of the interface as I can, allow for the tight focus needed for long-form writing. Someone else in this thread suggested having writing and editing happen in another window, but that's still creating an abstraction from the layout, and not really having edits happen "in real time" if only because then editing is not happening actually within the layout.
Finally, I think there would be a significant barrier to training for many authors trying to work in layouts. There are applications, like QuarkXpress, that enable word-processing-like tools in the layout. But I couldn't imagine asking an author to learn enough about the above to ask them to write a long-form paper, much less an entire book, in that environment. Fonts are handled differently, styles are handled differently, etc.
So, essentially, this is a rewrite for TeX. But the reality is that creating complex layouts really, truly requires GUI layout tools. No matter how good the output is for this application, it's entering into an firmly-established market with a few, large, expensive players, and not a lot of action.
Publishing automation tools are nothing new, but one has to give up a certain amount (usually a lot) of control to create a document on the cheap. Even for those workflows that are intensely reliant on templates, designers are still working in InDesign for the initial design, which is then handed off to a person, or more frequently a system, to translate into something to be automated.
Even as a long-time TeX user, I'm not sure what the appeal would be here, but I could have been in publishing too long to see this for what it really is.
I foresee mashing a robust typesetting application and a robust word processing application as being an extremely difficult thing to do well. Both are very different use cases and resulting environments.
You can type directly into layouts in InDesign and see your line and page breaks in realtime. I think where the problem lies in InDesign is that it is, at its core, a typesetting and layout application and not a word processing application. There is a lot of work to do to get to the point of being able to write in your layout, and pages don't get added dynamically when adding new content as easily as they do in a typesetting application.
Yes, I know because I script for them all the time, but at least Adobe's API's try to be more robust than Apple's. My point was really more towards there being more to scripting than just Apple's own apps.
Apple has its issues with scripting in its apps but other companies like Microsoft and Adobe have robust scripting support in their applications. Developers like me have created significant workflows using scripting that save my company money, time, and errors. Apps like iPhoto and iTunes are really small potatoes by comparison. Having Javascript with Cocoa for scripting is truly powerful stuff.
Taking the entire migration process you describe changes the "price" to be paid for similar phone, so my claim of false equivalence still stands.
There's no "lesson" when I have made the conscious decision to stick with Apple all these years. I may have paid a premium paying for iPods and iPhones, but I feel my time is valuable enough to not have to mess around with my media files in any way you describe. Nor do I feel the urge to spend money on music I have already purchased, but I don't see that as being a mistake from which to learn a lesson. Nothing has happened to me with Apple or its products so egregious to feel compelled to take on anything like you describe.
True unless someone has made years of investments in iTunes-sourced content, then moving over to a cheaper phone with the same feature set is no longer an apples-to-apples comparison. I have a collection that goes back to iTunes' and the iPod's very first days. I'm not terribly keen going through any conversion/repurchasing process.
How can anyone argue they don't have biases? From a 2013 article they ran explaining their politics:
"We like free enterprise and tend to favour deregulation and privatisation. But we also like gay marriage, want to legalise drugs and disapprove of monarchy. So is the newspaper right-wing or left-wing? Neither, is the answer. . . it opposes all undue curtailment of an individual’s economic or personal freedom. But like its founders, it is not dogmatic. Where there is a liberal case for government to do something, The Economist will air it. Early in its life, its writers were keen supporters of the income tax, for example. Since then it has backed causes like universal health care and gun control. But its starting point is that government should only remove power and wealth from individuals when it has an excellent reason to do so."
How would you define deliberate practice, then? I would agree that deliberate practice may be hard to define across all skills, but it could be defined for a specific skill.
For example in programing, I would consider problem sets and side projects with functions and goals that are aligned but still outside of one's normal scope of work to be deliberate practice. Working on Project Euler problem sets could be considered deliberate practice. They are problems that can be done in most any programming language, are known to be great for learning a new one, but generally fall outside the usual work of handling data, transforming content, etc.
I would consider Project Euler to be akin to practicing scales on a musical instrument: playing scales is not necessarily music in a "having popular appeal" sense, but it does enable new skills and depth of knowledge of the instrument.
A document that large must have some kind of a structure that you and your team can use to break it apart into smaller, more manageable chunks. One thing to consider is to place the content into a content management system of kind (a wiki comes to mind) to allow the content to more easily be maintained and grow without the limitations Word creates.
The decision may not have been up to you to keep it all in one Word document but making the case to either break apart the document or find a better system in which to maintain it ought to be easy in the face of the usability issues you mention.
A pre-paid ticketing system could make this problem worse because there is no "cue" as it were. At least a bill being placed on the table, paid, and then picked up later by the server. Having the bill picked up by the server is, ostensibly, the last interaction aside from refilling the water.
Of course, tickets could get handled in some special way like being redeemed at the end of the meal, or the ticket pays for the core meal, and a separate bill is given for drinks and extras not handled by the ticket.