> but it’s very hard because the expertise is so thin on the ground.

This might be part of it...

> Why would anyone with the expertise to make these calls bang their head against the wall trying to educate bureaucrats about these things

But I suspect this might be most of it: good engineering is boring (to the recipient). Preemptively solving problems gets no credit.

The armed guards sound like a threat vector.

obviously you fail to see the possible nuances in engineered concrete...

And Redhat[0], and professional services a la Accenture[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#2010s%E2%80%93present

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

Their old services arm was Kyndryl which they spun out as its own thing

Because some people would still smoke in restaurants and airplanes if left to their own devices.

I spent way, way, way too much time at that site (Partly because it’s a 1990s GeoCities mess).

Compelling, but still wanting a Nokia 33xx brick recall.

Same, the marketing absolutely got me.

> This is something much more close to justice as the punishment fits the crime.

True, but to put a still finer point on it, still fantastically more harmful to that poorest man than the king.

Again I agree, this is why some countries have scaling fines. If a rich person gets a speeding ticket they still don't execute them.

We're on the same page.

The real injustice is that the poor man does not have a hat. Whereas the king most likely has a whole room dedicated to them.

> I've wanted an excuse to try out emacs in the first place[...]

This isn't the excuse - just try Emacs! I've gone through periods where I really wanted to level-up my $EDITOR-fu, and just jumping in is what I did. Compared to so many other decisions, this is such a low-barrier, low-cost decision, there's no reason to not just do it. If it's stalling your development speed, jump back to vi or VSCode, or whatever. Don't want to stick with Emacs? Uninstall and forget it was ever there.

For my editor explorations (vi, emacs, ex), I was strict with myself and used $EDITOR exclusively for 4 or 8 weeks (I forget which) - which sometimes just turned into years.

I'm not deep into Emacs culture these days, but I'm hard-pressed to understand why one wouldn't just go canonical GNU Emacs rather than some fresh "revolutionary" Emacs - you'll have your mind blown regardless, without the potential bugs and lack-of-history/community which come with some new-hotness interpretation of a standard that is already fit-for-purpose.

I disagree somewhat. It helps to have some kind of exciting, exotic, whimsical, or challenging context to try it out in. Like how they say you learn a technology best with a project. "Just" trying it out can be a flavorless and easily dropped experience. But I agree with the other poster that this is not a great project for learning Emacs as it currently exists.

> I feel a better use of the screen space is around the corner

:)

See too the Porsche 917[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_917?#Construction