TIC-80 is not only free but actually has more features than PICO-8. Supports more languages for example. The display resolution is also higher. The code memory limitations bigger.
> "you're lucky you even have a job; shut up and stop complaining"
You probably have seen the dotcom crash yourself - there were a lot of developers feeling lucky to even have a job. There probably will be another IT bubble burst, and a lot of people will regret they did not form a union when they had at least some say in the matter.
> I wish there was a way that we could apply our skills toward fixing this injustice.
Educate yourself on why does that happen. Main purpose of every company is to make money. As long as IT is making a lot of money programmers will be paid a lot. As soon as industry starts to cool down - our salaries will drop as well.
Indonesian 12 y.o. who makes Nike sneakers for 1$ a day will probably disagree. Humanity as a whole have made tremendous advancements in medicine, engineering and agriculture, technology as a whole have been advancing in giant leaps, yet benefits of those advancements are largely felt by 10-20 countries and 3-5% of the population. Even in the US some people cannot afford insulin and other types of basic healthcare. Workers's wages are stagnant for the past 50 years, while their productivity was steadily rising (https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...).
> And now we have the mechanisms for almost anybody to get out of it. I grew up very poor
Survivorship bias, "if I've made it, then anyone can".
> nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country
Care to provide a source? We have kindergartens that accept children as young as 1.5 y.o, older kids (3+) typically stay at kindergarten for 8 hours a day.
Early communist attitudes underestimated the economic value of functioning nuclear families in regards to areas such as childcare and domestic services. Writings of idealists in the 1920's (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-fam...) reflect a gross devaluation of the economic value of labor in the home versus labor outside the home.
Nuclear families were already under pressure in by the 1920's due to the impacts of World War One which resulted in a surplus of women and internal displacement that broke up many nuclear families. This was compounded by the family code of 1918 which liberalized divorce and resulted in many men abandoning their families. A 1926 Atlantic archive summarizes illustrates the impact:
With the breakup of the nuclear family as an economic unit many women and children entered a workforce that was ill-equipped to receive them depressing factory wages. The shift of labor from child rearing to the production of consumer goods resulted in an increase in the besprizorniki, or the "unattended".
The most complete works on the subject are by Wendy Z. Goldman including The "Withering Away" and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family, 1917-1936 and Women, the State and Revolution Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936. Copies of the second can be found online and a quote on page 76 summarizes the cycle.
The decrease in children's homes and daycare centers inadvertently increased the numbers of besprizorniki as the needs of women and the needs of children formed the tight, alternating links of a vicious circle. Without daycare, many single mothers were unable to search for work, and without work, they were unable to support their children, who in turn ran away from impoverished homes to join the besprizorniki on the streets. The large numbers of besprizorniki then forced the state to divert scarce resources from daycare centers to children's homes, increasing the hardships of both employed and unemployed mothers, and ultimately increasing the numbers of besprizorniki.
It's not just raw input speed - writing on paper allows you to quickly jump around the text, making small corrections, adding notes/symbols/drawings, etc.
I can jump around and make corrections in vim far quicker than I can flipping a pencil, erasing, flipping it again, writing correction. And that's for a simple edit that doesn't require moving block of text. Hand writing it slow and inefficient.
Because you don't write a lot of code on paper? Working with text (for notes or prose) is very different than working with code.
You don't think "I need to correct that thing located 23 words forward so I use 23w or press w 23 times" - you position your hand and make a correction.
