Yes, but music notation is not simple text. Markdown was made for simple text. If you try to represent more complex text, it turns into Asciidoc or Rst.
Or even just using a plain old light meter. I use a Gossen Luna Pro (with 'spot' attachment) with my meterless cameras (which is most of them). It's reliable.
Ray wrote a later story ("I Don't Care Who Keeps the Cows") in which there becomes a trend of different kinds of brain-enhancement technologies to make everyone super-intelligent. Of course, the enhancements are sold by hucksters who are using the enhancements to control the enhanced.
This has always been true. I never fixed my car. I knew how it worked well enough to know, hey, that sounds like its coming from the exhaust pipe. Then I took it to the mechanic. I can do basic maintenance on my bike, but I still take it to the bike shop. I have a small collection of vintage cameras, which means tracking down the few people left who know how some particular model works, might have parts. If your Synchro-Compur shutter needs parts, forget it. For most people, most of the time, the assumption has always been that someone else knows how to do that.
everything degrades. We live in a world ruled by entropy. Even digital stuff degrades. It has to be stored somewhere, in some form, and there is always a risk of loss. No matter what.
I recall reading some years ago about a study of tornado warnings that showed that every additional minute of warning time had significant value in terms of preventable damage and casualties. Presumably it would be similar for earthquakes, but early detection is a much harder problem.
Editors do try to get and use _relevant_ blurbers. And a weak blurb probably wouldn't get used unless they really had nothing else. Also, the first readers of blurbs are booksellers and reviewers, not readers, who may pass over a title if no one is willing to vouch for it. If you present a title to your sales team with no blurbs, they will make frowny faces at you.
Inside publishing offices, people who give a lot of blurbs for books are known as "quote whores." It's very much a game of who you know, who your editor knows, who your agent knows, etc. It's not to say a blurb is worthless, but a blurb from someone who doesn't give a lot of them may be worth more.
I worked at a culinary school for a while. In the bread kitchen they taught you the formula stuff, but also, to recognize what the dough would feel like, look like, even taste like, when it was right. They taught you how to adapt if the flour was a little drier today than yesterday, if the kitchen was a little more humid.
When I had to give my cats thyroid pills, I mushed them into soft treats. This generally worked, but sometimes took a couple of tries. But this trick only works if the cat wants the treat more than they don't want the pill. A dog can be tricked into thinking the pill is the treat.
Flavored pill compounding is apparently also an option, but I've never tried it.
Isn't the whole point of Substack, etc. monetization, one way or another? Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but that to me goes against 'independent'. But then, I'm not just old enough to remember when blogs weren't monetized, but remembering perusing Factsheet Five to see if there were any interesting new zines to trade with. Maybe you could mark the Substack blogs with a little swastika like an asterisk.