The whole economy suddenly felt like a game of musical chairs, and I was convinced I needed to grab a seat, any seat, as fast as I could. - Robin Sloan

Well, you know our saying: It's not over until you hold the book's ashes in your hands, weeping at the years you've lost.
I did not know we had that saying, sir.

"The smell!" Penumbra repeats. "You know you are finished when people start talking about the smell."

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever,

In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested.

Thus, the problem was ongoing.

Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.