A Digital Slug, provisionally

None of those quite gets at it. Let’s follow a community learning guide: people can read it online, download it, print a copy when they need one, and improve it later. I care about what happens after someone makes the thing.

Start with a hypothetical guide, 100 reading sessions, and one year. Those are our assumptions. We haven’t made a guide or observed its readers, and a reading session won’t count as proof that someone learned.

Let’s combine them: map the full lifecycle, then calculate only the operational electricity we can support. Keep everything else on the page, even if we can’t put it in the number.

And keep backups and revisions in the questions. A copy disappearing from my screen doesn’t tell us what happened everywhere else.

Keep it as a model to learn from, not a coefficient to copy. And don’t divide the IEA total by an invented number of prompts. Let’s inspect the device report first.

We can try that as an explicit proxy and see what it lets us calculate. I want the mismatch next to the result. If we later measure reading, replace it.

Use electricity for the first calculation, but keep the other costs beside it. Show totals and per-reading quantities separately. Let’s try one watt-hour per Slug; that’s our chosen scale, not something we discovered in the data.

A proposal for a unit of account. Calling it a working currency would require more: who accepts it, who checks a claim, and who can change the rules? Leave those questions open.

Then use the range, but call the result an incomplete subtotal. Show me the units before the output.

I can check that: ten minutes is one-sixth of an hour, not a tenth. And we haven’t measured this guide. Keep “benchmark proxy” beside every calculation.

You’re right—I slid from “per reading” to “overall.” Keep both columns. And don’t call a thousand downloads a thousand useful readings.

Good. Reuse is still worth investigating, but the proposal shouldn’t reward an obsolete guide just for being opened a lot.

Keep a maintained source, its evidence, and a change history. Put a review date on it. Retire misleading copies, and allow a local or printed version where that helps someone use it.

Then record those gaps. No automatic Slug refund when I press Delete, and no assumed paper-saving credit just because the guide is digital.

I’ll keep it as a provisional unit of account, and attach the boundary and gaps wherever I use the number. This is my proposal for this purpose; someone asking a different question could choose differently.

My next step is to measure actual reading and investigate the creation workflow. I also want someone who needs a printed guide to challenge our assumptions about access.