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Amazon might pay a team several million dollars over five years to shave .1% off of total delivery costs by optimizing routing. And this has massive benefits both for amazon's profits and for our delivery costs. A million pieces like that make up a part of why modern technology and society is so powerful. 6 vs 7 is a 1% difference in literacy-averaged-over-years-of-life for everyone. Having children sit in reading class for an extra year wastes billions of hours of time, time that could be spent on ... anything valuable, learning more, doing more, etc.
... not that phonics actually does that, the evidence for which is strangely not debated at all in this thread. But it does matter! We could still be using roman numerals for math. "Does it really matter how long it takes to add CXXVMI and VXMCMII as long as they get there in the end?"
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