Most of your examples seem more like "prerequisites" or basic skills that you build on. But scaffolding is a thing you build up to get something else done, then get rid of afterwards. So, a scaffolding skill would be a skill that enables you to learn how to do something you actually want to learn, but once you have learned how to do that thing, you no longer need the scaffolding skill.

Algebraic notation can still be useful to a chess player. Knowing basics like how to properly cut things is integral to cooking. Debugging is an essential skill for programming. Etc.

A couple better examples of scaffolding skills:

• In calculus, learning to calculate a derivative using limits. Once you have the concept of derivatives down, you wouldn't go through that exercise, you would use the the various formulas (or a math program) to actually calculate them.
• When trying to get a business group to adopt Agile methodology, using strict Agile Scrum, which gives a bunch of prescriptive processes, and demonstrate how to "do Agile". But, teams that have internalized the Agile philosophy tend to ditch many of those processes (or at least strict adherence to them) as they move toward more efficient approaches, tailored to their situation.

There are conventions pertaining to the style a letter is written in. You might have a as an arbitrary element in set A, while a₁, a₂, etc., are a sequence of elements in A, while fancy-boldface A or fancy-script A (I don't know how to render those here) could represent the class of A-like sets. Also, a′ would be another case of a, or maybe the derivative of a, while a″ would be a third case, or maybe the second derivative. Sometimes superscripts or backscripts are used, when subscripts are not enough. Sometimes the Greek equivalent of a Latin letter denotes some relationship between them, e.g. ⍺ is some special version of a.

If the math goes way off into the weeds, the author might even whip out a Hebrew letter or two.

There is a related problem where many browser-based productivity tools follow design principles from websites that are trying to get clicks. For example, I commonly run into DB interfaces at work that will return, say, 10 (or 25, or other small number) results per page. Now, it's good design to not let a query that returns, say, a million results, crash the browser. But, if a few hundred, or even a few thousand, results will display within milliseconds, why make me page dozens (or hundreds) of times? (I'm looking at you, GitHub commit history!)

Another example would be Microsoft Office's long history of making design choices that optimize increasing "engagement with the tool" rather than making the tool unobtrusively facilitate the task. They got rid of Clippy, but now they're into obnoxious pop-ups that are designed to call attention to some new gadget or feature.

The "click" economy has had pervasive effects on the software industry.

It seems to me this is an example of you and Kaj talking past each other. To you, B's perspective is "eminently reasonable" and needs no further explanation. To Kaj, B's perspective was a bit unusual, and to fully inhabit that perspective, Kaj wanted a bit more context to understand why B was holding that principle higher than other things (enjoying the social collaboration, the satisfaction of optimally solving a problem, etc.).

Except there's more at play than just winning the election. If you're a voter in a swing state, the candidates are paying more attention to you, and making more promises catering to you. The parties are picking candidates they think will appeal to you. Even if your odds of winning stay the same, the prize for winning gets bigger.

It was exiting a few elections ago when Colorado was in play by both parties. We even got to host the Democratic convention in Denver. Now, they just ignore us.

One thing you touched on, but didn't delve into, is that the various "pay" components will having varying marginal utility at different levels.

For example, if you're literally starving, "coolness" won't matter much, you need enough money to buy food! But if you have enough money, you start caring about other things.

Perhaps having some social interaction is important, and you would sacrifice other things to have at least some of that in your job. But, beyond a certain point, the value diminishes, and would likely go negative, as the constant socializing gets tiring, and distracts from work you actually would like to do.

I think a good manager would be good at optimizing against those utility curves. They would pay people enough, but not more, than they need to not be upset about low pay. They would recognize that one team party per quarter might be valuable to the team, but parties every week would not be appreciated. They would give people opportunities to socialize, but also, to avoid getting dragged into socializing when they would really rather be focused on the job. And so on.

The OCD in me objects to the colors not being in chromatic order. On the other hand, if you wanted to maximize visual contrast between adjacent colors, then a sensible order would be black, red, green, purple, orange, blue.

As a former teacher, I firmly believe that if we want to reform schools, we must reform the teaching profession and school management structures. At least, we should address the things that are most insane:

• A school district is a big operation, with many having thousands of employees, and budgets running into the hundreds of millions of dollars. And it is usually run by literal amateurs. As in, the school board is a group of unpaid volunteers.
• As tough as it is to be a teacher, consider what it's like to be a principal: You get the most odious parts of being a teacher (dealing with discipline, contentious meetings with parents), with a longer workday, shorter (if any) summer vacation, much greater responsibility, much greater public exposure (and corresponding chance of getting fired for some perceived failure), but not really that much more pay. It's hardly surprising that it's hard to find good people to take that job. So, as a teacher, you can't count on competent support from management. But, you really need it.
• The teaching profession takes a lot of skills. Yet, the job description for a first year teacher, and the job description for a 30th year teacher are identical. Imagine hiring an engineer fresh out of college and asking them to do what a senior architect does.
• But, from a practical standpoint, the job of the inexperienced teacher is often much more challenging. The experienced teacher gets to pick the honors classes, the electives, etc., to teach. The inexperienced teacher gets stuck with the remedial classes. It's not uncommon for a new teacher to get hired to teach class sections that were added at the last minute -- and those sections will be full of students who got put into those sections at the last minute, because they didn't have their act together, didn't pass, didn't register, etc.
• As you discovered, an inexperienced teacher will find it a lot of work to deal with even one or two classes. Where I work now, if someone was asked to conduct a training session, they might spend a couple days prepping. We ask teachers to do 5, 6 even 7 of those per day, only not with well-mannered professional adults, but kids whose brains are not fully developed. And then grade homework, call parents, be hall monitors, function as social workers, etc.

I could go on.

There are many problems one could bring with various approaches to teaching. There are many challenges that teachers would face even in the best of systems. But fundamentally, there are some serious structural issues with the design of the system.

Ironic that "Maybe" seems to have one of the narrower ranges of probabilities...

The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there's no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.

If your only choices for gridlines are "off" and "obnoxious", "off" seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.