"I guess if they're for life that makes sense. But isn't it super inconvenient? I feel like technology and procedures would have changed so much every time that running the election would be a huge hassle. Does each leader give several years of notice before retiring so they have time to find candidates and pull the voting setup together?"

"This is only our second Glorious Leader, and the first one died in office."

"Ouch, poor guy. You said on the mailing list that he only made it to 88, but most people here would still have retired by then."

"It was before I was born."

"I don't think I understand the relevance of that, can you explain?"

"...so I would not have heard anything that was said at the time about the possibility of his retiring."

"When do people usually retire, on Ibyabek? Though of course I'd expect someone who was willing to govern a planet for decades with no prediction markets to be an outlier."

"In my line of work I would most likely have been moved to a desk job before age fifty. I don't know about other jobs."

"Moving to a desk job isn't quite what I meant--I mean, when do you stop specializing hard in something that contributes to the economy and start focusing on your hobbies and side projects and hanging out with friends and family and travel and similar?"

"People become too ill to work at different ages."

"I find it hard to believe that you're all that obsessed with your jobs when you don't even pick them yourselves. But you said you have a good social safety net, so it's not that people hit seventy-five and realize they don't have twenty years of savings."

"Savings aren't necessary in a moneyless society."

"Exactly. So why wouldn't people retire while they're still healthy?"

"Maybe our people are more diligent."

"Maybe. Or more inclined to get attached to whatever they happen to be doing even if it didn't start out related to their favourite interests at all. How does the job assignment work, anyway, do you all put all your test scores into a giant database and it spits out a solution that matches up with what places are hiring?"

"I think it's something like that, though I don't know the details."

"Actually, it just occurred to me--how many hours of work do people do on a typical workday and what fraction of days are workdays? Especially on planetside jobs; if everyone has to be on the spaceship all the time anyway that would add constraints to the scheduling."

"Well, that depends on the job - anyone working outdoors needs daylight, for instance."

"I suppose so, if you don't go in for big outdoor lights. Let's say accountants, as a concrete example, or whatever's closest to that that you know about. People who sit at a desk and think."

"What is an accountant?"

"Well, accountants here handle money, but presumably Ibyabek has some similar position that keeps track of how many things a factory has made and how much of what materials it's been using and whether any machines have needed repair. That sort of thing, where it doesn't matter what time of day you do it."

"I would expect those people to work at the same time as the factory workers, so they could ask questions."

"Makes sense. When is that? I assume it isn't usually seasonal unless the thing the factory makes is."

"I believe factories are generally open all year."

"Cool, so that should be a good example case for how many hours a day and how many days a year people work."