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+# Wellspring: Apologia: Explicit sandboxing of protected classes:
+
+Every society treats certain selected groups of people with "kid gloves" and assigns them protected status within a "transparent" bubble or sandbox.
+It is difficult to balance the need to preserve these sandboxes while also preserving the dignity of the people who are benefitting from the sandbox - the
+people inhabiting the sandbox may find it unpleasant and demeaning to be constantly told that they are in fact, inhabiting a sandbox.
+Traditionally, most cultures have balanced these requirements by never explicitly acknowledging the existence of these sandboxes.
+While this is a workable approach that satisfies the needs of the persons inhabiting the sandboxes, it produces undesirable outcomes in the following ways:
+
+* Because these sandboxes exist to protect persons who lack key knowledge and experience, it follows that the persons assigned to these sandboxes may fail to
+  realize that they are in fact, receiving special treatment, and for this reason they may (and a sizeable number of them in fact, do) fail to realize that there
+  is a curriculum of knowledge and experience that they are expected to master in order to graduate from the sandbox.
+* The traditional strategy of not explicitly acknowledging the existence of these sandboxes often doesn't make it obscures that these sandboxes have a clear
+  deadline date by which the protected class of individuals are each expected to **graduate**. Many persons find themselves ejected from these sandboxes after
+  their graduation date has passed and they are surprised at how differently they are treated after they are ejected from the sandboxes. More importantly,
+  they are stunned to find out that there was indeed such a curriculum and graduation deadline, and that they failed to pass a test which they were never
+  explicitly made aware of.
+* The traditional strategy also makes it difficult for us to reason about the fact that people often inhabit multiple different sandboxes simultaneously, each
+  with its own required curriculum and graduation date because we refuse to even acknowledge the existence of the sandbox to begin with.
+** However, the law often has to refer very directly to these overlapping sandbox periods.
+** Yet because they are never articulated clearly in culture or in law, the law doesn't have the vocabulary to speak clearly about them, and usually fails to
+   properly create the desired outcomes since neither the entire culture and the law itself are all avoiding talking about these sandboxes.
+** Often, because we fail to recognize the existence of sandboxes, we fail furthermore to recognize that many times we may be unknowingly speaking (in legislation)
+   about several overlapping yet distinct sandboxes at the same time, and this causes us to legislate hastily and disastrously by introducing rules that affect
+   unintended secondary sandboxes in unintentional ways.
+
+Wellspring has chosen to introduce an explicit framework for thinking about these overlapping sandboxes inhabited by protected classes of individuals.
+
+## The rational justification for sandboxing:
+
+Humans are a rational species, and the faculty of reason is a rational creature's only tool for survival. Experience and knowledge are the raw materials for our
+minds to use to form abstractions which enable us to thrive both in terms of subsistence and in terms of our ability to forge useful relationships and integrate
+into social systems.
+
+We recognize that certain crucial categories of experience and knowledge take time to develop, and that prior to the mastery of these areas of competency, it is
+expected that those individuals who have not had the chance to master those competences will err and will perform below the expected competence of one who has
+mastered those competences.
+
+Sandboxing is a necessary mechanism for the development of a rational creature which is **not omnipotent** and whose tool for survival and thriving is the
+**gradual acquisition of conceptual knowledge**.
+
+Let there be no ambiguity: `Wellspring` recognizes and champions the need for the protection of the mind of a developing rational being from exploitation by mature
+predators seeking to sneak into a playpen of disarmed, underdeveloped minds and poach easy prey.
+
+## Examples of sandboxes which should be explicitly recognized by the polity:
+
+Not all of these sandboxes are appropriately by legislation, and private sector mechanisms are obviously both sufficient and ideal for many of them (such as the
+development of manners).
+
+Throughout history, human cultures have created various incubation systems to enable these individuals to develop these competences in a sandboxed environment.
+These sandboxes permeate the entire private and public sphere and are woven into every element of the culture. An inexhaustive list of such competences includes:
+* Manners and an understanding of the proper way to speak in both vertical and horizontal relationships.
+* Sensitivity to the fact that there are biological differences in capability between individuals; and the proper vocabulary and level of compassion for those
+  less capable.
+* An understanding of sexuality and the long term personal and psychological consequences of sexual decisions. Hitherto, cultures have often encapsulated this
+  in the "legal age of consent".
+* A mastery of economic principles and an understanding of one's own economic interests; and skill in the art of negotiation.
+** Most cultures have expressed the protections required for the development of these skills in the form of labour laws; especially in the form of the minimum
+   wage law.
+** The class of jobs known as "unskilled labour" or "minimum wage jobs" is intended to be a sandbox environment within which young workers learn the principles of
+   business, finance, continuous career and skill development, and negotiation. Hitherto, because it wasn't made known explicitly to these young individuals that
+   these jobs are intended to be a sandbox from which they will graduate, they tend to cling to the sandbox protections of minimum wages and other similar laws,
+   beyond their expected graduation date.
+** Notice how this "sandbox" reasoning framework provides a strong case for laws prohibiting child labour.
+** We recognize that acknowledging this opens the door for arguments in favour of an age-gated miminum wage policy for example -- that is, that minimum wage laws
+   would not be universal but rather they would be based on the age of the employee, with an eventual cutoff to zero when the employee passes a certain age. We
+   don't take any specific policy position other than to assert that once an individual passes the legislatively defined sandbox period for the acquisition of
+   these competences, all such special treatment laws should cease to have any effect on that person's contracts.
+* An understanding of long-term consequences and the basic structure of various common contracts. Hitherto this has tended to be encapsulated in law as the age
+  of sui juris.
+* An understanding of their level of talent in the various available professions, and a clear comprehension of which skills are their strengths, and therefore
+  which skills they should pursue further as careers; and which skills they should realize are not best for them. In general, this is a fairly difficult sandbox to
+  get right, and most cultures generally expect young people to use their teens and their twenties to find at least one career path they are competent at and commit
+  to it.
+
+## Why `Wellspring` has chosen to make sandboxes explicit:
+
+The purpose of sandboxing as a legal abstraction within `Wellspring` is to make explicit the reasons why sandboxing is needed, and moreover to ensure that persons
+inhabiting sandboxes have the required curriculum and expected graduation date communicated clearly to them. We expect that this will ultimately result in more
+desirable outcomes since individuals can better prepare themselves to graduate these sandboxes rather than to fail to graduate, yet still be held liable for failure
+by the culture at large if they fail to realize that there were milestones that they were expected to achieve.
+
+We have seen that in past cutures founded on elements of "capitalism", the failure by large numbers of youth to graduate from these sandboxes produces
+dissatisfaction, especially because they tend to complain that they didn't even know that they were being assessed in the first place. This is essentially the
+complaint that people are making when they say things such as:
+
+"I was told that in a free society I can be anything I want to be and I followed my dreams but I eventually discovered that certain doors weren't open to me.
+Sadly I spent too long knocking on those futile doors without committing to a more realistic door. I have also been convinced now by a Marxist that under Marxism,
+I would have had a much longer incubation time in the sandbox, within which I could find my desired field of work. In reality, under Marxism I would have had a
+much shorter sandbox time and I would have been assigned to some job without any say in the matter. My real complaint here is that I feel that the sandbox period
+I was given was too short."
+
+`WS` doesn't think that it is possible to define the perfect sandbox durations for every protected class's development -- but we do think that explicitly informing
+individuals that they are in fact inhabiting a sandbox and that there is a deadline for graduation, will help them to more capably manage their development.
+Moreover we hope it will reduce the number of individuals who find themselves ejected from sandboxes and labelled as failures when they never even realized that
+they were being given special treatment within a sandbox in the first place.