It means to pointlessly take something to a place that already has it in abundance.

Look to Windward is my favourite. The Ways of Dying monologue is hauntingly beautiful.

Excession, by Iain M Banks.

Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer’s kiss through the few millimetres’ thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum.  What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

Gorgeous.

It’s an idea from Lean management. Everything you need to keep, prevents you from keeping something else; requires you to remember where it is, where you could be remembering something else; takes longer to move when you have to move it; takes longer to organise than having less would. It poses fire hazards that having nothing wouldn’t pose. Blocks light that having nothing wouldn’t block. Keeping stuff is inherently wasteful.

None of this is to say that keeping stuff is bad. It may be very useful to keep it. But you should always recognise that doing so incurs a cost that you need to trade off against its usefulness.

While we’re on it, inventory is one of the eight kinds of waste identified in Lean. They are:

• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Waiting
• Overproduction
• Overprocessing
• Defects
• Skills (misuse of)

Remember TIM WOODS.

All of this is meant for running a factory, but I’ve found a lot of them useful in other bits of life, especially the idea that Inventory is a form of waste.

Inventory is waste.

Ooh! Does this include, when you want to join a road but can’t get out because nobody gives you way, the ability to telekinetically push the button on a nearby pedestrian crossing?

Margaret Atwood with a flamethrower is, by far, the best thing I have ever seen.

I’ve just got to 11kyu. If you’re on online-go long enough, it turns out you can advance pretty far just by opponents timing out on games.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time working in a lab, the ability to control static electricity would be a godsend! There’s really nothing like spending weeks preparing a new material as a fine powder, carrying it over to the weighing scales, placing a glass sample vial onto the scales, taring it, then a scooping up some of your powder with a spatula, careful not to lose a single particle, then carefully, CAREFULLY carrying the scoop of power to the sample vial – then seeing the static blast your powder out of the spatula to coat the OUTSIDE of the sample vial, plus the scales, plus your nitrile glove…

I have trauma.