Studying the demise of historic civilisations • Hacker News Board

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#311

Post by dalbasal » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:04 PM UTC

nonbel wrote: post #285

dagaci wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Egyptian Civilization was sustained because of the Nile delta productivity. Literally all the nutrients gathered over 1/4 of the of the African continent are deposited nowhere else along the river route but in Nile delta, this unique phenomenon of nature meant this area is extremely resilient and can withstand any level of exploitation. Egyptian Civilization continued for over 3000 years (what we know about) which is…

The ~600 BC Egyptians claimed it was because the proximity to water protected them from periodic "great conflagrations" and the lack of rain from catastrophic flooding: > "There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes. There is a story, which even you…

Amazing quote thanks for that. It's just inspiring to imagine Plato and Socrates, in a garden, discussing basically the same article we're discussing here.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#312

Post by magduf » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:07 PM UTC

dak1 wrote: post #5

xiaodai wrote: post #2

Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? They seem to think that Shang and Zhou are different civilisations? Instead of a continuity as they like to call it in China. There are good reasons why they should be considered continuations because they shared a similiar script for writing.

The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script. For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different We…

>For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese

Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#313

Post by barberousse » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:14 PM UTC

antisthenes wrote: post #308

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this could be true. 'Looting' is the plundering of goods from others, usually by conquest. Many civilizations were stable for long periods without expansion. In fact, Arnold Toynbee made the argument that imperial expansion was a symptom of decline. If by loot you mean - as you say - the use of raw materials, labour and the environment, I don't think the word has any analytic meaning whatsoever.

> If by loot you mean - as you say - the use of raw materials, labour and the environment, I don't think the word has any analytic meaning whatsoever. By that definition, we have expanded the looting in the last century by several factors of magnitude. In that context, we should also view the global economy as a single empire.

At a very general level, there are people making that exact argument: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674006713&co...

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#314

Post by magduf » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:16 PM UTC

hungryhobo wrote: post #46

dak1 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The script has changed considerably over time between different dynasties, and different areas have had mutually unintelligible languages, even if sharing similar script. For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese, and Korean and Vietnamese both used to use Chinese characters, but they are all separate languages. Similarly, numerous "dialects" in China are less mutually intelligible than many different We…

honestly this is just not?true. the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it. it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty. Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading…

>Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different

The Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters is absolutely nothing like the Chinese pronunciation of them, and the meaning is sometimes different too. (The Kanji for "letter" (as in a piece of paper you write a letter on) means "toilet paper" in Chinese.)

https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/cj-false-friends.html

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#315

Post by dhruvrrp » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #294

shadowprofile76 wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low paying jobs in developing economies have to be considered in the context of existing alternatives. If a Vietnamese rice farmer's son previously had only daily hours of backbreaking labor to look forward to on his father's paddies for what amounts to a dollar worth of earnings per day (only paid when they can finally sell the rice after many weeks of toiling) and then one day American McShoe Factory opens in the n…

I love this kind of reply. To me it's like that rabbit duck optical illusion[1]: when seen one way it seems reasonable, even almost inevitable, and then it suddenly flips and sounds like smarmy weasel words excusing exploitation. Here's my suggestion, why not pay the former rice paddy worker 50$/day and improve human rights at the McShoe Vietnam factory? It's still an awesome bargain by western standards. Oh and the…

Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, unless you don't mind destroying the local economy and you'd rather force rich countries to subsidize economically backward countries.

To put the money into perspective, $50/day, which might seem like a pittance to most people on HN, is almost 4-5 times the amount that most employees make at some of the better Indian outsourcing companies.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#316

Post by barberousse » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:22 PM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #256

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to forget that the current Chinese government is trying to work hard to erase the diversity of the entirety of China, trying to get everyone to use the same spoken and written language - iirc they already use the same written language, it's just that people will speak the same characters differently depending on region.

The French did something similar in France, changed a rather diversity country into a monoculture, in a period of around 100 years.

That's a component of modernization most Western European countries went through during the 1800s.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#317

Post by gerbilly » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:23 PM UTC

dhruvrrp wrote: post #315

gerbilly wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this kind of reply. To me it's like that rabbit duck optical illusion[1]: when seen one way it seems reasonable, even almost inevitable, and then it suddenly flips and sounds like smarmy weasel words excusing exploitation. Here's my suggestion, why not pay the former rice paddy worker 50$/day and improve human rights at the McShoe Vietnam factory? It's still an awesome bargain by western standards. Oh and the…

Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way, unless you don't mind destroying the local economy and you'd rather force rich countries to subsidize economically backward countries. To put the money into perspective, $50/day, which might seem like a pittance to most people on HN, is almost 4-5 times the amount that most employees make at some of the better Indian outsourcing companies.

> Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way

Because we make sure to keep it from working that way.

Rich countries don't seem to have much trouble with destroying 'backward' countries when it suits them[1], maybe Vietnam could use a bit of this kind of economic 'destruction' you describe.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#318

Post by blacksmith_tb » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:30 PM UTC

BurningFrog wrote: post #288

boudin wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And cheap labour in countries with lower worker/human right standards

A lot of (rich) people confuse poverty with slavery. They are nothing alike.

I would say this is an attempt on their part not to put slavery in a better light, but to minimize the immorality of wage labor. Slavery requires force to capture people and to keep them from escaping. Wage labor replaces that entire system of work with one where people will volunteer, even compete, to be exploited and can be discarded at the whims of employers. Kevin Bales' _Disposable People_ [1] goes into this theme in depth.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/178676.Disposable_People

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#319

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

mnm1 wrote: post #143

stcredzero wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, anyone could build a prosperous society on the back of slaves if they have some natural resources to exploit. But that ceases to be competitive past a certain level of technology and value-add. Even slaves in the American South got paid extra for work requiring exceptional skill and attention to detail. It turns out you can't whip people into producing quality past a very basic level. The legacy of th…

Are you saying that black people aren't suffering today due to slavery and Jim Crow? How do you explain that the median white household wealth is sixteen times that of black households? Or is that a leftist conspiracy also? https://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/03/26/the-racial...

Are you saying that black people aren't suffering today due to slavery and Jim Crow?

No to the first. The causation from slavery doesn't reach the current day. There were tremendous gains in literacy rates and per capita wealth of black people after slavery. Then there were later reversals in literacy rates and rates of out of wedlock births which date to the mid 20th century.

https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/11/14/a-legacy-o...

"If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on "the legacy of slavery" with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals."

As for Jim Crow, some really bad things happened under that, it's true. Those laws were overturned by the civil rights movement.

Incidentally, my family name indicates that my ancestors were also essentially slaves. That form of slavery persisted into the 1800's. No one in my family talks about suffering as a result of that. The notion would just be seen as silly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea#History

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#320

Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

jlktrl wrote: post #64

jcranmer wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it true to say that China is the longest surviving civilization? Not really. The Chinese tend to emphasize viewing their history through a lens of continuity and a single notional empire whereas the Western history tends to view their history as discontinuous and fractured empires. But when you start comparing the actual effects of these empires and their rises and falls, they are actually much more similar. For…

The comparison of the Roman Empire and the Chinese civilization is very flawed. First of all, Rome did not unite neighboring groups in Italy as a culture, never mind Europe. The lands and tribes they conquered simply used Latin for trade and as a lingua franca. It never became the mother tongue for any of those people. In China, for thousands of years, you have people from every province celebrating many of the same…

Nonsense. If what you're saying about language was true then the people of France and most of Spain would be speaking a Celtic language, Gaulish or Celto-Iberian.

Instead they speak direct descendants of the language of the common tongue of Roman citizens, 'vulgar' Latin. The pre-Roman languages of most of Roman occupied Europe were extinguished. Apart from Greek, which was kind of the second language of Rome (and later the only language, once the west collapsed) and Palestine/Syria, it's only in Britain where pre-Roman languages survived -- that is until the Anglo-Saxons wiped most of it out, excepting Wales and Cornwall.