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3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

openculture.com

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Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#201

Post by adamsmith143 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #182
adamsmith143 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure 300K TC seems impressive relative to the Barista you buy your Latte from but it pales in comparison to the amount that people like Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, etc have increased their wealth in the past 2 years for example, which is on the order of 10s of Billions. You are far closer to the homeless you guy step over on the way to Twitter HQ than to Jack Dorsey and sure if you deliver a great result this quarter ma…

You're only closer to the homeless guy with a completely naive take on the utility of money.

Can you check my math?

0 -> 1M -> 10B

Not sure how far away from 10B 1M is. Maybe you can help

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#202

Post by adamsmith143 »

FredPret wrote: post #127
adamsmith143 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure 300K TC seems impressive relative to the Barista you buy your Latte from but it pales in comparison to the amount that people like Zuckerburg, Musk, Bezos, etc have increased their wealth in the past 2 years for example, which is on the order of 10s of Billions. You are far closer to the homeless you guy step over on the way to Twitter HQ than to Jack Dorsey and sure if you deliver a great result this quarter ma…

It’s not relative. 300k buys you a fantastic life. You’ll never be in the 0.1% with a job vs owning assets, but these jobs are amazing by any measure, and a world away from being poor. The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply. You may say it buys them outsized influence, but media companies will always have…

>The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply.

I think this almost completely false. Elon Musk just bought Twitter and could drastically change a major point of interaction for hundreds of millions of people. The Koch Brothers spend billions to influence, to great effect, the laws that are passed in the US. These examples are not rare. The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie.

But anyway I think the general point is that is that even by working yourself to death you only increase your income or net worth by small numbers while someone like Elon Musk can 10x it over the same time period.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#203

Post by nyx_land »

jamesfisher wrote: post #198
blakesterz wrote: post #54

The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634

cat excuses | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 67 ILL 49 WITH HIS BOSS 17 BREWING BEER 13 WITH AAPEHTI 8 WITH THE SCRIBE 6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE 5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER 5 OFFERING TO THE GOD 5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING 5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE 4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES 4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE 4 OFF ABSENT 4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING 3 WITH HOREMWIA 3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO 3 LIBATING TO HIS…

> BURYING THE GOD

Thousands of years later and yet who among us hasn't missed work to bury God?

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#204

Post by Cthulhu_ »

itsgrimetime wrote: post #161

Seeing the frequency of the days off and the reasons really humanizes these people that (at least I) just imagine as some alien beings that I had nothing in common with. Also there’s just some that are funny given cultural norms today - I’m assuming it was more akin to taking bereavement leave, but imagining telling my boss I won’t be working because I’ll be drinking for 3 days is pretty comical to me: day 24 (LIBATI…

> imagining telling my boss I won’t be working because I’ll be drinking for 3 days is pretty comical to me:

Isn't that basically weekends? Anyway I think it would be a lot more acceptable these days if you get paid per day and you're replaceable enough to not Need to be at work every day.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#205

Post by [deleted] »

dylan-m wrote: post #28
robbedpeter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale. We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood educa…

> This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b

[deleted]

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#206

Post by xen2xen1 »

noneeeed wrote: post #93
jeffbee wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dogs also hunt scorpions. Dogs are not immune to scorpion stings, they're just ignorant.

Dogs seem to hunt pretty much anything. I wonder if we've bred out the understanding of what is and isn't edible in dogs, but not cats? Or perhaps its a social thing that wild canids teach their young? Half the dog owners I know have some story of their dog catching a hedgehog or something equally inedible, but the worst that seems to happen with cats is their prey fights back a bit harder than they expected and they…

Dogs were bred / created to keep their owners safe, not themselves. That seems to track. I've lived several places I'd not live without a dog alarm or three, so I can't say I'm not grateful.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#207

Post by inopinatus »

ALittleLight wrote: post #7

I used to live in a scorpion-rich environment and can attest that a sting should disqualify one from manual labor for a day. I found that every time I was stung though the effects were less and less. The last time I was stung was a minor nuisance at most. I would advise, if you find yourself living with scorpions, to check your shoes, by shaking them out, before putting them on.

Look on the bright side; now you can go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#208

Post by tsimionescu »

divbzero wrote: post #124
ARandomerDude wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that the dates are "Month 3 of Summer, Day 24" etc. The curious bit to me being the enduring use of 4 distinct seasons, when there are obviously other ways to mark a year. Is anyone aware of a culture that did/does not have exactly 4 seasons?

Another phenomenon I’ve found curious is the cross-cultural definition of a week as roughly a quarter moon, and correlated names for days of the week. [1] Sunday Sun Sōlis Hēlíou 日曜日 Monday Moon Lūnae Selḗnēs 月曜日 Tuesday Mars Mārtis Áreōs 火曜日 Wednesday Mercury Mercuriī Hermoû 水曜日 Thursday Jupiter Iovis Diós 木曜日 Friday Venus Veneris Aphrodítēs 金曜日 Saturday Saturn Sāturnī Krónou 土曜日 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N…

As far as I understand from the Wikipedia article, this practice has spread directly from Judaism (7 days) through Christianity through the Roman Empire (which renamed the days according to the planets/gods) to all of these places. It's not clear from the article if perhaps the Ancient Greeks had a similar system already - but otherwise, the Indians and the Chinese adopted this system from Roman/Hellenistic sources between the 3rd and 4th centuries CE, and other cultures around them adopted it from them slightly later.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#209

Post by jhanschoo »

dylan-m wrote: post #28
robbedpeter wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily with improvements in nutrition, public health, and medical science. It's mostly plateaued over the last 50 years, but it's evident that pre-industrial / pre-rnlightenment humans had a much harder life, including things that suppressed potential at an almost global scale. We may see additional gains if there are globally adopted pedagogical improvements in both childhood educa…

> This is incorrect - iq has risen steadily In particular, we recently invented this peculiar notion that one can boil intelligence down to a number :b

We know we can quantify intelligence as in IQ because it is what we call aptitude in several tasks (e.g. pattern recognition, short-term recall), and we've found that they are correlated, and aptitude in those tasks is measurable (e.g. ability to recognize pattern and time taken, ability to recall and time taken). If intelligence as in IQ wasn't as transferable as it is we would be calling them different things. For example, intelligence as in IQ and being knowledgeable are different aspects of the popular notion of being intelligent or smart.

Re: 3,200-year-old Egyptian tablet records excuses for why people missed work

#210

Post by wesleywt »

jamesfisher wrote: post #198
blakesterz wrote: post #54

The original with ALL of the excuses is at the British Museum here: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/Y_EA5634

cat excuses | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn 67 ILL 49 WITH HIS BOSS 17 BREWING BEER 13 WITH AAPEHTI 8 WITH THE SCRIBE 6 MAKING REMEDIES FOR THE SCRIBE’S WIFE 5 WRAPPING (THE CORPSE OF) HIS MOTHER 5 OFFERING TO THE GOD 5 HIS WIFE WAS BLEEDING 5 FETCHING STONE FOR THE SCRIBE 4 WITH KHONS MAKING REMEDIES 4 SUFFERING WITH HIS EYE 4 OFF ABSENT 4 HIS DAUGHTER WAS BLEEDING 3 WITH HOREMWIA 3 WITH HIS BOSS DITTO 3 LIBATING TO HIS…

Who knew that Egypt was so progressive that guys can take off when their wife or daughter has a period.
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