141–150 of 208 posts
And geriatric politicians caused the fall of pax Americana by reacting too late for climate change. The wheel goes round.
I wonder if the next empire will set an age range, like 35-65.
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Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state. Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran…
Wasn't the dole only implemented because land ownership had concentrated to a few extremely wealthy individuals? Only a few generations earlier, during the Second Punic War many landowners had either died or had their farms ruined to deny food to Hannibal, allowing the land to be bought at low prices.
It was implemented because it got votes. It's not a coincidence that it was restricted to people who could vote.
You get welfare whenever you expand the franchise too far.
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Another, related view is to look at how many was on the dole. During the late empire, around 20% of the population in Rome was effectively on welfare, getting food from the state. Instead of drafting these poeple into the empire, Rome recruited foreigners for the army, while the productivity of the domestic population kept going down. Eventually the state, needing to pay both the welfare receipients and the army, ran…
Is that actually a useful correlation? Subsidized grain was a very prominent feature of the early empire. I'd be surprised if the late empire had a significantly larger proportion on it.
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How to get published: "Other authors are wrong." How not to get published: "The general consensus is right." So although individuals may not flip-flop constantly, fields as a whole do. Pick almost any topic in almost any field (especially humanities) and read papers 10-20 years apart. There's a constant cycle. The cycle becomes self reinforcing too, because now you can interact with previous criticisms ( Dr. A said t…
As someone who made their living publishing scientific papers for over a decade and amassed a track record that showed that I was pretty good at it, I can tell you from first hand experience that you are absolutely wrong about this. A much better approximation to the truth would be something like this: How not to get published: "Other authors are wrong." How to get published: "These specific other authors are right,…
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I agree this is a troll, but I'd like to point out a few things: > - Not going far from home, but using ~23 liters of gas($50 @ 210/L) just to get there? Absolutely could see this. I live in the US, but the nearest spot I'd like to go camping is probably a $50 round trip. And I'd like to camp in different places, so we're starting to look at $50 being entirely reasonable if I made a list of places I'd like to camp. N…
Even spending $50 in one direction on gas isn't insane for a weekend camping trip, a couple hours of highway driving at current prices, but I don't think anyone would consider that "not far from home" as OP stated. > For what it's worth, this is not allowed in many parks. Sure, but you don't need to camp in parks. That helps save on the $60/night fee as well. > You'll probably buy some special meat to grill, marshmal…
A bigger problem with the itemization of cigarettes is that listing them as a camping expense implies that you smoke more while camping than you would otherwise, which makes no sense.
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While not a proper historian I find Dan Carlin's observations very interesting, especially him comparing how, historically speaking, the middle class of their period had a lifestyle quite envious to our own, more akin to how we imagine the "idle rich" today (servants for all menial tasks, expansive homes, lackadaisical lifestyles and high quality education for personal pursuits). Underlaid of course by the same conce…
Historically the middle class in the past is the modern rich of today. It consisted of the bourgeoisie and the well educated elite who still had to work for their living (i.e. business owners, lawyers etc.) it wasn’t much more than a few percent pf the total population. Prior to the 20th century describing any person earning an ‘average’ income as middle class wouldn’t make much sense.
But the idea of being "middle class" is that you aren't upper class (because you're lowborn), and you aren't lower class (because you're rich).
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Lots of people died and disappeared, whole cities were abandoned, those that weren’t often had a tenth of their previous populations, people receded to subsistence agriculture, and literacy went to almost zero. If you took an interest in a subject and read a few books, you could be the worlds foremost expert on it. This was most prevalent in the west. Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revo…
> Rome was just a few sparks away from triggering an industrial revolution a thousand years early That’s a pretty amazing idea.
Lucio Russo thinks rather it would have been the Greeks, but makes clear that neither of them approached things with the modern scientific method.
What does the “Fall of Rome” actually mean? It’s not like everyone died or disappeared. They just stopped being ruled by a particular government.
Except it's exactly like that. Huge numbers of people died; population cratered.
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Even spending $50 in one direction on gas isn't insane for a weekend camping trip, a couple hours of highway driving at current prices, but I don't think anyone would consider that "not far from home" as OP stated. > For what it's worth, this is not allowed in many parks. Sure, but you don't need to camp in parks. That helps save on the $60/night fee as well. > You'll probably buy some special meat to grill, marshmal…
> never drank $25 of beer per day(while camping), never bought cigarettes A bigger problem with the itemization of cigarettes is that listing them as a camping expense implies that you smoke more while camping than you would otherwise, which makes no sense.