I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it. However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it. Conflicted.
Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
121–130 of 200 posts
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should n…
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Interesting thought exercise though.
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#123This blog series by Bret Devraux keeps bringing me back to the black death, and how that reformed labor relations. I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate. I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the bes…
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#124I'd normally be frustrated with all of the grammar mistakes, as it indicates to me that the author can't be bothered to proof read their own work before they expect others to read it. However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it. Conflicted.
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#125The modern UK leasehold system is, in many ways, rooted in the feudal landholding arrangements. In the UK, when buying a house, the buyer sometimes leases the land rather than owning it outright, and must pay ground rent to the landlord. A lease is usually bought for 80 years or more, but occasionally properties are sold with only a few years remaining. If the lease is not renewed, the homeowner risks losing the prop…
Vast majority of houses are not leasehold. It’s 125 years at lease, and aside from a couple of decades the ground rent was always a peppercorn (actual ground rents started in the 90s and have now finished)
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize pretty quickly that hierarchies (then and now) are often deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward, not just accidentally emergent
Even YC is designed that way, they fund people that can get into MIT or stanford or harvard maybe? Others with great records are rarely accepted, this is a known fact
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvania - 5 University of Washington - 5 Columbia University - 5 Johns Hopkins - 4 Yale - 4 Caltech - 4 UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
If you don’t understand that advertisement and public relations are merely propaganda, I’m not sure what to tell you beyond that. We think in terms of wholly different realities I guess. Nothing can convince you of my side and nothing can convince me against this conclusion that advertisement is fundamentally propaganda, and as long as we allow for it in politics we allow for the opportunity of malicious intent on th…
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
File this under Lies Engineers Believe About Political Science.
Not 100% what OP proposed, but in my country political funding is extremely capped. Compared to US, campaigns here are tame to say the least. But overall it’s for the better IMO.
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#129When you get to the end, remember that's how many to most black people lived until very recently until they were expelled from the land with nothing, due to the rise of more efficient farming techniques. The very few who owned their own land were more slowly pushed out when they were denied farm loans. Black people owned about 15 million acres of land in 1910, now they own about 1 million.
Re: Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
#130A reminder unemployment and underemployment and labour displacement existed in Roman times, and could be inferred to have carried into post Roman serfdom and the age of kings. It might not be the best choice for a peasant normally but walking off the land did happen. There are court records seeking the return of successful townspeople provably off their lords domain, and similar documents around marriage and land inh…
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.