51–60 of 73 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I realize that was tongue in cheek, but what I found more interesting is that is was only to stand for 20 years and was initially set to be demolished in 1909. So your question is even more amusing as the thing was only supposed to be temporary.
Since it was part of a World's Fair, it is unsurprising today that the Eiffel Tower was slated for demolition. I grew up very near to Balboa Park, and it was rather late in life that I learned that all those buildings were sort of hastily erected for the Panama–California Exposition, 110 years ago, and they were expected to be demolished quickly, or decay, because they were never intended for permanent habitation. An…
It's clearly either a giant granite birthday cake... or a prison far too easy to escape.
As the last two paragraphs of TFA point out, this idea is now widely discredited. However, there are a lot of things that don't seem widely known in popular culture about Stonehenge that might colour perceptions about this theory, and the counters to it. First, it's worth remembering the thing you look at today has been mucked about with for thousands of years. It's not "original". Depending on your definition of tha…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Stones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avebury
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Straight_Track
There are a lot of stone circles in Great Britain. I suspect that others located in Europe would have been dismantled for building materials over the past millennia.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Isles_Venn_D...
Would be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it. Like, it obviously had SOME purpose.
Would be pretty stupid to spend all this energy erecting stones just for the view of it. Like, it obviously had SOME purpose.
Yeah, why did they go through all that effort to build the Eiffel tower?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Universelle_(1889)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * To provide work Cite required. Work in a pre-industrial agrarian society is ever-present, unless there's a drought. (Although in that case the coffin builders may need extra hands.)
That's a simplistic, reductive, and uninformed expression of history which completely disregards the roles of the artisan, merchant, innkeeper, or any of the numerous other trades which kept early economies moving. Not everyone was a hand-to-mouth peasant farmer, either in medieval Europe, or in earlier points in history. The building of a cathedral provided generations of employment for stonemasons, men involved in…
"Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%." (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * To provide work Cite required. Work in a pre-industrial agrarian society is ever-present, unless there's a drought. (Although in that case the coffin builders may need extra hands.)
That's a simplistic, reductive, and uninformed expression of history which completely disregards the roles of the artisan, merchant, innkeeper, or any of the numerous other trades which kept early economies moving. Not everyone was a hand-to-mouth peasant farmer, either in medieval Europe, or in earlier points in history. The building of a cathedral provided generations of employment for stonemasons, men involved in…
It's clearly either a giant granite birthday cake... or a prison far too easy to escape.
Is this an Ylvis reference? Never thought I'd see such a thing on Hacker News.
