241–250 of 359 posts
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"It never became the mother tongue for any of those people." Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Portugal all speak a variation of 'Latin'.
by this standard, Japanese would be a variation of Chinese
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Take turkey.... Did the Byzantine/Roman civilization end when the ottomans took over? Social organization changed, but not wholesale. social organization in which populations, Economic and political activity continued, concentrated in cities. Greek remained a major language, as did many Greek laws. Incidentally, why was Rome/Byzantine civilization Greek speaking in anatolia? Because it had been Hellenised long before…
What you are doing here is writing 'civilization' where 'empire' is the more appropriate usage. Up to that transformation, we are in agreement. I assume the author of the second chart that you mention is doing the same thing. Frequency of use is not the most important issue, but Google estimates 75,400 hits for "Byzantine civilization" (plus 15,400 for "Byzantine civilisation"), and 4.3 million for "Byzantine empire"…
I think you hit these sorts of problems regardless though. You could say empire, civilization, polity, society, culture... They're all fuzzy classifications.
They aren't discreet terms. A civilization doesn't begin or end at a certain date.. unless you agree to some specific formulation. But, that will not be an exact fit when you try to apply it elsewhere.
Taken totally literally, civilization just means urbanism. But obviously, that's not what we're talking about here.
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What were those mines producing?
Tin and copper in Cornish mines, was the main driver early on. That isn't really the point, yes it was the 'age of steam' but in reality it made a few marginal mines profitable. There were no steam trains, no steam ships, no wide spread mechanisation. Britain wasn't some backwater that was propelled ahead of spain due to accidentally discovering steam power. It was already a power in it own right, with trading networ…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_power_during_the_Industr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Savery#Application_of_t...
Coal mining was a thosand times greater than metal mining by the late 18th / early 19th century:
Coal was so abundant in Britain that the supply could be stepped up to meet the rapidly rising demand. About 1770-1780 the annual output of coal was some 6.25 million long tons.
Versus:
Despite the collapse of the copper mining industry in 1866, the tin industry was still riding high producing 10,000 tons of tin a year - about half the world's production.
http://www.miningartifacts.org/English-Mines.html
Coal production 1700 - 1900:
1700 : 2.7 million tonnes
1750 : 4.7 million tonnes
1800 : 10 million tonnes
1850 : 50 million tonnes
1900 : 250 million tonnes
http://historylearning.com/great-britain-1700-to-1900/indrev...
More on copper:
During the middle of the 18th Century the quantity of British copper sold was over 700,000 tons.
https://www.copper.org/education/history/60centuries/raw_mat...
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"It never became the mother tongue for any of those people." Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Portugal all speak a variation of 'Latin'.
by this standard, Japanese would be a variation of Chinese
You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the…
> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious pr…
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…
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Really bad idea. That would encourage people to consume wealth over 5 to 10 million during their lifetimes, i.e. destroy real wealth, instead of investing it in productive enterprises, i.e. building real wealth. You want a situation where wealthy people build a lot more wealth than they consume. The last thing you want is for them to consume their wealth, making themselves better off but the society overall much, muc…
Lots of rich people madly spending their wealth would be great for GDP. The luxury industries would prosper, and those who work in those industries would also accumulate wealth to spend madly. Those who truly have a vision for improving the world would still get to do that. Or, maybe... if there were less of an advantage to accumulating wealth, we wouldn't destroy ourselves and the environment quite so madly while do…
2. If the world is poorer, it will be able to afford to protect the environment less, not more. The wealthier a nation, or a neighbourhood is, the more it cares about protecting its local environment. For example, as China gets wealthier, it cares more about having cleaner air.
3. Wealth concentration in the right hands is not necessarily a bad thing. Increasing taxation is just concentrating more wealth in the hands of parliaments/governments, which they are unlikely to spend too effectively given that they are spending someone else's money, but yet which still results in some great outcomes (scientific advancements, until recently space flight etc.). Wealth concentration means that great leaps forward can happen in areas that at first are going to be very expensive (medical/longevity research, grand projects like SpaceX, even originally mobile phones etc.)
If you want to tax anything, it is probably better to tax (frivolous) consumption, i.e. wealth destruction, instead of wealth creation.
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What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?
Indeed, why even have children?
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What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life if I can’t leave anything to my children?
What is the point of accumulating wealth over this short life?