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Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
71–80 of 349 posts
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#72I’m thankful for yeast. It’s so, so convenient that we have a non-pathogenic bacteria which will eat pretty much any simple sugar, can be found on the surfaces of most fruits, and is essentially effortless to cultivate, which also does a bunch of useful things like leaven bread and make a bunch of delicious short chain fatty acids (both in bread and on their own, like in marmite) and make alcohol (although that one m…
Yeast are not bacteria. They are eukaryotes.
I‘m thankful for nerds who make corrections so I can learn some interesting fact.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to see evidence, that people were pushed into the factories. I was under the impression, that many went into the factories, because working in agriculture was not easy, as machines were not common. And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
In seeing what has recently happened in China, I would agree. A gigantic migration has occurred in the past few decades where Chinese peasants moved from rural areas to the cities to work in factories. I thought for a long time "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony. I watched a pretty good documentary about this, and the ans…
> "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony.
Because, as horrible as the factory conditions might seem to modern eyes, they weren't, in general, as horrible as being an agricultural stoop labor peasant (either in the west in premodern or Victorian times, or in China today).
Serfs were running away to the cities way back in the Middle Ages, long before any Enclosure Acts.
The expected payoff wasn't nearly as low as it is for acting. While life in the cities wasn't a bed of roses by any means (deaths from infectious diseases were at a horrific level, to name just one downside), the one big advantage was that you no longer had a "master" or "lord of the manor" who essentially had the power of life and death over you. Yes, a factory might have a cruel foreman, and many did, but the workers were allowed to change jobs. Serfs didn't have that privilege.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#74Realized after reading this that it's American Thanksgiving today. Happy Thanksgiving to our American friends. I'm thankful for a lovely forum where we can read and share articles like this one.
Agreed. The tone of the HN comments section is occasionally somewhat more contentious now than a few years ago, but it has not generally devolved into the sort of partisan pissing match/bad-faith clusterfuck seen elsewhere in the interwebs. To some extent I attribute that to the fact that valuing science and reason can be a helpful quality in moderating the tone of interaction, even among anons. Which is really a luc…
Prove it, you partisan hack. :)
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would like to see evidence, that people were pushed into the factories. I was under the impression, that many went into the factories, because working in agriculture was not easy, as machines were not common. And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
Google "The Enclosures". In Britain people had their right to subsist off common land removed by Parliament[1]. You can argue that the move from agriculture to industry, from countryside to city, would have happened anyway. What is indisputable is that for many people, the possibility of subsisting in the ways they had before were systematically removed by the state (at the time under the complete control of the prop…
Would enclosures not have happened if industrialization didn't? IMO this was inevitable because peasants simply lost the leverage that they had received after the black plague. Countries like the US had no such laws, yet they all went through the same industrialization occurred all the same.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#76"Oh, and also that the universe exists at all" That's the one to keep coming back to. Could've been nothin.
On the other hand, nothingness has no cause or means for suffering.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why, what has it done to you?
Nothing concrete I can point to of course, I'm just wary of being actively grateful for it... it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood, and there could also be better alternative sweeteners that didn't make this list.
> it seems to me that some of the subtle and/or knock-on effects may not be fully understood
There have probably had hundreds of studies done by people who were actively trying to prove something and wrote that they fully believe that there are bad side effects yet not one states they proved something.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
In seeing what has recently happened in China, I would agree. A gigantic migration has occurred in the past few decades where Chinese peasants moved from rural areas to the cities to work in factories. I thought for a long time "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony. I watched a pretty good documentary about this, and the ans…
> "Why would so many people do this? This factory conditions are quite horrible, or at least the definition of soul-crushing monotony. Because, as horrible as the factory conditions might seem to modern eyes, they weren't, in general, as horrible as being an agricultural stoop labor peasant (either in the west in premodern or Victorian times, or in China today). Serfs were running away to the cities way back in the M…
But on the other hand, the Enclosures provoked a number riots[1], so I don't think everyone agreed with you that "free" city life was better than rural serfdom, with common rights intact.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#79>That even though the turn humans made from hunter-gatherer bands into agriculture pretty clearly made life worse, it eventually led to the industrial revolution Which also made life worse to begin with. Without the enclosure movement depriving peasants of their land and pushing them to work in the factories in horrendous conditions for pitiful pay it likely wouldnt have happened. Though I'm pretty thankful for the w…
I would like to see evidence, that people were pushed into the factories. I was under the impression, that many went into the factories, because working in agriculture was not easy, as machines were not common. And once factories were there, humans improved working conditions there. While in agriculture, well, way more difficult to do, as the work had to be done.
Theres been some research in modern day Bangladesh that seems to suggest that a presence of a garment factory in a village (aka sweatshop to some people) is associated with higher educational attainment for women and school completion rates.
Basically, garment factory work requires some level of literacy and numeracy. Having a factory in your village which provides jobs and independence vs farm labor work provides people an incentive to complete a certain level of schooling.
Re: Underrated Reasons to Be Thankful
#80Thank you, a lovely list. 7, 23, 24 were driven by the common unusual political occurrence of fair economic opportunity. These rare times where a balance of power occurs, by special circumstances, between the former autocratic rulers and everyone else. In Britain (7), domestic Royal monopolies were abolished etc creating an economic and legal environment where entrepreneurs would be rewarded. So people started invest…
To be picky, the timescale/locations of #23 is way off: Socrates (Athens= 470–399 BC Plato (Athens) 423-348 BC Aristotles (Athens) 384–322 BC Archimedes (of Syracuse) some 2-3 centuries later 287-212 BC Euclid (of Alexandria) was active in Alexandria around 300-270 BC Hyppocrates (of Kos) 470-360 BC Pytagoras (of Samos) 570–495 BC Thucydides (Athens) 460-400 BC Herodotus (of Halicarnassus) 484-425 BC Aesop (?) 620-56…
That today, thousands of years later, we have managed to retain what those people said or wrote is also a very good reason to be thankful.