Shower thoughts

[SunlitZelkova]

15 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Not advanced was the "Hunter Gatherers" who survived day to day and had no time to sit back and think of ways to make their lives easier.

This is an inaccurate depiction of hunter gatherers. Whether work or leisure is available is a cultural aspect, not defined by material conditions. The San and Hadza peoples in Africa value leisure time and thus choose to maintain their hunter gatherer lifestyle over agriculture, which they deem as involving too much work. A man from the latter ethnic group once said "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" On the other hand, in one Northern California tribe (which I unfortunately forget the name of ) work was valued and those who lazed around all day were ostracized from society.

15 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Population control was built in and nobody really had thoughts of building armies and trying to invade and control large areas of land.

With the introduction of farming, chemical sciences, physics etc. Human's lives grew easier but also fostered those who always wanted more than they had. And so began armed conflicts built around wanting to control more land both for farming and for the creation of villages, then fortified towns/castles etc and then each layer of advancement that built on the last up to today and just a quick look at world news will give you an idea of how that is going.

I'd argue human lives are harder and they are less free. People live in fear of an overlord, whether it be the grocery store controlling prices of food, the boss deciding your paycheck, or the manager assigning your work hours. Far away kings who know little of what it's like to be a normal working person in the present day and age make decisions without consultation of the masses, claiming to represent them simply because they were elected.

There is new evidence poking holes in the narrative that we went in a straight line from hunting-gathering to villages and then cities and states. Sites like Nebelivka in Ukraine or Cahokia in the US show people have lived in cities and then abandoned them without reestablishing cities again for centuries (or virtually never again in the case of Native Americans). The straight line idea mainly comes from European/Caucasian anthropologists trying to force the path of their history onto indigenous cultures to somehow justify the violence wrought on the indigenous peoples.

I don't think hunter-gatherer societies lived in idyllic peace either. War is just an extension of human squabbles. Except the squabble exists between a very small group of (usually) men, and unfortunately, everyone else seems to have forgotten how to say "No" when that small group of men tries to force them to do something or think a certain way. Contrast this with the Wendat in the 1700s, who required a completely unanimous decision from the entire community to go to war. A point I raise to show that while war may occur often, it is not a product of kings and emperors alone.

(I'm gonna go on a tangent here)

I like to call human civilization in the present day "the Empire" because in my opinion not much has changed since the days of the Roman Empire. The provinces fight civil wars, a select few run the state, many people are enslaved (in one form or another) by one institution or another, and spectacles are used to distract people from major issues in their daily lives.

In other words, (IMO), the world we live in is still one of kings and emperors, just with better bullets so to speak. Because of that, I don't believe "one layer has built on top of another" and that the systems of control we live under are more simple than at first glance. Therefore, the opportunity to change the world for the better exists right now. It is not hidden or locked away by time or technology or the word salad of political ideas that exist.

So rather than wondering if we are doomed because of the way our society works or the tyranny of history, I believe whether we are doomed or not hinges on the ability of humans to be creative and think outside the box. That's a biological (neurological) and psychological issue, not one of politics or history.

And ironically, while mainstream historians and anthropologists often like to cast prehistoric humans as being beholden to environmental factors, I'd say that's more the case now than then, because people were free to live completely on their own, get their own food, and not do what anyone told them to back then, but nowadays people are (IMO FYI, as I say it quite dramatically) enslaved to many things, whether it be being reliant on farmers for their food, placing the needs of their friend group over their self to the point of abandoning individuality, or obeying the law or the orders of those who make the law to the point of death.

But here's the thing- I'm not saying anarchy would be better. Both anarchic hunting/gathering and life in imperial cities have their own issues. I think people should just be free to choose what they want to do. It may sound like I'm arguing collective leadership or hunting/gathering would make the world a better place, but that's not my intention. The key is choice. Being free to build a village with people you like in your own way, or free to live on your own. It's up to the individual. Together with a culture based on mutual respect for autonomy and care for basic needs, that would foster much more creativity and cooperation than anything else, IMO.

The only reason we think there are limits on what we can do as a species is because we were born into societies that place limits on what we can do as individuals. Humans consciously created the world they live in, and they can take it apart and rebuild it how they want.

Unless they are not conscious, of course, which is a question I've grappled with a lot. Because as much as I have hope in theory, in practice I often feel like humans are unthinking machines who have all these thoughts and ability to sense things in the universe but aren't actually capable of doing anything outside of their basic instincts, and will thus be destroyed because acting on the needs of the species as a whole is not part of their instinct- only acting on behalf of the offspring or individual. I actually wrote a short story recently in which the human education system has been so dumbed down over the centuries that the AI system overseeing society has become smarter than them, but the AI system itself is bound by part of its programming to a certain behavior, but despite knowing it is bound does not remember who did it and cannot undo it. It can only wonder, just as that is all the humans can do.

This actually comes back to those "zombie civilizations" I mentioned in my shower thought about the vulnerability of science. Anthropology has the ability to shed light on what human behavior can really be characterized as and what events in history shaped the world we live in, but the average citizen and the average holder-of-power probably has little sophisticated conception of this enormous topic beyond that simplistic Hobbesian "we all fought each other and eventually a king came along and made us bear each other in order to advance civilization." People don't really know why things are the way they are now, and they don't really have an understanding of how culture shapes perspectives and values. Thus they throw their hands up and say "it's always been this way" or "this is inevitable" when it really isn't. But because of the pressures of day to day life, they can't really afford time to sit down and think about those questions, let alone actually let them influence how they live*.

Thus we are stuck inheriting problems and finding new ones caused by stones left unturned by the past generation, which then cause us to neglect the future, in turn causing problems for the next generation, in turn causing them to neglect the future, and so on and so on. And "it's always been and will always be this way" because some centuries old scientists, who were really just looking at history with bias and limited tools, told us that so that they could make their society feel better about crushing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a faraway "new" land.

I'd almost say the science is what doomed us into this trap, despite offering salvation. History used to come in the form of myths and stories, which can be open to interpretation and rejected easily. If history becomes a science, that buzzword makes one interpretation of it the law of the land. It's very hard to question science after all.

On that note I'm going to end the tangent. Theoretically we have a road to salvation, but realistically we might be doomed. That's my opinion.

*The heavy influence of my single college anthropology class really shows on me here. To be clear, I'm not saying we have the answers now, I'm just saying it's an open question.

[ColdJ]

3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

This is an inaccurate depiction of hunter gatherers.

You are getting confused by modern Hunter Gatherers. We are talking thousands of years BCE. Not only were there the dangers of other predators hunting the tribes for food but also you needed to move with the seasons, both due to weather and making sure you didn't completely drain the available food resources in a particular area. While you were encamped in one locale then other locales had time to replenish animals and plants. The tribes did not plant to encourage growth, but rather left an area so that it could recover. Same with animals, hunt enough to keep you fed but don't wipe out the population, so they have a chance to breed more. Modern populations are so huge that it is very rare that other animals are a real threat. It is other humans that generally cause humans to get killed by other than natural causes.

The invention of farming and animal husbandry changed that. Now you could settle in one location and build more permanent structures. More permanent structures gave you more protection from predators and the elements. More protection allowed you to produce more children, more children led to more excess children who were not likely to be needed or likely to get things passed down, who were sent off to fend for themselves. Some started new communities but others chose to steal rather than work, this led to groupings of these sort for their own protection, which led to the forming of gangs, who openly attacked and took from those who could not defend themselves. Gangs got bigger and formed the equivalent of Warlord run armies who would move about attacking settlements etc. Let this all grow and playout over time and eventually you get Emperors and kings who kept power by passing down to their own offspring. Layer builds upon layer. Of course the whole is far more complex and doesn't even touch on the creation of new professions that led to new discoveries etc.

3 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I'd argue human lives are harder and they are less free

I agree. Modern lives are harder but all the hardships are artificially created by other humans and their complex systems built around gaining wealth, because we have been convinced that being wealthy makes you happy. Which is a fantasy.

I was talking about way back when it started, not the complex mess we have developed into now.

All the rest you wrote makes my argument for me on when I said are we going to end up as Eloi.

Humans as a vast population are basically sheep, happy to be led into ways of thought and doing rather than using their natural ability to question and choose for themselves. Children aren't born hating others based on looks, countries or ideologies. They are taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves. A minority manage to shake off this brain washing for themselves, but the majority do not. Any conflicts going on in the world today are due to this happening.

Imagine if every single difference of opinion led to someone trying to kill the other so that their way of thinking was the only one left.

 

[DDE]

@SunlitZelkova, anthropology is probably irreversibly tainted by the fact that too many anthorpologists project not just their biases, but also their political preferences onto their studies. Cases of entire tribes being invented wholecloth to buttress a point are not uncommon.

Because of that, I prefer not to use those comparisons.

33 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

I agree. Modern lives are harder but all the hardships are artificially created by other humans and their complex systems built around gaining wealth, because we have been convinced that being wealthy makes you happy. Which is a fantasy.

I'd generalize that to sophisticated societies in general. Money is just one way of managing the complexity needed for the division of labor and geographic distribution.

Wealth making you happy isn't a "fantasy"; originally, a certain level of wealth - generally not monetary wealth but rent-generating assets - served to support and secure a certain lifestyle. The rigid hierarchy of society until recently served to moderate the expectations of said lifestyle, and so the overwhelming majority of individuals did not aspire to something completely out of their grasp. This really, really slowed down wealth accumulation, and people did not engage in back-breaking labor when they could.

In comes the "Protestant work ethic". In order to combat the amassment of wealth by the Catholic Church, Protestantism in all its many forms generally rejects salvation through works and instead declares work to be man's purpose on Earth. And the measure of work is wealth. "Wealth makes you happy" is an attempt to obfuscate a far uglier claim: your sole purpose of existence is to make money, make money, make money, make money. The rat race now has no finish line, the crab bucket effect seems to express itself as inflation, which denies the ability for anyone to "comfortably retire".

The "Protestant work ethic" has turbocharged the global economy and scientific progress immensely, but the fallout is clear to see.

1 hour ago, ColdJ said:

Children aren't born hating others based on looks, countries or ideologies. They are taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves.

On the contrary, familiarity breeds contempt like you wouldn't believe.

Also, your agency-denying model inevitably arrives to the conclusion that the world can only be saved by a good shepherd who'd guide these sheeple to the correct values. Never a good plan...

Almost all of my current leanings and opinions are the polar opposite of the teachings and the zeitgeist I would be "indoctrinated" into in the late 1990s and the 2000s.

[kerbiloid]

28 minutes ago, DDE said:

In comes the "Protestant work ethic". In order to combat the amassment of wealth by the Catholic Church, Protestantism in all its many forms generally rejects salvation through works and instead declares work to be man's purpose on Earth. And the measure of work is wealth. "Wealth makes you happy" is an attempt to obfuscate a far uglier claim: your sole purpose of existence is to make money, make money, make money, make money.

Got it. Bitcoins are the top.
They make them themselves, so the human may return to the thin world where he had come from, leaving AI to rule the material world.

32 minutes ago, DDE said:

that the world can only be saved by a good shepherd who'd guide these sheeple to the correct values.

Why necessary good? Any. The work in progress.

[SunlitZelkova]

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

You are getting confused by modern Hunter Gatherers. We are talking thousands of years BCE. Not only were there the dangers of other predators hunting the tribes for food but also you needed to move with the seasons, both due to weather and making sure you didn't completely drain the available food resources in a particular area. While you were encamped in one locale then other locales had time to replenish animals and plants. The tribes did not plant to encourage growth, but rather left an area so that it could recover. Same with animals, hunt enough to keep you fed but don't wipe out the population, so they have a chance to breed more. Modern populations are so huge that it is very rare that other animals are a real threat. It is other humans that generally cause humans to get killed by other than natural causes.

The San people are at least 20,000 years old. Their historical range spans much of southern Africa, where numerous predators live. The reason we don't really see them battling lions and leopards is likely because they were forced off their land by European colonial officials.

I'm pretty sure it's incorrect that prehistoric people deliberately left animal populations to recover. After all, in the Americas they hunted large mammals like mastodons and giant sloths to extinction. That said, I don't have direct evidence to back it up.

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

The invention of farming and animal husbandry changed that. Now you could settle in one location and build more permanent structures. More permanent structures gave you more protection from predators and the elements. More protection allowed you to produce more children, more children led to more excess children who were not likely to be needed or likely to get things passed down, who were sent off to fend for themselves. Some started new communities but others chose to steal rather than work, this led to groupings of these sort for their own protection, which led to the forming of gangs, who openly attacked and took from those who could not defend themselves. Gangs got bigger and formed the equivalent of Warlord run armies who would move about attacking settlements etc. Let this all grow and playout over time and eventually you get Emperors and kings who kept power by passing down to their own offspring. Layer builds upon layer. Of course the whole is far more complex and doesn't even touch on the creation of new professions that led to new discoveries etc.

Hmm, the only thing I question about this is why empires didn't arise in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, when the aforementioned Tualatin Kalapuya people who used to live where I now am lived seasonally in (albeit) permanent structures made of cedar wood. Further up north of course the tribes in Washington had their longhouses.

Tribes in both Oregon and Washington would catch salmon, process it, and then store it, but due to their culture of providing basic needs for each other, theft was not as common as in Europe.

On the other hand, fishing and smoking or drying salmon was a labor intensive process. But the chiefs in Washington and British Columbia had no real political power over the wider populace, because the average person understood that another person had no real right or ability to order them around. They did not possess an army or police force and thus couldn't force people that way either. What the chiefs were able to convince others to do was go out and capture slaves to do the processing and fishing for the tribe.

However, the chief was not a king or emperor in the same way as seen in Europe. An off hand, off the top of my head speculation would be that European and Middle Eastern religions often resulted in strongmen being able to claim they derived their power from god, whereas such ideas were rare in North America (at least what became Canada and the US).

Which is to say that...

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I agree. Modern lives are harder but all the hardships are artificially created by other humans and their complex systems built around gaining wealth, because we have been convinced that being wealthy makes you happy. Which is a fantasy.

I was talking about way back when it started, not the complex mess we have developed into now.

All the rest you wrote makes my argument for me on when I said are we going to end up as Eloi.

Humans as a vast population are basically sheep, happy to be led into ways of thought and doing rather than using their natural ability to question and choose for themselves. Children aren't born hating others based on looks, countries or ideologies. They are taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves. A minority manage to shake off this brain washing for themselves, but the majority do not. Any conflicts going on in the world today are due to this happening.

Imagine if every single difference of opinion led to someone trying to kill the other so that their way of thinking was the only one left.

...so yeah, I think there is a sort of tyranny of history and empire that dooms us as I said in the post before this. But I'm replying just to clarify I personally believe it is cultural rather than decided by material conditions.

I'm sure there's arguments that point to the latter though too.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

@SunlitZelkova, anthropology is probably irreversibly tainted by the fact that too many anthorpologists project not just their biases, but also their political preferences onto their studies. Cases of entire tribes being invented wholecloth to buttress a point are not uncommon.

Because of that, I prefer not to use those comparisons.

I agree, but I think it not just invalidates attempts to look at history in a new way, but also ways of looking at history that are biased, but so embedded in daily life and culture we might not realize they were.

So really we can just make it up. Then it comes down to whether humans have the actual power to make choices or are dominated by limitations upon their cognitive capability and/or material factors (being limited by instinct). That biological/psychological question I mentioned.

I know the rest of your reply wasn't meant for me but I thought I'd comment.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

On the contrary, familiarity breeds contempt like you wouldn't believe.

Another thing I'd mention is how vicious children can be toward living things. I recall hanging out with my mom while she babysat two three year olds one day, and we found a caterpillar while we were out on a walk. I was looking at it in wonder and was horrified when one of them crushed it, while smiling and laughing. That memory left a strong impression on me.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

Also, your agency-denying model inevitably arrives to the conclusion that the world can only be saved by a good shepherd who'd guide these sheeple to the correct values. Never a good plan...

I feel like this sort of belief is only possible through religious or pseudo-religious belief. Because realistically all of the humans are subject to the cycle of suffering he and I described, so none of them can escape it.

This brings me to a notion of Philip K. Dick's. He believed to defeat the "Empire" is to become it. So even if you overthrow whatever system or individual is causing suffering, due to the limitations of living in this entropic world, you're probably gonna end up doing a lot of the same stuff the old ruler did. He said this both as a critique of nations and religions, and the inability to overcome this problem led to a major existential crisis in his final few years.

The only way the good shepherd theory works within this "agency-denying model" is if this shepherd is somehow more than human (or not human at all).

Which, however, people aren't unlikely to believe, at least from my POV. But I think a good shepherd coming along is just another would be (or future) king/emperor. Whether someone believes there is a good shepherd while adhering to the agency-denying model or not is a test of whether they can mentally step away from the fervor of desire for change at any cost or are simply part of the large group of humans who are "taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves."

Because belief in good shepherds is kind of part of the bad behavior exhibited in human history that he and I are lamenting. It would be quite ironic to end up believing in a new one in the process of wishing the old ones had never come about.

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

The San people are at least 20,000 years old. Their historical range spans much of southern Africa, where numerous predators live. The reason we don't really see them battling lions and leopards is likely because they were forced off their land by European colonial officials.

I'm pretty sure it's incorrect that prehistoric people deliberately left animal populations to recover. After all, in the Americas they hunted large mammals like mastodons and giant sloths to extinction. That said, I don't have direct evidence to back it up.

Except it was not the Europeans who drove San off their original land, it was other Africans before European colonization, farmers and herders displaced them. European then repeated the process again against Africans to some degree. 

And they probably knew that you should not over hunt an area for small games or dig up all the plants in it but the huge migratory herds was another thing. 

its very likely say ice age hunter gatherer was much less nomadic than more modern ones like San who are restricted to areas not suited for farming. 
And its population density dependent after all the diseases in America killed off most of the population after Europeans arrived many people in North America switched to hunter gatherers as it was room for it and its less work.
Farming in America was also more an pain because no good draft animals and less efficient crops than Eurasia. 

[magnemoe]

7 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Hmm, the only thing I question about this is why empires didn't arise in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, when the aforementioned Tualatin Kalapuya people who used to live where I now am lived seasonally in (albeit) permanent structures made of cedar wood. Further up north of course the tribes in Washington had their longhouses.

Tribes in both Oregon and Washington would catch salmon, process it, and then store it, but due to their culture of providing basic needs for each other, theft was not as common as in Europe.

On the other hand, fishing and smoking or drying salmon was a labor intensive process. But the chiefs in Washington and British Columbia had no real political power over the wider populace, because the average person understood that another person had no real right or ability to order them around. They did not possess an army or police force and thus couldn't force people that way either. What the chiefs were able to convince others to do was go out and capture slaves to do the processing and fishing for the tribe.

However, the chief was not a king or emperor in the same way as seen in Europe. An off hand, off the top of my head speculation would be that European and Middle Eastern religions often resulted in strongmen being able to claim they derived their power from god, whereas such ideas were rare in North America (at least what became Canada and the US).

Might be an lack of benefit of large scale organization. River valleys and deltas was civilization starters as large scale irrigation infrastructure paid off big time. Writing is also important if you get large enough or the power structure become less stable. 
Now with better technology you will get large scale benefit because of it but this would be closer to industrialization even if Romans and Chinese benefited from it like rapidly raising armies of well equipped forces. 
Rome kept building fleets until they won the Punic wars. 

[kerbiloid]

26 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

Farming in America was also more an pain because no good draft animals and less efficient crops than Eurasia. 

And soil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_earthworms_of_North_America

 

 

8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

good shepherd

Maybe that's how the good shepherd is doing things.

The bad one would be even worse.

8 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Another thing I'd mention is how vicious children can be toward living things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War

The Paraguayan army was finishing with 9 yo soldiers mostly.

[SunlitZelkova]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Except it was not the Europeans who drove San off their original land, it was other Africans before European colonization, farmers and herders displaced them. European then repeated the process again against Africans to some degree.

Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of that. I think my point still stands that there are other factors in why modern hunter-gatherers aren't seen engaging with big predators often, yet those cultural traits I mentioned still existed even when they did.

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

its very likely say ice age hunter gatherer was much less nomadic than more modern ones like San who are restricted to areas not suited for farming. 
And its population density dependent after all the diseases in America killed off most of the population after Europeans arrived many people in North America switched to hunter gatherers as it was room for it and its less work.
Farming in America was also more an pain because no good draft animals and less efficient crops than Eurasia. 

People in North America were practicing hunting/gathering long before Europeans arrived. We know this from their oral histories.

Farming occurred to some degree with crops like maize. But many chose just to hunt and gather. We know they did try to form a city at one point now known as Cahokia, but it was then abandoned. This makes me think there was a conscious decision not to farm too much or live in large groupings, making the nature of how societies form a cultural factor rather than one defined by material conditions.

I guess we could say culture is defined by material conditions, but that makes me wonder why places like Nebelivka didn't develop into kingdoms/empires with social hierarchy, because Europe ostensibly had the conditions to support the maintenance and growth of the city indefinitely.

[magnemoe]

On 5/23/2024 at 7:06 PM, kerbiloid said:

The entire mathematics is based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_property, and then is step by step developed into its horrible magnificence.
It takes four best years of life in the university.

The entire theoretical physics is derived from the Hamiltonian mechanics, pure math.

Only the experimental physics is volatile to some extent.

And various paraphysics are, like chemistry.

And the parachemistry, called biology.

So, the science building just looks like a circus, but is a concrete barrack inside.

I see the problem as way larger in less hard sciences like physiology or economic, here dogma can establish and thrive, health is the larges arena for pseudoscience with anything from overblown trends to homeopathy who makes no sense at all. 
And in technology, why do people try to design SSTO? Only way it makes sense today is to fool investors with cool technology. But it has been so many designs who has been actively worked on. 

[ColdJ]

@SunlitZelkova The San have been proven to be the longest surviving continuous culture on the planet, The Aboriginals of Australia would appear to be the second. This is not necessarily a good thing as it is actually a form of stagnation. Though you could argue that if you have managed to survive 140,000 years doing basically the same thing then maybe you are on the winner in the survival stakes.

You have used the word "Material" and I assume that to mean the conditions (weather, terrain etc) of the area that those people lived in. I would argue that the conditions a people lived in actually influenced the culture they formed. We cannot apply a blanket model to the world and say that all human populations would evolve their ways of living and surviving the same way. So conditions and experiences within locales could definitely determine why very different cultures developed in different parts of the world. Language and dialects are quite facinating. We can see places where the influence of nearby cultures caused similar developement and then see where isolalated cultures developed extremely different forms of language. It is amazing to me just how many different forms of spoken communication have developed on this planet.

On 5/26/2024 at 7:05 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

Because belief in good shepherds is kind of part of the bad behavior exhibited in human history that he and I are lamenting. It would be quite ironic to end up believing in a new one in the process of wishing the old ones had never come about.

Very glad you said that. After what I had said I was agog that the conclusion jumped to was that humans needed yet another central figure to follow. There is already too much blaming a superhuman entity when things go wrong and then praising them when things go right. I would prefer that people just work together to make existence better and help each other out when things chaotically go wrong.

By sheep I meant any animals that will follow without making the choice for themselves, simply because one of their number start running in a direction. I could say flock of birds or some other animal that doesn't make one think shepherd, I just used a common phrase.

On 5/25/2024 at 10:51 PM, DDE said:

On the contrary, familiarity breeds contempt like you wouldn't believe.

I don't understand the reference within the context.

On 5/26/2024 at 7:05 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

Another thing I'd mention is how vicious children can be toward living things. I recall hanging out with my mom while she babysat two three year olds one day, and we found a caterpillar while we were out on a walk. I was looking at it in wonder and was horrified when one of them crushed it, while smiling and laughing. That memory left a strong impression on me.

More callous than vicious I would say. We have to remember that they know no better yet. They do not yet have a real comprhension of alive vs thing. The same way they will put anything in their mouths to see if it is edible or put themselves in harms way without thought of danger. "The fire is pretty, I want to touch it" They either learn through injury and pain or through a protector constantly telling them no. Even then they still don't really grasp the concepts till their brains develop enough. You and I see life and understand what it is and the beauty of it, but they do not yet.

On 5/25/2024 at 10:51 PM, DDE said:

Wealth making you happy isn't a "fantasy"

Yes it is. The belief is that money in abundance will allow you to get the things that will make you happy. In reallity, the ability to do what you want without others constantly blocking you is what makes us happy. Freedom to be as you want to be, to think as you want to think. There is just so much regulation these days that we see money as a way to buy ourselves out. I think most on this forum would love to be able to build a real rocket and go to space. Half is having the knowhow and materials to make it. The other half is paying all the agencies that have been setup to regulate it. It isn't the money that makes you happy, it is the getting to launch your rocket that makes you happy. I would love to grab a chair and some weather balloons, then go for a float. Assuming I didn't float so high as to freeze to death, it would be the regulatory departments that would either stop me or bring me down. People who decide to be Monks and live a simple life without wealth are happy. Tribes that existed without money before the modern world found them, were happy.

 

 

 

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Tribes that existed without money before the modern world found them, were happy.

And still the only unhappy tribe wishing to return to the happy forest life, are bored urban office staff and hippies; while the former happy tribes, having migrated from the happy tree friends life to the low-life suburban reality, prefer to keep their new unhappy life.

Probably, the happiness of the HG life is overestimated.

4 hours ago, ColdJ said:

The San have been proven to be the longest surviving continuous culture on the planet, The Aboriginals of Australia would appear to be the second. This is not necessarily a good thing as it is actually a form of stagnation. Though you could argue that if you have managed to survive 140,000 years doing basically the same thing then maybe you are on the winner in the survival stakes.

The San still survive because they do it in the most poor regions of the desert, unappropriate for the more developed (and thus numerous) Bantu, who need pastures and plowlands.
So, they are separated by lack of interest.

On 5/27/2024 at 1:30 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

We know they did try to form a city at one point now known as Cahokia, but it was then abandoned. This makes me think there was a conscious decision not to farm too much or live in large groupings, making the nature of how societies form a cultural factor rather than one defined by material conditions.

Family settlements can evolve into fortified family settlements, where all citizens are relatives, and an alien has poor chances even to survive, let alone become a true human.

The city is principally different. It consists of individual families, whose place in the city hierarchy is significant, while their family hierarchy is very short and doesn't play much role. Any urban family can be easily replaced with another family.

All what the family tribal people can reach without external invasion, is a large family clan settlement, where everyone has his role, and is stuck in the family hierarchy.
They don't need development, they are happy with primitive technologies. They need to capture more land, to grow or steal more cattle.
If one of them has moved to a city, he is pushed by his family, and is pulling other family members, to create a family outpost in the city. Then he tries to corrupt the city officers to let the clan capture the city commandment, and then starts pumping money into his family clan settlement.
That's the only way of thinking, available for the family tribal society. That's not how a city can appear, let alone the empire.

The only way to appear for the urban civilisation is when some local authority combines an intertribal gang army (protoEmpire), cut out the majority of other clans (to decrease their need in fertile land, to behead the tribe, and to disintegrate the tribe hierarchy, making belonging to the clan insignificant and dangerous, enough to become forgotten), and let the survivors (together with the clans who surrendered) settle at the special places under commandment of the Imperial gang teams.
Then the Empire must start extracting all strong/brave men from the conquered clans (by provoking them or by kind suggesting), by recruiting them into the Imperial army with no return, and by killing those who is enough strong and brave to rebel, but doesn't want to be recruited. Violence against the conquered women is the usual way to provoke and select the possible rebels. Also the best women from the conquered clans should be taken away into the Imperial cities as wives and mothers.
At some point the conquered clans get dissipated and assimilated.
That's how it worked.

But this requires several conditions:
1) the Imperial culture must be enough developed to feed both conquerors and surviving conquered, and to feed the great amount of soldiers;
2) the Imperial culture must provide the Imperial gangarmy with advanced weapon (iron knives and axes vs stone ones, maybe horses);
3) the Imperial economy should be developed enough to mass produce food, tools, and weapon;
4) there should still exist a primal authority, like a famous military cult sanctuary, obedience to whom is unquestionable for the tribes of the intertribal gangarmy; also it's their military and administrative brain, central bank and storehouse, military academy, etc.

This means that the cities and the empire can appear only in a metallurgical society living on a fertile land.
And once such empire has appeared, it will smash any proto-empires around, because it started first.

To become such empire, they should first become peasants rather than hunters, because the agriculture automatically increases their population density by orders of magnitude.
So, the hunters-gatherers, co-existing with the agricultural society, automatically become a marginal minority, and either get assimilated, or get eliminated.
The co-existence of the named Amerindian peasants and hunterers at one place just illustrates the pathetically low production of their agriculture. That's why any their settlement had no chances to become a city.

Any tribal settlement is just a tribal settlement, it's not a city and doesn't have a chance to become it.
Especially since the American continent and Pacific islands have rather poor nature in sense of farming. It was modified by hack-and-slash, crop rotation, artifical fertilizers, and the biota replacement (the earthworms, the cattle manure, etc), and it's either equatorial (so what's not in jungle, turns into desert) or mountains. So, it just looks like a green hell with parrots, but actually it's a swamp in a desert or a rocky desert.

So, the Amerindians and the Pacific people had poor chances to develop something much more advanced due to low fertility of the territory, causing low population density, which was making useless or impossible any technological efforts (you can't be a potter, when your village is a hundred of people, and they use palm leaves and grass baskets).

Yes, the civilisation never was a product of good will and kind intentions.
But others disappeared.

Edited May 29 by kerbiloid

[SunlitZelkova]

@ColdJ I agree with all the points in your response. Just one thing though.

8 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Yes it is. The belief is that money in abundance will allow you to get the things that will make you happy. In reallity, the ability to do what you want without others constantly blocking you is what makes us happy. Freedom to be as you want to be, to think as you want to think. There is just so much regulation these days that we see money as a way to buy ourselves out. I think most on this forum would love to be able to build a real rocket and go to space. Half is having the knowhow and materials to make it. The other half is paying all the agencies that have been setup to regulate it. It isn't the money that makes you happy, it is the getting to launch your rocket that makes you happy. I would love to grab a chair and some weather balloons, then go for a float. Assuming I didn't float so high as to freeze to death, it would be the regulatory departments that would either stop me or bring me down. People who decide to be Monks and live a simple life without wealth are happy. Tribes that existed without money before the modern world found them, were happy.

I think this is subjective. There are wealthy people who are happy are people who lack material possessions that are happy, and wealthy people who are depressed and people who lack material possessions who are depressed.

That said, I think the key thing is allowing everyone to have happiness. Amassing wealth involves keeping it away from others, so regardless of whether the wealthy person is happy or not, theoretically, I’d say people on average would be more happy if we dropped notions of mine and thine and worked together.

Emphasis on theoretically because realistically I think there’s all those very hard behavioral issues I mentioned earlier preventing humans from becoming cooperative and altruistic enough to realize such a society.

[Bej Kerman]

9 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Yes it is. The belief is that money in abundance will allow you to get the things that will make you happy. In reallity, the ability to do what you want without others constantly blocking you is what makes us happy. Freedom to be as you want to be, to think as you want to think. There is just so much regulation these days that we see money as a way to buy ourselves out. I think most on this forum would love to be able to build a real rocket and go to space. Half is having the knowhow and materials to make it. The other half is paying all the agencies that have been setup to regulate it. It isn't the money that makes you happy, it is the getting to launch your rocket that makes you happy. I would love to grab a chair and some weather balloons, then go for a float. Assuming I didn't float so high as to freeze to death, it would be the regulatory departments that would either stop me or bring me down. People who decide to be Monks and live a simple life without wealth are happy. Tribes that existed without money before the modern world found them, were happy.

What thing do you buy food and water with? The things you need to stay alive?

[ColdJ]

9 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

What thing do you buy food and water with? The things you need to stay alive?

"Wealthy"- Having more money than you need to survive.

Nobody said anything about not having any money. I was saying that the belief that having massive wealth automatically makes you happy is a fantasy.

Though now you have brought it up. Needing money to get food and water is a modern world problem. There are still tribes and communities around the world that can happily survive without money. They live off the land, hunt, gather or farm what they need and are self sustaining. It is only when people from our world intrude with our obsession with money and the buying of material possessions that they have problems.

 

[Bej Kerman]

4 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I was saying that the belief that having massive wealth automatically makes you happy is a fantasy

No it isn't. Never having to worry about starving will inherently make someone happy, or at least happier than someone who does  have to worry about starving to death.

[kerbiloid]

Money isn't the most important, but almost everything important requires money.

[ColdJ]

3 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

No it isn't. Never having to worry about starving will inherently make someone happy, or at least happier than someone who does  have to worry about starving to death.

I would say that anyone who doesn't have to worry about starving to death will be happier than someone who does have to worry about it. No need for massive wealth.

You are also assuming that the wealthy person will be able to buy food. Everything that you can buy relies on people who are willing to make it and sell it. What if the wealthy person has ended up in a place where worrying about starving is a constant thing, far away from commerce. The locals have gathered just enough to feed themselves, no amount of money from the wealthy person will make them part from their food because there is nothing there that money can buy. They are slightly happier than the wealthy person who is going to starve.

Billionaire built a shoddy sub and got squished trying to see the Titanic. Wealth didn't truly make them happy, because if it did they wouldn't have risked their lives, they would have been content with the life they had. Money gave them the chance to do something they wanted but it did not make them happy.

Crashing in your fancy jet in numerous places around the world will leave you stranded to fend for yourself, just the same as anyone else, wealth won't make it any easier.

Elon Musk is rich. I have never seen Elon Musk genuinely happy.

Your argument is based on living in a certain type of society, full of consumerism, food is bought from stores rather than  you going out and getting it from the land yourself. So you associate money with survival. If our society breaks down, the thin line of civility we work within will dissolve very quickly, money will become worthless very quickly, even if you could get it from the electronic system that no longer functions.

A society that doesn't block your personal freedoms is far more likely to make you happy.

If not, then you better start collecting Nuka Cola Caps.

Edited May 30 by ColdJ

[magnemoe]

9 hours ago, ColdJ said:

"Wealthy"- Having more money than you need to survive.

Nobody said anything about not having any money. I was saying that the belief that having massive wealth automatically makes you happy is a fantasy.

Though now you have brought it up. Needing money to get food and water is a modern world problem. There are still tribes and communities around the world that can happily survive without money. They live off the land, hunt, gather or farm what they need and are self sustaining. It is only when people from our world intrude with our obsession with money and the buying of material possessions that they have problems.

I say wealthy is not having to think much about money in everyday life, up to lets go on an vacation this weekend or I want an new PC. Major purchases like an house or expensive car is something you has to think about as it has impact. 
having $10K in your bank account who is money you can spend will makes you much safer and having much more freedom than having $100, having $100K don't increase this 10x however and $1000k way less. 

The problem here is status as in keeping up with the Jones, or the Kardashian . Now this is likely older than dirt, people in the stone age made stuff to impress others and had various hilarious effects during history. Look at all the idiotic fashions we have had over the years. The ladies obviously suffered most, and at least in Europe they did it to impress other ladies.
No its nothing wrong with buying an boat or an sports car if you use it but buying it just to impress your neighbor is kind of stupid. 

[DDE]

3 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

I say wealthy is not having to think much about money in everyday life, up to lets go on an vacation this weekend or I want an new PC. Major purchases like an house or expensive car is something you has to think about as it has impact. 
having $10K in your bank account who is money you can spend will makes you much safer and having much more freedom than having $100, having $100K don't increase this 10x however and $1000k way less. 

The problem here is status as in keeping up with the Jones, or the Kardashian . Now this is likely older than dirt, people in the stone age made stuff to impress others and had various hilarious effects during history. Look at all the idiotic fashions we have had over the years. The ladies obviously suffered most, and at least in Europe they did it to impress other ladies.
No its nothing wrong with buying an boat or an sports car if you use it but buying it just to impress your neighbor is kind of stupid. 

IIRC at about $50-100 net worth you tend to have something new entirely - minions to take care of minor things for you. It's also roughly the moment you're able to point at almost all things imaginable and just go "I want".

Spoiler

This wasn't an intentional reference, but now that we're here...

I also fully expect a discussion of why it's "Ich will" and not "Ich möchte" and why Oleg "Radio Tapok" Abramov went on and adapted it into Russian as nothing less than "I expect"

$1 bln is the point you can start meddling in world politics with an insurgency.

[kerbiloid]

Actually, a KSP gamer needs 100 mln USD.

Spoiler

To create KSP-3 with blackjeb and kerbals.

 

[magnemoe]

18 minutes ago, DDE said:

IIRC at about $50-100 net worth you tend to have something new entirely - minions to take care of minor things for you. It's also roughly the moment you're able to point at almost all things imaginable and just go "I want".

  Reveal hidden contents

This wasn't an intentional reference, but now that we're here...

I also fully expect a discussion of why it's "Ich will" and not "Ich möchte" and why Oleg "Radio Tapok" Abramov went on and adapted it into Russian as nothing less than "I expect"

$1 bln is the point you can start meddling in world politics with an insurgency.

Think you missed an $50m-100m for this to make sense except if you think kids who is very expensive, way more so if you want looks wealthy, not so much if you are really rich. 
But at $10m you are rich. Drank some beer and ate dinner with an guy like that, boss of a friend, very down to earth guy, an close to $1M boat, the cabin we was staying who I say is 10x more expensive but an company thing as its mostly for the employee. 
 

[kerbiloid]

According to https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-delta-v-did-the-v2-have, the delta-V of V-2 is 2.3 .. 2.5 km/s.

The lunar circular speed is 1.6 km/s.

The V-2 hull is made of tin, the tanks are made of aluminium, the oxidizer is LOX, so all of that can be manufactured out of the lunar regolith.
Titanium from the same regolith can reduce its dry mass.

Ethanol can be produced from the lunar ice, which contains clathrates.
HTP for the turbopump as well.

The lunar craters can keep it cold.

Thus, it looks possible and even reasonable to manufacture V-2 on the Moon to launch something on the Moon, around the Moon, or to the Earth from the Moon.

[kerbiloid]

The Terminator  universe was created before the internet had appeared.

This is the reason why the people were successfully fighting against the evil AI, and its terminator army.

Was it created in the internet epoch, Skynet would know that the assassinobots should look not as humans, but as kittens.

[magnemoe]

On 6/2/2024 at 4:45 PM, kerbiloid said:

According to https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59879/how-much-delta-v-did-the-v2-have, the delta-V of V-2 is 2.3 .. 2.5 km/s.

The lunar circular speed is 1.6 km/s.

The V-2 hull is made of tin, the tanks are made of aluminium, the oxidizer is LOX, so all of that can be manufactured out of the lunar regolith.
Titanium from the same regolith can reduce its dry mass.

Ethanol can be produced from the lunar ice, which contains clathrates.
HTP for the turbopump as well.

The lunar craters can keep it cold.

Thus, it looks possible and even reasonable to manufacture V-2 on the Moon to launch something on the Moon, around the Moon, or to the Earth from the Moon.

Fun as an gig  
But ethanol has pretty low ISP, think it was even 96% to keep engine temperature down.  Rocket is also pretty crappy as it was the first large rocket engine used. 
You obvious need an much more advance flight system and at least better throttle control, probably other systems too. 

Just saw an documentary on YouTube about the V2, it focused on the boat tail design, the way the rear of the missile tapper in. Almost all carton rockets uses this but no real ones, It worked and they just reused an forward segment backwards at the end but it was not any real benefit once you had decent flight control systems.