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The Worst Businessman of the 18th Century BC (2018)
- netsharc 7y ago> If Ea-Nasir were alive today, he would be desperately trying to affix his brand to any number of products. A dig on someone we know? He was making money by selling his name to put on towers, casinos, terrible steak, what else. He's working with Russians nowadays.
- friedman23 7y agoThanks for the explanation.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Razengan 7y agoI wish this would apply to the platform wars that occur every so often here. :)
- dang 7y agoIf you would link to examples, that would help me understand what you mean.
- Razengan 7y agoMac vs PC, iOS vs Android, Linux vs everyone, Haskell vs.. nothing, they get ire just for existing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21571130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21571130 That’s one of the more extreme examples, but entire groups of people regularly get attacked here in blanket statements for their choice of tech.
- dang 7y agoIt's certainly a bad comment but it was flagged and killed. By "wars" I imagined you meant much larger threads, of the kind that we should have moderated and missed. If you or anyone have examples of those, sending them to hn@ycombinator.com would be helpful. Best of all while they're still happening! But after the fact is helpful too.
- netsharc 7y agoSigh, I'll intepret that as "please don't mention established facts because butthurt people living in fantasyland will start flamewars.". I'll switch to HN China then...
- dang 7y ago"Facts" is a red herring. There are infinitely many facts; they don't select themselves. Humans do that. Even assuming that your comment was factual, it was still an off-topic provocation that would take the thread to internet hell. We ask people not to do that on this site.
- elihu 7y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669759
- Razengan 7y agoI just love this: > “The copper of mine, give it to Nigga-Nanna – good copper, in order that my heart shall not be troubled.” > “May Samas bless your life. ... In order that your heart shall not be troubled, give good copper to him.” “May your heart not be troubled..” It’s just a small sample of letters, but it seems people from 4000 years ago had better empathy than us. Why do we not show each other this kind of courtesy any more? Why do most of our interactions today seek to upset someone or become upset instead of seeking accord?
- friedman23 7y agoThe reason why we don't show any form of courtesy anymore is because there is no community. There are so many people on this planet suffering so much injustice that we may as well be ants to each other.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- geekpowa 7y agoI think you are lensing this through your own cultural filters/assumptions. My first reading is as a veiled threat: honour our agreement or I bring trouble to your heart.
- Razengan 7y agoYour first sentence could just as well be the response to your second.
- jml7c5 7y agoI would be very wary of reading too much into the tone of a translation, especially when the language has been dead for so long.
- dmcdm 7y agoReally? I take this as evidence indicating basically the opposite - fundamental human nature, as reflected through our communications and business practices, hasn't changed significantly in thousands of years. Some folks might be courteous, giving others the benefit of the doubt in hopes they'll "catch more flies with honey" or, more-likely, due to pervasive social norms and taboos. Others might issue thinly-veiled or direct threats, hoping to coerce the desired outcome. Either way, there have been shady business people and the ripped-off, the scammers and the scammed, for going on 4 millennia, at the very least, and there really is no sign the status quo going to change. If anything, this should dispel our romances of the human condition. The form is immaterial to the underlying function of the communication. "I feel ripped off, please deliver the goods." ~1800 years later, and 2 millennia ago, the graffiti at Pompeii http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2... tells a similar (and somewhat more humorous) story but in a different context.
- StandardFuture 7y agoThis is actually really entertaining. I thought I had read somewhere that there are thousands of untranslated ancient Sumerian/Babylonian/Akkadian tablets. Does anyone know if this is true?
- Bayart 7y agoAFAIK most of what's been in European collections for ages hasn't even been transcribed. I remember Irving Finkel lamenting the utter lack of Assyriologists.
- lawlessone 7y agoare they online? i;m guessing not but would be cool if they were
- csomar 7y ago"the work that you have done is soooooooo good." How did they translate the "soooooooo" part? Were ancient people really using this kind of tone?
- Razengan 7y agoA particularly long line perhaps? I suppose that must have been one way to be passive aggressive in cuneiform.
- wolfhumble 7y agoThe city of Ur Kaśdim (Ur of the Chaldeans) is the birthplace of Jewish patriarch Abraham. 1) It was identified with Tell el-Muqayyar by Henry Rawlinson in 1862, situated near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. 2) 1) https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11%3A31&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+11%3A31... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_of_the_Chaldees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur_of_the_Chaldees
- baot 7y agoI hear Softbank are offering 20 billion
- twic 7y agoThis Ea-Nasir guy was certainly no Kushim. Kushim would never mess you around like that!
- Razengan 7y agoIf this were Reddit you could bank mad karma by saying something about EA screwing people over for 3800 years.
- ouid 7y agoDo I need to update my filters? Why can forbes detect my adblocker?
- dilippkumar 7y agoSlightly off-topic. Ever since I came across the Proto-Zagrosian hypothesis [0] [1] and subsequent dravidian linguistics papers [2], I can’t stop looking at words like Ur and not make a mental connection. Even some of the names here sound more plausible if I mentally substitute the letters with equivalent dravidian alphabets. I was browsing Google maps around my home town and I coundn’t stop seeing the root words - Bangalore (Bangal - Ur), Mysore (Mys- Ur), Hosur (Hos - Ur), Coimbatore- (Coimbat - Ur). I have no training in linguistics so I’m going to admit that many of these are probably just words that look similar. Any dravidian linguists here want to chime in? I’m really excited to see how studies in Proto-Zagrosian evolve and what new connections we might find from it. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elamo-Dravidian_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elamo-Dravidian_languages [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7817/jameroriesoci.135.3.551?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7817/jameroriesoci.135.3.551... [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12284-011-9076-9