4 ms·

Ha, yeah - though except for "the medieval London murder rate would be 15 to 20 times higher".

by nickt 6y ago

ashtonkem 6y ago
It’s pretty hard to overstate how relatively safe modern life is, even modern cities that are considered unsafe. Heck, in Ancient Rome being out after night fall was considered a death sentence. Aside from the high murder rate, that’s when all the supply carts arrived. Being on foot surrounded by carts before the invention of consistent urban lighting was a very dicey proposition.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Well, Johannesburg could probably play the medieval murder league on the expected level.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    I stand corrected, medieval London was safer than Johannesburg. Current london has 18.4 murders per million residents, which gives us a range of 276 to 368 murders per million for medieval London (15-20x). Last year Johannesburg had 68.3 murders per 100,000, or 683 per million. So current Johannesburg is roughly twice as dangerous per capita than medieval London.
qiqing 6y ago
Also from the article, modern medicine: "We have firearms, but we also have emergency services," he said. "It's easier to kill, but easier to save lives."
- iguy 6y ago
  This is true, and both make a difference. But worth knowing that the murder rate dropped, over centuries, to be extremely low around 1900 say. At this point medicine wasn't very useful at saving lives, and while guns (even machine-guns) existed, they weren't in the hands of every street-corner criminal. So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. Trying to figure out the impact of modern medicine etc. is more relevant for trying to understand e.g. the rise & fall of crime since 1960.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. We'll see how nations of soy-boys fare in the next major war. The Chinese PLA is undermined with one-childs, "princelings", and untested hardware so that it's questionable if they can fight. The US Army struggles annually to find normal-weighted applicants. I know one delusional Gen Z who wanted to apply at 320 pounds. Sadly the recruiters can be court-martialled for missing their quota, so they're under intense pressure to convince superiors to accept applicants with disqualifying items like tattoos, serious vision problems, etc. but who can still do a pushup. Japan basically lost WW2 because most Americans at the time had high school education and familiarity with farm equipment, so almost anybody could be trained to fly an airplane. Meanwhile Japan started training boys at 14 like ninjas and just ran out of trained pilots after Midway (they had 10,000 fighter aircraft and nobody who could fly them except as kamikazis.) The next major war will likely be between China and India over the Himalayan headwaters, which the CCP is damming for the notorious Xinjiang region, and this war will probably go nuclear.

Ha, yeah - though except for "the medieval London murder rate would be 15 to 20 times higher".

by nickt 6y ago

Ha, yeah - though except for "the medieval London murder rate would be 15 to 20 times higher".

It’s pretty hard to overstate how relatively safe modern life is, even modern cities that are considered unsafe. Heck, in Ancient Rome being out after night fall was considered a death sentence. Aside from the high murder rate, that’s when all the supply carts arrived. Being on foot surrounded by carts before the invention of consistent urban lighting was a very dicey proposition.

inglor_cz 6y ago
Well, Johannesburg could probably play the medieval murder league on the expected level.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  I stand corrected, medieval London was safer than Johannesburg. Current london has 18.4 murders per million residents, which gives us a range of 276 to 368 murders per million for medieval London (15-20x). Last year Johannesburg had 68.3 murders per 100,000, or 683 per million. So current Johannesburg is roughly twice as dangerous per capita than medieval London.

qiqing 6y ago

Also from the article, modern medicine: "We have firearms, but we also have emergency services," he said. "It's easier to kill, but easier to save lives."

iguy 6y ago
This is true, and both make a difference. But worth knowing that the murder rate dropped, over centuries, to be extremely low around 1900 say. At this point medicine wasn't very useful at saving lives, and while guns (even machine-guns) existed, they weren't in the hands of every street-corner criminal. So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. Trying to figure out the impact of modern medicine etc. is more relevant for trying to understand e.g. the rise & fall of crime since 1960.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. We'll see how nations of soy-boys fare in the next major war. The Chinese PLA is undermined with one-childs, "princelings", and untested hardware so that it's questionable if they can fight. The US Army struggles annually to find normal-weighted applicants. I know one delusional Gen Z who wanted to apply at 320 pounds. Sadly the recruiters can be court-martialled for missing their quota, so they're under intense pressure to convince superiors to accept applicants with disqualifying items like tattoos, serious vision problems, etc. but who can still do a pushup. Japan basically lost WW2 because most Americans at the time had high school education and familiarity with farm equipment, so almost anybody could be trained to fly an airplane. Meanwhile Japan started training boys at 14 like ninjas and just ran out of trained pilots after Midway (they had 10,000 fighter aircraft and nobody who could fly them except as kamikazis.) The next major war will likely be between China and India over the Himalayan headwaters, which the CCP is damming for the notorious Xinjiang region, and this war will probably go nuclear.