ksdale

60 ms·

571.
by ksdale 8y ago
Thank you for the research, I was way off! That's quite interesting. Thinking on it some more, I think her information may have come from something ibn Battuta had written, which matches your time period, and also explains perhaps why
572.
by ksdale 8y ago
If the book I was reading was correct, there was a period of years where all precious metals were required to be taken to a government building and traded for paper currency, though I'm not sure how long it lasted. But you're righ
573.
by ksdale 8y ago
I just read a very interesting history book (Before European Hegemony, by Janet Abu-Lughod (sp?)) that said that China was one of the first countries to have paper currency and that as early as like 1100 if I remember correctly, foreign mer
574.
by ksdale 8y ago
Interesting! I too, would have expected a much larger difference.
575.
by ksdale 8y ago
I don't know if the math is correct, but oil and coal are far more energy dense than wood which may account for the discrepancy.
576.
by ksdale 8y ago
I agree completely with you, but I remember during the crisis that a large part of the outrage was directed at banks "taking advantage" of the poor by lending them sums that they couldn't hope to pay back. I can remember a co
577.
by ksdale 8y ago
One of the hospitals we had a child at had income based repayment and it was a sliding scale all the way up to 100-something thousand dollars per year of income. At the lower end of the scale, they cut your bill to a small fraction of the o
578.
by ksdale 8y ago
I agree that there is regulation that is needlessly complicated, but there are also a lot of regulations that are only perceived that way because they need to be complex to cover a bunch of important edge cases. I can't count the numbe
579.
by ksdale 8y ago
You are obviously correct that we don't just kill things because they are subhuman, but it sure makes the threshold for deciding to kill things lower. We generally kill animals very differently than the way we kill humans, particularly
580.
by ksdale 8y ago
Thanks for the detailed reply. You seem far more knowledgeable about this than I!
581.
by ksdale 8y ago
I think mass murder of civilians on the basis of socioeconomic class is pretty damn close to a genocide, and definitely different than the Civil War, even though a lot of civilians died in the Civil War.
582.
by ksdale 8y ago
This is a quote from the wikipedia page about the Red Terror, from the chief of the Ukrainian Cheka: "Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. A
583.
by ksdale 8y ago
Well from what we read about the genocide in Bosnia, the ethnic conflict was purely made up over a period of just a few years prior to the genocide. The party in power in Serbia latched onto a massacre that had been perpetrated by the Ottom
584.
by ksdale 8y ago
I remember a professor talking about the tobacco industry trials and they were talking about damages that the tobacco companies should pay to the state for increased healthcare costs due to lung cancer, and he said that the supremely ironic
585.
by ksdale 8y ago
I don't think there's a conflict between being realistic about the fact that some people will do bad things and the belief that we can still be compassionate toward those people. Obviously the main problem I'm talking about i
586.
by ksdale 8y ago
I think wars happen because of perceived existential threats, genocide happens because of believing some people are subbuman.
587.
by ksdale 8y ago
I took a class in college that only covered genocide, and if there is one single lesson I took away from that, it is that all of the worst atrocities in the history of the world grow out of a seed of convincing people that there are other p
588.
by ksdale 8y ago
I'm assuming this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, but if you think about what a non profit setup would look like, it would basically be a subscription model, which people have shown they don't really care to support, or businesses &qu
589.
by ksdale 8y ago
I'm sure this isn't entirely accurate, but I think it can be analogized to Sherlock Holmes' powers of observation. Everyone sees but they don't observe. They don't notice details about anything. Mindfulness is like
590.
by ksdale 8y ago
Definitely not a "startup" CEO, nor do we have employees yet, but my wife and I own a small business together and we really enjoy spending all of our time together. It's a giant advantage for us to be able to casually discuss
591.
by ksdale 8y ago
Yeah, along the same lines, the actual definition of insider trading is a lot narrower than people think, there's interactions that would be insider trading if it came from the CEO, but is not insider trading if it comes from a guy who
592.
by ksdale 8y ago
Anecdote from the US: Your belief may become more true as demographics change, but my parents and my wife's parents, who are baby boomers, and the vast majority of their friends and acquaintances, have no interest whatsoever in living
593.
by ksdale 8y ago
Years after college, I still really enjoy walking through a university bookstore and looking at the books in the curriculum for each major. Pretty much everything that's not a textbook is regarded as a really important book by the expe
594.
by ksdale 8y ago
I agree that we need to be very judicious in choosing the right books. Somewhat related, I read Madame Bovary a while ago and the back of the book said something about it being one of the first modern novels (or something to that effect) an
595.
by ksdale 8y ago
In my effort to read some portion of the classics, I really experienced his observation of the difference between reading in school and reading later in life. I couldn't believe how much more I was impacted by some of these books just
596.
by ksdale 8y ago
I know next to nothing about physics, but I think time is more concrete than that. There have been experiments in which they've measured discrepancies in different clocks according to what physics predicts. That is, time passes differe
597.
by ksdale 8y ago
Excellent points! Cooking is definitely something I'm grateful I picked up from my mom growing up and we really try to involve the kids in the kitchen as well. And first aid is a great skill as well that I hadn't thought of. My wi
598.
by ksdale 8y ago
I have much younger kids, and we also think this is very important. It seems like everything in a kid's life is so nerfed. For us it starts with letting the kids do things on the playground with an actual risk of injury (obviously we&#
599.
by ksdale 8y ago
I don't know what will actually happen but I'm partial to strict liability for manufacturers. If the cars actually cause fewer accidents than regular cars, then even if manufacturers are liable for every accident, the total cost w
600.
by ksdale 8y ago
It seems to me like as soon as you can demonstrate that the cars are safer than the average driver, they should be okayed for road use. An absolutely staggering number of people die in car crashes. People will of course die in and around au

More ›