People had less children in history than you thought. “Our model Egyptian woman, married at 17, experiences nine live births and four (or three, depending on when menopause arrives) miscarriages. With nine live births and a 55% child mortality rate,… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIb: Children and Childrearing
Better is not always better. “There are several problems with these assertions. Yes, the Tiger tank was formidable in terms of armor and firepower. Yet its weight, fuel consumption, maintenance burden, and mechanical unreliability rendered it strategically inferior” https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-allied-technological
Marriage in the past looked different that I thought. “these societies are substantially less individualist than most modern societies: they understand individuals primarily as filling a role within a larger community, as parts of a whole, gears in a machine… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIa: Family Formation
I have no idea what to think about this. “As I ate dinner one night at the Ritz-Carlton, in a Chinese restaurant overlooking the indoor swimming pool, I reflected that the promise of a five-star hotel is insulation, a cocoon… Read More »How Many Comedians Does It Take to Change a Country?
I learned this the hard way. “Companies don’t hire people because they have good skills. They hire people to solve expensive, painful problems. In fact, most companies would rather not hire anyone at all. Hiring is a last resort.” https://alifeengineered.substack.com/p/nobody-cares-how-hard-you-work
Death ised to work differently in the past. “another factor is nutrition in the agricultural cycle: warmer climates often planted winter wheat (harvested early in the summer) and had their dying season in late summer, early fall, while cold climates… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part II: Starting at the End
This series will be good. I can feel it. “We are used to thinking about this question in terms of individuals, but this is a modern framework, both culturally and economically. As a cultural notion, modern societies tend to be… Read More »Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part I: Households
Good principles for life. “Before you proceed with memorizing individual facts and rules, you need to build an overall picture of the learned knowledge. Only when individual pieces fit to build a single coherent structure, will you be able to… Read More »Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge
Diplomacy has changed many times in the past. Why should it stay the same now? “A new chapter started with a bang. In 1814, the Austrian foreign minister Prince Klemens von Metternich was convinced that diplomacy had to make a… Read More »We need a planetary system of diplomacy for the 21st century
I tend to agree with most stuff in the article. “Let me pick the quality and fuck off with your auto bandwidth quality. My internet speed is sufficient to stream a 4k Blu-ray so don’t further mangle the quality of… Read More »Shut The Fuck Up