I don’t think I’ve ever sustained more than 30-35 hours a week as a salaried employee anyway. I used to think I was an outlier but now I think this is common and the most effective work week for “knowledge workers”.

A book called The Rule of Empires discusses several examples of this dynamic in history. One people conquers another to exploit them, but distinctions blur over time, especially due to intermarriage. Once the typical imperial authority has a few half-other-community nephews, they start losing interest in maintaining social stratification.

The point is that there must be many other factors that tend to increase or decrease the likelihood someone will commit a crime, because their wealth is not a very good predictor of crime at all at the individual level.

If your output variable is “#cancer in large population”, yes, an increase in tobacco use rate causes it to go up. I don’t think that’s true of crime, though. Not every recession causes a jump in crimes rates.

But I was talking about the output variable “Does person X commit a crime?” For that, most of the time poverty will not cause crime. There must be many other factors involved such as community relationships, opportunity, values, likelihood of going to prison, etc.

I respect people like Angel and their communities, but life in prison is more like it to me. Anything less than twenty years is a slap on the wrist.

What money?

Similarly, most poor teenagers don’t commit crimes, therefore poverty is not a sufficient cause of crime.

Seems hard to say given the lack of experimental data, but an interesting question.

I once read that there’s a common mammalian threat-response neural network that generates flight behavior if the threat is far, freezing at medium distance, and fight up close. How the distances are set varies by species.

Based on that, fighting could be the expected reaction in this situation, but I think humans are a little different. A nearby human threat can generate other responses such as submission, begging, or tending. He had to realize those wouldn’t work and suppress them. Someone could appear to freeze if they were trying to decide whether to fight but having a hard time making the decision under stress. It probably helped that the killer appeared somewhat confused, therefore was not exerting any emotional dominance and was more vulnerable to counterattack.

Every society, certainly every powerful society, seems to be confident in its moral superiority. Military conquest, enslavement, and mass murder were apparently considered normal actions for most of history, so the real question is, why did ideological opposition to colonialism develop? It probably partly comes out of political opposition due to the unequal distribution of costs and benefits in the colonizing society, but I would guess it’s mostly from people applying the ethics they’ve learned in highly pacified cores to the world in general.

The article doesn’t describe a “national” problem. “By the EPA’s own estimates, the nation’s drinking and wastewater infrastructure will require more than $744 billion over the next 20 years,” which sounds like a lot but is about 30 cents per day per person.

Conditions in the US are spotty. It appears water is a problem in some cities scattered around the country. “The federal government’s share of capital spending in the water sector fell from 63% in 1977 to about 9% of total capital spending by 2017, according to the ASCE.” That’s an interesting shift, a kind of de-nationalization. Strange how the US political system started falling apart the moment it won the Cold War and lost its unifying enemy.

Some things never change. Apparently Rome kept getting “caught up” in conflicts among neighbors too.

I suspect a fair amount of that happens. You can also ask whether US-style long trials with a zillion ways for rich defendants to get off are really “due” for a country riddled with organized crime.

That’s my understanding too. I think metal infantry armor must have been more expensive than a sword. And I read somewhere that around 1000 a basic sword was a typical item a peasant might own. I figure then it must have been affordable enough for a big empire.

Brave New World in many ways simply describes the world today, but a few things are very different. Classes aren’t assigned at birth in most countries, obviously. More importantly, Huxley wrote in the days of mass production where society-wide prosperity meant workers could have a Model T in any color so long as it’s black. But now everything is hypercustomized. Yet there is till tons of conformity as people eagerly imitate perceived success on social media. In both reality and BNW, individual choices don’t matter to the system at large: we all live in a giant social machine that produces incredible amounts of goods by the combination of our alienated labor.

Mistakes are inevitable. My question is, what was their system and was it designed to catch human errors? Do they have a reliability target? Performance incentives?

Medieval armies used various troop types such as armored infantry and armored cavalry, but also archers, crossbowmen, light cavalry, etc. Heavy infantry and/or heavy cavalry were the core of many armies for centuries, but only rich armies could afford that, such as Greek cities, Rome, or late medieval kingdoms.

Armor was well designed and fitted, and soldiers were used to it, so they could be quite mobile. Compare football receivers and linemen: the big guys can keep up OK over a short distance, it’s long runs where they have less endurance. Armor could be a disadvantage in very warm weather or on swampy ground, but otherwise it worked quite well. One reason pikes became common was that they needed a big two-handed weapon to get through the armor.

> presumably starting with a mere few dozen disciples--managed to proliferate so rapidly across different languages and cultures (from Rome to Egypt to Iran, etc.) despite facing competition and even persecution from other, previously established religions (such as those in India and the Roman Empire)

All those assumptions are questionable. There’s very little data on how Christianity got started and what happened for the first few centuries. Maybe it started with a few hundred followers and grew at a fairly “normal” rate, just a little faster than others.

In many places, Christians weren’t much persecuted. Ancient people were generally live-and-live about religion. Certain individual emperors would get concerned and try to persecute them, but their policies didn’t necessarily take much effect on the ground. Persecution often backfires and creates inspiring martyrs, then and now.

It does appear that fairly early on, the church was unusually literate and organized, which may have helped them grow faster than others. Maybe it was a coincidence from having a relatively urban, Jewish base. Also, the “established” religions weren’t really autonomous organizations, they were outgrowths of societies and ways of life. So, if you moved from rural Iran to Antioch, or were captured and enslaved, you might lose any connection to your original religion and be ready to pick up something new.

You could try searching “character-driven sci fi” or fantasy. Some will still be space operas, but it should pick up what you’re looking for too. Could also look into “hopepunk” for a break from angst, but I don’t actually know anything about it.

Yeah, I don’t see the logic in ever releasing such a person from prison.

I thought raids across the border were standard for pretty much any ancient empire or state. But eventually the western Roman Empire got invaded, with Goths etc entering en masse. Hard to raid Germania when you’ve been invaded because you ran out of soldiers.

According to John Kay, the Shang were one polity of many in that day. They weren’t a unified state yet, they were a collection of allied settlements bound by family ties and ritual. There were other settlements of different communities interspersed with Shang sites, perhaps similar to how 5th century Britain was spotted with ex-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Norse villages.

But Kay also says Chinese writing today traces back to the Shang writing system, as well as some other cultural elements such as bronze working. So they were especially influential, if arguably not quite “Chinese” yet.