this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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The Internet in Ancient Times
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Welcome to the stone age... or the bronze age... or the iron age... heck, anything with an 'age' is welcome, except our modern age or any ages to come.
This is about what the internet was like thousands of years ago back when it all started. Like when Darius the Great hired mercenaries via Craigslist or when Egypt invented emojis.
CODE OF LAWS
1 - Be civil. No name calling, no fighting, keep your flint hand axes inside your leather pouches at all times.
2 - Keep the AI stuff to a minimum. It gets annoying and old fashioned memes are more fun for everyone.
3 - None of this newfangled modern 21st century nonsense. We don't even know what "21st century" means.
4 - No porn/explicit content. The king is sensitive about these things.
5 - No lemmy.world TOS violations will be tolerated. So there.
6 - There is no ~~rule~~ law 6.
Laws of justice which Hammurabi, the wise king, established. A righteous law, and pious statute did he teach the land. Hammurabi, the protecting king am I. I have not withdrawn myself from the men, whom Bel gave to me, the rule over whom Marduk gave to me, I was not negligent, but I made them a peaceful abiding-place. I expounded all great difficulties, I made the light shine upon them. With the mighty weapons which Zamama and Ishtar entrusted to me, with the keen vision with which Ea endowed me, with the wisdom that Marduk gave me, I have uprooted the enemy above and below (in north and south), subdued the earth, brought prosperity to the land, guaranteed security to the inhabitants in their homes; a disturber was not permitted. The great gods have called me, I am the salvation-bearing shepherd, whose staff is straight, the good shadow that is spread over my city; on my breast I cherish the inhabitants of the land of Sumer and Akkad; in my shelter I have let them repose in peace; in my deep wisdom have I enclosed them. That the strong might not injure the weak, in order to protect the widows and orphans, I have in Babylon the city where Anu and Bel raise high their head, in E-Sagil, the Temple, whose foundations stand firm as heaven and earth, in order to bespeak justice in the land, to settle all disputes, and heal all injuries, set up these my precious words, written upon my memorial stone, before the image of me, as king of righteousness.
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Well... that and there are far too many people on the planet to be supported through a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Even when you get into the millions, you need agriculture and animal husbandry. And farming and herding is a lot more work.
Oh yeah? Industrial farming gives less food per hour of work than collecting wild nuts? Are you sure about that?
If you convert it to money inbetween and state and distributors take 2/3 of it, yes.
Please do show me the data that 8 billion people can survive on hunting and gathering.
With modern farming, 10% of the people can now produce enough food for everyone. And if everyone had equal income instead of the top 1% syphoning off half the wealth, we could globally support a middle class lifestyle by everyone working 20 hours a week, the same amount that hunters and gatherers "worked".
10% of the people, first of all, is around 800 million people. And secondly, that's a lot of really hard work that can't be done just 20 hours a week. I'm in Indiana. I know farmers. It's not even a 40-hour-a-week job. It's a sunup to sundown job.
So sure, everyone gets a break. Except farmers. Who earn the same amount as everyone else but have to work a lot harder.
If the required labor was split up more equitably then farmers wouldn't have to work sunup to sundown.
The entire point of large scale agriculture is that it's more efficient than individual peasants working a single field or whatever.
Nobody is saying that farming isn't hard work, but modern farming should produce more food per man-hour than neolithic farming (or hunter/gathering), right? So why should it be that farm workers now have to work harder than prehistoric people?
Because the tools are more expensive. But that's only half of it.
Have more farmers ...
I agree with but for one thing. If we doubled the farm workforce then each farmer wouldn't have to work as hard. And we certainly have another 800 million people to throw at it.
Source? Everything we do is more an more complex. A TV show requires hundreds of people. A smartphone, millions if we include supply chains. Same for a car. A modern house requires dozens of highly specialized workers for weeks at a time, plus materials. People live much longer with better health, that's a lot of labor in research, machines, drugs and raw manpower (nurses, surgeons, etc).
Maybe you meant a pre-industrial middle class?
They didn't say we could.
They said industrial farming is more effective per manhour at food production.
And it is. There are obviously further complexities to have everything else in a modern society, but that doesn't change the fact that even modern productivity increases aren't decreasing work loads for some reason
Also, people tend not to die from infections anymore, or starvation (usually). One bad famine doesn't wipe out everyone you know. The vast majority of babies survive to old age and only extremely rarely does a mother die in childbirth.
And the entire population of earth doesn't live around areas where you can forage anymore.
Little things like that
Infectious disease became a lot worse than in hunter gatherer societies since animal husbandry and sendentary living.
Only since the advent of germ theory has it been better.
Okay, so how about medieval peasants also working 7-8 hour days, ~150 days per year?
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html