aomurphy

Zompist is a bit unusual these days: one guy working on one project (his Constructed World Almea) for over 40 years now, with 30 of those on the web. It's a beautiful relic of the early web. Most of the sites from my old "conlang" bookmark folder are dead now, but not zompist.com

Pretty likely! You can often see ones that follow the same format in the same hand, but with different names subbed in. Presumably some people went to a specialist who then followed mostly the same format varying for your own needs (a bit like a lawyer today?). It's unclear what the proportion was, maybe there were lots of people who figured DIY was good enough.

I learned this in a college course, Wiki seems to cite a few sources for this as well, but they're all a bit old. Not sure what the latest research is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_tablet#CITEREFGager1992

There's a very active historical debate about whether a schedule like this, often called "biphasic sleep", was more common in pre-industrial societies. There's a historian called Roger Ekirch who thinks it was, starting in his 2004 book "At Day's Close - Night in Times Past". There's a bunch of criticism of it, since the sources are a bit ambiguous, or if he's generalizing from Medieval England (his main focus).

Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions!

In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on state/federal land. You usually must make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn't interested in it.

I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it's hard to see this as worth doing.

I don't quite agree with the author about modernity. I argue that the modern Ultra-Orthodox are modern, specifically in the way they justify their beliefs. Most of what I'm going to say is just a summary of this lovely paper by Haym Soloveitchik then at Yeshiva University: https://www.lookstein.org/professional-dev/rupture-reconstru...

The basic point is that modernity has destroyed tradition as a justification for a way of life. Look, before people were often happy to say "We do this because our ancestors did it." and that alone was enough. And when the sacred texts was a little off with tradition, people were happy to try and make sure that they could be read to agree with tradition. But now, you have to try and fall back and argue from higher authority. In the end this often looks the same, but it lends much greater power to those who interpret sacred texts, and pushes people to more and more extreme interpretations.

There's a book I just read, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell. It's a travelogue though the Middle East meeting the small religious movements that survived Christianity and Islam over the last ~2000 years: Mandaeans, Yezidis, Coptic Christians, Samaritans, and the Kalasha. The Kalasha are a tiny group of pagans who live on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and one of the interesting things that comes up when Russell visits them is that they don't really have explanations for a lot of their rituals. They do things because their parents did them, and so on. and it's troublesome because when faced with Islam, or outsiders, it's hard for them to justify what they're doing, there's no intellectual basis.

And I think that, on a much smaller scale (Judaism has had a more formal intellectual basis for a long long time) is what modernity, chiefly through literacy and improved communication, brings. I also think that blanket rejection of groups like the Ultra-Orthodox or fundamentalist Christians as "dated" or just wrong isn't very helpful, certainly they're not going away any time soon.

This has been predicted in higher ed for the past ~2 decades. It's relatively easy to look at the number of students in the pipeline, and you can see there were two big peaks in the last half century: baby boomers in the 60s-70s, and their children in the 90s-2000s. They managed to keep the boom going a little longer in the late 2000s with increased international enrollment, but it's over now (peak enrollment was 2010).

the other big trend has been that colleges in the US are disproportionately concentrated in a broad arc from New England through the Midwest for historical reasons, but young people in the US are increasingly concentrated in the South and West. I suspect we'll see a die off of lots of the small colleges that really only appeal locally throughout those areas. It's going to be pretty painful, look at what happened with Sweet Briar, which just managed to stay open (and admittedly suffered from another big trend: the death of women's colleges).

The best source for all of this (as with most news about how universities are run in the USA) is the Chronicle of Higher Education.

I'm not Swedish, but I find this area relatively interesting. The idea is fairly straightforward: Sweden's model created low income inequality between the poor and the rich, but did not create low wealth inequality. A large proportion of Swedish capital was controlled by 15 families, and most wealth his still controlled by a small inherited class (many descended from the old Swedish nobility), and 80-90% of wealth is passed down. We might think of Sweden's long period of dominance by the Social Democrats from the 1930s - 1970s as a sort of bargain between the lower/middle and upper classes: pay your workers well, ensure a strong welfare state, don't be too ostentatious and the lower class will let the upper class run their businesses as usual. One family, the Wallenbergs, controlled ABB, Ericsson, Electrolux, Atlas Copco, SKF, AstraZeneca and Saab. In the 70s they employed 40% of Sweden's workforce and were 40% of Sweden's stock market's worth.

https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish-wealth-distribution/ http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/wea...

For Socialists, this led to an obvious question: what should be done about this? Their solution: most of this wealth comes from ownership of Capital in Sweden's large firms (this is an important distinction between Sweden and Denmark - Sweden has many more large corporations). Workers represented by the trade unions would own a large share of capital and then redistribute the profits from capital back to the workers (and reinvest in the firm and in worker training and investment in new firs controlled by workers). I think this is a relatively interesting take on the idea of "worker controlled enterprises". A very leftist take on all of this is here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...

Of course it didn't happen, as part of the larger global ant-left backlash beginning in the late 70s which took basically everyone by surprise (see also The Iranian Revolution, the American Evangelical movement, Likud, the rise of the BJP in India...).

It's still an interesting idea, I think made more interesting by the rise of index funds like Vanguard. Increasingly capital is controlled by a small group of massive investment funds whose goal is to do nothing. This has led to the half-joking idea that index funds are worse than Marxism. I'll let Mark Levine explain:

" Virtually no one that I talk to in or around the financial industry really believes the "common ownership of companies by mutual funds undercuts competition" theory. It just seems too attenuated: Sure, it might be in BlackRock's and Vanguard's interests if the companies they own don't slash prices to compete with each other, but it's not (usually) like they call up executives to tell them that. Plus "competition" is usually a more nebulous concept than price-cutting: It might be in shareholders' interests to keep prices high, but it is also in shareholders' interests to see more innovation and more competition on quality. If you own the entire economic pie, your interest is in growing that pie, not in keeping each company's slices the same. And the way the pie grows is through the normal capitalist processes of innovation and competition and creative destruction and so forth.

Still I am so desperately fond of this theory. What I love -- what is made so clear in Jacobin's discussion -- is how it wraps capitalism all the way around to socialism. Index funds are in many ways a perfection of financial capitalism: Not only are they the result of scientific finance (modern portfolio theory, the efficient markets hypothesis, etc.) replacing earlier and less rigorous forms of investing, but they also concentrate and align shareholders with each other, and corporate managers with shareholders, in a way that seems like it would be well suited to "ensure that corporations remain within capitalist logic." And the result is something that both Marxists and also financial analysts think is quasi-communist, that "undermines the basic logic that made capitalism an economically and politically successful system in the first place." What if Marx was right that capitalism would ultimately destroy itself, but the way that it does so is through index funds? "

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-26/maybe-ind...

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index... (this essay is also fun because he discusses the hypothetical "Best Planning Robot", a computer so good at allocating capital it finally solves all of Kantorovich's problems)

Anyways, all of this sort of suggests on silly idea: why not just wait until Vanguard controls most of the stock market and nationalize it? I don't think anyone believes this, but it's certainly something to think about.

It's worth one day finding a printing press class and setting some type by hand. For one thing, what you'll produce is beautiful, and it really gives a sense of how much art, work, and mastery goes into type.

Empirically, this does not seem to be the case. Labov at UPenn has been studying American dialect formation for the past ~50 years, and has found several ongoing changes. In some ways the Midwest is getting more divergent, with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

Many small dialects are disappearing, but others are becoming more divergent (out west). It's a mixed bag.

This has an interesting perspective on why the number of CS grads in the US seems so cyclical. The author argues they aren't, and the 1980s crash was a capacity crisis, totally different from the 2001 dot-com bubble crash. He also argues that we are about to experience another capacity crash, as there are not enough CS PhDs who want to go to teaching, and therefore enrollment will be capped.

Could you link to some of them?

Yes, absolutely. I think LeGuin is the last "great" Utopian writer we've had. The Dispossessed is a beautiful work, and one that doesn't have a dark heart. It has bad parts, it might not last, but it's not Omelas. You're exactly right, Omelas is about how we the reader would choose.

Would you leave everything behind because of evil? Would you live with it?

Also, the work on Easter Island is widely disputed. Easter Islanders probably did not purposely cut down all of their big trees, but the trees were devastated by the release of rats which ate their seeds. See "The Statues That Walked" by Prof.s Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo from the University of Hawai'i for a more up to date work.

One of the best books on the subject is Prof. Mark Noll's "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis". The first part is a discussion of how different American groups understood Slavery as Christians in antebellum America. Broadly, several strands can be identified 1) Southerners generally felt content to argue that Slavery was in the Bible, and thus Christian. That Roman and Hebrew slavery was wildly different than Southern Slavery, with race as the underlying factor was not generally mentioned. Roman Slavery was done on peoples of all sorts, and not generally passed down from family member to family member, and was not conceived of as part of a racial hierarchy. There was also a lot of nonsense about sons of Ham and such. 2) Northerners generally felt that the Bible was "in Spirit" against slavery, either broadly in the sense that one should not do it (but not necessarily seek emancipation violently), or actively as many Abolitionists read it. Interestingly, Northerners sort of gave up on the literal argument, and generally argued from broad principles of the New Testament. What could be Christian about owning other men? If all Christians are brothers, how can one justify such an institution as slavery? 3) African Americans read the Bible as not only "in Spirit", but also sought a lot of specific arguments. How could Slavery be Christian when it broke up Christian marriages between slaves? Encouraged the rape of black Women by often married white Slave owners? That banned reading, and thereby prevented Christian blacks from reading the gospel? There was a lot of discussion about how Biblical Roman Slavery differed from modern Southern Slavery - Roman slaves were not racialized, nor forbidden to read by law. One particularly interesting line of thought to me is the idea that Roman slavery and Hebrew slavery, since it was not based on race, and often came from debt implied that if what Americans in 1860 were doing was Biblical Slavery, then White Slavery must be legal. Obviously, this was refused by White Americans, so something must be different. This wasn't picked up by many Whites, but one of the few who did was John Gregg Fee a really interesting preacher in Kentucky who argued that slavery must be ended, lest eventually the majority must be slaves. 4) Catholics and European protestants had a wide variety of views, which honestly I don't remember well enough to summarize here. In general though, outside of America the issue wasn't as pressing, only Brazil legally had kept around Slavery in this period.

It's a good book, and definitely well worth reading. Not that long either.

Lovecraft's racism was significantly more extreme than for his time. He constantly called New York "Jew York", even while married to a Jew. He was a complicated fellow, but explicitly wished not to be a product of his time, but an imagined better era (Specifically he calls out the time of Queen Anne in one of his letters0.

These figures are similar from 2009: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fpt.2009.5 from Population Trends March 2009, Volume 135, Issue 1, pp 20–28 by Amy Ellis Office for National Statistics.

What figures do you believe are accurate?

No, the point of the stay is that he cannot.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio...

See:

8 U.S. Code § 1152 - Numerical limitations on individual foreign states

See this analysis https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/opinion/trumps-immigratio...

Also, the ACLU's complaint is that permanent residence holders are being denied due process by being kicked out of the country without legal recourse, so it is not purely by the policy. See Judge Donelly's Stay Order: https://twitter.com/joshleitzel/status/825529124986900480/ph...

I think that being a student here is hardly catering to their whims. She was let in by the University, works there, and studies there. It seems fair to let her continue to do that.

Also, why do you think immigrants are always going to be non-American? My father has lived here for nearly 40 years, pays taxes, pays into SS, and raised my family here. Is he just fulfilling his whims?

A majority of Americans want to allow refugees from Muslim countries, including Syria: http://www.voanews.com/a/poll-americans-divided-along-party-...

Democrats (who voted 89% for Hillary) are strongly in support.

Overall 59% of Americans believe immigrants make the country stronger: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/15/americans-vi...

I think, usually, hard work is necessary, but not sufficient. You won't succeed without it, but if you're not lucky, you won't succeed either.

And many were raped. Repeatedly. In a culture where this was thought of as normal. How can a relationship be consensual and loving when one partner literally has the right to order the other, to harm the other in any way, to literally kill the other? If there were so many consensual and secret relationships, why did white slave owners talk so openly about rape of black women (and white women actually, read William Byrd Carter II's diary, it's a shocking horrible thing), and speak so strongly against any sort of liason between white women and black men? Black slaves lived in a world where killing your rapist would get you found guilty [1]. Surely there were some loving relationships (people are diverse), but just as surely the majority were not.

And what were slave-owners trying to protect slaves from? If slaves had it so good under slavery, why did thousands and thousands attempt to flee at great risk to their own life? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for the Republican Party after reconstruction, again at great cost to their own lives? Why did so many who did flee write about the evils of slavery, and campaign against it, and no free black wrote for it? All slaves were owned to extract economic value of them, they were huge capital investments.

[1]http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaacc...

If you look at the linked study they're careful to point out that they're only looking at what happens when you're already stopped by police. Blacks in America are much more likely to be stopped overall, so it's not definitive.

They're looking at P(shot|stopped by police and white) and P(shot|stopped by police and black) not P(shot by police|black) and P(shot by police|white).

The situation for salarymen of the same year in big corps. at Japan is kind of similar. Wages are only from tenure, so two people who have been at the a corp. for 10 years have the same salary, even if one's a total duffer and the other is super important for the company. The reasons for this are historical, but don't really matter to this discussion. Almost everyone at these big co.s are hired right out of college in yearly "classes" and then stay their until retirement (ideally, obviously things are more complicated). The system isn't as strong today, so I'm describing something that existed more in the '80s.

What end's up happening is people in the same year are sorted by many other things. Better more interesting tasks are given to higher status workers, they avoid more grunt work, get nice perks (at top levels, things like a company car, etc.), and more respect.

It's hard to separate the effects of this on the company from all the other things Japanese companies do which are different from USA/Europe. But you might look into that.

It's path dependent. Many things happened in the SF Bay area that led to this. Here are factors in a rough order of importance.

1) Most people's savings are in housing. I do not know if this is the case in Switzerland, but in Anglo countries, the majority of most people's money lies in housing. So right there is an enormous incentive to not increase the supply of housing. This is also heavily influenced by the fact that American schools are funded by local property taxes, so not only does the value of your home determine your savings, but also the quality of your child's education. I think this is the fundamental issue, but not the only one.

2) Strong property rights, etc. covered above. It seems like you have this in Switzerland

3) Now, historical reasons. In the 1950s - 70s there was major development of American "inner cities", which mostly consisted of destroying minority neighborhoods and replacing them with freeways. This was a legacy of the fact that at the time the only urban planners where all transportation engineers, and viscous racism. This is important as it led to minority groups deciding that most "development plans" are actually plans to evict them (historically, not that far off). That things were handled so badly led to the first anti-development movement [1]. See the Fillmore District for such an example, although they didn't build a highway through it. See also [2].

4) The next thing to think about is prop 13. Prop 13 basically limited the amount that property taxes on residential areas to roughly 1~2% no matter what. This also brings up an important distinction between Switzerland and California: to my understanding you have citizen initiatives, but they are consulted on and shaped by the legislator. California's are... not. They are often poorly designed. This had many knock on effects, the most important of which for our story is that now cities have little incentive to build more residential housing, since corporate property tax rates are not so capped.

5) In the '60s and '70s, as alluded the anti-growth movement began. This movement reacted to justifiable worries about the destruction of communities, environmental, and historical damage by demanding little growth.

6) Both the anti-growth movement and Prop 13. came about in the '70s, when rent control was also passed in SF. Rent Control means that there is little incentive to invest in an already owned property, and it means that if a new building is built, it likely won't be affordable for low income people who are on rent control.

7) Racism. This is touchy, but in the 1950s and 1960s, many many white Americans left the cities to live in new suburbs, so called "White Flight", with government loan help which blacks could not receive. This was coupled with laws passed against obvious housing discrimination (such as so called "compacts" which made it illegal to sell to non-whites), so moving to a suburb with high housing prices meant that mostly poorer blacks could not buy houses there. It's difficult to say how much this plays out today, but it had a really strong founder effect in most outlying communities, leading to a culture opposed to mass transit ("it'll bring those people here") and multi-person housing ("I love my community of single family homes. It's not my problem if people can't afford housing here. We're full").

So basically everyone is opposed to more building. Minorities are convinced that more building will price them out (true) and that development is likely biased against them, preservation activists don't want new things built, suburban communities don't want to become any denser, municipalities prefer business over homes for tax reasons, and everyone who owns land has no desire to build more.

[1] http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=The_Freeway_Revolt [2] http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Redevelopment_A-1_and...

Cultures experience mental illness in very very different ways.

http://news.stanford.edu/2014/07/16/voices-culture-luhrmann-...

People tend to think their talking to spiritual things in some sense, but Americans heard God, or angels or demons, Indians tended to hear from ancestors or kin, Ghanaians from various spirits. Indians and Ghanaian found that many voices where helpful and positive. The Americans all found their voices to be violent and negative.

If you read the article there's a whole section on how Seattle had a similar problem. That's why all the new condos look so similar, there are very few materials that don't leak.

Being part of a small dedicated group fighting for a cause absolutely leaves you open to this, even when the ideals you are fighting for are against that very goal. You can see it all the time in far left groups, there are often similar sorts of deals going on, like this: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/09/socialist-wo...

Anecdotally, I've met/heard of lots of creepy guys (almost always guys) at these sort of highly motivated ideological groups. There's a strong in-group/out-group thing going on.

I assume far right groups can be similar, but I've never been involved in one. Also it's less interesting, since they generally don't jump up and down to be called feminist.

!0,000 Years ago was ~8000 BC. Nobody knows what languages people spoke back then. Our oldest reconstructed languages like Proto-Uralic and Proto-Afro-Asiatic are hypothesized to have been spoken around then, but they are very rough guesses and certainly are unintelligible to all modern humans.

There's certainly never been a shortage of protectionist economies, it's pretty much the default of countries for obvious reasons of protecting vested interests. The best explanation I've ever read for the rise East Asian export economies post WWII is in the book "How Asia Works" [1]. The title is a little misleading, it's only about East and SE Asia, but it has a good broad overview of what made Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China all rapidly industrialized 1945+, and why South East Asia (particularly Malaysia) failed.

The main thrust of the argument is that markets need to be protected but also forced to export. Whether this is through tight currency controls (to get foreign currency you have to export), government support, or government force (Park arrested South Korean businessmen, and released them only when they agreed to focus on export). And ruthless culling of companies that failed in the global market. You also need very disciplined land reform, to create the initial capital generated by intense land use by small farmers - many SE Asian nations failed to do this, and South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan were all quite successful [2]. China is more muddled, but they also had a strong focus on exports and government support for that.

Exports are important, as otherwise protected companies stagnate and become uncompetitive, reliant on government support. With a focus on exports, countries can use their local market as a test bed and a market to build up to exporting to richer countries.

What I'd really like is a good overview of ISI policy in the successful East Asian Countries versus Latin America which has an even longer history of ISI.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Asia-Works-Joe-Studwell/dp/0802121... [2] To an extent too succesful: Japan spends a lot of money today protecting inefficient small farms created by land reform. But it's a small price in comparison.

Right. Another aspect of this is that SF is one of the few cities where minority groups have been able to use housing laws effectively to try and prevent them being kicked out of the city as prices rise (in most other American cities, these actions have failed). Look at the Tenderloin or Chinatown. This creates a pretty difficult where mostly poor minority groups feel like they have to be anti-development, because otherwise they won't be able to live in the city anymore. In theory given enough building and enough time, prices will go down and SF could be diverse again, but most people think that would be along time. It's a compounding situation of bad choices.

I also think you're giving short shrift to the effect that Milk's and Moscone's assassination had on city politics. It heightened everything that was going on elsewhere in the late '70s - the rise of the environmentalist movement, urbanism, increasing power to minority groups.

I would also say that a lot of the blame belongs to the cities outside of SF: SF only has 11% of the total population of the Bay Area and most of it's suburbs are even more anti growth then the city itself, they just hide it better by being zoned for single residency housing.