This made me recall immediately the "I, pencil" article. It's stunning to remember that almost anything one gets to touch or see throughout the day is a product of almost always global collaboration, if we include a things conception with its production, and also transportation, selling, etc.

Going off of that, when I realized that an ice cube was proof of incredible engineerning and that in terms of mankind, it's brand new tech !! I "couldn't believe it". I got that the concept of freezing water was some complex thermodynamics, but never realized it implied I couldn't make an ice cube without it when it's hot outside ! I thought the French had been drinking cold champagne all these years ! (turns out they have, since mostly only the rich ere drinking it and they were using various caves to keep cold temperatures, and they shipped ice from the Alpes; no source on my hands, but that's what I remember when looking into it).

Shizzles, I couldn't make a simple flame by myself ;p

Before refrigeration, people would use evaporative cooling to keep things cool: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaporative_cooler

And cooler cabinets, where they had blocks of ice in a compartiment at the top of a closet (of sorts).

(source: guided tour of a late-1800s castle with a fully equipped French kitchen complex. Complex because they had rooms for separate tasks.)

Ice Houses were really popular; especially in the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_house_(building)

Harvesting ice in the winter was a common and wide spread activity in North America (and most of Europe). Short article on Hudson River ice harvesting http://www.genealogy.clifflamere.com/Aid/History/IceHarvesti...

This is the result of free markets. Centralized economic planning is simply unable to deal with the complexity.

Please don't take HN on generic ideological tangents. They lead to generic ideological flamewars, which are more or less all the same, and therefore off topic here.

Wut? Do you really think you can convince me that USSR did not have toilet papers or pencils? Or send the first man to space? This is not about what economical model is better. People can collaborate both under central economic planning and through free markets. One might certainly be more preferable to the other, but that's totally a different conversation (I'm not a fan of either, for the records).

You will laugh, but yes, USSR also had troubles with toilet paper from time to time (while launching satellites i guess) - https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

In my Soviet childhood it was quite permanent, actually. So permanent as a child I would be surprised to hear it's a trouble :-) We used newspapers cut into rectangular pieces, and it was such a usual thing that cultural norms already existed around it. Where I lived, for example, cutting newspapers for bathroom use was definitely a men's chore. A lady could be very angry at her husband, not finding accurate pieces in time of need.

Wow, thanks! This is why I like to err in public sometimes, you never know how interesting things will come your way.

The soviet union was one problem after another of limited availability of goods. I'm glad you are open to this info.

Free markets are self-organizing, and are constantly adapting, evolving, and innovating. Centralized planning (socialism) cannot hope to match it.

Free markets also have no concept of human suffering; they centralise power with the most ruthless and exploitative, and so preference those human traits.

Equating centralised planning with socialism is wrong though. You can have the latter without the former.

> USSR did not have toilet papers or pencils?

No. Just that it could not produce them reliably with efficiency. Consider this from Friedman's book "Free to Choose":

First, the wood comes from a tree, "a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon." To cut down the tree and cart the logs to the railroad siding requires "saws and trucks and rope and . . . countless other gear." Many persons and numberless skills are involved in their fabrication: in "the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, ... untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!" And so Mr. Read goes on to the bringing of the logs to the mill, the millwork involved in converting the logs to slats, and the transportation of the slats from California to Wilkes-Barre, where the particular pencil that tells the story was manufactured. And so far we have only the outside wood of the pencil. The "lead" center is not really lead at all. It starts as graphite mined in Ceylon. After many complicated processes it ends up as the lead in the center of the pencil. The bit of metal - the ferrule - near the top of the pencil is brass. "Think of all the persons," he says, "who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make sheet brass from these products of nature." What we call the eraser is known in the trade as "the plug." It is thought to be rubber. But Mr. Read tells us the rubber is only for binding purposes. The erasing is actually done by "Factice," a rubberlike product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with sulfur chloride. After all of this, says the pencil, "Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?" None of the thousands of persons involved in producing the pencil performed his task because he wanted a pencil. Some among them never saw a pencil and would not know what it is for. Each saw his work as a way to get the goods and services he wanted - goods and services we produced in order to get the pencil we wanted. Every time we go to the store and buy a pencil, we are exchanging a little bit of our services for the infinitesimal amount of services that each of the thousands contributed toward producing the pencil. It is even more astounding that the pencil was ever produced. No one sitting in a central office gave orders to these thousands of people. No military police enforced the orders that were not given. These people live in many lands, speak different languages, practice different religions, may even hate one another - yet none of these differences prevented them from cooperating to produce a pencil.

Toilet paper, lightbulbs, stockings. I brought carloads of that stuff from the west back in the stone age.

They/we did, of course. But the supply never matched the demand up or down. Usually it was lack of.

The USSR had pencils, yes.

> USSR did not have toilet papers or pencils?

They had cars made of toilet papers. /s The car industry is a great example of how centralized planning is a total failure.

Yeah, we certainly can't produce toilet paper unless 50% of the population is in poverty.

Yes, 14.8% = 50%

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States

I believe OP was talking about trade throughout the world.

National slights, regardless of nation being slighted, aren't ok here. You've done this before, unfortunately. Would you please not do it again? It's obviously uncivil. If people can't respect each other here, they can't comment here.

Because of HN's origins, it's often the case that there's some ambiguity about whether a statement is scoped to the US or more widely. The fix for that is disambiguation, not taking or making insults.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

To take your sarcasm further, it appears we can't: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-venezu...

(Yes, I know we could)

Freer markets means less poverty though.

Haha, do they?

I think the question is how do you define free? Free for powerful to do anything they want? Free subject to govt control? The tension is between those points.

The term is "free markets" which have a reasonably agreed upon definition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market

Absolutely, nothing has brought a greater level of prosperity and equality to the world than free market capitalism. This is simply an empirical fact. Just like it is an empirical fact that every socialist nation in history has created huge levels of poverty and inequality.

I feel like the fall of the British Empire and subsequent reversion to the mean is probably responsible for most of that prosperity.

The revision to what mean? The pre-British empire mean? Because pre-British empire wasn’t exactly a prosperous period.

Hey, remember when the USSR started and they eliminated homelessness within 10 years. And also, were the first to space. In addition, had citizens that were better fed than the US, had more doctors per capita. And this is just from State Capitalism, not Socialism.

No I don’t, because that never happened. I do remember millions of soviet citizens dying from famine though, and millions more dying from state sponsored killing. I don’t remember any famines taking place in developed free markets during that period. However, I have a pretty clear memory of the two class system that developed in all of the socialist nations that existed in the 20th century. One of the starving poor, and another of the rich oligarchs.

That's not inherent to markets, it's caused by allowing a market system to have a feedback loop where investments are rewarded proportionately to their size (capitalism). The people able to participate in the feedback loop inevitably become wealthier than those who can't until the market prioritizes what they want over everyone else.

Shameless plug, I made a short podcast episode about this, from a systems perspective. It looks at what it takes to clean your teeth...and how systems have a tendency to spiral out this way. It’s a feature of problem solving systems: they generate new/different problems that need to be solved, and therefore propagate the system into something like global collaboration.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-0-cleaning-your-...

Toilet Paper is one of my favorite "How it's Made" episodes. Feel free to check it out at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z74OfpUbeac.

My favorite part is at 4:43 with the Circular Saw!

Deeplink to 4:43 https://youtu.be/Z74OfpUbeac?t=283

oof, look at those wee small rolls at the edges... seems the machine is a bit out of sync!

I think those are trimmed off because they're uneven?

They might be trimming the first inch or so, so that there's a neat edge

One can recognise an engineer to how long one can watch, fascinated, "how it's made"! It's a great show.

Except TP is not the solution. If a bird pooped on your arm, would you rather use a dry paper towel to clean it off or water?

I don't get the false equivalency between your arm and your anus. The anus is neatly tucked away, and is supposed to handle fecal matter. You're not going to accidentally rub your unclean anus on some food or in your face, unless you cook differently than most people and is more flexible.

Would you put your face in your shoes for hours at a time, or rub it on the ground when you walked? Probably not, but thats no problem for the feet, because they're a different body part with different strengths and requirements.

That's a common argument, and a flawed one at that IMHO. If a bird pooped on a table, would you rub it off with your bare finger with some soap water, or would you use paper? (Granted, even this might give you the hint that dry paper isn't always the best idea.)

Well no, the whole point is that there's shit on you in the first place already, not touching it is not an option.

You clean your arse with water so that it's clean and not just wiped with paper, just as you afterwards will wash your hands instead of just wiping them on a paper towel.

Well, that comes down to cultural or personal preference. Some cultures consider feet unclean. Some people consider the anus unclean. How clean you try to make a body part depends on how clean you consider or expect it to be.

Soap and water. Never just water alone.

If a bird pooped the human way (same diet and result) the solution would be a piece of dry paper or leaf

It is not just unpleasantness. It is an essential tool for the contamination risk management.

Wiping with TP is still relatively unpleasant and ineffective in terms of cleanliness.