Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the Roman Empire

Re:Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the... by johnwalkr on Monday June 13, 2022 @02:54PM (#31729928)

That’s actually a really interesting metric. Cost of living has really shot up in Canada while wages have stagnated. Everyone knows that housing has increased dramatically. This leads to less disposable income obviously. I’m 40 and grew up in Edmonton. Once or twice a year, as a kid and into my late 20s, my family and and/or I did a hotel type vacation in Banff or Jasper once a year, which seemed expensive at the time, and multiple times camping in the Rockies per year, which basically seemed free. My slightly more wealthy friends’ parents had a cabin and boat.

Now if I were to live in Edmonton again, I could probably still camp as if it were free but I appreciate your assessment that a minimum wage worked could not. Because I certainly could as a minimum wage worker back in the day. And I probably would never justify a domestic hotel type weekend or week long trip within Canada.

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Re:Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the... by verve_rat on Monday June 13, 2022 @05:36PM (#31732092)

I'm in NZ, a few years ago a colleague and I would bitch to each other that we are in the top 10% of salary earners in the country, but we felt not that well off. We were worried about affording a house that wasn't a damp, drafty shit hole. But people in our position a generation or two ago were buying boats and beach houses.

We have been getting fucked for a while now.

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Re:Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the... by eastbound on Monday June 13, 2022 @04:16PM (#31731192)

I’ll take the devil’s position: Your are not owed by nature a footprint on the ground, or a weekend camping.

Manille (Manila? Capital of Philippines) has 43079 inhabitants per square kilometer (23sqm per person, including agriculture), China tries to do the same.

The key is nature doesn’t owe you democracy, and governments neither. We can store many people vertically if we remove their personality. What I mean is poverty doesn’t make the system itself collapse, it can actually survive pretty far, even thrive while everyone is expunged.

After all, USSR only collapsed in 1991, 69 years after Stalin took power, after killing probably 1/4 of its population in gulags.

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Re:Lead poisoning probably did not cause the downfall of the... by johnwalkr on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @09:57PM (#31748284)

I don't know why I'm replying to someone who thinks governments don't owe us democracy but people are allowed to complain when things get worse and I would prefer if previous policy didn't disallow increasing density in Canada. Incidentally I live in Tokyo now and it's now cheaper than Vancouver and the density (which is actually not as high as people think[1]) is a positive, not a negative.

[1] Just for fun, I checked densities. Tokyo 23 wards (the actual city of Tokyo): 14,500/km^2. Downtown Vancouver: 17,000/km^2. Downtown Edmonton: 5,000/km^2

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