5040
As his income grew, Cato also became a regular investor in commercial lending. Although a law from 218 BC banned senators from engaging directly in commercial shipping, Cato formed partnerships of fifty investors that backed the commercial operations of fifty ships. He fronted all of the initial capital and then lent money to investors that they could each use to buy a share in the enterprise. Cato himself entrusted one share to a freed slave who acted as his agent. He then profited from the trading activities as well as the interest on these loans, while following the letter of the law and limiting his direct exposure in case the cargo was lost.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
Free Shakespeare in the Park is a New York City civic tradition dating back to the 1950s. It is, as the name suggests, free to the public, but because Central Park’s Delacorte Theater has a finite number of seats, tickets are given out on a first come, first served basis. Some folks, who either can’t or don’t want to stand in line to get tickets, have taken to employing line-standers to do the waiting for them. According to Sandel, the price for a line-stander in 2010 was “as much as $125 per ticket for the free performances”
>There were some 90 dentists and around 30 doctors operating in the City, for the most part trained in China but unable to operate in Hong Kong without taking more exams. The City provided a handy alternative and they were allowed to operate there without oversight from the authorities. Many were actually very good at their job and attracted patients from a wide area – including a number of policemen to our knowledge – the best of them with smart premises along Tung Tau Tsuen Road that ran along the north side of the City.
For many, a big part of the appeal was the low costs of living. Surely choosing relative squalor with low prices should be an option?
A related phenomenon is not being able to hear the difference between 128kbps and 320kbps. I find the notion astonishing, and yet lots of people cannot tell the difference.
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/redressing-the-balance-...
>Jeff Bezos(01:34:00) We were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
By 413, Demos had inherited his father's peacocks, descendants of an original breeding pair given to Pyrilampes s.v. on one of his embassies to the Persian court. They were such beautiful εὐόφθαλμος and expensive birds—a pair valued at a thousand drachmae (Ael. NA 5.21)--that visitors would arrive from Sparta and Thessaly to see them, and in hopes of obtaining some of their eggs. Apparently Demos continued the tradition his father had begun, more than thirty years previously, of admitting the public on the first day of each month to view the birds.
Music is mostly unpaid labor and there's no shortage of musicians.
What if you are a lonely oldster who'd love to slowly sweep away dust and cigarette butts in front of the local store for 5$ an hour. It doesn't seem obvious that outlawing this is good for society.
The shower is outside on the back patio. The shower is fitted with hot water from the conventional water heater plumbed from the house. The shower is surrounded by a stainless steel privacy screen and a lot of really tall tropical plants. It’s the one feature that friends and family seem to like the most about the cottage. But the county authorities said it was completely illegal.
First, the county inspector cited the raw sewerage that was being released into the environment. By “raw sewerage” he was referring to warm soapy water. The “environment” in this case was my rural back garden. The remedy was to plumb the outdoor shower with a drain that carried the “sewerage” into the septic system for safe disposal. I had this work done at some considerable expense that I struggled to afford at the time. Then the inspector was invited back to final the plumbing permit. Unfortunately he cited the project for another violation instead. It seems that rain water was able to drain into the outdoor shower and enter the septic system which was a code violation. He couldn’t have told me this earlier? Evidently inspectors shy away from proscribing holistic solutions. Instead they just look at what’s in front of them and check off boxes on their clip boards. It’s up to the property owner to understand and comply with the impenetrable codes on their own. So I covered the outdoor shower with a simple roof that prevented the rain from entering the drain (completely ruining the whole concept of a tropical outdoor shower). When the inspector returned this too was a code violation since a covered structure with plumbing constitutes a second dwelling unit on a lot that is only zoned for one unit. I removed the roof from the shower in disgust. Finally a sympathetic neighbor said he had a similar problem with his outdoor shower and solved the problem by re-labeling it as a hose bib on the permit documents. I plugged up the shower drain with concrete, removed the shower head, and invited the inspector back to approve the hot and cold hose bibs inside the little privacy screen on the back patio. In fifteen seconds he was able to check off the little boxes on his clip board and there were no more problems with the outdoor shower. A sense of relief and calm washed over me. But it only lasted for ten seconds. The inspector then said he couldn’t sign off on the building inspection because this house didn’t have a shower or bath tub…
source: https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2014/05/22/building-cod...
>Medical and dental care were no problem at all: many of the residents were doctors and dentists with Chinese qualifications and years of experience but lacking the expensive pieces of paper required to practise in the colony. They set up their neat little clinics in the City, oases of cleanliness and order, and charged their patients a fraction of what they would pay outside.
Source: City Of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City (1993)
The narrative structure of Strange Manuscript is that of a story within a story. The frame story has four characters. Lord Featherstone, a British aristocrat, has fled the boredom of society to cruise the south seas in his yacht. He is accompanied by Dr. Congreve, a medical doctor who is knowledgeable in such fields as geography, botany, and paleontology; by Noel Oxenden, a Cambridge scholar who is an expert on philology; and by Otto Melick, "a littérateur from London". The four are becalmed in mid-Atlantic when they discover a copper cylinder containing a letter and a manuscript written on an unusual material which the doctor later identifies as papyrus. To while away the time, they take turns reading the manuscript aloud, pausing between turns to discuss its contents and debate its authenticity.
The author seems to have been a rather cool dude
Among the books from his library presented by the family to Dalhousie College are hymnologies of the Greek Church, a beautiful set of Euripides, works in modern Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian showing signs of use, as well as French, German and Italian classics with pencilled marginalia, all attesting the breadth of his intellectual interests. Since his death, his best book, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder has been published by Harper's. It anticipates such romances as King Solomon's Mines, being a tale of wild adventures in an Antarctic Topsy-turveydom where lovers fly about on tame pterodactyls, and utter unselfishness is the chief aim in life of the highly civilised (but cannibal) inhabitants. [...] De Mille was a tall, handsome, dark man, an excellent teacher, a good conversationalist, best in monologue, an amateur musician, an adept at caricatures and comic verses; in short, a most unusual personality.