gleech
Re:Bullshit Jobs
on Friday August 31, 2018 @08:12AM (#17884836)
Sure: "40 hours a week" for moderns is also an underestimate.* But the figure everyone goes around repeating about hunter-gatherers is a more dramatic underestimate. The accurate !Kung estimate is 48-56 hours spent on these things: so we seem to be about the same, but with massively improved quality, cost, and nutrition for us.
The debunking applies to the claim that they had more leisure than us. Lee says: "work week... of 2.4 days per adult... [the bushmen] appeared to enjoy more leisure time than the members of many agricultural and industrial societies."
* Industrialised-world cooking time per week seems to be about 6 hours. https://www.statista.com/statistics/420719/time-spent-cookin... Difficult to find average shopping time, but call it 5-7 hours a week. https://www.statista.com/statistics/521924/time-spent-househ...
Re:Bullshit Jobs
on Thursday August 30, 2018 @03:08PM (#17879759)
This "original affluent society" hypothesis is much-promoted but much of it just isn't true.
Lee's numbers explicitly counted only the initial foraging of the mongongo nuts, i.e. none of the food processing, firewood gathering or tool maintenance. After adjusting for these, the average !Kung work week is at least 50 hours and probably more. See:
http://www.rachellaudan.com/2016/01/was-the-agricultural-rev...
Re:The Manchester Baby was the first stored-program computer
on Friday June 22, 2018 @08:10AM (#17373317)
I made a tiny app to solve this kind of disagreement; I was annoyed by the unjust dominance of the ENIAC over Hoelzer's 50 Jahre Computer and the Z3, but also over the Manchester Baby, which really was a massive step forward.
There are about 2304 "first" computers, by my model.