magicsmoke

The state could already force people under their control to sell commodities to their soldiers for clay tokens. Why switch to gold, a much more difficult resource to obtain and produce coinage with? Was clay suddenly no longer convenient for some handwavey reason because we're now in the Axial Age, despite being used for centuries before? That's the gap in Graebers book that I don't think he covered adequately.

The reason was because now the various city states needed a way to convince people outside their jurisdiction to also provide goods and services for their wars, and those people could not be cowed into using clay. Clay only works within a states jurisdiction because they could punish counterfeits and ensure it's value among subjects as a tax credit to the state. Outside a state's jurisdiction, foreign soldiers have no guarantee that those clay tokens will continue to be a secure store of value. What if the state you were fighting for collapsed tomorrow? Now their tax credits are worthless. Gold, on the other hand, holds it's value because people like shiny things regardless of which king is stamped on it. But because the gold is issued by a state with their tendency for standardization, now your gold trinkets come in nice standardized units instead of a random assortment of jewelry, what gold would have been used for previously.

You should rethink that phrasing. That's a heads I win tails you lose kind of proposal.

This was a really enjoyable read and actually helped plugged a few gaps I got from Graeber's work. I personally think his model for where money originated is very solid. Early human tribes work on emotional kinship ties and obligations within the family without a need to precisely account for debts. Money first appeared with city-states as standardized clay tokens used to account for grain taxes owed to the state. Give grain to the city or provide labor and services, get token, give token to tax collector on tax day to keep your city-assigned plot of farmland. But after this point in his book he jumps straight to how gold currency appeared with the rise in warfare in ancient Mesopotamia, but doesn't really give a good explanation why.

Based on what I got from this post, humans are evolutionarily wired to like shiny things, and this gives us a competitive advantage. Instead of lazying around to enjoy the sunset after a good harvest, our ancestors would have used the time to make elaborate collectables for its artistic qualities. Despite collectables not being something you can eat or live in, they happen to be a good insurance mechanism during hard times. Other tribes, though untrusting and hostile, also like shiny things and will share their food with you for collectables during emergencies where you need to depend on the kindness of strangers, turning them into a way to store the value of the leisure time used to create them. I wouldn't call this currency because collectables have no standardized value, its value being entirely subjective based on artistic preferences. One hunter might really like the color of your beads and give you two pheasants. Another might only give you half, but will give you three for your ivory comb instead. But this system is enough to sustain basic barter circles between foreign tribes and account for social obligations over time.

This evolutionary tendency to like shiny collectables combined with standardized states is what I think creates our first metallic coins. King Croesus of Lydia is facing a major war crisis as the ancient near east enters an age of chaos and decides to hire foreign mercenaries. He can't pay them with standardized tax tokens since they aren't his citizens to tax. He can't negotiate a tribute with their leader in luxury goods and jewelry because they're ragtags gathered from all over the land with no single leader. What he can do is melt down his golden collectable statues, divide them into standard units reminiscent of existing tax tokens, stamp them with his symbol, give each individual soldier a coin for every battle they fight, and appeal to our inherent love for shiny things. And so the first gold coin based on the existing idea of clay tax tokens is born.

There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why should the government invest into scientific research?

Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote.

Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Why build a phone that lasts 10 years when you build one that lasts 4, convince people to throw away perfectly working phones, and funnel the additional annual sales volume into technological research?

There's another way to frame that argument. The spike in window repairs and glass demand will incentivize glass factories to invest in technological advancements to make cheaper and better glass. Investments they would not have made otherwise because there wasn't enough demand to spread the fixed investment cost across and make it profitable. After all the windows are repaired, the glass factories still retain their capital investment and technical knowledge, are producing glass cheaper than before, out-competing their counterparts abroad, and maintaining a global technological lead in glass production.

Bastiat's parable doesn't account for the sticky effects of capital investment. The glass makers in his stories only replace windows with old techniques and never use the spike in demand as an opportunity for technological development.

If you're in a situation where a state is after you, cash or bitcoin isn't going to help. If they decide you owe them hundreds of millions, they'll claw it from you when you try to spend that cash on oil and find out your tanker was intercepted in the Indian ocean and its contents sold off to pay the state.

The article's description of global momentary systems being colliding whirlpools is very apt. The international arena is a game played by giants, where individuals travel and do business with their permission, and we very quickly find ourselves unpersoned if we piss off our home whirlpool and can't find another to jump into. Most of us that stay comfortably in the center of a whirlpool don't even notice it. But criminal groups, political dissidents, international corporations, and even someone dealing with cross border taxes and payments will know how bad the waves on the edges can get.

If you subscribe to MMT, the IOU here is that the government promises not to throw you in jail for failure to pay taxes if you give them some tokens every year. If you own land within the boundaries of a state, and you decide not to answer the door when the tax man shows up, you'll quickly find out how much ownership you really have.

If you decide to go full nomad and never "own" anything, the tokens still work as IOUs in the eyes of the state. Try paying bus fares (public infrastructure fees) or parking tickets (fines/taxes) in bitcoin or gold.

Money is an IOU to be free from state violence in return for economic productivity and corvee labor.

On the one hand, they're right to cringe at the tone-deaf socialist era government communist propaganda. "How do you do fellow kids" with a communist flare. Clearly produced by cadres in their 60s in a communist bubble.

On the other hand, the current nationalist Chinese bubble is not that much better. Listening practice on Bilibili would be a lot better without the equally tone deaf comments about how all their neighbors are puppets of the US without any personal agency and owe their culture and history to 5000 years of glorious Chinese civilization. The current anti-Chinese sentiments in the west would be far worse if your average American spent even 30 minutes on Chinese websites. They can complain all day about how biased BBC is towards China (arguably true), but I don't see CGTV overtaking BBC globally in popularity anytime soon. One whiff of that smug self-superiority is enough to make anyone regret learning Chinese.

The climate doesn't care about per capita, but people do. And solving climate change involves a global effort, but if you insist on shoving most of the burden to the global south who never had a chance at a first world lifestyle, they'll just tell you to screw yourself. You want to insist on bringing your accumulated centuries of carbon emissions onto the lifeboat, while telling everyone else to impose quotas on their luggage, then they'll be happy to drag you to the bottom together.

Using drones wasn't going to dramatically increase the damage someone like the Boston Marathon bomber did or decrease his chances of getting caught. Would be domestic terrorists are deterred by the fact that they are domestic and will eventually be arrested given the dragnet of internet and CCTV surveillance we all live under, not because they can't somehow fly a bomb into a stadium instead of leaving a pressure cooker backpack. Drone availability is way down on the list of things a normal person would consider before deciding to pick up domestic terrorism. Top of that list is probably whether they can win a shootout with the police force when a dozen swat vans inevitably show up at their address.

Depends on what is considered a loss.

Bombers flying towards the political capital = launch the nukes.

Navy sunk and the enemy is setting up a blockade = maybe we'll go be north Korea instead of giving up existence here.

Both sides burn through all their high tech armaments and don't have enough to really keep fighting = truce for 3 years so we can build more shit for the next war.

It might also be instructive to compare with medicine or law. These practitioners are also liable for their actions, have to be licensed by a professional organization, and can have their credentials revoked in the event of gross incompetence. Software designers have none of these burdens.

It's weird that most of the discussion is focused on a false dichotomy between a single universal language for all humanity, and preserving every single language that exists today even if they only have a few dozen speakers. The reality is that most minority languages will die out, but we'll still have more languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers and backed by modern education systems than anyone could realistically learn in a lifetime.

Probably the human tendency for loss aversion. No one today cares about the exact preparations and steps needed to prepare an offering of sheep intestines to Zeus other than a some PhDs in classical studies, but I could imagine ancient Greeks thinking that their youth deciding to worship Roman or Christian gods was a bad thing that took away from their cultural heritage. But after that event happened, no one today really cares or notices the loss of the precise minutia of ancient Greek cultural practices and values.

As someone who speaks a language that may be going the way of the dodo in a couple of years, watching his family back home decide not to pass it onto the next generation because it has no economic value and takes away from the rat race of school and jobs, and knowing there's no objection I can make because having grown up in a foreign country means I can't even speak it correctly, I'm afraid I have to agree with that bleak assessment. Waxing poetic about how minority languages should be preserved seems hollow when the minorities themselves don't see the point. Why do they have to shoulder the burden of carrying an outdated relic just so some English speaking aristocrats can feel blessed about how diverse their world is?

There are days when it feels like fighting a losing war. Digging up a few old movies to hear the sounds of a dying language and wondering if your kids will care enough to keep this game of broken telephone going into its final rounds, and why you have the right to impose that burden on them in the first place. Maybe it's better if they never know what they lost. I recently found out that my parents could have taught me two other languages that are also dying out, but they decided not to because who in the world would I use them with? Then I shrugged and went on with my day.

Astronaut: English

Cosmonaut: Russian

Taikonaut: Chinese

Spationaut: French

Vyomanaut: Indian

Based on their entries on wikitionary it looks like most phonetically written languages are able to express all these terms. Whether they commonly use them is a different question. From a cursory glance most of these are European languages such as English, German, French, etc. Languages like Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Vietnamese, Thai, will use a term that's semantically correct but doesn't try to imitate phonetically.

I'll go out on a limb and say this bullshit gives English a small bonus in being a global franca lingua (if you discount historical factors). It would be hard to communicate and discuss foreign ideas and words when you can't even express them concisely in your own language.

Insert comments about programming languages and their pros/cons here for hacker news flavor.

The confusion over Chinese names and logograms is pretty funny considering that in Chinese, western names are written with a set of phonetic logograms and losing that spelling information with latin/cyrillic characters makes it hard to tell if the name was English, Italian, German, or Russian.

Personally, it would be great if names on western websites are written with logograms in parenthesis and names on Chinese websites are written with spelled characters in parenthesis. Just another one of those weird cross-cultural areas of friction.

Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect

http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf

It's a way to take 方言 and decouple it from linguistic terms like language and dialects so a proper study and classification of the Chinese language family and its various languages and dialects can take place without interference from Chinese politics. When someone points out that Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are 方言 then linguists can nod politely, agree that they are in fact "topolects", then continue classifying them as Sinitic languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family each with their own collection of dialects.

Would be interesting to know if the study of Arabic has similar issues because from a layman's cursory knowledge Arabic has similar diversity when it comes to mutual intelligibility.

Contractual penalty clauses are activated: Good luck collecting, get lost.

Credit rating is dinged: In the eyes of the lenders that debt trapped you. Why would you still want to be rated well by them?

Country cannot secure international finance: Continuing to secure financing from the people trying to debt trap you is a good idea?

Reputation damage: Same idea, why do you want to keep your reputation up with debt trappers?

Trade sanctions among financiers allies: This one actually has teeth. Don't pay your debts, don't get to trade with your debtors until you do. Hence why Iran and Cuba are locked out of trade with western countries due to their nationalization of western capital.

Taking on debt as a precondition to accessing a trading bloc so they get you hooked onto trade and can use that as leverage to force you to pay up is a pretty good power play. Of course, that leverage decreases if have other trade blocs as options.

Nationalizing the infrastructure is always an option. Unlike the US, China can't send marines around the world to seize the property.

There's a kind of twisted logic to it. If your construction techniques are constantly improving and the high volume of construction incentivizes you to develop more cost efficient construction technologies, then planned obsolescence of buildings is like planned obsolescence of phones. Build soviet block apartments, knock down in 20 years, replace with prefab building compartments with wiring and plumbing built in at the factory. Then export the prefab technology worldwide to take advantage of the infrastructure boom in other developing countries. Isn't build fast, break fast, and learn fast the whole silicon valley ethos?

Looks like Kylin OS uses the Linux kernel. While not impossible to use in a real-time application (SpaceX Falcon 9 uses it) there's definitely work involved in stripping it down enough to work as an RTOS. NASA Perseverance uses VxWorks instead, which was designed from the beginning as an RTOS. VxWorks is also proprietary and looks like it's US export restricted.

8 ms isn't hard to hit. 8 ms with 100% reliability is.

> (c) any act aimed at collecting information to the prejudice of the defence or security of the coastal State

This could have an extremely broad interpretation. Any military ship sailing through territorial waters with some passive wireless sensors, sonar, and temperature/salinity gauges could fall under this. Civilian ships as well if that info is later forwarded to the military.

I meant that if he was willing to put his family through that much trouble, they probably weren't that close in the first place. In which case, what does or doesn't happen to family left behind isn't a large factor in deciding to defect.

Even in a nonauthoritarian country, defecting means you'll never return again to see your friends and family anyways. Given that, defectors probably consider making a political stand more important than their personal connections regardless of what happens after they leave. Not everybody has a loving family and close friends they can't give up.

Probably higher than your average citizen without access to classified information, but not high enough to make defection a common occurrence that significantly hampers intelligence work. Some hackers may be disillusioned with the system, but most are socially conditioned to accept it as better than the alternative, imposed by external enemies and pressures, or not their problem. Defection is also not unique to authoritarian countries, see Snowden.

If that's the case we would see an effort to reverse those wrongs by reverting all the economic benefit that America gained at the expense of Native Americans. All the land and lives taken, and all the wealth and prosperity they could have generated. The total sum if repaid would probably erase a significant part of America from the map.

So it was wrong. But clearly not wrong enough to warrant erasing America and its wealth from existence. Saying sorry and expressing regret is cheap. Actual action is expensive.

As an aside, I wonder what the psychological effects are from growing up in a nation where the public discourse is all about how the nation was unjustly founded. If a significant part of the next generation believes that America's historical foundations are rotten to the core and that its existence is a tragedy, what happens next?

The cost to launch that weight into space and make sure it hits its intended target on landing would make it prohibitively expensive.

It seems like what's implied behind this question is that any Chinese hacker that's exposed to uncensored material would immediately turn against their evil regime, so the regime must constantly be on guard against ideological infiltration.

I think that's a really simplistic view of human motivations and a reflection of how China is viewed in the West onto how any "reasonable" Chinese hacker must also view China. When in fact, how this hacker might view about the situation could range anywhere from feeling that the government was justified in their actions from a realpolitik point of view to an acceptance that it's just one of those complicated problems in Chinese society that can't be solved overnight, like systemic racism or economic inequality in the US. I doubt Americans live every minute of their lives thinking of all the minor tragedies that occur in their country at any given moment, and is motivated by them to overthrow the American system. Rather, it's more of a shrug and carry on while trying to do a little better within the system they have.