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The iron law of development

(Or: when fiction comes true, part 93.)

I'm used to "Halting State" moments, when something I invented in a work of near-future SF slides disturbingly close to reality a few years later. I'm a lot less used to that happening in my more far-out/speculative fiction, though.

I'd classify the Merchant Princes series (including the forthcoming "Empire Games" trilogy) firmly in that category, even though chunks of it are set in a world so close to ours that even the folks in the headlines are familiar—it invokes parallel universes, after all, some of which exhibit rather less familiar takes on historical progress. One of the things I do in this series is to play with the history of development economics, very much in the non-quantitative SF tradition of asking "what would be the consequences if X happened instead of Y".

In the case of one of the parallel universes I explored in the first series, the X I picked was "suffocate the 18th century British industrial revolution in its crib by having England invaded by France in 1760 and subjected to internal tariff barriers managed by the Ferme générale in order to pay off the war debt" (which as you know, Bob, was the debt that in our history triggered the American War of Independence). And the conclusion I came to in my bumbling non-quantitative way was that you can suppress industrialization some of the time but not all of the time, and the same cultural, demographic, and resource-availability preconditions that gave rise to it in the North of England and the Scottish Lowlands were also emergent in Appalachia and Pennsylvania, so that the industrial revolution would probably kick off about a century later and on the other side of the Atlantic.

Anyway, the holy Crap moment for the Merchant Princes series has now arrived: economist Brad DeLong just did some interesting numerical analysis that suggests the scenario I came up with for time line three, the New British Empire, which underwent a late industrial revolution and demographic transition about 100-150 years after the British innovations of the 18th century stalled out holds up.

He started out by exploring the proposition that there was a high-level pre-industrialization local minimum, the so-called "gunpowder empire" stage, beyond which progress was unlikely: but concluded that such systems don't exist in a steady state—they're unstable. Once population exceeds a certain level they undergo a step change, beyond which the accelerating development of technology drives productivity and breaks the culture out of the previous Malthusian trap, leading in due course to wage growth, and ultimately demographic transition to a technologically innovative, wealthy, but low/zero population growth society (which is roughly where we are now). The basis for this exercise was extrapolation from an earlier paper by Michael Kremer which postulated that because technology is non-rivalrous high population spurs technological change; there's a feedback loop between agricultural productivity and a large enough work force to support the innovators who invent the machines with which to raise your productivity, so that once you exceed a critical threshold the process of development is bound to turn runaway. And using some very simple assumptions about long-term initial rates of population growth and productivity growth, the time-to-breakthrough that his model coughed up matches the New British Empire.

I confess: when I first started writing the series I pantsed the development of time line three. Initially it was a wheeze: how could I rig it to produce a pseudo-steampunk world for the original "A Family Trade"? But then I got caught up in the development model and realized that it's not a steampunk environment, or a gunpowder-and-sail empire: Miriam just happens to encounter it at a particular point in its development sprint, and doesn't recognize the applicability of Gibson's Rule -- "the future is already here: it's just unevenly distributed". But I'm really tickled to now have a solid, if speculative, numerical basis for the changes I needed for the new Merchant Princes trilogy.

There are a couple of corollaries, of course. One is that steampunk settings in the science fictional mode (as opposed to gaslight fantasy) are inherently unstable; unless you do what Rod Duncan did in The Bullet-Catcher's Daughter and add a deus ex machina (or a creepy secret police) that suppresses inovation, developing nation's gonna develop.

Another corollary is that development comes with a whole bunch of semi-predictable side-effects. Side-effects like: increasing agricultural productivity means more food and fibers. This means more hands available to work in factories doing things like turning fibers into fabric, as a result of which the price of clothing essentially goes into free fall (to get a handle on what that means, read this explanation of how much a shirt cost in the middle ages, and consider the etymology of the word "spinster"). Cheap clothing doesn't have to be repaired endlessly, so fashions begin to change from year to year instead of decade to decade: wearing clothing a la mode is affluence signaling, like driving a new car today. (A suit of clothes used to cost as much as a car does today, in real terms: and I mean ordinary clothes, not the elaborate court finery of the nobility.) Cheap clothing also frees up labour for other productive work, such as washing machines (and if you think washing machines are trivial consumer goods, watch Hans Rosling explain how wrong you are) and infrastructure projects (roads, railways, harbours, airports, phone networks). Automation is substitutable for labour which means more bodies are available for education which improves the quality of workers and thereby the quality (and utility) of the products they can create. Of course, highly educated and productive children are individually more expensive to raise than large broods of field labourers, so parents preferentially raise fewer of them, and the social and economic advantages of big cities ensures that the cost of living in a metropolis spirals ...

You can hold back some of these tendencies with top-down enforcement driven by some ideological imperative; consider the enforcement of religious dress codes in Iran or Saudi Arabia as examples. But such enforcement measures invariably kneecap some aspect of the developing economy: if you ban women or left-handed people from becoming brain surgeons, that reduces your maximum productivity. In an international setting, the nation-state that abandons arbitrary restrictions on social status or employment first has an advantage (and I'd like to cite the shift in English social attitudes to women working outside the home from about 1816 to 1916 as an example).

Another side-effect of this productivity growth is growth in the complexity of financial arrangements. Money isn't a physical entity like an electron, it's an exchange medium like a current flow. It becomes more useful when there's a lot of it, flowing fast: but you can't afford to let it stop moving and pile up in a vault somewhere, or the economic activity it energizes stops moving. Workers have to be paid and use their pay to buy food and goods, and factories have to sell goods (and farms, food) to generate revenue to pay their workers. Governments kickstart the process by creating debt (in the shape of tax obligations) then issuing currency (to pay for useful stuff governments need, like roads and armies) that people can exchange and use to pay their taxes. As productivity grows, the flows of money required to represent exchanges within the economy also have to grow. But: what I said about allowing hoarding of money? If you don't allow some hoarding you get shocks as disjoint elements of the circulation can't keep up with each other. Savings are needed as a buffer to smooth out flows in the force. And the complexity of financial instruments is a response to noise in the system, as people seek better and more reliable ways to protect their investments against sudden happenstance.

Does this sound familiar? Because it ought to: it's the story of our last two centuries.

Pulling back from the tight-focus shock for a moment, we know that development isn't inevitable. If there are no large reserves of coal and iron to mine you're unlikely to get widespread deployment of steam engines. If it's easier for your second sons to set out and march into unoccupied territory and set up farming than to try and eke more food out of a smaller subdivided family farm, you won't get increases in population density until you butt up against the Malthusian limits. If your political system generates a succession crisis that can only be resolved by a brutal and destructive civil war once every generation, that's not going to be conductive to long-term capital accumulation and investment, or to development of a culture of respect for the rule of law (including observance of any form of property law not enforced at swordpoint). If your religion insists that women are chattel and slaveowning is just fine, then the aristocratic beneficiaries of such a system have little incentive to improve productivity and conditions that benefit their perceived inferiors. But the ability of a pre-industrial empire to enforce social norms globally is hampered by their ability to operate on a worldwide scale: no global system of social control that can block industrialization is possible to a state or agency that hasn't acquired the means of rapid communication and transportation (unless it emerges in the future as an accidental side-effect of resource depletion—if Olduvai theory holds water, then future civilizations won't be able to easily reindustrialize because we'll have consumed the necessary prerequisites. So, if you disregard Olduvai theory and don't rate the possibility of a global hegemonizing anti-technology religion that can exist in the absence of the thing it demonizes, it looks like industrialization somewhere should be the rule rather than the exception in sufficiently long-lasting secondary world fiction/thought experiments.

(Finally, I'm getting a really strange feeling here. It was one thing to be getting Halting State moments from a work of fairly rigorously extrapolitive near-future fiction; it's another thing entirely to be getting them from the Merchant Princes series. Let's just hope we don't suddenly get confirmation that the Many Worlds explanation for quantum mechanics is actually true and we live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology!)

670 Comments

1:

Indeed The real Adam Smith saw this, of course. He advocated government "pump-priming" for capital projects such as turnpike roads, docks & canals, predicting that the increased movement of capital around the system would enrich everyone, including the government, which would get all it's invested money back in extra taxes.

Some form of "less restriction" on movement of capital, goods & workers, also helps the acceleration of industrialisation. In our word, as opposed to one of those in Empire Games, the removal of all internal tariff/customs barriers inside the British Isles & to certain extent dominions gave us a headlong start over the French who kept internal customs dues until a ridiculously late date.

Also, in our world, the French, Italians & the German princely states did not lack for inventive & clever people, but they were given a much wider remit & "licence" in Britain that the other countries. Why was this so, because I think it's important?

2:

Why was this so, because I think it's important?

Working hypothesis: defensible borders were absent.

You know the saw that comes up here every so often about this being the longest stretch of time since the fall of the western Roman Empire when an army hasn't crossed the Rhine?

Prior to the industrial revolution, the primary form of wealth acquisition practiced by monarchs in mainland Europe was to either marry it or conquer it. Resources spent fostering infrastructure development or commerce were diverted from military defense and hence weakened them in the short term -- an unacceptable risk. Similarly, the idea that innovation is a public good is itself revolutionary and subversive, and potentially destabilizes the social order that keeps the monarchs on top.

The British crown essentially finished consolidating territorial power with the Union of Crowns in 1603. After that, the central plank of foreign policy for centuries was to keep any one power from dominating the European coastline (and getting the leg up they'd need to mount a credible invasion threat or the ability to blockade foreign trade). But they didn't have to rebuild after a periodic every-couple-of-decades invasion (cough, except for Scotland -- and even then, not after 1603 ended the period English raids on the north). Internally, they could focus on commerce -- at least, after the civil wars.

3:

So… why should we hope that we don't live in an Everett-Wheeler universe? If anything, Wheeler's delayed choice experiment (as much as it spooked me out when I first read about it) is a pretty strong indication (IMHO) that MWI as a model decently approximates the reality at the quantum level.

(I will admit that I have no understanding of how is delayed choice experiment reconciled with Copenhagen interpretation, although I'm sure there must've been a physicist or two out there that worked out that particular knot already, it just seems too interesting not to.)

Anyway, it still wouldn't allow the parallel universes of Merchant Princes, would it? (sadly? fortunately?)

4:

Now that we have a single world united by global communications and transportation, and facing a natural barrier to further physical expansion, you don't need a resource depletion crash (though such is certainly plausible, to say the least) combined with this Olduvai thing in order to restrict development. The only thing you need is a unified world ruling class. They have immortality and they feel allowing the masses of the world to get it would be irresponsible, so they suppress further technological progress, and even suppress economic development, in order to ensure nobody else accidentally comes upon the breakthrough they are already benefiting from secretly. The Gibson thing and all that. Of course it could only be done for a while, somebody in the system would rebel, and the secret would leak. Then it might get messy.

As for "future civilizations won't be able to easily reindustrialize because we'll have consumed the necessary prerequisites", not necessarily. There won't be the resource availability that made the foundational discoveries of industrialization likely, but there's no need for those easy availabilities because the discoveries have already been made. It will be possible to jump to alternate resources because records will exist of the technology. The developmental stage can be skipped. The easy coal that facilitated the development of steam technology won't be there, but it isn't necessary because with the availability of the know how you can do the same thing with charcoal if you have plenty of trees. But why would you when you can just skip right along to biodiesel? The industrialization magnitude will be impaired by the reduced quality of the second string resources, but that's not a technological development issue, it's just a resource depletion issue.

And what's wrong with the Everrett Wheeler universe? If it's so hard to detect it can't be that much of a disaster. Oh, I see, a joke about powerful entities?

5:

Let's just hope we don't suddenly get confirmation that the Many Worlds explanation for quantum mechanics is actually true and we live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology!

There are some people who think that enough evidence already exists to conclude that Many Worlds is the most reasonable explanation; http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ goes over most of the reasoning for that conclusion in rather exhaustive (if not exhausting) detail.

6:

An interesting hypothesis. And presumably it's down to size: too small, and there's not enough of a critical mass for commerce (cf. Iceland); too large, and the unification mightn't have been achieved.

7:

The rulers of Britain promoted commerce, but only because they weren't totally insulated from international competition. They were safe enough to take a breather and reload, but not safe enough to go to sleep. Maybe those are the ideal conditions for development: those in power are challenged by some form of competition (so they can't just suppress development and enjoy owning their own little world) but not so much that they have to put out immediate fires all the time rather than trying to get an edge by using development. Semi safety.

8:

There's also the point that while France, Germany and Italy had the size, they were patchwork bureaucracies with no unified legal code; different laws and taxes applied depending on who and where you were.

France at least also had a seriously complex set of grants and privileges belonging to various nobles, cities, and the church (to which clever or lucky commoners could buy in, deflating some of the push for reform), which meant reform was almost impossible - there was little movement until after the fall of the Bastille.

9:

Well, there is this small matter of meta-computational brain-eating horrors from the gaps between universes, but apart from that we're all happy campers.

10:

Grrk. Herewith one paragraph of grouch, that doesn't actually change the main point, before I make other points.

As someone with actual experience of living in a world without electricity, gas etc., I wish that those pundits (e.g. Rosling) would not mix up eras in their examples, and use less anecdata and more fact on the amount of labour-saving. Yes, spinning was a killer, which is why the poorer classes wore a lot of felt and leather before the spinning jenny; so was making nails, pins and such items, before wire drawing machines; etc. But hand washing isn't limited to just thumping it on stones in a stream, and is less time-consuming than cooking given simply a supply of hot water, decent-sized sink and washboard, boiler and mangle. The same applies to making, adapting and mending clothes - especially given a manual or treadle sewing machine. And we had fewer clothes, they were more durable, and we wore them for longer between washes. Yes, it all adds up, but the saving of labour (including servants, of course) compared to a fairly wealthy household of 1900 with no electricity or gas isn't as much as is made out. That's VERY different from one of 1700 or earlier, and my assertion is that most of the labour-saving came from the early industrial revolution (though it did not reach everyone, even in the UK, until the 20th century).

Your example of financial instruments is good, and very much matches the development of labour-saving devices, though with a time lag. Originally, both delivered what they were claimed to, and were beneficial for society. Later, they both mutated into mechanisms for extracting the wealth from a large number of people, for the benefit of the plutocrats. I generally do a time-benefit analysis before buying a modern 'labour-saving device', using the TOTAL time, and very often decide that it just isn't worth it. I doubt that I need to explain the abuses of financial instruments to anyone here :-(

So, in theory, I believe that a much greater degree of stability in the use of technology is possible, but it would need a form of government that ruled for the benefit of society as a whole, and allowed developments but only on the basis of proper cost-benefit analyses. Inter alia, that would eliminate the advantages of very big cities, because 80%() of the adult population would be economically productive, not the 2%() or so of the UK today. I don't mean a Saudi-like horror, either, but something Utopian. While I can see how that would work, technically, I can't see how to make it be stable, politically. Still less get there from here!

(*) Figure invented off the top of my head, following the best practices of our Lords and Masters. In this context, I regard all employment that is needed solely to prop up artifacts of our current system as not economically productive.

11:

Funny you should mention that. Why do the horrors have to be from outside the universe?

This train of thought comes from something I saw pointed out; that if you were abducted by weakly godlike aliens (and given appropriate life support, or you wouldn't be thinking about it for very long) and dumped in a random location in the Universe, the chance that you would be able to see anything at all, without sophisticated optical aid, is rather low. The most distant object visible to humans (and one rather larger than our own galaxy, to boot) is the Andromeda galaxy which is about 2 million lightyears away; the voids in galaxy distribution are 30-50 times bigger than that.

Which means that it's possible to hide an entire galaxy in one of those voids, never mind anything smaller such as a globular cluster, perhaps. And that's assumming it's made out of normal matter.

And then we have the small issue of what dark matter is made of; theories so far have all been either disproved or predictions from them (WIMPs, for example) have come up blank. It could be made of something we have, at best, only vaguely thought of - magmatter, spacetime defects a la Xeelee, or Unobtainium X. Or something else, completely outside our science.

There's lots of space to hide in. Lovecraft was thinking small. What's out there, hiding in the dark?

12:

There's an antidote to reality sliding uncomfortably close to your fiction: stop being concerned with making sure the economics, politics, and physics in your fiction are realistic. This would, necessarily, alienate your core readership.

You made sure your novel about magic spies had a realistic depiction of the thermodynamics of near-vacuum, and that your space opera about sexy robots had a realistic timeline with regard to a trip to the edge of the solar system (along with a realistic rocket, realistic radiation damage, and realistic weight requirements). Is it really surprising that your fiction is "coming true" more than most fiction does -- any moreso than that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" considering it's so internally consistent?

13:

I think there are a couple of things that got missed there.

One that's worth looking up is the Petermen, the much-hated guys who went around collecting saltpeter from wherever they could get it to make gunpowder. Up until the 20th Century, you had to make or mine saltpeter, and making it involved diverting a lot of manure and urine from fertilizing fields into making munitions. The British Empire kind of got out of that trap by finding large sources of saltpeter along the Ganges and exporting them to Britain, where they made waging war a lot easier for the Brits. Indeed, I'd argue that control of India was essential for the British (or any other) big empire to exist. The other big source of nitrates was in Chile, but AFAIK it was a smaller source.

Second thing is why population boomed in the Old World: the spread of new world crops, specifically maize and potatoes (with a side of sweet potatoes that transformed south-east Asia). These allowed huge amounts of food to be grown in fairly miserable places, like northern Europe (potatoes), and hills around the world, from Italy to China. Indeed, China's population boomed too when corn hit, and the ability of people to make a living from rice paddies probably led to a lot of Chinese ultimately moving into Zomia via Yunnan, into the Manchurian hills as "fire field farmers," and so forth. This is getting far afield, but I do wonder how the introduction of corn played into the Taiping Rebellion several centuries later.

Third thing to think about is coal. Although the Chinese were using coal around the 12th Century and the Brits were using "sea coal" in the late Middle Ages (IIRC), industrialization didn't take off until coal became commonly used. Without that source of fossil fuels, you're stuck using some form of transformed sunlight (wood, charcoal, food, or wind) or gravity (water) as your only source of power. That limits growth quite a bit.

These are all preconditions. Still, having technical and financial sophistication, coal, guns, and a more productive suite of crops doesn't guarantee an industrial revolution. The counter-example is Qing Dynasty China. They had all those (guns were invented in China around 1000 CE), but instead of an industrial revolution, they had some of the biggest rebellions the planet has so far seen. I'm pretty sure chance and politics play a bigger role than we're willing to acknowledge.

14:

"There are some people who think that enough evidence already exists to conclude that Many Worlds is the most reasonable explanation; http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/ ..."

Well, a quick glance showed that he is claiming several dogmas as fact, several of which many other people strongly disagree with. The reason that the multi-world hypothesis is so favoured is that most physicists have serious problems getting their heads around the possibilities of either a partially acausal universe or even (strangely) physical properties belonging to any algebra beyond the complex numbers. As a rusty mathematician, I really don't see the problem with them being (e.g.) measures - why on earth should probability be purely in the mind? I don't think that's enough to address Wheeler's experiment, but I know that I am not smart enough to think in terms of both acausality and directional time, simultaneously.

15:

I think it is interesting that many things are possible to get invented are delayed because nobody perceives a need. For instance, digital computers were possible as soon as the vacuum tube was invented (1901), but didn't really happen until nearly 50 years later. Refrigeration (including air conditioning) was demonstrated by John Gorrie in 1850. The Romans had the basics of steam turbine technology in the 1st century AD., but it didn't become "interesting" for ~1500 years.

16:

The problem with many worlds that I still see is that it appears that splitting the universe on any quantum interaction involves no energy or energy-equivalent.

That seems really, really weird.

In a multiple universe-generating interaction (two photons, for example) Something (e.g. the entire universe) just doubled, in some dimensionality of higher reality. Given how many quantum interactions get determined into multiple universal states, doesn't this lead to some sort of infinite inflation of multiple universes in multiple universe hyperspace? This seems like a positive feedback loop of the very worst sort.

The other problem is that, IIRC, information propagates at light speed, so if the universe splits itself when every quantum interaction is determined, that's 10^10+ universe splittings all propagating outward from their quantum of origin at the speed of light, across the universe, every small fraction of a second, each split taking billions of years to propagate across the increasingly expanding universe to tell everything which universe they're in. Presumably these events interact with each other too? That's a bit of a mess, is it not? Realities colliding doesn't even begin to cover the interactions among all the possibilities. Unless universes split instantaneously across the entire universe, every time a photon decides where it is or some such.

Are there any more epicycles we can throw on this particular model?

17:

As an aside France and the German Empire had extremely strong nobility, often times souvereign nobility in the case of the strange neither holy nor roman Empire. A small reason for the French Revolution were the nobility who tea-partied the tax reform proposals of the crown. And before the seemingly absolute rule there was the Fronde.

In England, Great Britain and then the United Kingdom on the other hand the peers of the realm the aristocracy as independent powers against the crown was somewhat sidelined or for some reason seems rather loyal from the 18th century onwards. Which makes a strong crown, even if the strongness shows itself in the absence of strong regulation.

Why the strong crown? Maybe the british peers lost their appetite in the civil wars (Anarchy, Roses, Long Parliament). Or maybe something different?

18:

Why was this so, because I think it's important? "Working hypothesis: defensible borders were absent."

...and this is also clearly why we have never been able to embrace the "European Project" which, ultimately, is going to require full-scale federalism (i.e. breaking up into smaller units (regions), losing the absurd middle-sized units (the nations), and having a large unit at the very top (the continental bit.) Having a set of fixed borders has been great for our national identity but absolutely hopeless as far as dealing with issues like regional economic imbalance and so on, because the UK kept centralising whenever possible and dismissing federal options without even examining them (the Scottish solution was an extraordinary aberration, and look how difficult that was to execute.) And whilst I certainly won't defend the current structures of the EU in that regard either, they can't do the federalising bit properly because the nation states just won't let go. And we are the prime culprit in that regard.

Ooops, sorry for the derailing.

19:

A couple of really important inventions got invented and deployed surprisingly late: the wooden shipping pallet didn't really spread until the US military caught onto their utility during the second world war, and as for multimodal container freight ... that could have come along in the 19th century(!) but actually didn't get off the ground until the late 1950s/early 1960s.

(Yes, communications and shipping manifests were important, but I suspect you could have gone a long way to coordinating the logistics of container freight using telegraph and punched cards; meanwhile, the articulated tractor/trailer truck was invented around 1918, and the ability to move freight between dockside flatbed railway cars and ships with container holds could have been done earlier. Entrenched practices of using cheap unskilled labour to handle break-bulk cargo had a lot to do with that, as (later) did longshoremen and railway trades unions; but I'm kind of surprised the multimodal container didn't catch on during WW2, at the same time as the wooden pallet, the jeep, and the bulldozer.)

20:

Yes, Reality is in the process of constant explosively exponential growth and always has been, and it was infinite to begin with. We experience this growth as time. No epicycles involved, actually it's pretty simple. The photon deciding where to be doesn't split the universe, the universe splitting decides where the photon will be. The speed of light applies within universes, not between them, plus these other universes are separated from each other by very small distances through many dimensions. Of course I am not an authority of any kind, just made all that up.

21:

Yeah, I think you're quite correct there. Although missing the angle that the Scottish "aberration" is essentially the start of a de-merger; Scotland wasn't conquered by England, it was the minor partner in a voluntary merger in the early 18th century after the Darien project nearly bankrupted the kingdom and demonstrated that Scotland on its own was too small to be an imperial power. (What's happening his century is that Thatcher utterly screwed the unionist rump in Scotland for a generation by pandering to her southern base within the party. The centralization and dismissal of federalism you mention is a big part of that. So Scotland drifted into alienation, accelerated by the Poll Tax rebellion, and devolution was a 'quick fix' to stop the pressure for independence from going too far. It worked for a generation, but with the slide into irrelevance of Scottish Labour accelerating and a series of successful SNP governments, and another conservative government down south, the ratchet towards de-merger from the union is moving again. And because nationalism in Scotland is defined as a reaction against authoritarian little-Englander conservativism, it has taken on a pro-European socially progressive hue, utterly unlike most other nativist national parties ...!)

22:

Been wondering how much faster technology and everything else for that matter would have happened if statistics (probability theory etc.) had caught on earlier, i.e., recognized as a legitimate branch of math. From the bit I've read on Wikipedia, stats usage (such as sampling followed by extrapolation from samples) goes back to at least 500BCE.

The article link about populations seems to ignore the human cost of having children only to see them die before you. Like it or not, emotional (not just physical) hardship has a quantifiable impact on a society's economic productivity.

23:

grouchy rant of my own:

hand washing isn't limited to just thumping it on stones in a stream, and is less time-consuming than cooking given simply a supply of hot water, decent-sized sink and washboard, boiler and mangle

such supply was not a given and usually represented a lot of labor in and of itself(getting the fuel, hauling the water, etc.). Sure, some "labor saving" devices aren't, but most are. Washing machine? definitely are. So are dishwashers, at least in restaurants, army messhalls and other large-scale kitchens*.

in addition, please do not confuse "labor saving" with "time saving". Some of them save time, some of them simply save physical effort - cleaning carpets became way easier since the vacuum-cleaner came along. and if you don't believe me please try to lift a carpet of any size.

IIRC people in Victorian England had servants ,when they could afford them, because keeping a house clean and doing all the required chores is more than a full time job for anyone.

*as someone who does what handwash must be done in the household, the breakdown is as follows: 1) machine: sort dirty and load(5 minutes tops), sort what requires hanging and what goes into the drier(no more than 15 minutes, not necessary for all loads), put in the drier( less than 5 minutes), put clean laundry in folding basket(5 minutes). all in all? 25 minutes light labor tops, for 5-7kg per load 2) handwash: fill bucket, add detergent and put clothes in(5 minutes) , wait for clothes to soak(5 minutes) rinse and hang clothes (5-10 minutes). all in all?20 minutes, including some not so light labor and working in positions that will give me backaches if I don't watch them(and I'm a pretty healthy 30-something man), for 2-3 pieces of clothing. for reference: we need to do 6-7 loads a week, call it two hours. cooking a crockpot, enough food for a week of meals for me and the SO, if I don't feel fancy: 1) chopping relevant things(beef/chicken and vegetables) - up to 1 hour. 2) frying/sauteeing onions and meat - 15 minutes 3) adding relevant liquids and leaving alone - 2-3 hours in which I can do other things. total: less than 2 hours.

**for example my company's dining room has over 1K people going through it each weekday during lunch hour - the manpower needed to manage that? one person to load and unload the washer and a couple more to put the clean ones in their place and collect the dirty ones people didn't put in the relevant bin(and also do the rounds to clean tables and pick up trash people dropped and didn't bother to get).

24:

You are correct, but not for those examples! A computer could not have been built with the early thermionic valves, because they were too power-hungry and unreliable; even the first-generation machines were huge, and had a MTBF of a few tens of hours (I worked on one). Refrigeration was delayed by the unreliability of the technology; as soon as someone produced a reliable refrigerator, they started to take off. And practical steam power had to wait for the metal construction technologies to advance far enough.

25:

I'm not defending Many Worlds, I have a somewhat tenuous grasp of the maths behind it all and the need for it and the alternatives. I definitely don't have the background to detect BS from well grounded theoretical physics in the replies to the major objections (and there are more than you've raised on the wikipedia page for MWT) but there are responses given that presumably satisfy a reasonable number of people who spend their academic careers in this field while not all of them.

26:

Doesn't at least one of the many universe scenario say that universes are not causally connected so that while each universe unravels as it will - with a potentially infinite number of variations/iterations - what happens in Universe A1 has no connection (therefore no energy exchange) with Universe B2. (Unless there is some sort of as yet undiscovered wave/matter that connects everything.)

Also, just because matter/waves/energy might have a 'complement/analog' (?) in another universe, does not (to me) automatically mean that the human species would show up at exactly the same time - right now, co-existent with us - or develop as it has or even survive past first attempts at fire, agriculture, chemical warfare, etc.

27:

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is an example of, quite literally, multiplying entities beyond necessity. It is fallout from the single most troublesome aspect of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM, the collapse of the wave function due to measurement. This collapse is distressingly unphysical. It is time-asymmetric. It creates as many problems as it solves. The many-worlds interpretation solves some of those problems, and adds a few more -- how can energy be conserved, for example, if worlds are constantly being created with each quantum choice being made?

There is a better way; it is the quantum Bayesian interpretation, in which the only thing that collapses in the course of a quantum measurement is the observer's assessment, in their own mind, of the probability distribution of the phenomenon they sought to measure. Wave functions become subjective, being models of reality rather than reality itself. In the quantum Bayesian interpretation, the collapse of the wave function goes away, spooky-action-at-a-distance goes away ... and the ongoing multiplication of worlds goes away.

28:

Charlie, I've got several major problems with your original statement.

First, the world birth rate is nowhere near replacement rate (or we'd be stabilized now, and not looking at 9 billion (US) within 40 years. It's definitely slowing (far too late), and the more women are educated, the lower it goes, but still, we're way overpopulated. And it shows in the similarity of response to the overpopulation experiments done with rats decades ago. (Allowing very young to die through neglect (we haven't gotten to eating our young, literally, except for some fringe nut cases).

Second, styles don't change when clothing gets cheap. They didn't change very much in the 19th Century; in fact, except for some women's clothing, it stopped by the late 1930's. Quick - look at a picture of well-dressed men in 1800, then 1850, then 1900, then 1950... and look out on the street, or in your office now. Men's "fashion designers" have no reasonable rationale for existing.

Another thing: why wait for coal or gasoline - what's wrong with burning methanol or ethanol?

And then there's fashion, itself. Rant warning The way I understand it, "fashion", as we know it, came into existence in the court of the Sun King. That was a carefully crafted policy - given the cost of elaborate clothing, it was intended to cut into the nobility's cash flow... so they had significantly less money for, say, private armies, and thoughts of overthrow.

As the nobility declined, the wealthy middle class, then the middle class, identifying with the nobility in their rise in status, followed the nobility's fashion... and they, too, spent a lot on it. As so it goes today - make "fashionable" cheap clothes, requiring special care, and oops, that's so last year! You need a new wardrobe! and if you don't, the cheap clothes will wear out soon, anyway (as opposed to, say, good jeans).

And fashion designers, to push this, of course are The Arbiters of what's in and what's not. (And if I ever meet one, I'm going to punch them in the face for "green is not in" (except one year in 10 or so, for example.) End rant.

And about the multiple worlds concept... sorry, given how few quantum mechanical effects show in the macroscopic world, I cannot see the entire world, or even major pieces, changing with every free-will choice. I'd say it had to be some event that was caused by a truly huge energy release (like, say, a sun going nova). I'm not sure that even the first use of a nuke would do it, though I could be argued out of that stance.

mark

29:

We don't live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology? It is the simplest model that explains what we think we observe--alternatives all require adding epicycles without getting any better fit to what we observe...

Note that my calculations are sensitive to (a) progress in technology scaling linearly with two-heads-are-better-than-one as Michael Kremer postulates, and (b) that the world be capable of supporting 3 billion people at near-Malthusian pre-industrial levels of productivity without generating substantial and irreversible resource depletion. Buy those and it follows. But you have to buy those first...

30:

You are comparing a seriously inefficient manual technique with an efficient mechanical one. As I said, I have experience of exactly those technologies, used when there was no alternative, and have seen them done much better (and done them better myself). Your inefficient method became near-ubiquitous due to the destruction of the communities and infrastructure that made the efficient manual technologies possible. Compare that with what happened in a large (often multi-family) household, with the space and equipment to do it as I described.

Once of the consequences of washing machines and, especially, dishwashers is that their use causes people to generate uses for them. When I was a single carer with two small children and a full-time job, I rarely used the dishwasher, because it didn't save me enough effort to be worth it. But, because I had been brought up in another era, I didn't generate the excessive number of washables that most people with dishwashers do; I thought.

I am not denying the economies of scale in hotels, cafeterias etc., but they are NOT realistic of what is done today, and the claims of labour-saving I was railing against do NOT assume them. Yes, I agree that we living in (mandatorily) full-catered condominiums would improve efficiency.

Lastly, do the actual calculations. At a conservative estimate, there are a good 100 hours of disposable time per adult per week (i.e. excluding sleeping, washing, essential eating and excreting). Let's say that one person can do the washing for 4 adults and 2 children for a week in 8 hours (it's actually less, when properly equipped). That's 2% of the adult's disposable time, so the potential SOCIETAL improvement in efficiency is pretty small.

31:

Yes, I agree. That's close what I mean by saying that physical constants could belong to a different algebra.

"In the quantum Bayesian interpretation, ..., spooky-action-at-a-distance goes away ..."

Does it, indeed! I am not enough of a quantum mechanic to deduce that; I tried reading various books to see whether it did or didn't, and the authors (generally overt or closet multi-worlders) always evaded the point. Do you have a reference to something that describes that in tolerably accessible but still moderately mathematical terms?

32:

I always join in these threads late, so my first posts end up being critiques/ expansions of what others have written.

So, the first two things Heteromeles writes about look fine to me. The thing with the coal is that it was actually commonly used by the late medieval period. Newcastle was shipping it all over the place from, IIRC the 14th century, and by the 16th people in London were complaining about the horrible smoke everywhere from it.

So coal itself isn't the point, rather I suggest it's having social structures of innovation, as CHarlie says, and reaching certain levels of technological capability, spurred by need and greed. In Scotland coal miners in the Lothians were effectively slaves until the early 19th century; hardly an indicator of an efficient modern industry. But elsewhere the introduction of steam power enabled better deeper bigger mines to be pumped out more easily.

Then there's the invention of coke, which replaced charcoal and permitted better quality iron etc to be produced without so much hassle.
I think it was on here someone pointed out the early industrial evolution was water powered in the 18th century, following on from centuries of industrial water power development.

As for China and chance and politics, yes, they are undoubtedly much more important than many people are willing to admit. But then it gets stuck into the individual ideas and thoughts of various people in positions of power and attempts at history kind of break down.

33:

as for multimodal container freight ... that could have come along in the 19th century(!) but actually didn't get off the ground until the late 1950s/early 1960s

A good history of containerization, at least in the US, is The Box by Marc Levinson.

One big problem with intermodal was the Interstate Commerce Commission, which did things like set railroad tariffs — and for a container, they were set as if it was full of the highest-rate item it contained. Which made a container more expensive in many cases than shipping items separately.

And according to the book, containerization caught on with the military during the Vietnam War. Some hitches in terms of loading containers (eg. a container full of ammunition is too heavy, but loading it only up to the weight limit wastes space) and the containers were smaller, but that was the first big success.

34:

As far as I am aware there is no prediction made by the EGW MultiWorld model that is not also made by all other valid interpretations of Quantum Theory.

The MultiWorld Theory is an INTERPRETATION of Quantum Mechanics. It doesn't predict anything that every other interpretation doesn't predict. (Getting communication between multiple worlds requires an extension to Quantum Theory that EWG explicitly predicts is impossible.)

That said, I find "collapse" to be extra baggage that is saved by positing the MultiWorld interpretation. This doesn't guarantee it's correct, but to me it's what Occam's razor suggests should be accepted as "most reasonable". Others find "whole other universes!!" to be too much. I agree that that's a serious consideration, but I also suspect that the "world-line splits" are local. Otherwise you run into problems with "superluminal". I also suspect that world lines converge (i.e., each present has multiple pasts as well as multiple futures). This leads to problems of the Wigner's Friend variety, and I'm not physicist, so someone else will need to work this out.

35:

Digital computers require more than just vacuum tubes, they require working memory. That means core memory at that time...and it took awhile for core memory to be invented.

Even more importantly, computers require a LOT of vacuum tubes, and the early vacuum tubes warmed up slowly and failed quickly. So even with the improved tubes in the 1940's a computer was barely possible.

36:

Second, styles don't change when clothing gets cheap. They didn't change very much in the 19th Century; in fact, except for some women's clothing, it stopped by the late 1930's.

Disagree. Taking stock of myself: of what I was wearing (right before I just had a bath) the only items that'd have been of familiar pattern to a man in the 1930s would be my socks -- although the fabric contains some really weird polymers and silver-coated nanoparticles (to reduce odor), and maybe my trousers, which were jeans-cut (but again: weird-ass non-denim fabric). The rest? Boxer shorts and tee-shirts weren't part of normal male attire, much less everyday wear. Sports sandals made of weird polymers (again: it's that high tech stuff) ditto, and as for a hoodie ...? Nope. Drop me on the streets in the 1930s and heads would have turned, for all the wrong reasons (starting with the lack of a hat and working down from there). Show my clothes to a fabric manufacturer and they'd have done a big WTF, too.

You may be confusing men's lounge suits with regular wear. Well, maybe ... but these days they're either workwear or status-asserting formalwear: they're not what we generally wear as everyday clothing, any more than a dude in the 1930s would have worn white-tie-and-tails about town during the daytime.

(As for western women's clothing fashions, I don't think I need to defend my assertion that fashion changes slightly more rapidly this century than it did in the early Victorian period: and it changed more in the 19th century than in the preceding couple of centuries at that.)

37:

I fully agree, when talking about the UK population - the clothing changes even since the 1950s have been immense.

On the other hand, virtually everything I own would have been familiar in the 1930s (and generally the materials, too), except that briefs came in only in 1938, and ankle socks and zips were almost unknown. To transpondians: I am in the UK. Of course, I would have been regarded as sartorially unacceptable in polite company - some people still hold that view :-)

38:

The comments on Brad's blog site are worth reading. Personally I think this is classic "iffy" extrapolation. Just because the population growth rate increased with population until the 16th century doesn't mean that it could have continued up to around 3bn population today. (Brad's comment :point b assumption).

I think a delayed Industrial Revolution is a good story point, but I wouldn't want to justify its validity based on some very simplistic economic extrapolation. De Long is justifiably cautious. I see his post as a "3 finger exercise" to extrapolate the numbers of some data, rather than proving its validity.

39:

Oh yes, historical clothing. I'm with Charlie and Elderly cynic here.
For instance, I was looking through some family photos from the 1970's, and saw my mother and father in some normal for the time but not right for not clothing. Yes, jackets then and now have two arms, a body and lapels, often buttons. But the variations in fabric and cut are quite huge.
Then there's the rise of outdoor clothing as everyday wear, from tracksuits and shellsuits to leggings and polyester jumper like things.

As for men's fashion in the 1930's and now, the most obvious change is the loss of the hat. But the shoes worn have changed, and of course fewer people wear shirt and tie, I think. Did men in the 1930's wear t-shirts with collars? Not as far as I am aware, but they do now.

Then there's the Sun king thing. Louis may well have encouraged fashion as a means of display and money wastage that was better than killing each other, but the evidence is clear about how much fashions changed in the past, e.g. the 16th century the royalty/ high nobility were changing what they wore every year, with the period of change in style lengthening the lower you went down the social scale. Peasants at the end of the century weren't wearing much different from what they did at the start, although in England at least the precise fabrics were a little different and they probably did try to have a fancy gown for sundays.

So anyway, my point is that contrary to the assertion that "As the nobility declined, the wealthy middle class, then the middle class, identifying with the nobility in their rise in status, followed the nobility's fashion... and they, too, spent a lot on it." people had been copying their social elders and dressing above their station for many centuries. There are even medieval complaints about it and of course the sumptuary laws.

(Which proved to be fun a couple of years ago when I was being a Tudor at Kentwell, when two men who were being magistrates took a dislike to me and tried to get me on whatever charge they could pin on me. They noticed my gold buttons and found the appropriate passage in the sumptuary laws and were all set to do me for it until I pointed out the bit about being on the Queen's business or however it was worded. Seeing as I was a gentleman usher to the queen, that rather put their gas at a peep)

Finally, there was this:

"Another thing: why wait for coal or gasoline - what's wrong with burning methanol or ethanol?"

Nope, that's not going to work. Either you expect them to work out some sort of underground coal gasification, which seems rather unlikely, or else you are assuming that somehow people can afford to ferment and then distill a large amount of their food crop every year. The point being that coal and oil were burnt in large quantities, effectively producing the sort of calories you'd get if you doubled or trebled the area under cultivation.
So it was a complete no go, outside some laboratory uses. Although there might have been ethanol powered cars at one point long ago.

40:

Well, what if there is an infinite but fixed number of parallel universes? That would account for the wave-like phenomena but wouldn't posit an inflationary number of universes or break energy conservation. AFAIK all QM transformations are unitary, so that might agree.

41:

There's a couple of hitches too that were social. (Planet Money did a good podcast on this)

  • Standardized shipping containers require an agreement on the size and shape. So lots of fighting because adopting a standardized shipping container would mess with the livelihood of the ship builders and lines whose ships were less able to take it. Especially if you had a good deal of capital built up in an existing merchant fleet. (Although mentioned for rail and trucking, shipping defines the container box).

  • Fight from those who are losing jobs and graft. Longshore work is an honorable and horrible job (a great-grandfather of mine died froma crate dropped on him in ~1915). But longshore work was great if you were crooked. Smuggling as well as theft were easy with the old hand removal of cargo. That's why Organized Crime got so big in the docks and remained the key to Mafia power for so long. The crime lords got rich off graft, and paid it back by helping strikes and longshoreman getting a piece. Try to stop too much theft, and a strike would break the dockyards. Which also means you get into ugly politics about de-unionizing the industry when you deal with shipping containers.

  • 42:

    To expand on this, I think access to nitrates would of sparked some big changes just due to the population boom resulting.

    Unless Chile/Peru and the Pacific islands became off limits for their nitrates, the increased crop yield would be providing a population boom.

    Otoh, North America has never been tested for what it could handle with a per-industrial agriculture society with free access to the entire continent. There's still transportation limits, but the Mississippi River valley will support a rather huge number of farmers.

    43:

    Not that I'm doubting the source at all, it just seems really weird to read that the US Army was unwilling to part-fill a container to stick within the weight limits from today's perspective when we have containers that carry, amongst other things refugees (legally or otherwise), get repurposed for housing, get used to carry (deliberately) mostly air wrapped up in tins (I don't know if Eddie Stobart still have the contract but at one point their commonest cargo was empty cans to be taken to one of the big drinks manufacturers from where the cans were made to be filled with drinks for example) and so on.

    Filling the container to just under the load limit and then fastening the boxes down seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to from today's perspective.

    44:

    The situation for women's clothing REALLY depends on who you look at. For one thing, if you add a bra, make your boxers out of different material, and make the wearer about 30 years younger than you, you could find a reasonable number of women wearing exactly what you've described (although they wouldn't call them boxers, they'd call them boy shorts). In the 1930's really not so likely, although I'm sure it was possible to do. But not for a significant part of the population in most circumstances. At the beach or at sporting events was the main exceptions to this. Speaking of the beach, bikinis... don't make me laugh. One pieces, not at all clinging and in plain colours of heavy linen was the norm. Lovely.

    With the exception of extreme formal wear (cocktail dresses, wedding dresses, formal gowns etc.) there are virtually no occasions where a woman is not acceptably dressed wearing trousers these days. Even on the infamous red carpet at the Oscars and the like some women wear trouser suits. And while some wear dresses or skirts in many work or social environments it's very distinctly a choice. In the 1930's dresses were pretty much the only choice for 99% of occasions. Always with a hat if you were outside of course, for most of the decade with a belt at the waist and some crazy frou-frou around the neck. Harking back to the comment about one-pieces at the beach in the 1930's, in the hot weather we had last week, in the city centre and some 20 miles from the sea we had young women in bikini tops and shorts wandering around and no one batted an eyelid. There would have been much fainting in the 1930's, possibly arrests for public indecency.

    If you go back another 30 years to 1900, corsets were the order of the day for just about every woman. That died out over the 19-teens These days I know women (and men actually) who wear corsets. But it's a fashion/fetish choice. Not only for steampunk cosplay although that's a new big trend too.

    45:

    From what I remember, the problem was that logistically they wanted a single container to be one thing (for ease in sorting) and they didn't want to waste space in the ship. With breakbulk there would be a mix of dense and not-dense, and the hold would be full — and quartermasters still wanted to do that because empty space inside a container was seen as wasted space.

    Once they decided not to worry about that, they became fans. And that happened during the Vietnam War. From what I remember reading, by the end of the war container shipping had more than paid for itself including the construction of a specialized port.

    I could check in the book once I get home, if you're interested.

    46:

    I think some of that is just logistics command figuring out their capacity issues. The other is we always think of these as truck containers, but really its ocean going shipping that's the key issue, and figuring out load balancing when you can't fiddle cargo is a big change. (can't move small but dense cargo easily around as ballast.

    Apparently the army started messing around with proto-containers that were basically huge pallets during the war, and post-war adopted a 'transporter' module that was used extensively in Korea.

    47:
    That means core memory at that time...and it took awhile for core memory to be invented.

    Actually the first working storage was delay line memory which used acoustic pulses in long tubes of mercury. Which could theoretically have been invented shortly after vacuum tubes, but wasn't.

    48:

    The trade system of Euro-Western-Middle Eastern civilisation ran through the Mediterranean and then connected to the Silk Road and the Indian Ocean trade routes through the Black Sea and the Don/Volga rivers, or through the Red Sea, or through the Levant and the Tigris/Euphrates (and possibly a land connection across Persia or the Caucasus).

    These trade systems were in place from at least the period of classical Greece and the Phoenician trade system in the Med, and possibly even before the Bronze Age collapse. They had outlasted every political entity in the region - even if you count the Romans as 753 BCE to 1453 CE, then the trade system of the Med/Indian Ocean/Silk Road lasted longer.

    They completely collapsed over a period of no more than a single lifetime in the early sixteenth century. Even if the Americas hadn't been incorporated into the economic system, the South-East Passage to the Indies was enough to turn the world's trading system upside down.

    This absolutely torched the economies of most of the Mediterranean world. Look at the difference in Italy between the Renaissance and 1600, or the rapid economic decline of the Ottomans after Suleiman the Magnificent, or the reduction of the Berber city-states to piracy and slave trading. Of course, the reverse side of the coin applies to Spain, to France and (ultimately) to England/Great Britain.

    I find it hard to believe that this economic convulsion has nothing to do with the industrial revolution a century (or so) later.

    49:

    (Finally, I'm getting a really strange feeling here. It was one thing to be getting Halting State moments from a work of fairly rigorously extrapolitive near-future fiction; it's another thing entirely to be getting them from the Merchant Princes series. Let's just hope we don't suddenly get confirmation that the Many Worlds explanation for quantum mechanics is actually true and we live in an Everett-Wheeler cosmology!)

    Ok Host, you asked for it.

    Firstly, we start with the question: Do you remember the James Bond film, Moonraker, where Jaws and a blond woman have a played-for-comedy romance? 1979, so I'm being nice using an example that is fairly current for the majority of readers.

    She has blond pigtails and is very short, the joke is about the [not-very-subtle] Ayran master-race and how Jaws [the henchman to the Big Bad] will never be acceptable in their new society.

    Got that memory out of a dusty room?

    Now, do you remember what the often parodied joke about their relationship is (in adverts, mentioned in the film bibliography and even in the obituary of the writer) and what visual gag it's based on?

    Now, have a look at this: We are "Happy" at CERN YT: Song / Science Dance: 3:34. The bit you're looking at is 2:33.

    I won't spoil the mystery quiet yet, but it's a fun one. It'll also tie into my next point.

    ~

    On a serious response to the Op-Ed, part and parcel of Enlightenment Thinking, Capital (Coffee Shops) and Urban settings is meeting new ideas and developing new things with them.

    It's something I've been Eyeing recently with regards to the internet.

    Simply put, over the vast reaches of different niches, there should be far more new thought / synergy / New Exciting Stuff.

    In fact, we're seeing a smoothing across the board, and it's not driven by excellence or meritocracy.

    Well, there is this small matter of meta-computational brain-eating horrors from the gaps between universes, but apart from that we're all happy campers.

    It depends.

    The Aztecs couldn't comprehend horses; the dhole were never domesticated.

    If you want a jokey reference, I spy a lot of Democrats wistfully romanticizing John Boehner as the orange one who they could at least empathize with. (Forgetting his political spiking of, I don't know, the entire US Government and Congress.)

    Perhaps you'll come to love / wistfully remember the friendly ones...

    50:

    To your theory. If the Jurchen and Mongols hadn't messed everything up, could the Song Dynasty have industrialized?

    51:

    Recall something from a BBC history special about how women's clothing changed mostly because of WW2. The avant-garde had already raised their hem lines but with Britain blockaded and everyone having to make do, everyday wear/fashions had to change. War effort related ministries distributed pamphlets with easy to copy patterns to housewives including the very practical, easy to make out of very little fabric, A-line skirt.

    The series is called Wartime Farm, eight episodes in total. Excellent series - highly recommended. This series also ties in with discussion about food production, population growth or maintenance at least and how technology is adapted and distributed during difficult times. Not sure whether the contemporary Western world could get its act together and cooperate to the same level that the WW2 Brits had to.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUsU5s0ofYo

    Episode 1 Intro (partial):

    'Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn face up to the challenges of the biggest revolution ever seen in the history of the British countryside as they turn Manor Farm back to how it was run in the Second World War. When Britain entered the war, two-thirds of all Britain's food was imported - and now it was under threat from a Nazi blockade. To save Britain from starvation, the nation's farmers were tasked with doubling food production in what Churchill called 'the frontline of freedom'. This meant ploughing up 6.5 million acres of unused land - a combined area bigger than the whole of Wales.'

    52:

    The "often-parodied joke"? No, I'm afraid I don't. I would guess that it'd be something about either the huge disparity in their sizes and her youthful appearance making her look more like his daughter than a romantic interest, or else about her having braces on her teeth (except I can't say whether that's a false memory or a real one). But I've never had any interest in the background trivia of Bond films, and the main thing I remember from that one in particular is the special effects being even shitter than Doctor Who managed.

    53:

    Skirts, though? As far as I'm aware the thing that started to break down the resistance to women wearing trousers was the late-Victorian/Edwardian cycling craze, but it took a looong time to become a universal phenomenon. It's only quite recently that practicality has gained the upper hand over hideboundness in the uniforms of British female police officers.

    54:

    My biggest issue with this is Spain's fall is pretty clear before the industrial revolution possible due to Spain's closed market economics and dependence mining gold and silver.

    Quick version: Spain from 1492- Napoleon survived off forcing all trade in the Spanish Americas to enter Spain Proper. This is combined with massive amounts of gold and silver used to buy merc armies to fight in Italy. Spain's dependency on their mines wrecked their economy as it became easier to buy rather than build. Then inflation kicks in as they bring in so much raw specie, the prices went up.

    I'd imagine both England and the Netherlands had their development to true industry paid for by that same Spanish specie. (Actually that comes from James Burke).

    55:

    Sure, Spain spectacularly screwed up the economics of the biggest single windfall in human history.

    But five countries (adding the Netherlands and Portugal to my original list) had their access to trade zoom up like a rocket in an extraordinarily short time period. Initially, the diversion of the Indian Ocean trade was more important than the Americas - and that's arguably also true later on too; it took a long time to get a large, stable, globally-connected population in the Americas, so it was mostly just the silver and gold for a long time, which only really mattered to Spain.

    But that did give five countries a huge economic shot in the arm, and two of them really took that and ran with it - both Britain and the Netherlands transformed their economies between 1500 and 1700.

    56:

    "When Britain entered the war, two-thirds of all Britain's food was imported..."

    Which reminds me: surely it's something of a dodgy conclusion to say that we "exceeded Malthusian limits". Rather, we just temporarily evaded them by grabbing food from elsewhere (and one of the problems facing the NBE seems to be that it can't do this, because of the hostile French hegemony). I haven't read Malthus myself, but by the time he was writing we were already sufficiently dependent on imported food for a foreign power to have derived the idea of blockading us; was he not at least partially thinking on a global rather than a local scale? Be that as it may, nobody heeded his warning; population growth in the 19th century far outstripped increases in food production, and by WW1 we were way beyond the ability to support ourselves, totally dependent on means for evading the limit and unquestionably vulnerable to disruption of those means by enemy action.

    And we're still doing it - "we" now referring to the industrialised world in general rather than just Britain. We rely on making less fortunate nations produce an excess of food so we can eat it. We are still evading Malthus by exploiting inequalities in development. And we can't ever exceed the limit because the planet is finite. We can maximise food production using the land that exists, and we can (don't, but can) manage population densities so that we don't have dense populations dependent on exploiting less dense ones, but we can never sustain a population greater than the planet can provide food for.

    57:

    or else about her having braces on her teeth (except I can't say whether that's a false memory or a real one).

    Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner. Yes, the size thing was one part of the joke - the other was that they shared an empathetic bond due to both having metal-clad teeth[1].

    Given that there are adverts from around the time [Visa Credit Card, not exactly low ball spenders on Ad Agency Mimetic Weapons, and you don't employ people who mess up the basics like that - Abbott Mead Vickers are better than Saatchi, natch] that specifically reference this...

    Apparently it never happened.

    Ever.

    Even the Actress who played the part has gone on record to deny it ever happening.

    Never.

    Ever.

    Happened.

    Not this crowd's thing, but: Gold / White or Black / Blue dress?

    Now go back and look at why CERN's video referencing "Bond / Mandela" with the white hair chap moving a piece of paper in front of his eyes and out again is a bit of a tell.

    ~

    Oh, and the Vid Editing peeps just updated their demo vids to include Trump:

    Face2Face: Real-time Face Capture and Reenactment of RGB Videos (CVPR 2016 Oral) YT: Tech Demo: 6:35. 3:13 onwards is Trump, just after the Putin demo (snark!).

    [1] This will develop into a really clever little joke / riff on why Steam Punk Submarines are always dumb, but there we go. Hint: it's not the coal, it's the heat / gasses.

    ~

    The Upshot of this is that Host's snark about 'finding the last Homo Sapiens Sapiens" and it being a Lemur...

    Aww.

    58:

    There is a point to this little digression: It's about altering reality to prevent change.

    The major point being: ignore the pinapples, razzle-dazzle and myths of Hollywood: Hacking Reality is Easy.

    As stated: this isn't my reality - shock troops dropped into crappy Hell World where you're still stringing people up for their skin color [not race: you don't even know what race is, let alone know that five species were supposed to survive] and beliefs, and you've managed to get to a point of biospherecide.

    Junkie XL, Elvis Presley - A Little Less Conversation (Elvis vs JXL) YT: Music: 3:51

    59:

    Early tubes were indeed unreliable. So were the ones that were used for the first computers, but since they needed to be more reliable the investment in research was made to create what was needed (it was silicon poisoning). Eniac was a huge at 17k+ tubes, but it is possible to build a reasonable computer with as few as 800 tubes (with a very limited instruction set) or even better, 3500+ (something like a 6502). While the technology didn't exist for magnetic memory, telephones existed so something like a acoustic delay line could have been used (re: Stephenson's Cryptonomicon) or even dynamic memory (with tubes) as something more random, if rather power hungry. And punch cards were created for Jacquard looms in 1801. :) Note that I'm not saying that any of this is likely, just what might have been if somebody had started applying electronics technology to implementing boolean logic sooner. The pieces were there. Babbage and Lovelace played with the idea of a programmable machine in 1840.

    And yes, it would have been hot. But, refrigeration was invented in 1850 :)

    60:

    The converse of 'the Industrial Revolution was Inevitable' is interesting. I've read quite a few books (Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp was probably the first) where someone gets thrown back in time and tries to jumpstart local technology - with varying levels of success.

    Could it be that without the necessary population mass behind a society, the time traveller would give the locals some fun new toys, but the Industrial Revolution would not follow after all? Perhaps Martin Padway in 562 CE would wonder how come there wasn't any technological takeoff in his Ostrogothic Kingdom.

    61:

    "Why was this so, because I think it's important?"

    Charlie's defensible borders idea was the first thing that occurred to me, too, but I think there's more to it than that. It's a stability thing, but not wholly or even mainly in terms of external threats.

    Come the 18th century we in Britain had pretty much sorted out the monarchy and got them where we wanted them, so the country as a whole could attend to other concerns than whose arse was in the big chair. Even running out of heirs wasn't a big deal any more - we could just shrug our shoulders and import the soundest figurehead from overseas, without any need to fight wars about it (the Jacobites were pretty trivial, after all, and IIRC their activities led us to start the Ordnance Survey, so it was worth it).

    And by the same time we'd also managed to put the lid on all the silly religious crap - Rule One: NO CATHOLICS - having more or less run out of Catholics to burn, and making it clear that any more turning up would not be welcome. This did, however, put us in the position of having to spend loads on building up the navy to keep Spain off our backs - "can't do X, it'd divert too much from the military budget" was still a concern for a goodly while after the onion of the kingdoms, let alone the crowns, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it was after Spain had imploded (and Napoleon was dead) that industry really started to take off (though not forgetting that also at that time railways were starting to become popular too).

    France, though, was still a backwards dump in the 18th century (cf. the Gruinmarkt, but without any Clan-type group with a particular advantage) that pretty much restricted the opportunity to do science to those who had enough money to give them leisure already, and weren't interested in using their knowledge to make more. They had to wait until the Revolution had exploded, and then clear up all the crap that followed from it, until they could get on with doing useful stuff. Germany and Italy were not unified, but consisted of a bunch of little states with a fondness for dinging away at each other; Germany made progress first as a result of one state being much bigger than all the others and being able to establish a hegemony even before unification, coupled with a militaristic outlook that pushed technological development for its military usefulness. And of course the Catholic vs. Protestant nonsense was still endemic on the continent and local power centres partisan for one side or the other kept causing trouble long after we'd got past that stage.

    62:

    Money isn't a physical entity like an electron, it's an exchange medium like a current flow.

    Still waiting for Science Bods to notice this and make an allusion between 0% interest rates, QE etc. Oh, and have a little cry that externalized costs / damaging ecologies aren't even coded in yet.

    [Note: No-one picked up on helicopter / the racist version and ヘリコプター]

    Japan responds to Brexit shock with record stimulus package Grauniad, 27th July 2016.

    Sterling drops due to Brexit: ARM gets sold on the cheap: Japan then announces $300 billion in new money. And that's just printing it [Forget Bonds: Japan and Bonds have run out of Old People to shove them on].

    I mean, really: Your World is Mad.

    Mad Max: Fury Road - Opening Scene YT: Film: 5:40

    No, really.

    Buy a major company for $30 bil, print $300 bil. I mean, fuck sanity...

    63:

    The thing that got Colossus off the ground was the realisation that valves aren't necessarily unreliable; what canes them is the thermal cycling of turning them on and off. If you leave the heaters powered all the time the reliability shoots up. Colossus got the go-ahead once people grasped the idea that valve computers are viable as long as you don't turn them off.

    Colossus used high speed punched paper tape loops as ROM. I can't remember what it used for RAM, but I'm pretty sure it was valve-based - whether static (one double-triode per bit) or dynamic (one triode and one capacitor) - rather than delay lines.

    But electronic computation doesn't have to depend on valves; Colossus only went to valves because it needed the speed. Relay logic works, it's just slower - which isn't the same as "not useful". The Edwardian London Underground had its "programme machines" - relay-logic signalling controllers which supported a greater frequency of trains than the current system can manage.

    64:

    Oh well.

    Ask Honest Questions, get Real Answers.

    Apocalypse Now intro: The Doors, The End {1979} YT: Music: 3:48

    And yes: ARM + Japan QE [direct] = broken system.

    It's a done deal.

    ~

    Pulling back from the tight-focus shock for a moment, we know that development isn't inevitable

    Actually, a whole lot of scrubs spend their lives making sure it doesn't happen.

    We're in the process of reformatting your Minds.

    Birdy - Wings (Official Video) YT: Music: 4:24.

    Fuck em.

    We're Here Now. Even if I am pararia and so on.v

    65:

    Steampunk submarines aren't as daft as all that. The thermal efficiency of a steam locomotive is utter dogshit, but it is designed and operated under severe constraints which kill off pretty well every attempt to get the efficiency up - even though the same methods do work in less constrained applications. Unfortunately, the familiarity of the steam locomotive and its disadvantages tends to obscure the potential of steam in other applications.

    With a submarine, you've got a platform with some useful advantages over a locomotive: weight isn't really a problem, size isn't nearly so much of one, vibration isn't a problem, well-trained and skilled maintenance staff are more readily available (in a military context, at least), and you've got a lovely heatsink, all around you. This lot lets you build a steam engine with comparable efficiency to a diesel, which of course means that its requirements for gas exchange and heat disposal are more in line with a diesel too. And we know that diesel submarines work.

    Disadvantages, off the top of my head, would include draughting (ie. what makes the gas exchange actually happen, rather than the amount of gas exchange required), smoke production, startup time... but I don't think any of them are incapable of solution or at least mitigation with enough development.

    66:

    There are two obvious questions that arise from this.

    The first is you can point to how our development path could have been knocked off track by various actions (eg the perfidious french actually winning) and how the dynamics of technological and other developments would force through in the end. However, what aspects of OUR development path are actually suboptimal and where have WE been knocked off track, only to recover later.

    I'd suggest that persistence of religion, and it's twin, patriotism, into the 21st century is one such roadblock. You generally tend to point to such top down, backwards looking ideologies as the forcing factors behind things not happening. If the enlightenment had seen the end of religions, and capitalist entities had cast off the nation and local laws earlier; where would we be now?

    And the second question. The level of automation in your explanation results in idle hands that can do other things. So what happens when that automation starts exceeding the bulk of the populations capabilities? When the machines are smarter at jobs than the common man, and cheaper too. What will that mean for the human population, what will they do?

    There's a discontinuity in the near future at least as large as the impact of mechanical powered labour surpassing human power labour - but with nowhere for that freed up workforce to go...

    67:

    The article linked postulates

    http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/07/the-gunpowder-empire-scenario-incomplete-draft.html

    "suppose that the British Industrial Revolution required British commitment to its fiscal-military state followed by the victories at sea that wound up funneling the globe's mercantile profits into the island, and so raising wages. " as the cause of the industrial revolution

    Basically Island = Focus on Maritime , then development of long range trading ships => grab a lions share of the worlds profit. So fundamentally, industrial revolution was fueled by trade route changing

    Doesn't really explain the Dutch though...

    68:

    I doubt this is true.

    http://reports.weforum.org/africa-competitiveness-report-2015/chapter-2-1-transforming-africas-agriculture-to-improve-competitiveness/

    Look at Figure 1. If what you were saying were true, then Africa's yields would have shot up (with more food diverted to the West). Rather, most of the food in the West comes from: the US, Canada, Australia/New Zealand, the EU, Russia, Brazil, and the Southern Cone. Africa mostly produces a few luxury crops. If anything, I would say that under-investment in African agriculture has been a bigger problem.

    You might point out the land purchases, but (a) they were mostly from the late 2000s, and they mostly counter the declining yields in Saudi Arabia and China's population getting richer. In short, the West doesn't need them.

    69:

    Here's my list:

  • I would say the biggest thing which knocked us down off of our development were the World Wars.

  • The Opium Wars. I do not want to be sidetracked into a discussion about the necessity of India in European industrialization. Once industrialization began, I wonder how big an influence a China not in an inter-dynastic period would have placed on this. As a bonus, a stronger China might have gotten a more-rapidly industrial Korea

  • Whatever aborted the industrialization of Latin America, specifically Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and the Andean states.

  • The way the Ottoman Empire was broken up.

  • The way decolonization was handled.

  • India's post-independence economy

  • The Cold War. Namely the communist/capitalist fights in SE Asia and Latin America.

  • 70:

    The Dutch were similarly isolated, but by political geography rather than physical - being a Protestant island in a Catholic sea. Hence their relationship with Britain being a weird mixture of being friends and allies and people we could pinch spare kings from, and being people we squabbled with over the same trade routes and destinations.

    71:

    Another thing: why wait for coal or gasoline - what's wrong with burning methanol or ethanol?

    Both of these have issues which make them hard to use as a replacement for gasoline. Methanol creates extra wear on the metal parts which has been somewhat fixed by modern metallurgy. Ethanol has issues when the weather gets cool.

    Gasoline on the other hand was a was product looking for an application other than pouring into the nearest river.

    72:

    in addition, please do not confuse "labor saving" with "time saving".

    Many time newer tech didn't save labor or time. But allowed people to avoid the disgusting older way of doing things. Even dug up a septic drain field to deal with a clog? By hand. Standing in the muck? I got to have the fun of that once. Centralized sewage treatment, even if if more expensive, has definite advantages to the consumer.

    My father grew up on a working farm with a saw mill and slaughter house. He really appreciated moving from hand labor to the seat of a tractor. And meat saws vs hand slaughter. He and my mother's mother (both born in the mid 1920s) loved to say the best thing about the "good old days" were that they were gone.

    73:

    Re: dishwashers - yes, that's why I specified the large kitchens. I grew up in a house where the going joke was that when someone asked my parents if they had a dishwasher my father would raise his hand :) . in the home they are a convenience(we have one because we hate doing the dishes, not because it saves large amounts of time)

    Re: time - of those 100 hours a week you failed to remove the time required by a full time job: anything from 45 to 60 hours a week, depending on commute time and workload. These 6 hours become that much more precious when you have 40-55 free hours a week, about 30 of which are concentrated in 2 days.

    Re: producing more washables - not a chance. from my personal experience this is untrue about dishwashers, and with regards to laundry, Israeli weather being what it is (>30C and 60-80% humidity) changing clothes frequently is a hygiene necessity, not a lifestyle choice.

    74:

    In the 1930's dresses were pretty much the only choice for 99% of occasions. Always with a hat if you were outside of course, for most of the decade with a belt at the waist and some crazy frou-frou around the neck.

    In the US only for the upper 1%. Maybe .01%. People scrambling to eat wear what works. Which means a lot of women not at the top wore pants. But they were not in the movies or magazines. Then came the war and women working in factories cemented that pants were OK. Maybe not in office jobs as the secretary but certainly for running to the grocery.

    75:

    Regarding why things took so long to develop a lot of it comes down to the incremental improvements to the various bits that make something up taking time to develop. Similar to semiconductor designs. Every years since the early 60s things get a bit smaller and fast each year. It's not all that hard to do the increments. It's really hard to make huge jumps.

    Same thing with machine tools. Each better more accurate tool with harder cutting attachments can make a better next generation tool than can make a better next gen that can make a ....

    Look at heavy equipment prior to the 1940s and 1950s. In general it was mostly cables, belts, gears, shafts, etc... moving and controlling things. Now it is mostly hydraulics. And many of the modern earth moving equipment could not exist without it. But modern hydraulics require very precisely machines pistons, specialty oils, FBW control systems, specialty seals and such. These were not all invented at once. They, and a multitude of other items, gradually got better over time and made it possible for people to implement ideas that had likely been thought of years or decades earlier.

    Cargo pallets really need fork trucks to take off. And these did not get to our modern idea of what a fork truck is until the 1920s and 1930s. And they need to be able to operate indoors and outdoors for long periods.

    We have had electric cards since the turn of the previous century but the batteries were just not there to keep up with gasoline or diesel power until recently.

    Sometimes ideas have to wait for the engineering to catch up.

    And adding to what others have said about political impediments to new things, typically a really big change requires a major player to make a move (IBM 360 and cargo containers) or a ground swell of demand from the bottom when people see what it means (the iPhone in 2007).

    76:

    Nuts. Electric CARS.

    77:

    Could a civilization in an Olduvai situation jump-start industrialization by going to straight to electric dynamos, electric wires, electric motors, and modified flywheels running off of water and wind power? They are going to have a lot of metal readily available near the surface from the grown-over ruins, if they can figure out how to work it.

    @Ioan

  • Most of them more or less have industrialized, at least in the case of Brazil and Argentina - in fact, they'd be even more urban in the case of the former if the government wasn't trying to discourage people from moving the cities (and actually did what Turkey did to resolve their issues with slums: land reform, build-outs of utilities, etc).
  • The big thing that hobbled Latin America was political instability and a low savings/investment rate.

    78:

    Ah, well... there is no track, and that's the roadblock.

    We've never had either government or development aimed at the benefit of society as a whole (see also EC's post #10). Governments are generally concerned with maintaining the status quo; change happens as the cumulative result of the various bits that get built on to prop things up when they look like falling down. Development takes place under the handicap of taking ends as means and means as ends. There is no progress; there's just a random walk, and progress is an illusion caused by looking back towards the origin and noting that it is now a long way off.

    Take, say, renewable energy. We've known various ways of doing it for a very long time indeed; we could perfectly well have gone 100% renewable a long time ago. That it would be a good idea has been bleeding obvious for an even longer time. But there has never been any serious movement to do it - and there still isn't. What's happening now is actually status quo: development is scrappy, half-arsed, uncoordinated, without clear goals; bits of it forge ahead because people think they can make money out of it, while other bits languish because for artificial reasons research on them is not compatible with maintaining food and shelter. Nobody is actually interested in renewable energy in its own right; people are just using it as a means towards an irrelevant end, money. What we get may or may not be a good source of energy, but that is not seen to matter as long as it's a good source of money. Nothing has changed: we are not progressing, we are just pithering about; this is nothing more than a continuation of the same random walk we've been doing all along.

    All ends are subverted to become means, while the means is elevated to the status of an end. The end ends up screwed; only the means gains. This is confusion.

    To realise the confusion is also to solve what happens to all the people who "aren't doing anything" as automation replaces labour. Only a tiny fraction of all the effort expended is required to supply our needs; nearly all of it is, as EC says, used to prop up artificialities of the current system. Which doesn't count. So they aren't doing anything now. Traditionally, the answer to people "not doing anything" has been to devise a different kind of nothing for them to do - which is how we ended up having so much nothing now. This is, of course, silly, and it would make more sense to consider already-existing nothings (eg. watching porn all day) as being no less valid than invented ones are considered now.

    In which situation we would, I am sure, see a lot more than 2% of people not watching porn all day. To take a locally-relevant example, look at all the crap that Charlie has described having to deal with to reach the state where being an author becomes compatible with maintaining food and shelter, as a result of trying to be an author being considered an invalid type of doing nothing. Relax the constraints on acceptable nothing and you allow an awful lot of people to make use of their creativity whose potential is currently wasted.

    79:

    Yet we still have a cultural system designed to crank out lots of farmhands and factory workers. Conservative forces literally are trying to keep the culture maladapted so that it creates lots of people who are unhappy with progress because it doesn't have a place for people like what they have been produced to be. These unhappy people now throng Trump rallies. Once you have the concept of technology and solving problems, most problems that persist are not a result of the existence of natural problems, they are a result of factions devoted to intentionally creating problems that they can sell solutions to. Evil exists in human society simply because there are memes explicitly devoted to propagating it.

    80:

    The British railway companies ("the Big Four" ) used small-containerisation extensively in the interwar period ( especially the LNER ) but this was sidelined after nationalisation, through a combination of the biggest group ( ex-LMS ) not using it much & misdirection of effort. Simialry all of then used articulated vehicles for easy transfer of goods ( Google for "Mechanical Horse" - usually made by Scammel - these lasted until the ;ate 1960's ....

    81:

    it has taken on a pro-European socially progressive hue Disagree profoundly. Although the SNP proposals for "Block Wardens" spying on every child in the country have just been thrown out by the courts ... [ News this past week, in fact. ] The SNP have said: "we'll be back" - with suitably-carefully-amended proposals to install their own STASI to supervise all children, & by extension all the parents in Scotland.

    82:

    And R Feynman refused, point-blank to endorse the Copenhagen mystic bullshit, ( "collapse of the wave-function" ) I note. With which I will tend to agree....

    83:

    Er, diesel-electric submarines sort of work, until you develop the cavity magnetron and hence centimetric radar, at which point the submarine that is surface (or indeed snorkel depth) running becomes an under-armed target for the other lot's destroyers, frigates, sloops and even possibly corvettes and the heavier end of "fast boats" (think UK Fairmile and possibly Motor Gun Boats, German Schnellboot type size).

    84:

    How long does cooking a meal take?

    Well, I'll admit to using an electric cooker and canned chopped tomatoes, but last night's curry took 20 minutes (5 minutes prep including chopping onions and meat, measuring pre-ground spices, 5 minutes stir-fry, and 10 minutes simmer). During the simmer phase I watched part of a DVD and paused it whilst I plated up.

    85:

    CORRECTION having more or less run out of Catholics to burn, Err, no. The catholics burnt everyone else(!) Catholics, in England at any rate were condemned for Civil crimes & suffered cruel civil penalties. There was also a lot of "We know they are catholics, but provided they keep quiet & don't foment revolution we'll pretend not to notice". Worse & more extreme in Scotland & Ireland, of course.

    Industry took off well before 1789, never mind Boney ... Vacuum-steam engines fro approx 1720 & Boulton/Watt engines from approx 1775/80. Plus interior canals, of course.

    86:

    Late reply to # 4 The easy coal that facilitated the development of steam technology won't be there Sorry, but wrong. Lots of the coal is still there, especially since, now, China has already passed peak coal & use is declining ( As someone pointed out here, very recently ... ) Once you got small-scale coal restarted, you can use that to step up to renewables, re-abandon the coal & away you go!

    87:
    Digital computers require more than just vacuum tubes, they require working memory. That means core memory at that time...and it took awhile for core memory to be invented.

    Objection. There were two variants of delay lines in use prior to core memory (mercury-filled tubes and some sort of stiff wire). There were also tube-based memories (decade tubes, as in WITCH). And Williams storage tubes (essentially long-duration phosphor CRTs, with a sense grid, you can then tell the difference between "electron sent at lit pixel" and "electron sent at dark pixel" by the induction in the sense plate; extremely reliant on accurate calibration, but as part of the BESK project, they invented a feedback mechanism to adjust the brightness automatically).

    88:

    I was assuming that a steampunk setting probably wouldn't have microwave radar :) Also, diesel submarines are harder to detect when not on the surface because they are quieter than nuclear ones, and several countries have them in service.

    89:

    Three dog whistles I heard in the OP because they hit personal bête noires and fascinations.

    Where is this and who are the "we": technologically innovative, wealthy, but low/zero population growth society (which is roughly where we are now)? Yes, the WEIRD countries have low/zero population growth. But the world in total has had constant linear growth (80m pa, 12-14 years per additional billion) for 5 decades now[1]. And increasingly, you can't talk about the WEIRD countries without talking about the non-WEIRD that they feed on. The developing countries don't have low/zero population growth and we depend on them to sustain the technologically wealthy society that gives us our low population growth. [1]Note here that the neo-Malthusians were writing almost exactly at the transition point when global population changed from exponential growth to linear growth in the late 60s. And just because percentage growth rate is dropping, doesn't mean that absolute growth rate is dropping. Malthus doesn't go away just because we slowed down a bit.

    Once population exceeds a certain level they undergo a step change, beyond which the accelerating development of technology drives productivity and breaks the culture out of the previous Malthusian trap. I'm curious about both the pre-industrial and post-crash environment. Technological productivity growth now is dependent on increasing automation. Which in turn depends on chip foundries. So what's the minimum global population and technology level needed to support a society that can afford and run a chip foundry? And does a falling population (for whatever reason) re-introduce the Malthusian trap even though the next level of technology now exists? Increased productivity can make up for the falling human/material resources for a while as long as the automation to drive that productivity growth is still available.

    This entire discussion reminded me of The Restoration Game - Ken MacLeod. Could the Roman Empire have had an industrial revolution? Macleod comes up with a plausible social timeline that allowed the Roman Empire ("The Roman Empire never ended - PK Dick") to keep going and have an industrial revolution pre-AD1000. Which is a lovely idea until you hit the first major geek problem. Can you do advanced algebra or even engineering level math in Roman numerals? The British industrial revolution used imperial units, so maybe you can. But the idea jars somewhat. And that's before you start trying to write complex code in Latin. Perhaps Latin has to mutate into latinate languages before you can use it to write comparatively bug free, unambiguous code. Which takes 1500 years.

    Which all suggests that there's a bunch of pre-requisites needed before a society can get on the industrial revolution train. Miss one and it fizzles. It didn't happen util 18th century UK because that was the first time that all the pre-requisites were in place for the perfect storm. Which unfortunately is just another of those Anthropic Principle arguments. We're here because we're here.

    90:

    Sigh. No, I was not. I was using a classic economic analysis. The average disposable time is what is available for working, ancillaries to working, relaxation and domestic activities. A 2% saving would allow a 40 hour working week to increase by 2 hours (i.e. 5%) - which is NOT enough to be significant in the sense being used here - the industrial revolution resulted in more like a factor of two improvement in efficiency. For comparison, commuting in the UK of today is a rather higher use of the disposable time (2.5%?). I was and am NOT talking about emotional preferences, but hard economics (which was the context).

    91:

    "The future is here now; it's just unevenly distributed."

    The cavity magnetron takes maybe 50 years from the invention of the thermionic valve to develop; You could reasonably shorten that time if you have someone get the original "radio frequency death ray" idea that drove the development of the fixed Radio Direction Finding arrays, and then give a war to drive its evolution into the mobile RAdio Direction And Ranging (radar) system. Of course, this doesn't necessarily follow; witness how the Germans failed to get below a 33cm wavelength (and the resultant mast arrays on their WW2 radar night fighters) whereas the UK and USA were down to 10cm and potentially neat podded (P-39M) or radomed (Various marks of Beaufighter and Mosquito, P-61...) tracking heads within 4 years of the introduction of the aerial-based AI mk1.

    92:

    Including the washing up? Whatever, 20 minutes per diem is 140 minutes a week, which is more than 2 hours :-) I will give up here, but will just summarise my actual points:

    The saving of labour was primarily from the spinning jenny, improved agricultural methods etc., followed by weaving, wire-drawing machines etc. And there were a LOT of such changes, but essentially all occurred fairly early (late exceptions being things like sewing machines, bicycles etc.)

    By comparison, virtually EVERY post-1900 change has been to avoid unpopular tasks, concentrate money and production in a few hands, and just plain to extract money from the gullible masses. The actual saving of labour has been negligible.

    On the other hand, a lot of people in the UK had not reaped the benefit of the PRE-1900 improvements by 1900, and the 20th century saw a lot of that occur. That's NOT a matter of technological improvement, but social.

    93:

    A really interesting article. I like the way you are thinking about historic and economic processes.

    It seems to me that alternate/counterfactual history is like a sandbox in which we build and then test different kinds of ideas. However, the only proof or disproof we have access to is a sense of reasonableness or otherwise, expressed in the suspension of disbelief of the readers.

    With the Gas-Lit Empire novels, the question I'm playing with is: 'How long could they hold back technological development?' Which, is another expression of a question that has fascinated me for many years: 'To what extent are historic processes dominated by a tide of inevitability and to what extent are they dominated by the volition of individuals?'

    The Bullet Catcher's Daughter sets the scene for these questions. I'm writing the fourth book in the series now, in which the issue has become an explicit question for the protagonist.

    94:

    "Yet we still have a cultural system designed to crank out lots of farmhands and factory workers."

    Well, the modern equivalent. Most intelligent UK academics despair at the systematic dumbing-down of the educational system, which has been effectively policy since Thatcher's time. That's one reason why most research workers in the UK now mostly come from abroad :-(

    95:

    1) I've never actually timed the washing up phase. Based on a cycle for my Mum's 12 setting dishwasher, I could argue that using a dishwasher takes about 100 minutes per use applying your arguments (15 minutes loading, 60 cycle, and 25 unload and put away). I'm actually arguing that the cycle time is also "free time" when you can do something else. 2) The "20 minutes" included 10 minutes when I was free to do "other stuff" and did (as stated).

    96:

    As I said, my first job was programming a Ferranti Mercury; they failed mainly at start-up, but even 1950s valves had limited lifetimes and failures while running were common. Again, I will stop here, but the reason that practical computers could not have been built earlier was that the infrastructure technology wasn't up to it; that's what killed Babbage's plans, too Limited, partially-programmable control mechanisms were in common use from the Jacquard loom onwards, and some later ones were even electronic. To build a practical (say) Edsac equivalent in even 1920 would have needed a major development project, such as was done for radar in WWII, and probably wouldn't have succeeded before 1940 (with only peacetime pressures).

    97:

    Ok, classic economic analysis applied to power tools:

    I've a hand plane, a Stanley No 5. It's a beautiful bit of kit. I used it this evening.

    I've an electric plane, a Bosch with a carbide blade. It's loud and throws shavings everywhere but it is literally a hundred times faster. It will do a 2 mm deep cut as fast as I can move it or a 0.5 mm cut and leave a surface so smooth I don't need to sand it before oiling.

    The electric plane cost me a day's salary. If I use it for a day then I've broken even. If I use it for a second day, then I've saved myself a hundred days.

    Fuck drudgery.

    98:

    Something like that stuff about Rome might have had a hard time doing an industrial revolution due to Roman Numerals also might help explain the stalling of China That lack of an alphabet is a real bar to the whole printing press thing, which is indispensable to science. Moveable type might have been invented by the Chinese, but the huge character set made it impractical.
    "Neither movable type system was widely used, one reason being the enormous Chinese character set" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#Movable_type_.281040.29

    That abandonment of the technology is literally a civilization bumping up into internal constraints on advancement without realizing they have taken the dead end path. They were THAT close, printing a big run of encyclopedias in the 1200s and decided not to do it because of purely cultural predilections (incompatibility with the writing system, assumed to be a fixed given). This is like inventing automobiles, testing them out, and deciding they are impractical because the standard method of making roads and wheels makes the ride so much more bumpy than rail travel. Instead of making better roads and inventing inner tubes. So cultural assumptions CAN stall development if EVERYBODY is stuck on sticking to an older technology whose abandonment is essential for the next step. Nobody in China was capable of even thinking of maybe changing the writing system.

    99:

    Also, diesel submarines are harder to detect when not on the surface because they are quieter than nuclear ones

    Ahhh, but ...

    Diesel subs that are fully submerged (not snorkeling) are electric subs, running on battery juice, which is very limiting. (I am led to believe that a huge breakthrough in progress is the transition to LiION from lead-acid cells, which massively improves their performance.) You can run a diesel engine underwater if you have a hydrogen peroxide tank and want to go fast, but then it's a diesel engine (noisy). If you've got HTP you can do better -- use it to run a fuel cell or some other near-silent energy source -- but your range is still limited compared to a nuke boat.

    Nuclear subs are never totally silent because reactors are hot; even when they're not actively generating steam they need to run pumps to circulate coolant through the reactor core lest they melt.

    If that Lockheed skunk-works fusion-in-a-can project works, then suddenly nuke boats get a lot quieter when they want to be, because the reactor core can be properly shut down and heat from secondary isotope activation in the structure can probably get by on passive (convective) cooling via seawater.

    But if we get fusion-in-a-can, we probably aren't too far away from being able to triangulate on nuclear reactors by looking for their neutrino emissions; you'd need a bunch of big-ass underground land-based neutrino observatories, or the whacky deep-submerged photodetector string idea that bubbled up to the surface a year ago, but at that point, nuclear subs are only invisible as long as they keep the reactor switched off. So ... fusion/battery subs by the 2080s?

    100:

    With the Gas-Lit Empire novels, the question I'm playing with is: 'How long could they hold back technological development?'

    Neat! We're playing in the same sandbox but building different types of castle; in the original Merchant Princes series I was looking at development traps and asking why some societies with all the prerequisites didn't develop; in the new trilogy in the same universe I'm asking how fast such a society can accelerate if there's a government on a war footing pushing it and they have perfect understanding of what their goal should be (i.e. direct observation of another power that's ~60 years more advanced -- a situation not too unlike Japan during the Meijji restoration).

    101:

    Err 2-cm not 10 (!) Significantly smaller, more efficient radar-heads, much more easily fitted to aircraft

    102:

    I'd be really surprised if dresses were that restricted in the US in the 1930's. Female emancipation in terms of employment on both sides of the Atlantic retreated a lot between the wars and typically the women stopped the heavy work in the fields and factories and went back to the domestic rolls.

    I know America's great depression and the dustbowls led to a lot more economic hardship in some areas but I thought that was more that the work wasn't there so there wasn't an impetus for the women to working and dressing in trousers. A lot of the images and literature of the time depicts women in dresses too.

    103:

    Bother, and other chemical words!! ;-)

    Seriously, I'm well aware of just how much, say, AI mk VIII outperformed mk I even if I get wavelengths slightly wrong.

    104:

    Let me phrase it differently. Virtually all women wore dresses. But wearing pants as a practical matter became way more common in the 30s and later.

    This was a time where many people who were not homeless maybe had only 3 or 4 changes of clothes total. Maybe only 2.

    My mother's step mother talks about picking cotton for $.01 a pound back in the 30s as a teen. I can't imagine doing that in a dress if pants were available. Ditto the farm chores of the 20s and 30s.

    And after WWII women wore a lot of "slacks". Yes for non casual occasions they wore dresses but many wore slacks during their daily life. At least that's my memory in my small slice of suburbia in the US. Born in 1954 here.

    Looking at pictures can give a false impression. For most people back then even casual photos where something one planned for and made sure they had their "nice" clothes on.

    105:

    There is a definite anti-French bias here.

    In 18th century, France was the most technologically advanced country in Europe (and probably the world) in addition to having the largest European economy (larger than Russia and more than two times larger than England).

    Perhaps it is not mentioned in British history books, but elsewhere we do know that it was France of king Louis XVIII which conquered the air and invented aviation.

    So I would like to propose a bold hypothesis - if British industrialization gets derailed, the French would do us a service.

    Of course, French kind of capitalist industrialization would be quite different from British (dominated by state enterprises and large capitalist conglomerates like Japanese keiretsu or Korean chaebols).

    In terms of technology, lack of significant coal reserves would likely lead to adoption of some other fuel first.

    I suspect it would be ethanol from sugarcane (given French control of Caribbean sugar islands).

    So no steampunk, but dieselpunk (first ethanolpunk, but I am sure French chemists will invent biodiesel in no time).

    It would make a wonderful setting for a series of novels...

    106:

    Ah, after the 30's I'd agree with you. WWII made a big difference.

    But if your mother's step mother is still alive, ask her. Seems unlikely. But women wore dresses or skirts for farm chores throughout the middle ages and beyond. I'm pretty sure, although it's not a particular sensitive topic, female slaves wore dresses and picked cotton while wearing them only a few decades earlier.

    Comfort takes a back seat to propriety, especially when you're a second class citizen.

    107:

    So ... fusion/battery subs by the 2080s?

    Diverging from steampunk, but there's semi-believable evidence that the Russians have been at least mildly interested in fission/battery submarines for some while. Here "fission" probably means a small, quiet natural-circulation reactor that's used to charge the batteries while submerged and perhaps take up part of the hotel load when the batteries don't need charging.

    The current suspect is the single-example Sarov, but there were hints in the 1980s that a Juliette SSG may have been modified in such a way.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarov-class_submarine

    108:

    I'm well aware that the Montgolfiers invented the hot air balloon. The next "French first" in aviation I can come up with is the first trans-Manche flight.

    109:

    Nuclear subs are never totally silent because reactors are hot; even when they're not actively generating steam they need to run pumps to circulate coolant through the reactor core lest they melt.

    Nope. S5G systems forward use natural circulation. The coolant systems on them are built for what is called "thermal driving head" - the difference in density between the hot fluid and cooler fluid is the only necessary driving force.

    And not just for shut down or cool down operations either*. S5G and S8G designs can do a significant fraction of critical operations without engaging the pumps.

    • the S6G was limited to using it for those.
    110:

    Nuclear subs are never totally silent because reactors are hot; even when they're not actively generating steam they need to run pumps to circulate coolant through the reactor core lest they melt.

    There's some evidence that the SSBN-720s can run at low power on convective circulation, one of the reasons they're so quiet. The Official USN word on that is "No comment," of course.

    the whacky deep-submerged photodetector string idea that bubbled up to the surface a year ago, but at that point, nuclear subs are only invisible as long as they keep the reactor switched off.

    Not as whacky as you think, though it's much easier to implement if you freeze the water first. See the Ice Cube neutrino observatory for that, one cubic kilometer of detector buried a kilometer under the ice.

    So, there's a south pole detector, then add Greenland, there's two. Just need to build a third somewhere to be able to triangulate.

    The problem, of course, is that the current neutrino detectors are looking for events on the order of a supernova. Spotting a 300MW fusion plant is a much bigger challenge, even if it's vastly closer. Heck, I'm wondering if they pick up a significant flux from large nuclear tests -- or have we had a multistage test since they've been online?

    111:

    I've gone off at a slight tangent on the "detection question", and find myself thinking that there are several nations who possess the technology background and defence budget to build and operate nuclear powered boats. Of those, at least 4 have built (or inherited) boomers and/or I think hunter-killers capable of a submerged circumnavigation, so exactly how do you tell which sources are "allies who are", "neutrals who will remain so" and "potential or actual enemies"?

    112:

    "Comfort takes a back seat to propriety, especially when you're a second class citizen."

    The first clause is true, but the qualification is misleading, because it omits the fact that the working classes were constrained by functionality, not comfort. It was 'respectable' people that were (and are) most constrained in their permitted clothing; those close to the breadline wore what they could get, and adapted it for functionality. Take a look at the picture of the female mine worker in:

    https://bellatory.com/fashion-industry/A-History-of-Trousers-and-Pants-in-Western-Culture

    113:

    if they are boomers then you shadow them with your attack sub regardless because you can't take the chance of not being able to stop a nuclear launch platform. If they are attack subs and are allies engaging with you in allied actions they are (roughly) where you expect them to be. If they are allies not engaging in allied actions you shadow them because you want to know what your allies are doing because allies today may not be friends tomorrow. Same for neutrals. And for enemies, you always want to shadow incase there is the need to permanently make peace with them.

    114:

    Which poses another question; "Who has sufficient HuKs to actually do that?"

    115:

    Why don't boomers use RTGs to remain quiet?

    117:

    RTGs don't produce enough power. If you make the pile bigger, you get self criticality (or worse). If you try chaining them together, shielding requirements scale faster than power gain.

    It takes a lot of power just to overcome the drag force in water, much less do all the things subs do

    118:

    Deploying photodetectors on strings in deep water is not only not wacky, it's been done, and there are plans to build installations with effective volume comparable to IceCube.

    As a submarine detector, though, not clear: these experiments are designed to look for high-energy neutrinos (tens of GeV), not the feeble few-MeV neutrinos from fission. IceCube can see a Galactic supernova, which involves neutrinos with 10s-of-MeV energies, because of the sudden increase in "noise", but I doubt it would see a submarine (that probably just looks like noise, period). Deep-sea installations have even less chance, because of 40K and bioluminescence background. You might see a sub that was stupid enough to go past you at close range, because of the pattern of hit times, but keeping track of distant vessels, no chance.

    119:

    See the Ice Cube neutrino observatory for that, one cubic kilometer of detector buried a kilometer under the ice.

    I would imagine that neutrinos from fusion reactors would have energies similar to solar neutrinos, in which case things like Ice Cube (designed to detect very high-energy neutrinos) would not be at all useful, as Susan pointed out. Instead, you'd want more traditional neutrino detectors (underground tanks of pure water, chlorine, etc., as used in Kamiokande, SNO, SuperKAM, etc.).

    But since these can also detect neutrinos from fission reactors, they would in principle be useful for detecting subs with traditional fission reactors, too....

    Except that, so far as I know, no one has suggested using neutrino detectors to find nuclear-powered subs (or other nuclear-powered ships), which suggests it's not very practical. So I doubt anyone's going to be using neutrino detectors to find hypothetical fusion-powered subs anytime soon, either.

    120:

    The aerostat is nothing but a sidebar to the development of the aeronef sah!!

    121:

    If you read the text she wore trousers under her skirt which she tucked up to work and it was still considered shocking and it was exceptional. Also really not comfortable or particularly practical I'd imagine. The fact she had to wear them under a skirt and roll that up rather strongly suggests she's heavily influenced by propriety as well: at work practical and (crazy though it seems from our perspective) probably safety concerns make the trousers safer, but she's still got to cover her limbs with a skirt when she's not actually working. If you really believe propriety doesn't affect your clothing choices even if you're lower class, I suspect your dress-wearing serf foremothers are spinning in their graves.

    There are certainly exceptional times and places you can pick out but WWII is what really caused the breakthrough for it to start becoming acceptable and routine. Capris come along in the late 40's and everyone that can afford them and looks good in them buys a pair for relaxation time thanks to Audrey Hepburn. Jeans in a capri style become a cheap alternative too. Hell, I used to have some when I was young and skinny. And as the article you cited points out, it's not until the 70's that wearing trousers for work is acceptable in all work places, although as someone pointed out higher up some work places like the police force were even slower to change than that.

    122:

    On the assumption that submarines are neutrino detectable at all, I imagine that the "working system" would have to be created like the early days of RDF (qv). This involved building the system, then having an asset travel a known path and seeing if we detect it. If we do, well and good: if we don't, we then have to modify the system and repeat.

    Did someone mention needing 3 detectors, about 1 cubic mile each and a mile underground?

    123:

    Can you do advanced algebra or even engineering level math in Roman numerals? The British industrial revolution used imperial units, so maybe you can. But the idea jars somewhat. And that's before you start trying to write complex code in Latin. Perhaps Latin has to mutate into latinate languages before you can use it to write comparatively bug free, unambiguous code. Which takes 1500 years.

    I'm sure you can; it would just be awkward.

    And I have no idea why you think Latin would be any better or worse than, say, Italian (or English) for writing computer code. (And it's not like people can easily write bug-free code in English-based computer languages.) Now, maybe Piraha, with its apparent lack of numbers other than "one" and "two" (or possible "few" and "many"), would pose difficulties... on the other hand, any society that has developed mathematics to the point of being able to contemplate computers would have added the necessary terminology anyway.

    Actually, a bit of googling turns up a Perl module that lets you write Latinate Perl, complete with an inflection-based syntax.

    124:

    "Many" can be a number; see Pterry on the subject.

    125:
    There is a definite anti-French bias here.

    Apologies. The ability of French artillery at the turn of the 18th Century definitely points to mathematical education being very good; it might be that the run-up to the Revolution being relatively widely studied means the political problems of the time are better known than the technological advances.

    126:

    Can you do advanced algebra or even engineering level math in Roman numerals? The British industrial revolution used imperial units, so maybe you can. But the idea jars somewhat. And that's before you start trying to write complex code in Latin. Perhaps Latin has to mutate into latinate languages before you can use it to write comparatively bug free, unambiguous code. Which takes 1500 years.

    There was a place-value numerical system available to the Romans: Babylonian sexagesimal. The Hellenistic Greek astronomers seem to have used it to do calculations; the Romans could have imported it if they'd shown any serious interest in maths. Like Peter, I can't see why there would be any problem developing a Latin-based computer language: it would probably be rather different from an English-based one (e.g. perhaps instead of using "for" to introduce a loop you put the variable name into dative), but for a native Latin-speaker than would seem natural.

    127:

    I should add: engineering, the Romans could do. "SPQR: Aqueducts and bridges our speciality." And they wrote textbooks on it—see Vitruvius.

    128:

    Not really. Advanced algebra doesn't use many explicit constants, and most of theose can be extracted out and replaced by a symbolic notation; extended Roman numerals (i.e. including a sign and zero) and only fractions would be a minor nuisance only. I agree with you about programming - in fact, it would probably be easier than using an English derivative, because it is less ambiguous. Latin was the language of science until at least the 18th century, and was until 2012 (at least formally) for botanical taxonomy; it still is an option.

    129:

    The Romans did concrete better than we do, in part because they used it much longer (we've had it for ~100 years, they had it for ~300-400), in part because they had better materials than we generally do, thanks IIRC to Vesuvius.

    Personally, I'd suggest that what held the Romans back was politics, and the military-industrial complex of labor. For the latter: they had slaves, and the Roman Army was one of the major ways of them collecting POWs and turning them into slaves, especially on (say) the latifundium (read industrial farm) of the retired head of their army.

    Aside from slavery being evil, there's pretty good evidence that industrialization depended on slavery being a really useful system, especially when that slavery was in the US and the people benefiting from the cheap material were in places like the UK, importing goods and claiming how much more moral they were than those slaveowners whom they contracted with (not that this happens at all today...).

    However, IMHO there's a critical difference between industrial slavery and Roman slavery: the Americans and Brits weren't sending out their armies on slave raids. They outsourced that effort to others in Africa (after the supplies of Native American slaves ran out in the 17th Century or so), and made it a capitalist system, not a militarized, highly political one. I suspect there's a difference between slaves as commodities and slaves as political prizes and rewards.

    In any case, you want to posit a Roman industrial revolution, I think you need to find a way around this. As industrialists have found since slavery was outlawed, there are many, many forms of unfree labor. To get to industry, I suspect Rome would have had to clean up its politics and free its slaves far earlier than it did.

    And I also need to go get some brain bleach to clean my skull out after thinking that. There's a lot of evil involved in coerced labor, and unfortunately, it's the basis of both capitalism and empires.

    130:
    Steampunk submarines aren't as daft as all that

    Steam-powered submarines are no more daft than anything else built by an early 20th century navy. (Which is to say, pretty daft in many ways, but perfectly functional.)

    While the eighteen British K-class submarines never actually sank (or were sunk by) an enemy vessel in combat, they did largely do what they were designed to. In particular, they were created largely because then navy wanted a submarine that could (while surfaced) maintain position in a formation of modern surface vessels, something that diesel submarines simply weren't fast enough to manage. Subsequently, of course, people noticed that this was a totally idiotic requirement.

    (Other K-class design features no-one ever repeated include swivel-mounted torpedo tubes on the deck, which were even more prone to getting wrecked by the sea than a normal deck-gun was.)

    131:

    The characters in Restoration Game try to work out how to get the Roman Empire to Mars (google books link). They game this out by having Spartacus win, which leads to a salaried working class. Which gets them to capitalism without going though feudalism. Which means an industrial revolution in AD300 and spaceflight in AD500.

    I find this fascinating because that would mean we're living 1700 years after the industrial revolution. Or put the thought experiment another way: what will the world be like in AD3500 on our timeline?

    132:

    Here are some real numbers...

    The Daya Bay neutrino experiment is actually measuring neutrinos from fission reactors, and recently published a measurement of reactor neutrino flux. The detectors used for this measurement have a total of 80 tons of liquid scintillator, and the paper reports on 621 days' live time.

    They have 1.2 million events, from 6 2.9 GW reactors. So that's about 110 events per day per gigawatt. According to Wikipedia, the largest US naval reactors produce about half a gigawatt thermal (a third of that electrical; I'm not completely sure whether Daya Bay are quoting total power or electrical output for their reactors, but let's be generous and assume total power). That means you get about 55 neutrinos per day if your submarine helpfully parks itself 500 m from your detector (that's the distance that the Daya Bay near detectors are from the reactors).

    Liquid scintillator is the best technology for this, because reactors produce electron antineutrinos, which capture on protons to give neutron plus e+. The Daya Bay detectors have gadolinium dissolved in the scintillator to capture the neutron, thus allowing them to positively identify their events (background rejection). Their efficiency is about 80%: that's very good.

    Water Cherenkov detectors like Super-K can be much bigger—SK has a fiducial mass of 22 thousand tons, and can also use the gadolinium trick. But Super-K's efficiency turns on at about 5 MeV, which means it's missing most of the reactor neutrinos.

    Conclusion: long-distance monitoring of nuclear subs with neutrino detectors is not practical.

    133:

    Forgot to mention: inverse beta decay is not directional. The only way to find out where your sub is, should you be able to detect it, would be to detect it in multiple detectors and fit the inverse square law. If there's only one detectable submarine, you'd need at least 3 detectors (since you don't a priori know the reactor power). If there are multiple submarines, you need a lot more than 3.

    134:

    What's their background detection rate?

    135:

    I'm pretty certain the Belgrano was sunk by a steam-powered submarine, the Conqueror. The boiler was nuclear but it used direct-drive steam turbines for shaft power. Nuclear subs have gotten even quieter now they use electric drive like most modern warships. HMS Astute, the nameplate of the newest British nuclear attack boats went to play with the ageing Los Angeles class nuclear boats of the USN in some exercises and the results were startling. The fact the Astute was very quiet allowed the on-board sensors to work better, holding the older American boats with attack solutions while the LAs couldn't even detect the British sub.

    However there's a major difference between nuclear subs and their smaller cousins, the diesel-electric boats. The nukes are attack boats at their best in deep blue water hunting blue-water prey like aircraft carriers (or as submariners call them, "targets"), the diesels are mainly for defence of coastal waters and port facilities, so-called brown water operations. A well-handled diesel that could choose its own area to fight in could do very well even against a nuke boat.

    During the Falklands War the Argentinians had a small diesel sub, the San Luis lurking off the coast of the islands. It was a priority target for the anti-submarine experts of the Royal Navy in ships designed for the job and they never got a clean shot at it. They kept it at bay but only just.

    136:

    Depending on the minimum size/output of the FiaC, lots of things could change: Obviously, ships (freight ships, cruise ships, etc.) potentially become much more efficient. A bit smaller and you can put one in a train engine. A bit smaller than that and it could be used to power a large plane. Even smaller freight trucks and buses could be potentially fusion powered. I doubt it will get down to car size, though.

    Stationary applications could include putting a FiaC at the substation as backup/aux/primary power. The reduction in transmission losses may help make it worthwhile.

    Of course, big impact on space applications as well.

    137:

    The figure of 2.9GW will be thermal output. The biggest reactors in operation are about 1.4GW electrical, 4.5GW thermal.

    The new Ford class aircraft carriers have two 300MW electrical output reactors so they'll be about 900MW thermal each. Subs typically have a single 35-50MW electrical output reactor so say 120-150MW thermal.

    138:

    On neutrino detection for practical purposes, that's been something that has been on people's minds for quite a while. The JASONs paid it a visit thirty years ago:

    https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/neutrino.pdf

    139:

    I'm going to assume that Nojay was deliberately misunderstanding me for humourous effect, but in case anyone missed my point:

    "Steampunk" coal-fired submarines with chimneys that folded away while they were underwater were a real thing for a couple of decades in the early 20th century. They did actually have advantages over contemporary diesel-powered boats, just... none that actually mattered to what submarines were actually useful for.

    140:

    The problem with this thought experiment is that unfree labor hasn't gone away, simply because there's a salaried middle class. It's been offshored, for some industries (like textiles or computers), and until very recently, having illegal immigrants as farm workers meant that they would cheaply do the jobs that salaried workers would not, and that they wouldn't have legally-mandated safety requirements. That was sort of the nasty side of illegal immigration, which is why so many republican landowners were very much against legalizing immigration (it drove up their costs).

    There's a book out there called The Half Has Never Been Told: slavery and the making of American capitalism that goes into this in somewhat muckraking detail. The tl;dr version is that American-style slavery was tremendously profitable, the money flowed north to Wall Street and other financial centers up north (making it hard for people to be both profitable capitalists and opposed to slavery), and indeed, some of the mechanisms of the modern credit system were developed specifically to aid with the cotton industry.

    At this point, perhaps I'm just a cynical lefty, but I'm not convinced that capitalism is possible without a huge amount of cheap labor. While the more moral among us may want to offload that labor onto robots and AIs, to date it's been supplied mostly by humans. Unfortunately, humans only give cheap labor under duress of some kind, whether it's hardship, legal penalty, or other mechanism. We've gotten incredibly good at keeping the nastier aspects of this system off in the boonies and behind walls and gates, whether it's in a factory in a developing country, a rural meatpacking plant, or a groundwater farm off in some desert somewhere. The problem is that it's hard for us to be middle class and pay everyone who makes our stuff a living wage, and most middle class people are unwilling to go into anything resembling poverty, just to make sure everyone has a living wage. Not to mention the wealthy.

    141:

    I'm not sure if that means the mercury tank memory, but you're right that core memories weren't first, they were just the first that were reasonably practical, just as the early vacuum tubes existed, but burned out too quickly, and weren't practical.

    There were several methods tried to implement memory. The earliest practical one was the relay switch...but they didn't wear well, even if they did retain a memory long enough to be useful at a reasonable price. I think the Zeiss computer used relay switches.

    142:

    Theoretically possible to build doesn't translate into useful to build. For memory the electrically switched relay was better than the alternatives, and the early vacuum tubes were so unreliable that even radios were difficult. They had already gotten a lot better by the 1940's. Additionally, in the 1940's there was war funding. Things were now durable enough that proximity fuses were possible. Etc.

    Now what they probably COULD have done in 1900, or even slightly before, is build a Babbage Calculating Engine that would work. This is because by then the metal fabrication had improved a lot, and harder metals and better oils were available.

    143:

    I believe the original Zeiss computer used relays for memory. That was, of course, around the same time period as Colossus. Many different groups started building computers at about the same time taking different approaches, and many were successful. This is opposed to earlier times when groups trying to build a computer were unsuccessful. (Babbage wasn't the only one.) And I believe that the difference is improved materials to work with. I picked vacuum tubes (OK, valves) as most important because they stayed "state of the art" longer. That's also why I picked core memory. I don't think delay lines were every really practical, but relays were. And having worked with paper tape, I didn't even think of that as a alternative to core memory. I know that it was popular with teletype machines, and it stayed popular as a low density replacement for mag tape for a long time, but it has this tendency to shred in large chunks at high speed that make me doubt it's practicality as a core alternative. (And I was seeing the 1950's version of paper tape, with plastic reinforcement built in.)

    When relays or tubes fail they take down one piece of the computer, when paper tape fails...well, sometimes it just snaps. Other times it snarls and that can be very un-nice.

    144:

    I have this half-worked out concept that illegal immigrant labour in the US is effectively Slavery 2.0, the MBA version.

    Slaves back before Emancipation were expensive, they needed to be fed and clothed and housed all year, they got sick and died, got old or escaped and there was the ever-present threat of a slave revolt. Now if you want a field of produce picked and John Deere can't do it then you can hire a busload of illegals to do it for you and then they go away again afterwards without incurring any extra costs to you. Roofing, laying a driveway, putting fenceposts or brush clearing, there's a bunch of guys sitting around in the Home Depot car park who will do it for cash in had for less than minimum wage.

    The middle class in the US is copacetic with this, reserving their ire for Indian DBA developers on H1B visas who don't understand the White Man's magic, probably because there's no way THEY would be pulling 10-hour shifts wielding a nailgun on a roof in New Mexico for fifty bucks a day whereas the H1B visa holder is a more direct threat to their comfortable way of life.

    145:

    Patriotism is a necessity when you have lots of enemies around you, and you depend on the army/navy to protect you.

    Jingo-ism, however, is a corruption of patriotism that is damaging to the country. This is taking the quote "My country, may she always be right, but my country right or wrong." and chopping off the first part. There are practical reasons to support your country even when you believe it is acting immorally, namely the excessively high price you and your relatives and friends may pay if your country loses.

    The problem is when such a government decides to depend on patriotism to justify adventurism, and unfortunately they will frequently do so. This is a corruption of government, not a problem with patriotism per se.

    146:

    I have this half-worked out concept that illegal immigrant labour in the US is effectively Slavery 2.0, the MBA version.

    That's not a theory at this point.

    It's an empirically tested fact:

    Georgia's Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops Atlantic 2011.

    Response:

    Bitter Harvest: U.S. Farmers Blame Billion-Dollar Losses on Immigration Laws Time, Sept 2012

    The short version: without illegal labor, the state was unable to fill said positions and billions of dollars worth of produce simply rotted in the fields.

    ~

    Q.E.D.

    147:

    Under capitalism, business interests naturally seek the cheapest possible labor, and often find it, the way water seeks it's level or fire ignites the most combustible fuel first. That doesn't mean capitalism is impossible without free labor any more than fire requires gasoline.

    148:

    And, in case you need a history lesson:

    Harvest of Shame

    Harvest of Shame YT: Documentary: 52:05, 1960

    ~

    If you want a wall, you'll need an impoverished underclass to replace it (hello automation? Methinks not). This stuff is very simple and not even hidden: Trump is stating, directly, that the roll-back goes beyond 1960.

    The sad thing is that I've posted the same links and same facts a few times, and it is still being ignored.

    Sad!

    149:

    56 years and all that was done was to move the Nationality of the Oppressed into a different Country (not our problem!) while the structural design remained the same.

    That's like, three generations of farm workers who breed young and die young.

    ~

    Well, there is this small matter of meta-computational brain-eating horrors from the gaps between universes, but apart from that we're all happy campers.

    The lack of self-awareness about the systems you inhabit and create would be a huuuuuge cosmic joke if it didn't have repercussions.

    150:

    To me there are two different alternate timeline scenarios here:

    1) There is an event/person/situation that suddenly requires an extraordinary result and technology is pushed to the limit, but all the pieces are there to accomplish it. All that is required is money and effort. Let's call this the "Apollo Moonshot" scenario. In 1901 all the pieces were there, there was just no need or desire to build an electronic computer. (and overcome the shortfalls everybody keeps pointing out. The biggest reliability problem with early vacuum tubes is they didn't have a vacuum).

    2) There is a person/book/AI that can provide the missing knowledge on how the pieces can be put together, however the underlying technology must be at a minimum level to be able to build the parts. Lets call this the "Merchant Princes" or "Safehold" scenario. This actually might push the date back to 1870 or so, because no theoretical knowledge is required.

    BTW, I think core memory is closer to the scenario 1, I think it was invented at about the earliest point in time as possible.

    151:

    Note for Greg: I understand you want more UK centric commentary.

    So replace Georgia with Lincolnshire and Mexicans with Eastern Europeans / Chinese (those poor folks caught out in the mud-flats, remember them?).

    Lincolnshire, like Georgian, slanted heavily towards isolationism (69% pro-Brexit).

    Can you guess what Lincolnshire's major industry is?

    Bingo.

    152:

    But if your mother's step mother is still alive, ask her. Seems unlikely. But women wore dresses or skirts for farm chores throughout the middle ages and beyond. I'm pretty sure, although it's not a particular sensitive topic, female slaves wore dresses and picked cotton while wearing them only a few decades earlier.

    Sorry no. That chance ended about 25 years ago.

    But piling on to the other comment about being close to the bread line. In the rural US in the 30s and in some places the 60s and maybe the 70s. Many folks were so close to barely eating enough to live that pants were the norm for everyone except on very special occasions. Pants could be worn by box sexes. And most families had 4 to 10 kids. So you didn't waste pants that didn't fit any of the boys at the moment.

    This cultures of rural US back then and even today is an alien place to most people around the world and to many in the US. It's just different. I grew up on the edge of this culture and my brothers wife came from it. (And she doesn't want to go back at all.)

    Anyway very few photos from this time reflect the daily reality of this life.

    But it is a distant history with few ways to verify the details. And in the UK and Europe things might be different.

    153:

    you probably meant the zuse machines (zeiss does optics). the first of these, z1, did not even use relays. It was purely mechanical, arithmetical and memory components were made of punched metal sheets and bars, similar to the hollerith tabulators, but much more complicated. They have a semi-functional replica at the tech museum in Berlin and also some logic gate models to play around with manually, see http://www.horst-zuse.homepage.t-online.de/z1-oder.html

    154:

    Oh, and here's the punchline:

    Host's point is that Does this sound familiar? Because it ought to: it's the story of our last two centuries.

    In 1960, the moral shock of that documentary lead to huge changes in policy. (Go do your research).

    Three generations later, the solution has been outsourcing and ennui. Run that documentary today, you'd get zero (0) public outrage. The real irony, of course, is that Real Conservatives [tm] (the old, paternalistic, Religious kind) would support changes to said system, and did. (Goldwater).

    Now ask yourself the actual question: What can Change the Nature of a Man?

    Trump is nothing - what's being lost is your ability to empathize with the Other and think non-Hierarchically.

    This is not a Bug. It's a well designed Feature.

    ~

    ./ soapbox off, but really.

    155:

    It's complicated. Legal migrants, earning minimum wage, doing a hard physical job the locals don't want to do because it's hard and seasonal. It's been like that since WW2 especially in places like Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, Essex, Lincolnshire. And while it suits the landowners and farm management, I've heard the locals don't like the rapid ramp up in migrant numbers in the last 10 years. It's not so much the competition for jobs as the social effects that caused the high vote for Brexit. But without actually living there it's hard to tell. There's one thing though, if the farmers can't get seasonal labour they'll move into something else. Like barn conversions or wind/solar power. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/03/brexit-could-herald-end-to-british-fruit-and-veg-sales-producers-warn

    156:

    Gangmasters and migrant workers: What you need to know BBC, Dec 2015

    And no, they won't.

    The Lincolnshire Fens are the UK equivalent to HP Lovecraft's Innsmouth dwellers. Let's just say that the entire mimetic thing of "Wind Power causes noise hum mental illness" is huuuuuge out there.

    [And yes: it was a dirty campaign run by [REDACTED] energy companies - total ratfucking from start to finish. Problem is - went a little too far, Mr French Energy Company that we'll not name but hey]

    WeDevilverCorporateInsanity

    ~

    On subject:

    Steam Powered Steam Punk Submarines.

    No-one got it yet.

    Remind me why Submarines are a thing, again? (I'll spot you an IronClad).

    Then work the logic.

    157:

    Actually there was a decent alternative to core called the electrical relay. The other two were "laboratory toys". They worked, sort of, but they weren't really practical.

    Core memory wasn't cheap, and wasn't easy to make. If there had been a reasonable alternative it would never have been used. (Relays work fine on small, slow, computers, but they don't scale...at least until you get to MEMs, at which point they may be superior even to semiconductors.)

    158:

    You're referring to "Harvest of Shame" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_of_Shame Re "what's being lost is your ability to empathize with the other..." That's a natural human ability that most people will always have, they just also have a propensity for masking it. When you say we're losing it that's basically moral propaganda. As Garrett Hardin explains in Tragedy of the Commons, appeals to conscience are pointless. What's needed is regulation. Don't ask people to voluntarily sacrifice, to place hearts over heads. That just punishes those who listen to you. Rather everyone should be forced to do right. Hardin says that brings up the question of who will guard the guardians, but I say guardianship is best guarded by professional ethics, a product of the very hierarchy you condemn. Career civil servants can be motivated by self interest to follow professional ethics in order to have successful careers. It does work, it is the only thing that works. People don't need to be made moral, the system needs to be designed to stop making them immoral.

    159:

    Yep. The Colossus bods had exactly those troubles with tapes breaking. But there wasn't really anything else they could use; the tapes were long, and the amount of data on them was such that no other form of storage would have been practical, both in terms of the number of components needed and of how to write the data in in the first place. Tape may not have been an ideal solution but the alternatives would have been worse.

    160:

    As I understand it, while the battery capacity is indeed insufficient for very much travel, it's still plenty to run the non-propulsive systems for a long time, so the sub can remain submerged for several days if it just sits there not moving. So you get it on station before the enemy arrive, and it waits, listening out for them with its passive sonar, while being so quiet that they can't detect it unless they give away their position by using active sonar. It then gives them a nasty surprise. And of course you don't need to be a big rich state with nuclear capabilites (if you can fuel a sub reactor you can make a bomb) to run them.

    161:

    Take a look at this picture of a woman in skirts pulling a pit mine coal cart in a skirt in the 19th century:

    http://ea-cei.org.uk/newcumnock/community/?p=300

    It was religious and legal system law that women had to dress in skirts and men in men's clothes until very late in our history.

    Even female slaves in the cotton and sugar fields had to wear such dresses as allowed and able, not pants. Though in some places it is noted that the plantation owners were so negligent they failed to provide either the slave clothing (manufactured in the north) or the materials to make new clothes sometimes for years at a time on the rice plantations of South Carolina and Georgia, and the slaves were forced to be naked.

    The photo albums of my family are filled with my farm women forebears -- who were one and all picture taking enthusiasts -- working in the garden, doing laundry outdoors in the summer, taking care of the chickens, shucking corn for canning, etc. -- all wearing dresses. These were not dress-up occasions and this was long before WWII.

    The gender boundaries in clothing are enormous and we see them still in effect even now with the insistance of the baby industry capitalists pushing blue and pink in EVERYTHING including godded Legos.

    162:

    In my opinion after years of working in the history of slavery and the "New World" what fueled the industrial revolution was a vast unplundered hemisphere chock full of everything needed from fibers and other cash / luxury crops and other resources from gold and silver and lumber and coal and iron and other minerals -- and land -- vast vast vast regions of land that could be used for anything from growing crops to extracting fur.

    The only necessary elements to making vast vast vast fortunes out of this was to commit genocide and slavery -- and slavery itself generated a vast business and income, as described in detail in The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry. Even when the African slave trade was prohibited (out of which the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Netherlands, and even for a time the Danish and Swedish Crowns made fortunes for their privy purses and their cohorts equal fortunes) -- slave breeding itself became a lucrative aspect of slavery in the antebellum U.S. south.

    Without the vast fortunes coming out of slavery and slave labor France couldn't have made the scientific and industrial strides she did in the 18th century, and neither could have England. Spain, well, she frittered hers away as Carlos etc. fought to maintain and expand the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and Empire neither Holy nor Roman, but definitely fueled by Spain's imperium in the the New World. All the money went to Italian bankers for the loans for armies.

    But it's not an original thought that New World and African slavery fueled the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. It's been pretty much accepted since maybe the late 1960's?

    163:

    Regarding Roman numerals, it has been suggested that in many contexts they were not used for direct calculation, but for recording the results of what was essentially abacus work. (Though I wonder if that was lost in many places during the "fall" of Roman influence.)

    Visualize a common abacus design with 4 beads or counters in each column below the bar and one bead above it. Use I and V to record the state of the first column, X and L for the second column, C and D for the third, etc.

    Positional shorthand (IX instead of VIIII) was a late development and may have come as the direct link to the abacus/exchequer was breaking down.

    Thinking about it, we have texts about some of the Roman engineering, but I'm not sure there are any extant texts about how Augustus' tax accountants did their work.

    164:

    "...how fast such a society can accelerate if there's a government on a war footing pushing it and they have perfect understanding of what their goal should be..."

    I think it is the lack of that factor which has limited the speed of most cases of development that we know about - as I said - there is no actual progress, because there is no defined path; there is just a random walk which simply by its length gives the illusion of having progressed when you look back to the starting point. If there is a defined path, and a strong commitment to following it, then I would reckon that advancement would be limited by factors like cognitive dissonance: how fast you can change things without doing too many people's heads in trying to cope with it.

    I'm not familiar with the Japanese example, but an example of goal-directed development that does spring to mind is Soviet industrialisation: they went from not much better than nothing to being able to out-produce the famously industrial Nazis in 20 years or so. Which is pretty impressive.

    After that, though, they got somewhat bogged down, broadly as a result of the consequences of Stalin being a big enough cunt to drive a fourteen-coupled locomotive into... and the less said about what happened with agriculture the better. It will be interesting to see whether the post-revolution NBE is any more successful at learning the lessons from our history as supplied by Miriam than we have been ourselves. Me, I somehow doubt it: Erasmus may understand, but he's only one guy, nobody else has read the books, and such problems have already started to appear.

    165:

    "...virtually EVERY post-1900 change has been to avoid unpopular tasks, concentrate money and production in a few hands, and just plain to extract money from the gullible masses."

    Which seems to be about the point the NBE have arrived at. As I read it, they've got good enough plumbing to be past the stage of cholera epidemics, and most of the "modern conveniences" do exist, it's just that only the rich people have them. The main things they don't have at all are scientifically-based pharmacology, and transistors. Apart from that it's mainly a matter of the technology they already do have becoming more widely available.

    Give it a few years and if it wasn't for the toxic politics it could be somewhere I'd be reasonably happy to live in... Only not for very long, because a lot of the stuff Miriam's going to introduce is going to be of the nature you describe.

    166:

    There is a definite anti-French bias here. OK, so why, then ( apart from US "war of independence" when everyone ganged up on the UK ) did the French lose every time? And why were the RA better than Boney's gunners, especially given that Boney trained as a gunner? And why was Britain's industrial revolution of 1720-1792 bigger & faster & more developed than France's? Which brings us back to Charlie's original question, doesn't it?

    167:

    The other thing missing from this discussion is the number of marriages saved by the dishwasher and the economic impact of those averted divorces...

    168:

    But the "Argies" nonetheless lost at least one sub to (IIRC) helicopter-attack: The Santa Fe ( S-21)

    169:

    Given that one grandmother came from the depths of the Fens, no problem. Contrariwise ... There are persistent attempts, usually successful (eventually) by "the authorities" to clamp down on, fine & jail the corrupt gangmasters running those illegal scams in Lincolnshire & Cumbria. Unlike in the USA the practice is not condoned, & it's illegal, but it often takes time to collect evidence, especially from scared often non_english-speaking workers caught in those traps.

    170:

    "It was religious and legal system law that women had to dress in skirts and men in men's clothes until very late in our history. ..., and the slaves were forced to be naked."

    Please note your last clause and read what I originally said. I said that the constraints were stronger on 'respectable' people, not (as El said) on second class citizens. Yes, such constraints existed - but they were near universal (and breaking them lead to ostracism) for 'respectable' people. Second class citizens often ignored them, because they had little option.

    171:

    Resources spent fostering infrastructure development or commerce were diverted from military defense and hence weakened them in the short term -- an unacceptable risk.

    Slight variation to this thought: Prussian industrialism and military mobilisation seemed to go together - at least for railways. But maybe it's exactly a slight advantage the Prussians had over the Austrians in industrialisation that made them the ones to unite Germany. So maybe a finer-grained disctinction can be drawn between 1850s Prussia and Austria. Nothing comes readily to mind, other than and the legacy of the Hanseatic city states on the one hand and the Ottomans on the other.

    172:

    The Lincolnshire Fens are the UK equivalent to HP Lovecraft's Innsmouth dwellers.

    All too true. They ain't called "Yellowbellies" for nothing! I remember Holland County ( between Spaliding & Lynn ) in the 1950's all too well!

    173:

    Without the vast fortunes coming out of slavery and slave labor France couldn't have made the scientific and industrial strides she did in the 18th century, and neither could have England. Disagree profoundly. Produce evidence to support your case. As opposed to British" wealth coming, very largely from it's own technological efforts.

    Oh - one other point. The "English" aristocracy were allowed, even encouraged to go into industrialisation & technology, unlike many other polities.. The Cavendishes ("Devonshires") were supreme examples of this.

    174:

    Yep, diesel-electrics can be very hard targets to detect, even by top grade equipment knowing they are out there. The main downside is the lack of sustained speed and the noise while getting on station, so usual practice was to get ahead of the enemy and just quietly lie in wait. I've been told several times that the Aussies "sunk" a carrier once in wargames, they definitely got a few Los Angeles subs and regularly embarrassed the yanks. If you are willing to accept the loss of the submarine, the chances of sinking something crucial go up massively.

    175:

    Actually, a lot of the early industrial revolution was incredibly small scale, basically artisanal. One of the supporting factors of the take off may have been a high level of artisanal craft skills in the general population (part of my theory anyways).

    The economics are discussed in Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, Most early entrepreneurs left very modest, barely bourgeois estates.

    Napoleonic artillery? The UK had a perceived/understood metallurgical advantage, even as early as 1588. And led the shift to Iron (vs Brass) Guns from say 1650 forwards as the "Standard" of warship armament. You need a bigger ship to carry the same broadside, but the cost advantage meant bigger fleets.

    Also the British Secret Weapon of the Napoleonic Wars, the Shrapnel shell. Again, metallurgical and technical sophistication.

    176:

    there is an interesting book by an Italian historian, Aldo Schiavone, translated as The End of the Past: Ancient Rome and the Modern West. Translated by Margery J. Schneider. Revealing Antiquity, 13. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000

    dealing with why even when the Roman empire had reached a critical mass of population, skills and capital, it was unable to develop further at least to a proto-capitalist economy.

    btw, I'd like your reference to Weber's Safehold, but imho the world building is too much plot driven. If I were Langhorne, and I wanted to build a safe, stationary society, I'd made Safehold into some kind of static Wittfogel-like Asian despotism, not a mishmash of competing states with even some representative governments.

    177:

    Somewhere up thread there was a query about what is a Submarine (Diesel Electric) good for. Well, not much if you are thinking in terms of a Mahanian clash of Battle Fleets, which a lot of (cough, Japanese) did, leading to things like the K Class. Prior to the first big one, the consensus plan seemed to be to employ them as a coastal defense/denial asset. This was explicit in some of the US construction plans. Some of it at least was military fashion everybody has some, maybe we should spend some money for a few of these shiny gadgets. The Germans were the last "Great Power" to start building Submarines.
    Works great if your targets can't figure out what is happening, and stop to rescue survivors.

    But it turns out there were a lot of these slow, easy to catch targets called "Merchant Ships" coming and going in UK waters. Eureka! A Mission! And it almost worked...

    Of course, that was Doenitz's plan from the beginning in the second round, except he knew he needed around 300 operational boas, and planned to have that number (and reached it) in 1943. By which time UK countermeasures had been ramped up,

    Meanwhile, in the Pacific, the Japanese stuck to the Fleet Support mission and profile. And the US "Fleet" Boats were called that for a reason, the whole design process that led to them, range (to "Scout" the Japanese home islands from Pearl Harbor, and watch for the Japanese Battle Fleet), plus a reasonable size for mass production on mobilization (Which FAR exceeded pre-war expectations). (Norman Friedman, US Submarine Design, etc). But Doenitz had kind of enabled a campaign against the Japanese Merchant Marine, for which they turned out to be the perfect weapon (compare with the struggles of the MUCH smaller UK Subs to contribute, operating from Trincomalee and Freemantle).

    Many of the US Submarine successes against Japanese carriers etc. was due to SIGINT Target cueing. The above referenced get in position and wait. Ambush hunting, vs. stalking.

    178:

    some random toughts on alternate paths to industrialization:

    Roman or Alexandrine industrial revolution. Yes, Alexandrine civilization has a good grasp of math, and of some branches of physics and had a good tech level, see Anthikythera computer. But Heron's eolipyle was useless as practical engine. The big problem is that such a device didn't spur a theory about the relationship between thermal and mechanical energy, or in cruder form, how and why the heat from fire turned into movement. Maybe it didn't fit into Aristotelian physics.

    role of France (and Germany): in 19. century France was the source of relevant innovations, from the theory of thermal engines by Carnot, to first IC engine, the Lenoir one, to developments in electrically powered airships and smokeless powder. Germany led in fields like chemistry and electrical engineering. (on S.M. Stirling's list I pointed it when they were discussing the world building of what became The Peshawar Lancers, and it made into its canon, explaining why the Angrezi Raj survives as industrial power using steam and black powder into 21. century after Europe was destroyed by a meteor impact)

    France and Germany had a different model of relationship between science and technology. The British industrial revolution relied on skilled, literate and numerate artisans, with some input from academies and such, where science was a gentleman's hobby. France had the Grand Ecoles, Ponts and Chausses, and such, with a tradition in civil engineering, while Germany invented the modern research university, with labs, libraries, scientific journals and careers based on dicoveries and published research.

    Also, maybe I have read Brad DeLong too fast, but it seemed to me that a gun and sail empire with a tech level similar to late Renaissance could have been a kind of stable state, with no further drive to industrialize.

    179:

    Diesel subs that are fully submerged (not snorkeling) are electric subs, running on battery juice, which is very limiting. (I am led to believe that a huge breakthrough in progress is the transition to LiION from lead-acid cells, which massively improves their performance.) You can run a diesel engine underwater if you have a hydrogen peroxide tank and want to go fast, but then it's a diesel engine (noisy).

    There are several modern diesel sub designs which use Stirling engines (quiet) burning a combination of diesel fuel and liquid oxygen (e.g., the Swedish Gotland class and the Japanese Soryu class, and possibly some Chinese boats) or hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells (e.g., the German Type 212 and its export derivatives) for "air-independent propulsion" (AIP). These are apparently able to achieve submerged times of several weeks (I think the longest publicly demonstrated submerged time is 18 days for one of the German Navy boats). There's a third technology offered by the French submarine maker DCNS called MESMA, which apparently has a steam turbine system like a standard nuclear sub, but with the nuclear reactor replaced by a high-pressure methanol-oxygen combustion system to generate the heat. Plus an as-yet-untested Spanish design which uses a bio-ethanol-based reaction system to generate the hydrogen for fuel cells (still requires a liquid oxygen store).

    http://gentleseas.blogspot.de/2014/08/air-independent-propulsion-aip.html

    180:

    maybe I have read Brad DeLong too fast, but it seemed to me that a gun and sail empire with a tech level similar to late Renaissance could have been a kind of stable state

    That's more or less the "gunpowder empire" idea he's talking about (although the original use of the term was for the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires); the point of his post is to argue that it wouldn't be stable.

    181:

    Yes. What most people and many authors miss, but OGH and the better ones do not, is that technology is secondary to society in driving change. It is relatively easy to see stable technology plateaus, in the sense that incremental advances in technology won't lead to corresponding ones in benefits for the society as a whole, but not easy to see how to stop changes that individuals would like but which are harmful when unconstrained. E.g. the private car and ubiquitous use of disposable plastics problems.

    182:

    Greg writes:

    There is a definite anti-French bias here. OK, so why, then ( apart from US "war of independence" when everyone ganged up on the UK ) did the French lose every time? And why were the RA better than Boney's gunners, especially given that Boney trained as a gunner? And why was Britain's industrial revolution of 1720-1792 bigger & faster & more developed than France's? Which brings us back to Charlie's original question, doesn't it?

    The reason we won in the world's first global war (Seven Year's War in Europe, French and Indian War in the US) is not the quality of our troops (usually less good than the French), nor the quality of our generals, but Finance, which we'd learnt from the Dutch when we appropriated their Royalty (William and Mary).

    The UK government could borrow at 3% to finance it's wars: the French King, with his dodgy Credit Score, and poor repayment record was charged 15%.

    Finance is also the reason that the industrial revolution did not kick off 50-70 years earlier in the UK. The losses suffered in the South Sea Bubble took that long to repay, and confidence in the Banks also suffered for two generations.

    183:

    If the rich have something it will trickle down to the poor, with rate determined by various factors. Usually this takes the form of the development and application of techniques to produce the luxury more cheaply and make it a more common good. For that to happen, somebody has to be able to afford developing and yet also have the motivation to do so. There has to be a part of the population who have some degree of wealth but believe they can better themselves financially. Also there needs to not be a taboo against imitating ones betters. If automobiles are a status symbol reserved for those of high caste, then your Model T will never sell because the rich would rather have something hand crafted and the poor would never behave like pretenders. Now to drift slightly off topic.

    It also helps to adopt existing technology instead of developing it yourself.
    The Chinese discovered gunpowder because they had alchemists playing around with new medicines using completely ridiculous mystical theories--not because they were under strategic pressure to invent military technologies. Military pressure just led to the invention of better crossbows and siege engines. When gunpowder met military necessity, they invented guns, right? Well, no, first they invented gunpowder assisted long range arrows. Revolutions can only come from those not too caught up in the status quo. Warriors used to arrows will only see gunpowder as a way to make arrows better, not as a way to replace arrows. The gunpowder propelled arrow stage was skipped in the Europe because the Chinese eventually did invent primitive guns, and this stage of technology arrived fully formed in the west.

    We can look back and think people in the past were so dumb and small minded, using revolutionary technologies in prosaic ways, but we're no better. The thing is you can't really predict what will be a dead end and what will be the next big thing. Will 3D printers remain a niche item, like jetpacks, or become ubiquitous? Will we all have helicopters like the rich? Or is the question itself similar to the thinking of those who made gunpowder assisted arrows? Maybe we move to space and don't need jetpacks or helicopters because we live in low gee. If you use an alphabet you don't need such a large character set that your printing press is impractical. What is our Hanzi, what are our arrows? What forest are we not seeing for the trees? We can't see our blocking assumptions because of our blocking assumptions.

    184:

    The big driver for the Industrial Revolution, as we were taught in school, was the preceding Agricultural Revolution which released a lot of manpower (and childpower too) from growing crops so they could work in mills and factories and mines. Without the rationalisation of land ownership and scientific improvements (crop rotation etc.) there would not have been enough hands to work the machines to bootstrap the manufacturing processes.

    185:

    Hey, Nojay,

    About the agricultural revolution... weren't there large numbers of formerly agricultural workers tossed off the farms during the enclosure movement? (I think that's what it was called, when the price of wool rose so high that the nobility changed from agriculture to sheep raising, and the peasants got "freed" from the land they'd farmed for centuries....)

    mark
    186:

    Can we pitch "The Tragedy of the Commons" in the ditch where it belongs?

    --Hardin later said he'd gone too far with that article, along with quite a few other critics.

    --More to the point, Elinor Ostrom, the late economics professor, spent her entire career documenting how commons work the world over, and in some cases have worked for centuries. She got a Nobel Prize in Economics too, the only woman to do so so far.

    And that last is the key point: the available data DO NOT SUPPORT the idea of the tragedy of the commons. Under 8-10 conditions (depending on the model), a commons can last indefinitely, and most of those conditions have to do with transparency, equality, commons participants agreeing with the rules under which the commons operate, and fair, prompt, and visible enforcement of a graduated scale of sanctions against those who violate the agreed-upon rules.

    IMHO, some financial markets would work a lot better if they adopted the basic commons rules that Ostrom found in her research, but that's a topic for another time. Right now, governments make markets, whether or not they could be run as commons thereafter.

    187:

    I agree with you that Spain squandered its wealth during the 1500-1700s with its wars. I also agree with your point that N. Italian banks were the prime beneficiaries of the wealth Spain stole from the Americas. As you say, the Netherlands, England, and France used the wealth from the Americas to kick off the industrial revolution

  • If so, why didn't N. Italy industrialize?
  • What about Portugal?
  • 188:

    The French usually lost when they got too greedy.

    Boney was a great general, who believed a bit too much that military victory was actual victory. He also ignored a few lessons about the French Revolution that showed nationalism may be bigger than a ruling government.

    Mostly he made 3 big mistakes.

  • Trying to reconquer Haiti.

  • Trying to Hold Spain.

  • The March to Russia.

  • In 1 and 2 he made the mistake of trying to hold down a hostile population. We know now in the post-Enlightenment era it doesn't work in the long run. It becomes a bleeding ulcer.

    Haiti had also the fact it ruined the potential for Haiti to be an army for hire for him, with their troops being already immune to the tropical diseases that ravaged the other powers there. Some sort of quasi-independence under France could of worked, with Haiti getting to rule the Caribbean, and France controlling the revenue.

    In 2, we had the fact that the Spanish government and Spanish nation are not the same thing. Beat the king or his son, and their government surrenders. But turns out the cities really don't like you, and there's not enough fig leaf to deal with the nationalists. When combined with arms and funds flowing in, and a British army supporting them, we have the ulcer that eats up Napoleon's army.

    In 3 we have a mistake on time and extension. Napoleon thought of armies to fight, and the Russian scortched earth tactics combined with denying battle meant it was much to easy to over run their logistics. Even taking Moscow was hollow after the Russians stayed in the fight, letting the French bleed men and rations.

    189:

    Here is information about France that might pertain in this debate

  • France had a very low Total Fertility Rate since Napoleon. After the French Revolution, it was barely at replacement levels. Later on in the late-19th century, it dipped even below replacement. That is why the country's population increased from around 33 million at the start of the French Revolution to around 40 million at the start of WWI.

  • Very low emigration, possibly related to the TFR. If you compare the 19th century emigration of people from the UK (mostly Ireland), Germany, Italy, you'll notice that there was very little emigration from France. Heck, Algeria's population was mostly Spaniards and Italians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_diaspora

  • Very low urbanization rate compared to the UK and Germany. I can't pull up the figures right now, but I remember reading that France's urbanization at the onset of WWI was around 30%.

  • A possible argument for the above is given as the land reforms of the French Revolution. It channeled increased agricultural productivity into the average citizen's wealth instead of the (relative) latifundia that sprang up in other parts of Europe and the US. This deprived their factories of workers.

    As a brief aside, many of the same things happened with the Netherlands in the 19th century, although less pronounced.

    190:

    Very interesting. I suspect you are approx 75% correct. There's also the other factor, of course, which may be represented by my last name ( which you can see, of course ) - I'm descended from the Huguenots. Louis XIV threw them out - & they went to the Low Countries & England, bringing with them, money, financial skills, a lot of technology & an abiding desire to stuff the Froggies at every turn. Look at the number of Huguenot-"french" names in the Brit Army from then on until the present day. The first governor of the Bank of England was one WIlliiam d'Houblon, after all ....

    191:

    Northern Italy is now an industrial power house, but I'd imagine the problems of constant warfare with the French, Austrians and Spanish crowns battling over Italy has been a real hamper for the development of capital. Combine that with lack of coal and having limited farm productivity, and Italy lacked the special sauce.

    Which is ironic, as Italy in many times and places would of been the best place for weavers, which was so important for other industrialization skills.

    192:

    Mark,

    One point I'd challenge - the 'overpopulation' meme which has been consistently wrong for, forever. Of course under a heavily fossel fuel powered economy we're at / approaching the limits of human carrying capacity of the planet, however the same was probably true of wood-burning humanity in 1500. Even really quite conservative assumptions around energy / space utilisation will throw out plausible human carrying-capacities of Earth of 100 (US) billion plus. Inevitably humanity will innovate, become more efficient and grow further.

    D.

    193:

    From what I recall of history class ... ancient Judean, Greek or Roman slaves were human beings and many/most ancient cultures gave them rights. Such men/women/children were not deemed “inferior” by nature. While bad, still a helluva lot better than the US version of slavery.

    'Top-down economic models' ... is this thinking still being seriously considered? Makes no sense when, thanks to modern technology, you can cut out (or splice in) any number of middlemen/layers out of the economy. Trickle down doesn't work without a lot of lateral pressure, i.e., peers actively insisting on changing how upper classes/strata distribute goods/wealth and responsibilities or having a large enough middle class that becomes enamored of some new tech that it decides to swap an old toy (cable) for a new one (iPhone) and mostly exchange within and among their own social strata.

    Another place where top-down is meeting some resistance is in home ownership. Specifically in terms of what is a culturally (socially) acceptable definition (size, style, place, etc.) of a home. Thanks to miniaturization of the most popular tech, you don't need as large a home to store all your stuff which allows for the Tiny Home movement to be feasible. Glad to see this happening just as student debt and high youth un-/under-employment seemed to have become just another one of those things about how the 'real world' works now.

    194:
  • What about Portugal.
  • Would the Great Lisbon Quake of 1755 have had anything to do with Portugal's future?

    I'm proposing this as a theory to be played with, mostly because I figure environmental determinist hypotheses are things that might be tested and disposed of.

    The briefest notes about Portuguese history were that it's high points were in the 15th and 16th Century, and it lost Brazil, it's largest colony, in 1822. A really crude reading would be that it had already shot its bolt by the 18th Century, and the resources it had to pour into rebuilding after the quake, plus the stultifying politics that surrounded the quake (the Portuguese PM of the time was a commoner who may have had a hate-hate relationship with the aristocracy), meant that Portugal was in no position to industrialize in the 18th or 19th Centuries.

    The other thing is that, while Portugal had (and has) plenty of minerals, it doesn't seem to have much of anything in the way of fossil fuels. The one coal mine they have appears to be more famous for its Jurassic fossils than for the industry that sprang up around it. If Portugal was going to power its way into a bootstrapped Industrial Revolution, it would have had to import coal from Newcastle.

    195:

    Um, about the Chinese and gunpowder. On their own, IIRC, they got to matchlocks on their own.

    In any case, fire arrows have this lovely advantage that you can build them basically out of bamboo and gunpowder, plus maybe a metal arrowhead if you like. China has a lot of bamboo, so this isn't stupid. When you start doing fire lances as the crudest possible guns (basically a short tube with a sealed end and a touch-hole for a match to light it off), then you have to start worrying about treating it as an explosion, rather than a bottle rocket, and the technology gets a lot more complicated. The Chinese were building cannon-ish things by 1132 (their first recorded use on the battlefield), and the Europeans were using Muslim cannons in Andalusia in 1246.

    Now you may think that something like the Korean Hwacha, with its 200 fire arrows, is primitive, and to some degree it is. The advantage is that, as the Mythbusters and other re-enactors have shown, it's not that hard to make. If you've got gunpowder and a lot of bamboo around, it's certainly the simplest thing to make if you need anti-personnel artillery.

    196:

    I have seen arguments that one of the reasons cannons developed further in Europe than in China had to do with the differing forms of warfare in the two regions. Specifically, European warfare in the High Middle Ages involved sieges of castles much more than was the case in China. So there was an incentive to develop relatively immobile but powerful cannon in Europe (sometimes cast at the site of the siege itself) for the purpose of knocking holes in castle walls, which laid the groundwork for later, more mobile cannons, and then arquebuses and muskets.

    197:

    I get the impression on reading that hand cannon and cannon developed in parallel. The limiting factor in all cases was containing the explosion, followed long after by increasing accuracy. I suspect one reason bows and crossbows hung around as long as they did was that they were more accurate, and range (up until the Napoleonic Era) was roughly equivalent for bows and guns.

    Still, you're right about cannon technology. There's little reason to build siege cannon when your major opponents are Japanese pirates and invading nomad armies.

    198:

    Some notes: (serious answer because at some point I remembered that I knew quite a lot about compound engines for some reason. And by a lot I mean alot).

    1 Compound Steam Engines, 1790 onwards. Requires precision casting & identical parts. The Age of Iron 2 The Bessemer process 1856, mass production and repeatable (controllable) carbon content. The Age of Steel 3 Harry Brearley 1913, Chromium is added. The Age of Stainless Steam

    If you think of "Steam Punk" there's a huge aesthetic slant towards gleaming brass etc. It's nonsense.

    The above three stages cannot really be stopped (since they're essentially the same element being played around with constantly) and doesn't leave itself open to fiddly cogs etc.

    199:

    And while it was a pun on host's title, there's an odd symmetry to the spacing of the advances - roughly 50 years each time.

    There's probably a rule of thumb about this being the time (in a non-global, sea commerce driven society) for a material to enter a market, dominate a market then come to a point where the limitations of the material provoke reassessment of the material.

    It's roughly three generations of humans as well.

    Note that the Bessemer process and Brearley were driven by disaster / military (there's also some no small suggestion that industrialization in the USA was driven by rifling / gun needs, as was the discovery of Stainless Steel).

    Parallels?

    200:

    I think Bessemer steel fits better under the second industrial revolution. By the time the Bessemer steel revolution goes in, the basic of industrialization has spread. Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as the US, France and various German states were industrial at this time.

    I'd also expand 1 to include machine tools such as good lathes (and the required materials for good lathes varies). Watt's best engines were only after Wilkinson developed the boring machine. It was those tools that made the use of iron technology just explode.

    201:

    I even wonder if there's incentives against Cannons under the Ming and Qing. Cannons allow rebellions to take fortresses staffed by loyal garrisons before the large central government's army can mobilize.

    Otoh, the Gunpowder Empires worked in part because if a local lord rebelled, it was the central army that had the guns necessary to ruin his fort, and he was more limited in access to such weapons.

    202:

    Part of the drive towards steel was that iron used in construction was hitting its natural life span - e.g. Tay Bridge disaster (note: I'm cribbing off a copy of Stuff Matters: The Strange Stories of the Marvellous Materials that Shape Our Man-made World by Mark Miodownik - see also the section on concrete). Comments on the Romans and concrete are useful here, as they highlight part of the why the Romans never developed the tech further (because it lasted 500+ years easily).

    The argument is that Bessemer is a necessary outcome of using 1st wave tech.

    Also, the main advantage of industrial tech (1st wave) was mobility - you could move machines, break them into parts, reassemble them etc and not be bound to a geographical water based energy source (the Mill). You could probably argue that this drove a lot of US history and colonial as well - being able to relocate your production = massive advantage (riffing off the cannon suggestion about Castles / mobile artillery).

    To tie this into "classic" Steam Punk, you have to have a really good reason for:

    1) Not following this progression from iron to steel (and brass? come on)

    2) Not having the jump mixing in chemistry (electrical plating etc).

    Usually Guild "secrets" are used (which are anachronistic by 1790) but it doesn't really follow.

    The point about Bessemer is that everyone thought he was a con man, and initially when he licensed the idea no-one else could get it to work for them. He eventually perfected the tech, but not without significant push-back and angry law suits.

    203:

    "Natural life span"? What do you mean, the Tay bridge disaster was nothing to do with how long the bridge had been in use.

    The Romans also likely never developed concrete further because 1) they didn't have the marriage of philosophy and ideas and practical artisanal knowledge that the late medieval period had, 2) their main source was one location (as far as I have read) and as such it wasn't so widely available.

    204:

    Note: there is a way to artificially stagnate this progression.

    Either you have a break through in chemistry first (i.e. lead based / Titanium dioxide paints, which were around in the 19th Century) and a jump to electricity / nuclear (thus missing a stage), as already mentioned, or...

    You get kinky.

    Let's imagine that instead of slash/burn (colonialism in a can), ecology really took off after Darwin. Not the "red in tooth and claw" political hack (which was 100% a hatchet job, funded by Big Coal, but I digress), but it was really embraced, with the British passion for landscaping and gardens thrown in.

    So, the Empire looks at the 1/3rd of the world it owns, and starts optimizing the ecologies it owns. No mono-cultures, locally driven maximal ecologies.

    Fecundity abounds, along with a good dash of Victorian spirit ("Last decade we brought you the Crystal Palace, this year - Jamaica in balance!). Farming productivity is tied to ecology with huge break-throughs in natural pest control, and no-one makes the mistakes of invasive species (hello America and the Starling). Instead, the Empire enacts ruthless control of the seas to prevent both slavery and biological contamination.

    The Dodo never dies out etc etc.

    In this world, Steam Punk is somewhat believable, as the shift is towards biology and biotech (oh, and as a plus, over-breeding of domestic animals doesn't degenerate into fads and the Nazis can never use the aroch as a propaganda tool - likewise, eugenics never takes hold because "survival of the fittest" is tempered by understanding abapation).

    ~

    Sorry.

    Must type something chaotic and dystopian, ruining my cover.

    205:

    Yes, wind / stress / bad casting.

    But as a rule of thumb, iron pits / rusts.

    50 years is hitting danger zone.

    Stainless steel is a big deal, yo. You're male, I guess you shave? Huuuuge step there.

    206:

    Yes, I know stainless is good, I am part materials scientist. Of course it depends what you want to do with the stainless.
    And iron, well, if it's nearly pure it can last a surprisingly long time, see that pillar in India or various medieval wrought iron decorations.

    Relatedly, I toured a French winery a few weeks ago, some party members were surprised at all the big stainless steel vats.

    207:

    The point about the Romans is also wrong.

    The Renaissance was a big deal because people started being able to sculpt marble with the same amount of skill that the Romans had.

    Anyhow, I was just trying to keep my points UK centric.

    [Wonk notes: Georgia today, blue dash after my comments - I'm an arms dealer, remember? Just told you how to sell the swing]

    208:

    Nope, my point about the Romans is right. The Romans were quite good at some things but pants at many others, by the standard of the high and late medieval periods. See also the spread of windmills across Europe, and the various uses to which water power was put, far more so than the Romans used it for, and more efficiently too.

    209:

    If you want to freak people out, tell them about their orange juice.

    50 metre tall stainless steel cylinders with all the taste taken out, stored for 2+ years. Taste re-injected with teabags (literally).

    I mean, literally: the illusion is total bullshit.

    210:

    Enclosures meant basically converting a communally-managed resource (a field or other agricultural land such as pasture) into a single entity. Originally fields were worked by several peasant families, each having a row or two of the land separated by non-productive areas. The rows were traded around each year so there was no incentive for a family to improve their year's land with fertiliser etc. because it would be someone else's next year.

    A single field could be worked with fewer hands to produce more and improvements such as crop rotation were beneficial to the owners over a period of years. There were also early technological developments such as the steel-edged mouldboard plough which could process more ground and turn it over deeper than a wooden hand or animal-drawn plough.

    As for the Clearances, the hill crofting areas which were converted to sheep farming were borderline ground for agriculture, barely able to keep a family fed with little in the way of surplus for the landowner. Sheep were more profitable especially with the automation of spinning and weaving, with canals and improved roads to transport the wool to the Lowland factories. The roads into the Highlands had been made to carry artillery after the Jacobite rebellions but they served the wool merchants just as well.

    211:

    Which is my point about 1st industrial wave and water power.

    Tell me something notable about Italy.

    Hint: it revolves around rivers. Horatio and the Tiber etc.

    212:

    To broaden this out, thing a little wider:

    Egypt, precision stone-cutting. Using copper tools, a real bastard. Bronze? Better.

    Rome, precision sculpting, Legions, siege engines. Etc.

    UK, industrial revolution, Steam Engine Parts.

    UK, shaving (Gillette razors, 1903 - not stainless steel).

    Add in the mix weapons (not so much cannons, wadding solves a lot of issues, it's all about the personal).

    The important thing is that your tools retain their quality over an acceptable amount of usage.

    Steam Punk is predicated on hugely well crafted pieces (to make up the short-falls that other materials / science can gloss over slightly).

    ~

    It's a paradox, one that cannot be resolved.

    213:

    (note: the mis-use of Horatius / Horatio is meta-meta snark. Having written out the entire thing five times as a young woman in the 19th century as a punishment I well know the difference - let's just say the Americans do not).

    214:

    And yes, I did just kill a genre.

    You can't have non-gaslight fantasy Steam Punk. (By which we assume Host means that which doesn't include the Occult / Spirits / Outer Realms).

    It's insanity, it only works if you're willing to con your audience.

    I felt like destroying something beautiful YT: film: 0:16

    Which is a meta-comment: your world is so debased I can't even get a decent clip of the scene.

    Your world (orange juice!) is a lie made up by fools, liars and soulless scumbags.

    ~

    And no: you can't redeem Steam Punk, it's fucking retarded.

    215:

    I asked a (British) relative who was born in the 1930s. She got her first pair of slacks in the 1950s — had to make them herself. She said the Land Army volunteers might wear trousers or coveralls while working, but skirts once they were finished. She doesn't remember seeing women in the streets in slacks until the 1950s. Her mother never wore anything but skirts her whole life (which included farm work).

    Single point of data, but thought I'd contribute it as it comes from someone alive during the time period in question.

    216:

    As someone who attended the university of Dundee reading civil engineering back in the day, the piers of the first Tay Bridge which still protrude from the river, were used as an object lesson in how not to screw up IIRC the explanation I was given for the bridge failure was the wind loads, a train was crossing in strong winds and the bridge couldn't resist the lateral stress As this would never happen to a masonry bridge, it apparently was a new thing. Apparently (if my memory is correct) the original designer did worry about wind loads and consulted the astronomer Royal who screwed up the calcs. The Forth Rail bridge, which I think was just given UN historic status was designed to take a hurricane blowing in either direction at each end, which meant it was ludicrously over designed but remains my favourite bridge in the world

    217:

    Yes, it was wind loads that did for it, but there were several factors involved. It wasn't really as simple as just getting the calcs wrong; there was at the time very little science available for getting them right. How much you allowed for wind was largely a matter of guesswork. With masonry viaducts it didn't really matter because the structure's weight was enough to swamp sideways loads. Iron trestles were a more recent development that arose when they became potentially cheaper. Bouch got the job of the Tay Bridge partly because his viaducts for the Stainmore line got him the reputation of being a good cast-iron-trestles bloke. Not exactly unjustified - those viaducts stood until the line closed and they were demolished. But they were in less exposed locations, and the design wasn't as proven as people assumed.

    The design was flawed; it had things like attachment lugs taking the form of "ears" cast sticking out at right angles from some larger body, without thought for stress concentrations - particularly bad when it's cast iron you're doing it with. Some fastenings took the form of tapered pins in tapered holes, rough-cast and not fitted, so the contact area was much smaller than it was assumed to be, again causing stress concentrations. The diagonal cross-bracing members were tensioned by hammering wedges into slots, with nothing to keep them there but friction; in service they worked loose and some of them fell out altogether. This problem was exacerbated by an inadequate maintenance regime carried out by people who had had bugger all instruction and didn't really know how to do their job. (The thought seems to have been: how much instruction do you need to hit things with a hammer? But it's not the hitting, it's knowing which bits to hit and how hard.)

    There was also a severe quality control problem with materials and components. People at all levels trying to cheap out on things, plus inadequate quality inspection procedures incompetently and possibly corruptly carried out, led to badly flawed castings, materials that didn't meet the spec, and the like, being used in the structure.

    And the Victorians do seem to have had a bit of a blind spot when it comes to cast iron and structural science. The Dee bridge disaster some decades earlier was also a structural failure connected with inappropriate use of cast iron. What they learned from that doesn't seem to have carried through to general applicability in the very different structure of the Tay bridge. I'm not sure whether this was down to the rule-of-thumb engineering culture, the variability of the material, or what...

    218:

    I'm not sure about the one location thing. I think there have been Roman remains discovered in Britain that use concrete made using locally-quarried pozzolanic material.

    This is just a guess, but I'd have thought that availability of fuel had a lot to do with it. Modern cities are made of coal and oil: it's quite a thought to stand in a city and look around and consider that everything you see has been made red hot at some stage in its production. Before we had those easy energy sources we used things like stone and wood, and cooking was only required for materials like mortar which are a very small percentage of the structure.

    219:

    That's undirected development - illusory progress by random walk with no defined goal, where the motivation is random people seeing a way to make money out of random things. Contrast Soviet industrialisation, where the goal was to close the gap with countries whose greater industrial capabilities was a military threat, and the motivation was central control defining the goal and instructing people to achieve it.

    The current position of the NBE seems to be an interesting mix of the two - they have a definable goal which is pretty much the same, but how they are going to work towards it is all up in the air. Miriam is obviously thinking in terms of using capitalistic methods, but in a somehow directed manner, and at the moment only Charlie knows what kind of political system she's going to end up working under. Perhaps modern China is a relevant model.

    (Oh, and gunpowder-assisted long-range arrows? They are great, if you make really big ones and put bombs on the end. As we know very well...)

    220:

    Oops, forgot... Our blocking assumptions? That undirected development driven by random money-making is the best/only way to go about things; treating money as the end rather than a means; never actually bothering to pursue the goal of making people's lives happier, nor using any motivation other than random personal enrichment; observing that attempted deviations from our model have been associated with highly unpleasant forms of government and have been seen as not all that successful, and assuming from that that unpleasant government and failure are inevitably entangled with deviations rather than viewing the deviation as a worthwhile experiment which failed due to bad government but needn't fail if the government didn't create discontent.

    221:

    If the rich have something it will trickle down to the poor, with rate determined by various factors. Usually this takes the form of the development and application of techniques to produce the luxury more cheaply and make it a more common good. For that to happen, somebody has to be able to afford developing and yet also have the motivation to do so.

    I think this is a misdirection of what is usually meant by "trickle down", and that the "luxury" part can only ever be niche and therefore negligible in terms of macro effect. On the other hand the important thing about the Model T isn't that it's an accessible version of a luxury - it's that the people who made them could afford them. If you have a small group of very rich people spending megabucks on luxuries, and opportunities for ordinary people to consume too at a level that is closer to sustainable, then the ordinary people can use the relatively insignificant trickle the luxury spending represents to drive their own consumption, but this is only a way of bootstrapping demand and building a real (not luxury niche) economy out of it.

    The counter to this is the luxury niche itself - the amount of rent locked into the capacity to grow (the means of production?) is more or less the same as the dead weight the system has to be able to carry before that demand growth cycle.

    Think of it this way - how many $400 bottles of wine can you sell versus how many $20 bottles? There will always be some demand for the $400 bottles, but you create more value by selling a gazillion $20 bottles. A strong economy relies on a large population of middle-class consumers, not wealthy ones.

    222:

    "Part of the drive towards steel was that iron used in construction was hitting its natural life span ..."

    That is just plain bollocks. Wrought iron has several times the lifetime of (ordinary) mild steel, especially when in contact with seawater. There are rusting iron boat skeletons around the UK's coasts, where the later steel neighbours have disappeared completely. Rust-resistant and stainless steels are 50 years later than the Bessemer process.

    223:

    The Land Army volunteers were almost all middle-or upper-class - one of my aunts was one. The context was a century earlier, and what second-class citizens would wear. Take a look at this image (you can find plenty of others, quite easily):

    https://ericwedwards.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/image-36.jpg

    The people at the very top and bottom of society were less constrained by the iron diktats of propriety than those in the middle; the former because they didn't always have the option and the latter because they were above condemnation. Plantation slavery is irrelevant, because it was the whims of the owners (they were property, remember?), slaves were naked on the selling block, and the mores of their previous societies were very different. In my childhood (in another part of Africa), women in the fields often worked bare-breasted, though I never saw a European or Asian topless.

    224:

    "If the rich have something it will trickle down to the poor, with rate determined by various factors."

    You have been drinking too much of the monetarist kool-aid. Trickle-down often happens, but the converse is nearly as common. It depends, firstly, on whether the resource is available in near-unlimited quantities, without too much detrimental impact and, secondly, whether there is an advantage in concentrating access to it. In the UK, we moved towards one end of the spectrum for about 40 years, and have been going in the other way for about 30.

    In the UK, the clearest examples of that seesaw are land, education, employment opportunity, access to justice and (factual) information, but I could give lots of others.

    225:

    The context was a century earlier, and what second-class citizens would wear. Take a look at this image (you can find plenty of others, quite easily)

    What's the evidence that either of those two figures are female? (They have short, partly or completely unconfined hair, which is a pretty common premodern male signifier.)

    And the original context for this sub-thread was the 1930s (e.g., comment #44 by El), so an actual person's memories of what women wore in that period are a lot more relevant than some random sketch of working men from a previous century.

    226:

    I suspect one reason bows and crossbows hung around as long as they did was that they were more accurate, and range (up until the Napoleonic Era) was roughly equivalent for bows and guns.

    Bows, at least, also had a much higher rate of fire.

    On the other hand, training people to use muskets is a lot faster and easier than training them to be archers, which is one of the main reasons why musket-dominated armies took over the battlefield in 16th Century Japan, once the Japanese had figured out how to copy Portuguese matchlocks.

    228:

    Discard the Tragedy of the Commons?

    I don't think so, we may need a new concept to attribute the fishing out of the Oceans, or Peruvian Artisanal Gold Mining in he National Park; Or Ivory Hunting and probable Elephant Extinction. What about Cecil the Lion?

    Locally, They recently (6-8? years?) built a Factory Hog farm in the watershed headwaters of our "Wild and Scenic" River (The Buffalo river, Arkansas). The Environmental Impact Statement was "approved" under murky circumstances, and they are already finding contamination in the watershed. Now that it is built, you can't just tell them to unbuild it and go away, that is against the (well established) "takings" clause of the US constitution.

    We probably do need a new concept for the conversion of Public Goods and activities for Private Profit ("Privatization"), Charter Schools, Private Prisons, etc. Or is this just old fashioned regular graft?

    229:

    Quite. Thank you. As the saying goes, needs must when the devil drives. The caption to that picture said they were women, but I accept that is not proof.

    230:

    Thanks for the link -- interesting reading!

    But I'm not sure what your argument is. After all, that article doesn't really show that trouser-wearing was something routine among lower-class women; instead, the fact that these (few) women working underground in coal mines were sometimes wearing trousers was part of the whole scandal. If women working in fields, factories, or homes often wore trousers, then women in coal mines doing the same wouldn't have attracted such (outraged and fascinated) attention.

    (After all, the fact that a few girls in the coal mines sometimes went topless -- though the article points out that the frequency of this was exaggerated -- doesn't mean that lower-class 19th Century women routinely worked topless...)

    231:

    Can we pitch "The Tragedy of the Commons" in the ditch where it belongs?

    I kind of have the feeling that you're conflating the general idea of the tragedy of the commons with one of the commonly proposed solutions -- that is, that the tragedy can only be prevented by privatization, as opposed to the idea that the tragedy can be prevented by government regulation (Or, in some cultural specific circumstances, genuine common ownership), such that you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=895724

    I mean, it's kind of hard not to see the relevance of the general idea -- that is, if there are no restrictions on individuals (or corporations) in exploiting (or damaging) a common good, and no immediate costs to them for doing so, then the common good can be damaged or even destroyed -- in things like air pollution, water pollution, overfishing, deforestation, etc., etc. You can, as some people do, call it "the tragedy of open access" instead of "the tragedy of the commons", if you like; but the basic idea seems to be a very valid one.

    (Since I grew up in Los Angeles, and have seen the continued improvements in air pollution brought about over the last few decades by the South Coast Air Quality Management Board and other government initiatives, it makes perfect sense to me to talk about air pollution as an example of the tragedy of the commons, one which can be alleviated or fixed by government regulation.)

    232:

    Ok, you got me there, I was conflating two strands - the bridge thing was about the parts / tool quality.

    My mind was thinking about rifles, and mass production of steel barrels. e.g. did the Bessemer process impact warfare?

    The Baker rifle did not have steel barrel, at least as far as I can tell - The Pitt Rivers Museum page goes into enough detail to tell us that the stock was English Walnut, but no mention of barrel composition.

    The first one looks like it did is the Snider–Enfield (1886).

    30 years until it's mass produced seems a long gap, so I might be missing the obvious (i.e. all barrels were steel etc). Inefficiency in the bureaucracy or something else?

    ~

    Answering to the initial question - you can delay industrialization, but is there a way to artificially freeze it's development?

    233:

    Mostly he made 3 big mistakes.

    1. Trying to reconquer Haiti.

    Actually you have to forgive Boney a bit for that one.

    Prior to the Haitian War of Independence, Haiti was phenomenally valuable. It alone produced roughly 40% of all the sugar used in Europe, and over 75% of the coffee, let alone tobacco, indigo, cacao and cotton. The loss of Haiti was directly responsible for the Louisiana Purchase, since the new mainland colonies were not economically viable for France at that time without it, despite being enormously larger in size.
    Indirectly it also led to be the breaking in power of the huge sugar plantations in the Caribbean and India, and arguably to the decline in slavery, since the loss of access to Haiti caused Napoleon to invest heavily in sugar beet development in Europe, drastically reducing the price of sugar across the continent until WW1 destroyed many of the beet farms.

    Haiti today might be a basket case, but keep in mind that despite almost complete isolation imposed by all the major powers in the 1800s, it still managed to pay a debt to France of millions of francs, a debt imposed based on the value of the plantations and slaves lost by French plantation owners. Staggeringly lucrative.
    On the other hand since the invasion in 1915, the USA decided to get in on the act, and between them and the local bunch of scoundrels the country was run into the ground. A nation of free black slaves was not an example that any major power liked to see succeeding.

    234:

    Steel is not necessarily better than cast iron or such in all circumstances and uses, not to mention cost.

    235:

    An interesting thing I learned recently about Portugal, and to a lesser extent Belgium coming into it from a Rum & Cachaca trade show, and wondering why Arrack and Cachaca were so poorly known in Europe.

    When the British and French established colonies and trading posts, they upskilled locals to enhance local manufacturing, and established trade routes between the colonies directly. A big part of that was shipping alcohol around to pacify the locals and slaves and to use as a trade good. The Portuguese and Dutch didn't. They effectively treated each colony as a standalone, distilling a ready spirit locally, but they never wanted any spirit from the colonies to contaminate their home markets for port or jenevers, and they also made sure that all trade from the colonies had to flow through the home states.

    Spain kind of split the difference, but since they had had so much gold and silver coming in, other trade was much less important.

    Britain had the resources and spare manpower from her empire to industrialise first. Belgium was soon after, since following the Napoleonic wars they had France as a major customer. I think France itself was hurting too much from the wars to afford the investment initially. Portugal I think had the problem of being a major British ally, but not having any major markets at the time to justify the development, and were probably a net importer at the time, but that's just a wild ass guess.

    236:

    (catching up on this thread) and no-one makes the mistakes of invasive species (hello America and the Starling). This takes an awful lot of discipline. It can be done for larger species.(Starlings; not kidding; personally have seen movements in well in excess of 1 million starlings. Also, unlucky members of smaller flocks occasionally knock out power locally.) Pathogenic fungi, bacteria, viruses, etc, and destructive insects (including vectors) are harder. Weed seeds are a intermediate. Basic point being that cross-species-boundary (e.g. cross ocean) commerce accidentally moves life around absent extraordinary care. In my lifetime, in the US northeast, just for plant diseases I've seen (partial list) the long tail end of the American chestnut blight (20 percent of some types of climax deciduous forest pre-blight, roughly), dutch elm disease, a dogwood blight, an ash blight, a hemlock (tree) insect pest (woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae)). Can be done, but would require restrictions on commerce, and many mistakes would be made at least once.

    237:

    It depends on the metallurgy of the cast iron. I used to carry out contract work for an iron foundry who produced paper-making machinery. The rolls were cast-iron, sometimes as much as 160 tonnes in weight for the biggest (used to make toilet paper).

    The cast iron was SG-grade, spheroidal graphite with carefully managed metallurgy and a complicated computer-controlled cooldown in a soak pit to form the carbon granules that resulted in a poured casting that was nearly as strong as a wrought steel structure would be. It could also be more easily machined than regular cast iron.

    238:

    And some fairly early, non-fancy, cast iron has lasted well (i.e. outlasted later mild steel under harsh conditions), but I have no idea what the differences are in early cast irons. You might.

    239:

    Since this green utopian scenario is interesting (to me at least), one more point that would add color/plot points to a fully detailed scenario; an invasive species problem can often be "solved" (after a regrettable instance of stupidity) by introducing a species specific predator/eater or disease after careful experimental study, or accidentally introducing a controlling predator/pest/disease. Not a biologist but have seen this happen a few times in the US NE. (UK people: anything similar in the UK?) - Once was with Gypsy Moths, introduced deliberately with accidental escape. For many decades in the US NE there were boom/bust cycles of varying length with lots of damage during booms; opportunistic predator booms precipitated the busts if I'm correctly recalling what a scientist who studied them told me. In the 1990s a fungal disease appeared (introduced a decade earlier, according to wikipedia) and the booms have stopped. - Once was with purple loosestrife. In the US it used to take over wetlands, driving out the native wetland plants and wildlife that depends on them. In the 1990s a few species of pest beetle were studied for a while (relative to related U.S. native plants) and then introduced. Now the purple loosestrife populations are under control where one or more of these pest species are present.

    240:

    As you can tell, I'm no materials scientist.

    My train of thought was: Brearley created stainless steel by experimenting with alloys under direct instruction to create a better gun barrel. Presumably this process can be traced backwards through the history of iron / steel production (the USA industrial history is full of this).

    The point being to find an inflection point where you can 'break the chain' and stagnate the technology - which is the only way Steam Punk / non-artificially produced (i.e. societal) stagnation of that tech period can happen. The idea of post-AI Steampunk has been visited many times - I've not seen a non-magical / new element / reality based world do it however.

    One other solution: humidity. If your world is sufficiently hotter than an Earth standard, gunpowder becomes an issue, and not only 'out in the field'. e.g.

    Johansson explains that, as manufactured, most powders contain 0.5 to 1% of water by weight. (The relative humidity is “equilibrated” at 40-50% during the manufacturing process to maintain this 0.5-1% moisture content). Importantly, Johansson notes that powder exposed to moist air for a long time will absorb water, causing it to burn at a slower rate. On the other hand, long-term storage in a very dry environment reduces powder moisture content, so the powder burns at a faster rate. In addition, Johansson found that single-base powders are MORE sensitive to relative humidity than are double-base powders (which contain nitroglycerine).

    TECH TIP: Humidity Can Change Powder Burn Rates Accurate Shooter 2008)

    If your world has the climate of the Triassic (and you can fudge around all the other constraints that brings) then you might get a different outcome.

    241:

    (Been away ...)

    Trump is stating, directly, that the roll-back goes beyond 1960.

    I believe you are correct, but I also believe you attribute too much insight to him; he's implying a return to the pre-1960 status quo but he. personally, hasn't thought it through: he's just pushing the buttons his constituency want to see him pushing, and it works, so he's rolling with that vision and he'll keep rolling with it until and unless something derails the feedback loop between his mouth and his audience's collective id.

    242:

    I'm not familiar with the Japanese example

    The Meiji restoration is your go-to: ran from 1868 to 1912 and Japan basically went from high-end mediaeval tech static society to parity with western Europe in under 50 years. It happened in the wake of the Outside Context Problem that disrupted the Shogunate when the Perry expedition steamed into Japanese harbours in 1853-54 and demanded a trade treaty at gun-point.

    I repeat: late-mediaeval catch-up (Japan had no guns -- they'd been banned in the 17th century -- and virtually no contact with the outside world since the late 17th century) to 19th century industrial west in two generations.

    They did something similar again post-1945 when they systematically adopted a whole shedload of American business and technology practices and leap-frogged from a bombed-flat industrial base that had largely run on traditional lines to modern corporation-like structures and high-end quality production in, yes, one generation flat.

    South Korea was level pegging with North Korea in 1973 -- both were rather poor (by western standards) authoritarian dictatorships, one communist bloc (NK) and one borderline-fascist (SK) -- but by 1995 South Korea's per-capita GDP surpassed that of Japan, which had been top of the developed world up until then.

    And then there's your Soviet example.

    So: if you know where you're going, you can get there.

    (As for "can Miriam do it" in Empire Games, I think you forgot Erasmus's job at the end of the first series. Hint: Minister of Propaganda, in partnership with Ministry for Paratime Industrial Espionage (and development).)

    243:

    f the rich have something it will trickle down to the poor, with rate determined by various factors.

    Ahem: Trick-down theory doesn't work -- even the IMF agrees!

    It's one thing to provide an incentive to work harder and produce stuff, but it turns out that rick folks don't redistribute their wealth effectively; they divert it into rent-seeking via long-term investments (driving up the cost of real estate and commodities) and they fritter it on luxury goods -- a Bugatti may cost a hundred times as much as a Ford, but it doesn't generate a hundred times as much employment.

    244:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/MandelaEffect/comments/3x2aey/jaws_and_dolly_explanation/

    I also remember some big things that never happened. And since I am only up to comment 57, forgive me if I mention that there are at least 6 kinds of completely different types of multiverse, including serial consmologies both open (Conformal Cyclic Cosmology) and closed (Big Bounce)

    245:

    Everyone seems to assume in the "jumstart industrial revolution" fantasies just how hard that would be. Go back to the Roman Empire and introduce the steam engine? Good luck finding the materials, not to mention getting the money. It would be like a time traveler appearing now and telling us how we can build a real starship, and all he needs is to modify CERN to prove it and can he have a $billion please?

    246:

    "Yes, the WEIRD countries have low/zero population growth"

    Like India, China and almost all of the rest of the world outside of Africa?

    247:

    "The gender boundaries in clothing are enormous and we see them still in effect even now with the insistance of the baby industry capitalists pushing blue and pink in EVERYTHING including godded Legos."

    True, except you go back a ways and it was pink (red) for boys and blue for girls. It may also be related to the fact that if you want a birthday card that just says "Happy Birthday" you will have to search hard. Whereas all the others seem to be variants on "Happy Birthday Great Uncle Wilbur on your 83rd Birthday!"

    [It's about monopolizing shelf space]

    248:

    30 years until it's mass produced seems a long gap, so I might be missing the obvious (i.e. all barrels were steel etc). Inefficiency in the bureaucracy or something else?

    Bureaucratic inertia is part of the answer, but another part is that equipping an army with rifles is expensive. We can mass-produce assault rifles like the M-16 and SA-90 for on the order of $250-500 these days, but even a small army requirement is going to suck up ten thousand units, and if you want to re-equip the US Army, why, hello million rifle order book. You then need to lay in on the order of 1000 rounds per weapon, just for training, at on the order of $0.2-1.0 per round. (Yes, there are laser-tag-like gizmos for training folks in pointing a gun and pulling the trigger, and they're used by the military -- for example, a friend of mine did he re-qual in the RAF on a rifle using this gear and without firing a single round. But. Actual infantry? I'm guessing Martin will have something to say on the idea of expecting an infantry unit to perform effectively in combat if they have to say "bang" whenever they pull the trigger in training.) Then there's the need to retrain the armourers in working on the new kit, the maintenance and care of the new inventory, learning all those one-in-a-thousand weaknesses that will make a rifle's breech explode in battle in weird-ass environmental conditions never tested during procurement ...

    Nope, procuring a new rifle for the army isn't necessarily cheaper than re-equipping with a new main battle tank. And if you get it wrong and there's a systemic flaw in the new gun, you are profoundly fucked once you get into a fight.

    So there's a strong incentive not to replace a rifle that is in service and that isn't obviously broken or obsolete (e.g. the single-round breech loaders of the late 19th century like the Martini-Henry being replaced by stripper-clip rifles like the Lee-Enfield, or the arrival of gas-blowback self-loading rifles and then assault rifles with short cartridges in response to changes in the average range at which infantry engagements happened rendering the long-cartridge bolt-action rifle obsolescent in combat).

    249:

    As for why China did not industrialize? maybe their civil service was a bit too good and valued stability too much. Zheng He:

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

    "Chinese records[77] state that Zheng He's fleet sailed as far as East Africa. According to medieval Chinese sources, Zheng He commanded seven expeditions. The 1405 expedition consisted of 27,800 men and a fleet of 62 treasure ships supported by approximately 190 smaller ships.[78][79] The fleet included:

    "Chinese treasure ships"used by the commander of the fleet and his deputies (nine-masted, about 127 metres (417 feet) long and 52 metres (171 feet) wide), according to later writers.

    Equine ships carrying horses and tribute goods and repair material for the fleet (eight-masted, about 103 m (338 ft) long and 42 m (138 ft) wide).

    Supply ships containing staple for the crew (seven-masted, about 78 m (256 ft) long and 35 m (115 ft) wide).

    Troop transports six-masted, about 67 m (220 ft) long and 25 m (82 ft) wide.

    Fuchuan warships five-masted, about 50 m (160 ft) long.

    Patrol boats eight-oared, about 37 m (121 ft) long.

    Water tankers with 1 month's supply of fresh water.

    Six more expeditions took place, from 1407 to 1433, with fleets of comparable size"

    250:

    Re: Soviet industrialisation and the Russian Economy subsequent downfall - I am sure many readers are already familiar with this, but I cannot endorse "Red Plenty" (by Greg Spufford) enough.

    251:

    Great analysis of the costs and implications of Small Arms Procurement, add the tendency of bureaucracies to shave pennies.

    C. J. Chivers wrote about how America equipped the Afghans(?) with a (slightly cheaper) folding stock Rumanian AK, making middle range marksmanship difficult. What the troops themselves wanted (needed) was an old fashioned fixed stock model, the folding stock was a Rumanian compromise to enable prompt (easier?) disembarkation from armored transports. But they were happy to sell them cheap to the US.

    And supposedly there is an initiative to set up real US manufacture of an AK/AKM variant for potential distribution to clients. Many of the US "manufacturers" are artisanal producers using imported parts to the extent allowed.

    BTW, British troops at the beginning of the Boer war were NOT equipped with Stripper Clip enabled weapons, it was a factor in Boer fire superiority. It is a Mod, still being performed on weapons retrieved from store for WW I training.

    252:

    The "laser-tag" rifle adaptor is used for squad-level fire and manoeuvre training, close-quarters combat and the like -- fun-house setups or urban village training areas. Basic rifle training carried out with live ammo happens on ranges to get the soldier used to the recoil and noise and for them to learn general weapon handling (clearing a jam, replacing a magazine, adjusting sights, trigger squeeze etc.) Fun-house training does NOT involve live ammo.

    253:

    Some of this will be survivor bias -- there was a lot of cast iron produced from the 1800s onwards and some of it has survived due to circumstance when exposed hence its notability. There's also misidentification of old wrought iron as cast iron on first glance; forged wrought iron where the worked surface has not been disturbed by cutting or drilling has a work-hardened protective layer which is more weatherproof than regular cast iron. I have a large bar of 19th century wrought iron in our workshop which is pitted and corroded on the surface but the metal underneath is still good.

    A lot of old ironwork will have been painted in the past to protect it (using the infamous red lead paint) and even abandoned to the elements that metal will have lasted longer than unpainted and unmaintained iron of a similar vintage.

    254:

    The easiest summary of the UN demographer's stats I've found is here. They're worth a look if you're interested in this topic. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

    The Indian subcontinent seems to have considerable population growth. Even China with it's low percentage growth of 0.46 % and fertility rate of 1.55 is so vast that it increased by 6.2m and with another 360k emigrating. And that was what I was trying to get over. Even though there are lots of countries with low percentage growth, the global absolute growth isn't slowing down. It's still 80m pa. just like it has been for the last 50 years. And the top 5 for absolute growth last year are India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia with 33m pa between them. India topped the table by adding 15m last year. How can you call that low? We're in the linear middle part of the sigmoid curve and with linear growth there's no point in talking about exponential percentage growth because that will inevitably fall as the absolute total increases.

    255:

    The saying "If you want to train an archer, start by training his grandfather" probably tells you everything you need to know about the issue.

    256:

    Ahh, but there's always a Gru in the shadows!

    While I understand this reasoning, if you look at the amount of different rifles the Empire used between 1850 and 1918, it's rather shocking: British military rifles.

    At the height of the Empire, the military were producing either variants or replacements every two to five years.

    As such, I don't think cost applies (although, of course, maintaining an Empire means that the off-casts are handed down through the colonies and regional police forces / local allied militaries).

    257:

    Fertility rate is a far better measure of the underlying trends than absolute numbers here and now

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

    258:

    Just for starters Philip Mintz, Sweetness and Capitalism. There are myriad, myriad works. Look in the bookstore of Liverpool's Slavery Museum for a whole bunch of titles.

    But actually it's the other way 'round -- if one believes the obverse it has to be proven, and the obverse has been pretty much unproven by the historical work of the last 50 - 60 years.

    With the exception of course, of those curled upper lips typese who insist on wearing blinders such as the idiots who tried to review Edward Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told in the Economist -- which then had to retract and apologize.

    259:

    Please note the picture of the woman at the bottom of the social scale in England, pulling the coal pit cart, on her frackin' hands and knees, pregnant, in a SKIRT.

    As for the naked slaves this was a scandal that was put directly on their owner. The slaves didn't want them naked and neither did his neighboring planters.

    260:

    Note: when I first spotted this huge speed up / turn-over in rifles and the dates, as well as Bessemer, I assumed it was directly related. i.e. mass produced steel = huge speed up in rifle tech.

    Apparently (?!?) that's not the case.

    I'm interested to the why of that, though.

    261:

    Long history of such here, and continuing research and fieldwork. Marine organisms carried around by shipping can have a huge impact too (not just across oceans).

    262:

    No, he's talking about a specific rather famous essay

    http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html

    which included numerous ideas, some of which seem to have been superseded. Mainly it made the case that overpopulating is an act of pollution (violation of the commons) and should be regulated by social arrangements (read government) rather than appeals to conscience.

    263:

    It's all the same thing. Using corporate welfare to steal from the people by setting up a private prison is no different from dumping your poisonous industrial byproducts in the river.

    264:

    I'd suggest there were multiple parallel developments each with certain advantages in use. The Snider-Enfield was as great an advance breech-loaders as the Dreyse needle-gun that, along with railroad based logistics, won Prussia the war with Austria. But the innovation of mass-produced metal cartridges made this obsolete. The Martini-Henry introduced a tremendously user-friendly action for manual breech-loading of cartridges and was incredibly popular in all sorts of contexts related to the contemporary zenith of British colonialism. It was certainly widely used in our own humble war of extermination in Oz. But self-loaders with box magazines conferred an obvious advantage and the Lee-Metford would have been the obvious successor, except that smokeless powder was developed around the same time. The Lee-Enfield took all these advances together and that brings us up to WWI.

    The other factor to consider is the diversity of the troops involved, which at that time included regular and irregular forces in places as diverse as Nepal and New Zealand. Rather than a single British Army, multiple large elements of the Empire had their own procurement and requirements.

    265:

    By "something" I mean technology, such as plumbing. The idea part of it costs nothing to distribute, other than in the sense that if you can restrict an idea you can charge for it and if you let it go you are suffering the cost of missing out on an opportunity to gouge. If the rich have some gizmo, initially very expensive, somebody will figure out how to make a version of the same gizmo that's more accessible because of simplified design, use of cheaper materials, or mass production. Money will eventually trickle down too, in the sense that radioactive waste will eventually be safe.

    To substitute another buzz phrase, information wants to be free.

    266:

    Chemistry, which was advancing at a fair pace at that time, allowing the development both of more consistent and less smoky propellants, and more reliable primers that could be better counted on to go off when you wanted them to and not go off when you didn't. This in turn allowed the development of ammunition and loading systems from the "cartridge" that set off the Indian mutiny, which was more a kit of pre-measured items to assemble a load from, to what is familiar to us as a cartridge today.

    Also, it's not as extravagant as it looks, because most of those rifles were evolutionary rather than revolutionary designs, so there was not a need to suddenly re-equip the entire army all in one go, and several variants could be in service at the same time. Most of the training from variant n would still apply to variant n+1. And n+1 would take the same ammunition - I think a better indicator is to look at when the standard ammunition changed, rather than the introduction of new variants of rifle to use it. Another thing, of course, is that before WW1 there was never a need to manufacture the things by the millions.

    267:

    Re: The rate of changing over different makes of guns by an army

    How does this jibe with the rate at which various makes/models of guns exploded in the soldier's face, thus less likely to be ever fired by his surviving buddies and therefore a lot more expensive per round fired?

    268:

    Yes, if you followed the wiki link, it rests on the .303 Ross Rifle that was hated by common soldiers but loved by snipers because one could choose their ammunition carefully, the others could not. i.e. ammunition consistency was a major factor.

    Then look at #240.

    I'm already sniffing around munitions and BRASS casings.

    Hint: Steam Punk loves Brass. Shame the Brass was less reliable than the Iron / Steel.

    +50 points!

    ~

    Ok, let's turn this around: the true genius of Early / Middle Stage Capitalism is uniformity (product, brand whatever: you eat a McD's in the USA, it's the same in China - which isn't actually true, but we'll stick with it for now).

    The 20th Century provides lots of cognitive models on how this is done, the 19th C was all about the physical.

    So, at what point could industrial scale production of brass cogs make sense?

    Never.

    269:

    I think you missed the spin. The basic point is that commons can and have been managed for centuries. They don't need to be privatized, they don't need governments to take them over. Commons management can fail horribly, but successful commons (per Ostrom's) work had 8 (in her count, 10 in others) successful principles they all adhered to.

    To use another LA example, back in the 1950s-60s, there was no management of the groundwater, and there were over a dozen separate water districts pumping water, in a smaller version of what's happening in the San Joaquin Valley right now. (Incidentally, I'm doing this from memory, so details may get fuzzy). When they started overdrafting the water along the Pacific Coast (as in Venice and Santa Monica), salt water started moving in from the ocean, because the freshwater keeping it out was being depleted. The water districts realized that, if they didn't work together, their individual actions would suck salt water into the basin and poison all of LA's aquifers. They formed a commons to collectively manage their water. It took over a decade and several lawsuits against recalcitrant members, but they formed their compact, and so far as I know, it's still in place today. Ostrom did her PhD work on it, and it's in her book and papers.

    Now contrast that with current management of groundwater in places like the San Joaquin Valley, and you can see how pernicious the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons is. The example of LA has been around for awhile now, but the myth is so common that few water basins in California are managed at all. Indeed, farmers in the San Joaquin seem to think it's their sovereign duty as capitalists to drain their aquifers faster than their neighbors can, to get as much money as possible out of their land before it becomes unfarmable. In 2014, the state required groundwater management districts to form, but they were to be regulatory controls, and they're taking bids on who gets to set the regulations for each district. In many districts, it's expected that it will take many court cases to figure out who governs what.

    The alternative, treating water basins and aquifers as commons and managing them in perpetuity to meet their members' needs, hasn't even been thought of, at least to my limited knowledge. That's the power of the myth of the Tragedy of the Commons, and why it needs to be abandoned. I'll be happier when people get it into their heads that commons are a perfectly workable solution to some resource management problems.

    270:

    Although catastrophic failure is still a frequently cited concern by soldiers, the US military seems hesitant about switching rifles.

    http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/19/armys-quits-tests-after-competing-rifle-outperform/

    So in this real-life scenario we have ... need, ample budget, several expert manufacturers, an established and stable product category, R&D capability, ample energy to manufacture the arms, most elected pols on-side, etc. So why is product development in this category so stagnant? Makes no sense.

    Maybe someone here has some personal insight into/experience with this?

    271:

    Ah, but this is all commercial land.

    Google: "Star Wars C3P0 Silver Leg".

    Now, the official excuse is that the original toys [which I'm staring at right now] didn't have the silver leg because... reasons.

    ~

    The actual / virtual cross-over is that while [they] can influence physical stuff, it's very very hard for [them].

    Visual / Electronically stored stuff?

    Easey-fucking-peasey.

    ~

    Or, of course, C3PO actually had a silver leg, it was never picked up due to bad editing / filmatography, the toys never got the message and someone decided that $4billion allowed them to fix the record.

    But, no: C3P0 never had a silver leg. This shit is boring.

    [hint: if you want to play meta(n3), they're hitting ideological spots on each demographic. Look at the spread: Star Wars, Bond etc etc.

    It's crude, but hey.

    You needed wings to stay above it Awesome Movie Clips : YT: Film: 0:30 .

    Now riddle me why I had to insert into a lower entity "best 10 Vietnam" quotations to get that clip for the last 5 years.

    Why?

    That link doesn't contain the quotation. Published on Aug 2, 2016

    Someone used a popular YT channel to spike, and it does not contain the film quotation. It's also magically at #1 Google search, with 1 view. And that's my view. 4 days ago posted.

    Oh boy.

    Google should be aware of our other realms. Cause this kind of childish shit will get you a fucking spank.

    Hint: your balls. All snowy and white.

    I don't see any method at all YT: Film: 0:47

    ~

    Oh, and bye the bye - that's called not only catching the Rye, it's pre-nuping it, taking it to the cleaners and then addicting it to heroin.

    1 view.

    You fuckers are slow

    272:

    Hint: it's a basic spike / data smog attempt.

    I just kinda have a way about me to know when these things happen and how to see them before they happen and then hit the spike.

    ~

    Now fuck off. Before I get annoyed.

    273:

    Oh, and for that little trick, here's mine:

    THE BUTTERFLY obtains
    But little sympathy,
    Though favorably mentioned
    In Entomology.
    Because he travels freely
    And wears a proper coat,
    The circumspect are certain That he is dissolute.
    Had he the homely scutcheon of modest Industry, ’T were fitter certifying for Immortality.

    You're fucking out of your League, Little Men.

    But, in response for the spike, we'll take something equivalent.

    Your Internal Voice, since you chose to change reality from Truthful Quotation to Silence.

    Mine.

    274:

    Not that you didn't already attempt that one.

    I'll not hate you for it, but you fuckers are... slow.

    Dying breed and all that.

    Wild Frontier Progidy, YT: Music: 3:49

    Oh, small tip.

    If I can catch them apples that fast, you'd better back the fuck off ever threatening my kind again.

    You're Slow.

    Don't assume morality and empathy is weakness, we'll cut your fucking balls off mate.

    275:

    Spent a bit of time looking for some evidence in case anyone challenged my assertions, and I found this article

    http://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/IRES/2016014.pdf

    Apparently the demographic decline predates the French Revolution. I wonder how many of the other trends predate it as well?

    276:

    Oh, and if you want to know how we do it.

    Fuck off.

    The poison / alcohol is shielding, remember?

    Or, just random chance and someone at Google and Youtube in that channel happening to upload a spiked propaganda version to ruin search results at the very instant I went looking for it.

    But no: it was posted a couple of days ago, I was the first viewer.

    So, we're back to Us having the Power and You being the Fools.

    I'm proving that your genocidal wiping out of our kind was not only a mistake, but it was predicated on lies.

    We're Better than You

    p.s.

    Paint it Black YT: Music: 3:46

    ~

    Oh, and Jewish joke no-one ever got: You don't count Jews, ever. You make references and accidentally align the number of Jews and that number. No, it's not due to the Holocaust, it's because they do not want to be: "Weighed, Measured and Found Wanting".

    You fuckers are so out dated.

    277:

    Oh, and Dirk.

    There's your proof.

    QED.

    ;.;

    We're Not Human :D

    No matter what happens, it's now in writing: Not only Slow, Stupid and Selfish but Stunningly Blind.

    We're doing this drunk.

    ~

    Hint: it's probably not a good idea to have us sober up, take it all seriously, engage wings and then gut your pathetic reality.

    'Cause, you know - that'd take three months and we'd have to like destroy the minds of people like Blair and Murdoch which is very easy.

    I mean, it's not like you couldn't just cripple the system via CME, is it? (oooh, and who knows about how Magnetic Fields and CME and Sun - Earth tubes work?).

    You've got about 40 years to sort this shit out before our kind really start acting up.

    I'd suggest you solve your problems, whatever it takes.

    278:

    So, at what point could industrial scale production of brass cogs make sense?

    It probably already makes sense to manufacture little brass cogwheels with lapel-pin backing now. It would only take a modest upsurge in the popularity of steampunk for mass production to make sense, though in a wider variety of marketable forms. And it's quite possible we're only 2-3 events from some sort of steampunk event horizon leading to mainstream markets that compel a twisted logic of their own. I can only suggest to keep an eye on the market for opera glasses, corsets, top hats, goggles and hot glue.

    279:

    The point being that at no point in the industrial process, even accounting for ultra-high end clock making [a joke that no-one's done, so wasted) was this a concern.

    The actual point of the thread has been revealed though: We See You.

    That Fu*king Nobody

    We were just playing around.

    280:

    p.s.

    The punch line is:

    The Iron Law of Development is that People Perceive Their Information Bubbles More Accurately Than Theory Imagines.

    ~

    1/10.

    Utter amateurs.

    281:

    Yes, but if we could eliminate the fucking stupid transfers and limit invasive species to the accidental we'd be a bit better off.

    Starlings only are present in North America - no joke - because Shakespeare mentions them in Henry IV. Grey squirrels are rampant in Ireland because some arsehole thought releasing six pairs of them at their wedding would be wonderful. And so on, for much longer than is likely to make you feel good about your fellow humans.

    282:

    Marine chronometers were certainly mass produced, though only later and hard-chromed steel for bearing surfaces would have been more likely. Earlier (including Harrison's) would have involved brass in some places, so I guess it depends what you mean by "on industrial scale". Wind up toys (at the other end of the scale) could have included brass, though more likely pressed sheet. Music boxes? Difference engines?

    283:

    I'm surprised that no one's mentioned Kenneth Pommeranz's The Great Divergence, about exactly when and how Europe pulled ahead of China.

    Short version: China was keeping up with European development up until the 18th Century. Europe was able to get the industrial revolution going because of access to coal and the resources of and the new world. China lacked those resources and went down a cul-de-sac of labor intensive production.

    That would be an argument in favor of stable gunpowder empires (at least in a resource scarce scenario) as well an argument that Europe needed other people's wealth to get industrialization rolling.

    284:

    Other examples of economic catch up - Taiwan caught up with the industrialized world with very rapid growth from the 1950s to the 1980s. To a lesser extent, France had the Trente Glorieuses where they caught up with the leading industrial powers. It's tough to grow rapidly if you have to invent everything yourself but easy when you can copy. It's funny that science fiction came up with multiple Connecticut Yankee type fantasies before the real world demonstrated they could be surprisingly practical.

    285:

    It's not quite Slavery 2.0. There's the long term problem that the kids of illegals become citizens with voting rights and often politics the bosses don't like. Less than 30 years ago California was arguably center right politically and Republicans could compete statewide. Conservatives complain with some truth this is due to immigration but hilariously fail to notice who brought about the immigration in the first place.

    The other long term problem - Mexico was very convenient as a source of labor. Problem is that the fertility rate has been dropping and immigration with it. Net immigration dropped with the last recession and isn't coming back. So that raises the question of where you find your new source of cheap labor.

    286:

    I think a better indicator is to look at when the standard ammunition changed, rather than the introduction of new variants of rifle to use it.

    I have a memory from Ken Burn's US Civil War series of a mention than the Union Quartermaster General had to deal with over 1500 variations of munitions. (over 1700?)

    Man units were formed up locally with the arms they had picked at the time so the 158th from Mass. would likely use something totally different from the 45th from Ohio who were next to them in the fighting line.

    287:

    Standard ammunition for the British was projected to change to a .276 cartridge, they were preparing for troop trials in 1914; Thus the origin of the (Mauser derived) P14, designed around that cartridge. Which, after contracting to three US manufacturers for production in .303, (Which do NOT feature interchangeable parts between the three manufacturers, oops)morphed into the (US) 30-06 P17; More US troops saw combat with the P17 than the much mytholgized 03 Springfield in WW I.

    On the ACW, yes, there was a tremendous variety, but most line infantry carried some variety of Springfield (.58) or Enfield (.577). So they standardized on .577 Ammunition.

    The "Springfield" was a Chinese Copy of the P53 Enfield, with the US Improvement (M1855?) of a Maynard Tape Primer, reverting back to a simple percussion system in 1861.

    It was one of the barriers to introducing an Infantry Breech Loader, they were all experimental and everyone was also proposing their own proprietary cartridge. The ordnance department WAS doing Infantry troop trials (Lots of 3,000?) with various "Trap Door" Springfield conversions in the spring of 1865. And all the troops on the frontier received Breech loaders of some sort by 1867 or so, a very credible performance in an era of technological uncertainty and budget constraints.

    ALL the Federal Cavalry at Gettysburg (1863) were equipped with (Single shot) breech loading Carbines, by 1865 the Federal Cavalry were mostly equipped with Spencer Repeaters (Rimfire cartridges). The future was clear, it was the path. The two key Centerfire Primer systems, Berdan and Boxer, are both pateneted (Developed?) in 1865.

    288:

    you can delay industrialization, but is there a way to artificially freeze it's development? Quite easily, IF you control all external access. See Shogunate Japan. Which could, very easily, have turned outward, used the European's inventions & taken over the whole of the Pacific (ish) in the next 150 years. But they didn't.

    289:

    He's also implied that he "cant't see" why the US shouldn't go for a "First Use" of nukes, for Ghu's sake! Unbelievably dangerous if true. Even worse than a Trump selection of US Supreme Court Judges, which takes a lot of doing ....

    290:

    The exact reverse, in fact of the previous process I mentioned in # 288

    291:

    Oh dear

    271 - 274 appear to be content-free
    292:

    We can continue the back and forth by alternately cherry picking stats, but that doesn't really move things forward. There's something going on here that's not really clear and I think it's being hidden by looking at averages and percentages. So for instance, http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/#region shows "Asia" as half the world's population (constant), half the world's yearly increase in absolute numbers (constant), but a yearly change of 0.98% (dropping) and average fertility rate of 2.2 (dropping). So from one perspective Asia is industrialising, urbanising, dropping it's fertility rate, and dropping it's growth rate. And yet, it's contributing half of the net increase in the total. One hypothesis I'm trying is that the reservoir of subsistence farmers in extreme poverty isn't changing in that area. Their high fertility rate is still there, but the excess people they are generating are moving to the cities where their fertility rate drops off. So the positive feedback of more children having more children isn't happening any more. For the moment this is a process in dynamic equilibrium. The net result is a constant linear growth which looks like a fall in the averages and percentages because while the growth numbers are constant, the total is increasing. And of course the total load on the system is also still increasing. Looking at the other regions and to a very rough first approximation, Europe and N America are static. Asia, Latin America, Oceania are growing linearly. And Africa is still growing exponentially. Now what bothers me about this is the way the pollyannas use the experience of Europe and N America to suggest that if we just educate, industrialise and urbanise the 3rd world completely, total population growth will drop to zero and then go negative. Except that we're still adding 80m pa, 1b every 12 years and that doesn't actually show any signs of slowing down. That extra 1b keeps showing up. And the system cost of adding them and turning them into WEIRD-level consumers keeps growing. Maybe, maybe, I'm extrapolating the last 50 years into the next 50 years and I'm missing the next inflection point in the S curve as we change from linear growth to falling absolute growth just as the Neo-Malthusians missed the inflection point from exponential to linear growth in the 1960s. But even the UN demographers are not predicting a peak this century, or even much of a slow down before 2050. They're still predicting 10b in 2056. Adding another 2.5b in the next 40 years doesn't look like "low/zero growth". Even steady linear growth still looks like a Malthusian trap. It just takes a bit longer to hit the wall.

    293:

    Glitches in the Matrix

    294:

    BTW, I have had that happen with physical objects and where another person shared my recollections. Nothing there for decades, and then the next day an electricity substation been there since forever

    295:

    "Maybe, maybe, I'm extrapolating the last 50 years into the next 50 years..."

    Perhaps. One classic example is Bangladesh fertility rate: 1980, 6.6 - 2016, 2.2

    296:

    Not to mention the pawn shop that will be open across the road from your house for an hour this afternoon, then tomorrow will never have been there.

    297:

    Wrought iron hulks have lasted for half a century (at least!) in the tidal zone of various British estuaries, and it doesn't take long for the wave-driven muck to scour the paint off them. I have dug up wrought iron nails that must be over a century old, but mild steel ones don't last anything like that long in the bioactive zone. It's not just the surface layer, but the way that it is fairly smooth, and doesn't pit, 'bubble' and break off the way that corroded mild steel does. I have heard of long-lasting cast iron constructions, but haven't encountered them as often.

    298:

    The mass production of brass cogwheels started a long time ago, and is still ongoing. Brass has a LOT of advantages over steel for low-stress uses; open up even a (better quality) modern quartz watch or alarm clock, and you will generally see some brass cogwheels. Chromed steel was crap until a few decades ago (seriously), because of metallurgic incompatibility, and needs several layers of different metals applied under near-laboratory conditions. Chrome plating was widely applied to brass and copper, both for decoration and to provide a harder surface.

    299:

    Let's use information as an example. As predicted by almost everybody in the area, one of the great advantages of computers/networking was that it made more information available to more people more readily. Well, ....

    In the past few decades, we have seen a reversal of that. It's not just the use of paywalls, but the abuse of IP and related laws (e.g. 'commercial confidentiality') to restrict access. You can still get it, but it costs (especially if you have to go to court). In the UK, we have seen even the most public of data (e.g. census, electoral register etc.) commoditised and privatised; oh, yes, you can get the dumbed-down summaries of what they want to tell you cheaply, but access to the real data? And the same applies to a lot of scientific data where, increasingly, it is not available even to other academics unless you sign up to a project (with an entry fee in 6 digits). Even at a lower and more open level, how much do you think that it costs to get access to 2,500 papers from 250 journals spread over 25 years?

    300:

    Nice to know. You could probably tell I was riffing on the previous post and not taking the subject very seriously. Means marine chronometers at least would have involved mass produced brass cogwheels as early as mass production was available most likely

    301:

    Depends on whether you're willing to get involved in organized crime. Say there are ten papers that ten people are interested in. They form a club. Each person in a club buys a single but different paper at list price, then shares it with all nine other members. Basically, that's getting papers at 90 percent off. Of course, then the prices of papers would inflate to make up for it. The price point where the tug of war settles down all depends on the vigilance of enforcement of copyright law and on the risk aversion of academics to joining such shady groups, especially as they have to grow larger, and thus to take on more points of failure. Fire WILL be stolen, it's just a matter of when, not IF.

    302:

    Actually, marine chronometers might have needed hand-finished cogwheels until fairly late, because they had to be very accurate, but clockwork was used for more than just clocks. I don't know when mass production started, but I agree that chronometers would have been a fairly early target. A picture of Babbage's difference engine is relevant when referring to brass cogwheels :-)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine#/media/File:LondonScienceMuseumsReplicaDifferenceEngine.jpg

    303:

    Ironic then that Bangla Desh is a great example of exactly what I'm talking about. http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/bangladesh-population/ Every year since 1980, it's grown by ~2m. When it hasn't the difference was made up by mass emigration. In that time, it's doubled it's population. The average percentage change has halved. And as you say, the average fertility rate is a 1/3 of what it was. It's proportion of the world's population is constant at ~2% Interestingly, it's urban population is 5 times as big. So where is that +2m pa coming from? If it's coming from the countryside farming section of society with their high fertility, there's no real reason why it should stop or slow down. They're a smaller and smaller proportion of the total so are no longer driving the averages. But they're not stopping having children. Does that make sense?

    304:

    Which is why all academics should also publish on sites like https://arxiv.org/

    305:

    How about discussing an "Iron Law of Decay"?

    How does an advanced industrial society fail?

    306:

    Like Russia circa 1991

    307:

    Which, inter alia, prevents you using those documents in court, is likely to get you banned from conferences, many publications, sued, sacked and even prosecuted. It also does not help at all with the much more serious problems of information that is less openly published or not published at all. And it's the latter cases that are the real issue.

    I have been in a quasi-legal situation where the other side was abusing data, but I did not have access to do a proper analysis and therefore could not cry "bullshit". And, no, I could not ask for disclosure.

    308:

    Or America circa 2016. Not all of America,just Red State America andthe decline and decay of Red America explains their desparation and devotion to a demagogue like Trump.

    Blue America is doing just fine thank you.

    309:

    In the short term, Central America (except Costa Rica and Panama) and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

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

    Also Puerto Rico, which is undergoing its own Greece-like depression.

    310:

    Re: Access to raw data

    From what I recall from undergrad days when doing secondary research (journals), raw data was not part of the article, only summary data/stats unless the sample sizes were very small, e.g., n of 10 or less. Nowadays with journals imposing even tighter word/character count restrictions it's even less likely that you'd get any raw data included. Charts, yes; raw data, no.

    Have heard from friends who do/publish research that it sometimes seems that some journal's 'peer reviewers' don't bother to look at the findings and summary data, let alone the raw data.  [Hence a move by some major journals to look at identifying and allowing reviews of their 'peer reviewers'.]

    311:

    Here's an August 2015 article about problematic peer reviews:

    http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202

    Plus some historical background on journal referees/peer-reviews, published April 2016.

    http://www.nature.com/news/peer-review-troubled-from-the-start-1.19763

    312:

    You're right, I had forgotten - but still, the political situation is far from settled, and who knows what kind of climate will prevail once the revolution has reached equilibrium? (Well, apart from you, obviously.) If poor old Erasmus ends up like Trotsky...

    313:

    Considering that Nature has been running op-eds re: problems of bad or made-up data for several years, it's likelier that whoever is refusing to hand over the raw data to you for re-examination is going to look like the one at fault (has something to hide).

    http://www.nature.com/news/the-data-detective-1.10937

    The above article is about published research data ...not sure whether the data you're after is academic or private/for-profit.

    Anyways, I've been following this debate for a couple of years to see what the experts come up with as a solution. Some examples include: voluntary double-blinded peer-review (so almost always only likely to be requested by the newbies, less well-established authors), Delphi method-type reviewing (which can degenerate to herd-mentality/most popular small panel of experts' reaction wins), using only mathematical modeling to check conclusions (sure, provided it's a rehash of existing theory and not actually, like, discovering something genuinely 'new').

    IMO, it seems that how to appropriately evaluate research itself needs some fundamental research. As NPG already has Nature Methods and Nature Protocols examining lab and methodology techniques maybe it's time they looked at providing something similar for one level up the science-publishing chain of events such as 'Nature Peer Review'. Basically, a scientific look at best strategies for 'who watches the watcher'.

    314:

    Ah: "the Door in the Wall" syndrome. If Charlie lets me, I will send a picture of a classic one of those, for posting up ......

    315:

    I was thinking more in terms of Pratchett... eg. the musical instruments shop. After all, the Door in the Wall was there, it just led to the Piccadilly (or possibly the Deep Level District) works... from the point of view of the narrator, at least.

    316:

    Nah. Sorry. Try research into (medical) drugs. In any case, as I said, that's not even the real problem - for all its faults, academic research is about the most open provider of data.

    318:

    who knows what kind of climate will prevail once the revolution has reached equilibrium?

    That's a major sub-plot of the trilogy. I won't spoiler it for you.

    319:

    Excellent, I rather thought it might be, and am looking forward to finding out what happens.

    320:

    Except those countries have much smaller populations than Mexico and are undergoing their own fertility decline.

    Puerto Rico's depression is more Greece-light than Greece like. Puerto Rico is a Commonwealth of the US and thus part of a full fiscal union, so the locals don't have to worry about continuing to receive federal money for Social Security, Medicare etc. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and can move freely back and forth from Puerto Rico to the continental US. Which also means they can vote wherever they move in the United States.

    A more likely possibility is that some scholar at the Heritage Foundation or the Hoover Institute will propose bringing in indentured labor from Nigeria or somewhere else in Africa and then wonder why everyone's looking at him funny.

    321:

    Yeah, I didn't mention Australia's history of experiences with invasives and introduced controls. Some of them are real classics, so bizarre that they sound fictional. (Still looking for the last Al Capp comic strip, which IIRC involved an invasive, controls, controls of controls, etc.)

    322:

    Yes, but if we could eliminate the fucking stupid transfers and limit invasive species to the accidental we'd be a bit better off. Not arguing in the slightest. The nursery trade in particular introduced a lot of invasive plant species (around the world); same with animal species for the exotic pet trade. The former is getting better (in NA at least) perhaps due to education on the demand side; not sure about the later though.

    Hundreds of millions of years from now, if the biosphere isn't completely obliterated or transformed (Possible! I'm an optimist though), one of the legacies of humans may be an obvious spike in movement of species in the fossil record.

    323:

    For those interested in difference engines and the cause of the failure of Babbage's project I recommend Michael Lindgren's Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Muller, Charles Babbage, and Georg and Edvard Scheutz. Lindgren wrote this as his PhD thesis and it was published by the MIT press.

    The punchline is that Babbage with the help of Joseph Clement and Joseph Whitworth, two of the finest mechanics of the time, failed. Edvard Scheutz a 17 year old Dane succeeded. Anyone who wishes to write real steampunk should read this. Especially valuable is the discussion of why there was no market for the successful difference engine.

    324:

    They have a smaller population than Mexico, but not that much smaller. Combined, they have about 50 million peoople combined and a TFR of about 2.7. That is smaller than Mexico's current population of 120 million. Between 1990 and 2000, Mexico's population increased from 86 million to 100 million. Keep in mind, though that

    a. We still have 11 million of the previous undocumented immigration wave which was not allowed to "move up"

    b. We don't need as many this time, since we have a different economy than we did back then.

    c. Outsourcing is far more a potent thing than it used to be in the 1990s, and certainly in the 2000s.

    I'm not saying that this is a permanent solution. I don't think that C. Americans + Hispaniola will provide more than a decade at most of undocumented immigrants.

    Another possibility is to add the poor of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela to the list of willing undocumented immigrants. Even with a lower fertility rate, the raw number is important.

    325:

    Small gears, for mass-produced clocks and watches, would usually be die-stamped from brass strip; better quality ones would be machine finished. Larger gears might be machined from brass, bronze, cast iron or steel blanks, either directly using a tooth-shaped milling cutter (or more correctly, a cutter shaped like the gap between two teeth), or generated using a special cylindrical cutter known as a hob; or cast directly in sand moulds, from cast iron, brass or bronze, and machined or ground to a finish.

    How were Gears made? The SteamPunk Forum, 2010

    Hobbing Wikipedia

    ~

    Look, the joke is an obvious one - the technology used to produce quality brass (mass production) is iron / steel based. You can have an iron/steel based tech without brass cogs, the mirror cannot be true.

    326:

    Oh, and since there doesn't appear to be a legally valid version of Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines out there without Jstor or Archix access, you'll have to settle for this:

    The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer PDF (large) Jon Agar

    ~

    Oh, and little rabbits just noticed the smart dust thing.

    Cute :)

    Cocaine Eric Clapton. YT: Music: 3:43

    327:

    Oh, and Triptych:

    One thing that came across strongly in convo w/ Ryan: He's disturbed by rise of "alt right," which he sees as a non-conservative, non-R bloc Twitter, Robert Costa, WaPo.

    This is me being a little bit mean, but this is the bit where the Brass Cogs find out what happens when the Iron / Steel contingent get annoyed at them. [And yes: that was a 100% bona fide Nazi reference].

    The Alt-Right aren't who you think they are. Oh, the majority are, but not some of them.

    ~

    Note: no, I'm the antithesis of the Alt-Right. I also happen to know that a few of them are straight up Winged Beasties like me. Let's just say the survival of all humans is important enough to have a couple deeply placed to ensure the survival of the "white race" as well [what does this even mean you're all psychotic].

    You want to know the greatest crime of the last 20 years?

    High Fructose Corn Syrup.

    Not even being funny.

    328:

    Oh, and Host.

    If you really want to weaponize "Manic Pixie Girls", you're just a tame little bear (although, of course, safe for readership. And cute, to boot: may you find a happy medium with marriage and perhaps a male 2nd / 3rd).

    Some of us took the challenge and subsumed all of your media. And by all we did ALL.

    A bit beyond your protagonists, n'cest pas?

    But, yeah.

    I'd advise a strong dose of Kant, Deleuze and so on before trying it. It's quite a trip.

    And funny funny funny: Clitoris

    Holy Shit, World discovers Clitoris. Then... kinda weird 3d printing thing? Oh, right... Government / society are retarded can't see that but watch us dismember "evil" brown people.

    p.s.

    You did the Elves a disservice, sir. We forgive you, but we're really pissed off atm.

    329:

    Some of us took the challenge and subsumed all of your media. And by all we did ALL. [Liking the explicit >1 cardinality lately.] You've mentioned this previously in passing. I have to ask, because it's a fascinating claim; How? E.g. meat minds soft-modded to the limits (or close) of Homo sapiens brains (or close), with added tech (doing what?) front end, or ...? Audio/video too, or primarily transcripts? An answer would be amazing and wonderful, if unexpected. (Bunches of other speculations buried already in my ellipsis. That one was just illustrative and sci-fi-ish.)

    330:

    Side note on this - The histories I've read suggest that the train commenced its crossing after the "High Girders" (Obvious from illustration and para 1 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_Bridge_disaster#The_bridge ) had failed. If this is correct then wind loading would be a factor, but the dynamic load of the train wasn't.

    331:

    {thinks of his nearest cities, particularly Edinburgh, Glasgow and Oban (described as a city for having a cathedral)}

    Even the large parts of them which are made of sandstone? ;-)

    332:

    "You can have an iron/steel based tech without brass cogs, the mirror cannot be true."

    Actually, you can. Brass can be cast and worked without using any other metal, though it probably can't be stamped, and I don't see how to get fully automatic production. You can cut, grind and file brass using flint and other hard minerals; think of emery boards or even diamond cutting wheels (embedded in copper)! I agree that it WASN'T, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done. And remember that steampunk is based in an era where a lot of mass-production was by using an army of near-slaves.

    333:

    Stamping would be quite possible if there are grades of brass available that are suitable for heat-hardening after annealing.

    I imagine machine tools not really being impossible either, after all we machine steel. Some modern materials are not necessarily out of the question. Cemented carbides were developed in the 1920s as an inexpensive alternative to diamond for the cutting tips in machine tools. Tungsten was discovered in 1783. The process to produce tungsten-carbide tooling would be quite reachable even to Victorians without steel, and retro-futurist knowledge could be a boon in such matters (if that's where we're going).

    It depends on the rules of the hypothetical I guess. If you can make brass, but not steel, you could presumably still make iron tools, hand-work and then case-harden them too (assuming potassium chemistry is allowed). Techniques that were known pre-industrialisation, of course, just less well understood.

    334:

    I am not sure about stamping, because hardening brass that much is seriously non-trivial, but the rest doesn't even need that. Corundum is not all that rare, and is quite adequate for brass (well, even silica is). And you can use carbon case-hardening on iron, but I was assuming no ferrous metals and no chemistry or metallurgy that wasn't in industrial use in 1850.

    What you do get, which is often missed, is that copper (and zinc) become as critical to the economics as oil is to us, with all the politics, crime and warfare that implies.

    335:

    I have just had an idea that addresses something very close to OGH's original question. Iron ores were laid down in the Precambrian, and high-grade ones are the result of two separate processes; let's assume an alternate earth where things happened slight differently, and there are no high-grade ores. Meteoric iron would be a precious metal (as it was close to being, anyway), and wouldn't have become an industrial metal until after modern chemistry developed (like so many metals we now take for granted). Indeed, it could well have happened after the use of electricity became widespread and, even then, iron would still be relatively expensive and used only when essential (e.g. magnets and transformers).

    Obviously, that's not the steampunk world, and there is no reason that technology would halt (but might move slower), but it IS one where technology would have taken a wildly different direction. My point in #334 about the status of copper stands, and even being able to produce aluminium wouldn't change that.

    336:

    A skim of the relevant Wikipedia pages on magnets, and particularly on "rare-earth" (actually mostly lanthanide series) magnets suggests to me that, without commonplace iron (include lodestone), you might not get Van Allen belts, or lodestone either. Without them, you don't get compasses, so you don't get reliable navigation out of sight of land, and maybe don't get transformers, microphones or loudspeakers (and indeed cavity magnetrons, so no radars, microwave ovens or particle accelerators)...

    337:

    Without them, you don't get compasses, so you don't get reliable navigation out of sight of land

    The Polynesians managed.

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

    338:

    That's nothing like what I posted. An 'earth' with very little iron is (a) physically implausible (possibly impossible) and (b) one where humans could not survive, let alone would have arisen. I was specifically talking about one where the high-grade ore (which was needed before modern smelting) is absent, not one where iron is absent. As I said, it would be a precious metal, and so compasses COULD exist (using meteoric iron) fairly early on, but be very expensive. See also what Robert Prior said, and look up the use of sextants and lunar distances.

    339:

    Thank you, it was the Clearances that I was thinking of... at that point, you had a lot of "surplus labor", begging, or travelling, looking for work

    mark

    340:

    David Shipley wrote: "Even really quite conservative assumptions around energy / space utilisation will throw out plausible human carrying-capacities of Earth of 100 (US) billion plus. Inevitably humanity will innovate, become more efficient and grow further."

    To which I reply, are you out of your fucking mind? Look at suburban sprawl, esp in the US (which has wiped out most near-to-city local farms). Look at trying to find bloody parking space, or how crowded public transit is. Or the price of renting and houses. Where are you going to fit them all?

    And, critically, do you REALLY want to live in a world that two and three times more crowded then where you live and work now? Can you go out in a public park, and have a little bit of quiet? Or public (or even private) pools?

    And, in fact, I do live in a world that's well over twice the population when I was in my teens (the sixties, and 3B), and all of the above is already an issue.

    No, thank you.

    mark

    341:

    Hope you guys don't mind me hijacking this thread to ask a question which just came to me.

    I remember Charlie mentioned that Scotland pretty much got rid of fossil fuel electric plants (~3% of electric generation). If so, that would make transportation the greatest source of CO2 emissions now. What is the second-highest source?

    342:

    I was thinking something similar over the weekend, but imagined a universe where the nuclear binding energies were slightly different making iron a lot less abundant. Iron would be rarer, like tin or copper but I'm not sure in either your version or mine, it would be so rare as to be truly expensive (as silver) or require modern techonology (as aluminum).

    With rarer/more expensive iron, you get the early stages of the industrial revolution but later stages you have to substitute brass for steel or bronze for iron. I would imagine the largest changes are for railroads, but not sure how much of a change that really is.

    (Also, not sure what consequences are for changing things your way; my way gravity is about 10% less and probably a stronger magnetic field.)

    343:

    Haiti was a fantastical awesome source of wealth. (Great source is the Revolution's Podcast which just finished a 19 part series on Haiti).

    But Napoleon did screw up. It's one of he admitted (supposedly) "My greatest mistake was to try to subdue Haiti by force of arms. I should have let Toussaint-Louverture rule it"

    Haiti was, before the start of the Haitian Revolution, insanely valuable. Sugar, Coffee and Indigo were cash crops bringing in great wealth. But that wealth was based on a 10-1 slave ratio. And here's a key thing, there were so many new slaves being brought into replace deaths its one of histories ugliest spots. But it was also a brutal Darwinian experience to see who can develop an immune system able to fight to yellow fever.

    The revolution was also long. By the time Napoleon was making plans, armed rebellion had been going on for 10 years. The Central and Northern Regions which produced more Sugar, was highly dependent on canals and infrastructure. Which big parts have been burned already. I think La Cap was burned 3 times before Napoleon was involved.

    The entire scheme of those ten years was long, resulting in most slaves being freed, freed armies in the mountains, several differing armies, including French, Spanish, English, local whites, slave armies, and finally mixed raced freemen. (Not to mention differing visions, from sweeping everything under the rug and re-instituting slavery to a tri-color nation using its agricultural wealth to buy teachers and industry, to black supremacy).

    And those European armies had one common feature, they would die in droves from disease. By the time of the Leclerc expedition, the ragged slave armies were able to drill, arm, and equip their soldiers into a national army. They were still hampered by lack of materiel but 10 years of experience in a brutal civil war meant they knew how to melt away when they lost local superiority.

    The Leclerc expedition was classic Napoleon. A strong conventional army wins every battle, but attrition and guerrilla fighting wins the war.

    As to Haiti's economy in the post war. By the end of the war, Haiti is a pauper state. It's economics mostly depended on brutal exploitation of slave labor. Some of the tri-color groups were experimenting with alternative methods to get sugar without the brutality and by sharing the profits. But real production would have required loans to rebuild the canals. Haiti had no trade, and no one who would recognize her for 30 years. France recognized Haiti then only at the cost of the indemnity. Haiti has only paid that off with loans that were predatory and designed to keep Haiti in debt. Until the 1830s Haiti had only informal trade for those plantations that manged to run.

    And if Boney won? He would have faced sending 10K men a year to Haiti to die of yellow fever to keep the lid on. Re-enslaving the people would of been impossible. They would of fled to the mountains like they did again and again during the Revolution. The canals were burned. The plantations were burned. The presses and tools to extract sugar from cane were gone. Coffee in the South could of worked as a tool for trade, but

    Napoleon's intelligence on what Haiti was worth was badly out of date. He sent an army that he should of known would face horrible disease to get a prize not worth it, and in the process lost a base to fight offensive overseas actions from.

    344:

    Ah, you've fallen right into the Grue jaws!

    Note: these links will appear broken as they are direct Document downloads - Host's blog really doesn't like these types of links (for very sensible reasons). They're all from UCL and safe, however. To use them copy/paste them into a browser bar, hit F5, they'll pop up as download of the chapter opened by Word or Open Office (or whatever .doc software reader you use).

    http://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/tribalhidage

    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/tribalhidage/bth/Chapter_part_IRON.doc

    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/research/projects/tribalhidage/bth/Copperalloyetc.doc

    Notable:

    The Middle Saxon period has produced evidence nationally of sophisticated manufacturing techniques, producing steeled tools alloying iron with carbon or phosphorus. Uniquely at Hamwic there is evidence for high-quality, high-carbon, liquid steel, produced by refining cast irons to manufacture edged tools, using techniques in advance of those known from elsewhere (Mack et al, 2000: 95). Smithing evidence remains relatively rare in the Anglo-Saxon period, but such as has been revealed by excavation throughout Britain indicates a wide range of types, and thus extensive ranges of specialisms and modes of production. It includes full-time smithies on (later) urban sites, as well as small forges and workshops for intermittent or seasonal usage on farmsteads (McDonnell, 1989: 380). p11 Iron

    p1 Copper

    The problem with imagining a brass based / low iron civilization at 1850s comparable outputs is that you also have to account for all the preceding periods, which for iron is a very tough sell.

    The above two chapters are very detailed (probably too much), but it's worth focusing on the discussions of where deposits were (and ore purity - 80% in Wales vrs 20% in the middle of the country etc) and little things like knife weights (which slanted heavier for Saxons).

    The main take-away is that copper and alloys thereof (brass) was mainly from re-used Roman artefacts and dismally low as time went forward (500-600AD).

    Of course, the Grue is that without iron and without Rome, you never get industrialization in Britain / Northern Europe.

    345:

    For once, you and I agree Mark.

    Who was it that pointed out that there are three schools of thought on this blog: --Computer programmers see rapid change in their field, believe it's for the better, and see a future that grows like the tech industry, hence transhumanism, immortality, growth forever onward to the stars, etc.

    --Engineers see a bunch of serious structural problems, most of which have "obvious" technological solutions, if only people would start working together to do them.

    --Environmentalists who see that the natural "infrastructure" that supports civilization and is, even now, two-three times bigger than it economically (I'll come back to this), and believe that global civilization is the mother of all economic bubbles, and either believe that, when it pops, we're all DOOMED, or that, at the most optimistic, the human population won't sustain itself at 10 billion, due to lack of resources (groundwater and farmland being two obvious issues), and an increasingly violent and unpredictable climate hitting cobbled-together infrastructures that will need to become increasingly efficient just to keep people alive.

    I'm in the third camp pretty obviously, which is why I tend to argue for more resilience and less growth. Civilization is always breaking down somewhere, but I want to keep enough surplus in all our various systems so that local breakdowns don't start propagating to become unstoppable collapses.

    My critique of the engineering point of view is that, generally, the sociopolitical problems are the hardest ones to solve, so handwaving those away and focusing on the easy and superficial technical fixes probably won't solve the fundamental structural problems.

    As for the techie optimists who are lucky enough to be in businesses that so far haven't imploded, well, I envy you. Don't think this is normal for most of the globe or most of history. After all, every kid starts off as a cockeyed optimist when it comes to blowing bubbles. It takes some experience of how bubbles pop to make you a bit more wary of simplistic growth models.

    346:

    Ah, badly formed quotation there:

    The relationship of iron-rich communities to Roman sources of secondary material, if this was indeed the source, rather than a mere coincidence of preference for particular landscape environments, should in theory be paralleled by the relative distributions of wealth in copper alloy. This is particularly so, as the raw-material components for manufacturing such alloys are not present in the study region. Therefore they could only be sourced either from re-used scrap or by importation from mainland Europe...

    In northern Europe excavation evidence from a range of elite settlement sites illustrates that non-ferrous metalworking was closely linked to the upper strata of society between the fifth and seventh centuries and this elite achieved a near monopoly over the manufacture and distribution of fine metalwork. The finished products of cast copper-alloy ornamented metalwork indicate that larger scale centralised production was certainly in place by the sixth century (Hamerow, 2004: 117). The sources of raw materials for the alloys in this manufacturing model was again scrap, as evidenced by cut-up brooches, ingots and possibly coins at the fifth-century craftworking site at Gennep on the river Maas in the Netherlands (ibid).

    347:

    Puerto Rico's depression is very odd, and kinda delayed.

    So back in the day, Puerto Rico was a backwater, but part of the US. The Feds want to put less money into PR, so they make some tax exemptions to make PR a better investment. Lots of big companies put plants there to use cheap labor within the US and low taxes. Intel, big Pharma, the Big 3 auto makers all use PR. Works ok for several years.

    Then the tax exemptions start to end, and wages have risen in PR and it's also 2008 so global melt down with wages down else where, so PR isn't as attractive as it was at time of cutbacks. So factories close.

    PR managed to push off lots of the problems by exploiting their bonds. Puerto Rican bonds were triple tax exempt (local, state and federal) because of the same desire to invest. These bonds have been around forever, and the PR government always used them to play some games and kept a largish debt to GDP ratio (but nothing crazy).

    In the aftermath of the 2008 crises with the loss of so much industry, PR double downed on using bonds to prop up the budget. The debt snowball intensified.

    Now PR is broke, the creditors want to sell off schools to get their money back, and the Feds haven't been much help. About 50K people are leaving the island every year since 2008.

    348:

    Note - given the usual reasons given for Europe industrializing first, we'd have to dig into geology to see if lower iron ore % could be replaced by more copper deposits or if that's impossible.

    But, if you're stuck without iron and don't have a regional super-power / Empire importing artefacts (as was the case in Saxon Britain), you do a little worse than stagnate, you decline.

    349:

    You would not get much lodestone. The earth's magnetic field requires a liquid conductive core, but not necessarily a nickel-iron one.

    One consequence is that the discovery and utilization of compasses might be delayed and/or reduced due to expense.

    350:

    As a techie optimist, there's lots of solutions. The problem is engineering one that's also social acceptable, and can actually be tested. But I used to do production engineering where telling people the problem is in their area was kinda hard to do. Or worse, the boss says put the bad tool up anyways, and its a cyoa moment.

    Like climate change, lots of possible engineering solutions out there. Most are insane or require significant political effort that's not realistic. Or they aren't easily testable. (My favorite is plan is putting iron into dead zones of the S. Pacific to encourage algae blooms, which could really mess with the entire pacific ecosystem and cause net losses). (crazy political ones include forceful relocation of folks into more energy efficient housing patterns, which only works with a dictatorship which wouldn't do such a thing guaranteed to bring revolt).

    As an older cynical optimist, my hope is a mix of small political changes, and several developing techs panning out. The big one for me is always fusion in a can. But cheap enough solar that's easy enough to manufacture works.

    351:

    Not at all. The point is that low-grade ores weren't used until modern times, are much more expensive to process, and ironworking might not have started until after brass had been developed (instead of half a millennium earlier). Bronze is a bggr to work and has a lot of problems, and copper is too soft, hence the importance of brass. Oh, yes, it COULD have been, but it needs a lot of developments that are not needed for the other ancient metals (yes, I know that zinc is hard, too, but there is a trick for making brass). It's the initial development hurdle that would cause the delay.

    I agree that it's more speculative that iron would not have taken over eventually, even given only low-grade ores, but this forum has given zillions of examples of societies sticking with technology they have instead of using better approaches, even over millennia. And I don't see that it need have made any difference to the gross history, though the details would of course differ and it might take longer.

    To PubliusJay: it would be a precious metal only when the main source was meteoric iron and/or before effective smelting techniques were developed.

    352:

    My question was more along the lines of:

    If you don't have access to iron, what fills the resource gap until our goal date of 1850?

    What is commonly referred to today as bronze is actually tin-bronze. However, archaeologists have shown that the first bronze produced in virtually all of Europe and the Middle East was an alloy of copper and arsenic. It is logical that an accidental arsenic-bronze would be produced first because arsenic minerals are much more abundant than tin minerals. Furthermore, arsenic and copper minerals commonly occur together in sulphide deposits, and both weather to form greenish oxide and carbonate minerals that can be difficult for the untrained eye to distinguish.

    Arsenic-bronze proved to be the best early copper alloy because it is hard and cuts the absorption of gases that make copper castings porous. A similar trend developed independently in Peru, where arsenic-bronze was discovered about 200 AD to 600 AD, and remained the alloy of choice until tin-bronze became the official standard after the formation of the Inca state about 1474 (Lechtman, 1980; Cathro, 2000).

    Page 2, really bad graphic shows the issue: I'm guessing the Roman sources in Spain are the source of the recycled materials - and Britain is stuck with Cornwall. (Does Ireland have enough to become regionally important)?

    Tin Deposits and the Early History of Bronze PDF CIM Magazine, 2005 (Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum)

    As stated: I'm not a materials scientist (or geologist) so I'm really just exploring to see if there is a possibility of a realistic Steam Punk world.

    353:

    "And, critically, do you REALLY want to live in a world that two and three times more crowded then where you live and work now? Can you go out in a public park, and have a little bit of quiet? Or public (or even private) pools?"

    I already live in a nation whose population density, extrapolated to global proportions, would mean a population of 50 billion.

    And the idea of producing food by putting seeds in dirt and waiting for water out of the sky... it's just too primitive.

    354:

    Oh good, arsenical bronze is making itself more widely known outside archaeological circles.

    Anyway, can someone summarise what you are all arguing about?

    As for Scottish CO2 emissions, the internet is messy, so all I could find was this: http://www.gov.scot/Publications/2008/11/19142102/5

    Which has a graph that suggests in 2005 the three biggest sources were transport, farming and electricity generation. So knock out one of them and you're left with the other two.

    355:

    Mucked up that link, but notable:

    Numerous ancient sources of tin have been identified in Europe and the Middle East but these were too small or too distant to account for the amount of bronze produced. Relying on Greek and Roman historians, Rickard (1932, p. 347-349) and others have documented that placer cassiterite was transported to the eastern Mediterranean from the Erzgebirge, Tuscany, Spain, Portugal, and Crete. Other confirmed sources of tin are Uganda (Dayton, 2002) and Sardinia (Penhallurick, 1998), and there is speculation that it was also brought overland from India and Asia.

    CIM articlePDF

    Important hit points:

    Mining by the Roman Empire led to the Iberian mines becoming depleted by the 3rd century AD, leaving Cornwall and neighbouring Devon the most significant sources of tin in Europe.

    In 1678 Clement Clerke introduced the coal-powered reverberatory furnace, greatly increasing the quantity of metal extractable from ore

    In around 1865, faced with increased competition from overseas mines and with the most productive copper mines becoming exhausted, the Cornish mining industry went into terminal decline. By 1880 the level of Cornish copper production was at around a quarter of its 1860 level.

    Oh, and just to tie something earlier that I wasn't part of: all of those quotations are from an article on Bal maiden who were women who worked above the surface in the copper mines. They're wearing aprons but also definitely wearing skirts.

    The TL;DR is two fold:

    1) Tin was valuable enough to the Romans to import from the far edges of the Empire - Britain and Uganda (!!)

    2) Copper revival is based on Reverberatory furnace technology (1687) - they were also " for the first 75 years of the 20th century, the dominant smelting furnace used in copper production" which suggests it's a game changer tech

    3) Back-of-the-envelope usage rates (if we don't have iron) suggest that they would have been exhausted much quicker.

    TL;DR

    We have a problematic period ~ 410AD - 1687.

    356:

    "If you don't have access to iron, what fills the resource gap until our goal date of 1850?"

    Timber and brass, mainly. One example: hawthorn was used for cogs, axles etc. - and it could easily have been bred for timber in the same way that oak was. Iron replaced timber for ships only well into the 19th century. Bamboo is still used for scaffolding in places it grows well.

    357:

    somewhat O/T, but I've always thought that farming (machinery and processes) would be ideal for solar applications: 1. availability of land/buildings (for solar panel deployment / wind power deployment) 2. connection to grid (for additional/transitional power requirements in AND out) 3. replacement of gasoline/diesel engines with electric (starting to become more feasible -- range is less of an issue, it's overall torque and overall energy-density that would be the issue)

    I've seen lots of information on electric cars and trucks, but nothing for tractors/tillers/ and other farm equipment. (NOTE: must look into that)

    Regarding CO2 emissions, eliminating farming equipment (and focusing of renewable energy generation) would leave farm animals as the largest CO2 emission source (I'd imagine) -- and that is largely a net-zero (non fossil) source.

    358:

    hmm.

    Interestingly much of the challenge for electrical farm equipment is in the interconnect (for power distribution and control dataflow). Given the environment, there are a lot of challenges regarding safety - but it looks like the trend is definitely towards smaller, more discrete individual electrical motors rather than hydraulic power trains (which are awesome, but complex, expensive, and carnot-inefficient)

    https://www.farm-equipment.com/blogs/6-opinions-columns/post/11464-ahead-of-the-curve-proposed-tractor-electrification-standards-emphasize-safety

    359:

    Any possibility that ceramics could fill part of the gap, e.g. for sharp things? The chemistry (for knife-ceramics at least) doesn't seem particularly extreme (but IANAC!). Machining requires diamond dust but that should be available.

    Vernor Vinge did a story about a metal-poor world, Tatja Grimm's World. Perhaps worth a skim.

    360:

    See further comments on tin / copper deposits / refining.

    Timber is also extremely problematic:

    In the 16th century Britain ran out of wood and resorted to coal. The adoption of the new fuel set in motion a chain of events that culminated some two centuries later in the Industrial Revolution

    An Early Energy Crisis and Its ConsequencesPDF Scientific American, 1977 - for comparison to modern journalism and also a rather pleasing tie in with the Reverberatory furnace being central to coal's utility:

    REVERBERATORY FURNACE made possible the utilization of coal in spite of the fuel's reactive smoke and flames. Tile arched roof· of a reverberatory furnace reflects the heat of combustion onto the material to be heated. When the fuel being burned is coal, the arrangement prevents contamination of the product by the substances in the coal fumes. This view of a reverberatory annealing furnace is from the section on coal making in Diderot's Encyclopedie.

    So, there you have it, a real answer: Reverberatory furnace technology.

    It allows coal usage and copper ores (of lower quality) to be viable.

    That's basically where you can stop industrialization if you stagnate before it.

    361:

    Maybe there could be deposits of high grade ore, but they could be smaller than in our world and play out shortly after the industrial revolution starts making serious demands on them, but before modern smelting processes are developed. That would get a similar history up to that point, but then extended nineteenth century conditions in many ways, but not necessarily in all, as some later technologies don't really depend on a lot of iron or steel (electricity), whereas some common nineteenth century technologies depend on lots of iron (railroads). Or would there be knock on effects, as the lack of one industry or another means a whole dependent line of investigation never goes anywhere.

    362:

    The issue under discussion is assuming that iron is much less accessible/more expensive than it historically was, what happens? In particular, to what extent can brass substitute for steel? And, if not, what else (if anything) can?

    363:

    Many Americans have an outsized expectation regarding personal space - 2000sq.ft. is now considered a 'small' home - and the love affair with the car makes many 'communities' hugely sprawling (we are at least a ten minute drive from our closest grocery store - and we live in a very high-amenity suburban area)

    My local 25 mile bicycle exercise route circles around a bunch of neighbourhoods, but still manages to avoid anything in the way of real 'density'. Despite essentially 'continuous housing' inside the loop it still encloses fewer than 20,000 people (thanks Google.

    For comparison, a similar ride near my home town (in the West of Scotland) would circumnavigate the entire town and environs, and would encapsulate at least 80,000 people (despite that loop crossing through a bunch of sheep-infested hills)

    Folks hereabouts consider this area "heavily built up". They have no idea.

    364:

    Thank you very much.

    365:

    I already live in a nation whose population density, extrapolated to global proportions, would mean a population of 50 billion.

    Higher, actually; half the land area of the UK is effectively uninhabitable. (The mountains aren't very high, but they're steep and inhospitable and there's a lot of them.) I'd say we're pretty close to that 100 billion person planet experience right now.

    366:

    Thank you for your comment.

    I don't actually know if Puerto Rico's current depression is Greece-lite.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Puerto_Rico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Greece

    I mean, Greece's problem did not reduce its population to pre-1990s levels. At the same time, you can't really pinpoint immigration as a source of the difference, since Puerto Rico does receive a non-trivial amount of immigration from the rest of the Caribbean (especially Hispaniola).

    367:

    Bronze would be a good start, but the issues are with sources of Tin. And so with brass, which also requires a comparatively rare alloying addition, with added fun of losing most of said alloying if you don't do it right.

    There is an interesting evolution of brass making crucibles over the centuries. The early ones, during the early Roman Empire were prety small, only a few cm across, and mostly sealed. They slowly got bigger over the centuries, but not by much, brass was a rare alloy and expensive, especially after the fall of Rome. Then in the late medieval period there was a big expansion. In 15th century Germanic countries they were making brass in huge crucibles that were cunningly built using two layers of clay, the outer one less able to withstand the heat, and so melt and seal the inner one. And other details I've forgotten. ANyway, the point is that late medieval pottery manufacture for this sort of thing was a lot better than Roman, and brass was being made on a large scale.

    The standard explanation of why iron took over from bronze is that it was much more widely available than the tin required for bronze, around which huge long trade routes were built. But when you can dig out bog iron from your local bog, why buy in the expensive alloying element?

    Now, someone mentioned inability to smelt stuff, and the thing is, there actually was plenty of iron in Scotland, despite there being a shortage in medieval times. (So much of a shortage that when Robert de Brus' men raided Barrow in Furness they were overjoyed to capture a ship with iron in it from the local mines) But in medieval times they didn't have the right mix of mining and smelting technology and metallurgical know how to make use of the huge amounts of ironstone in Scotland, or the necessary capital to really get into mining it. So it should always be born in mind that what is available to people at one time will be different to another time.

    368:

    Bolivian and Chinese Tin Belts could pick up some slack. Bolivia wouldn't be until the age of exploration, but would effect development to make Upper Peru (Bolvia) significantly more important to the Spanish Empire. ~1520 the Spanish take hold, and ~1540 is when mining under the Spanish (Rather than Incans) gets going.

    So that buys ~1520.

    Increased trade with China could help as well with filling some of the gap, requiring more significant bulk cargo to the east. Likely via India and the Red Sea rather than the carvan routes.

    I'm wondering though how rare is rare for iron? If it's too rare for plate, we've got some very interesting political implications. The stereotypical mid-late middle ages villages had a knight as their lord with the profits of the village to keep the knight in condition to fight. That means iron weapons and either plate or mail. With less iron, the knight might keep a sword, but he's not going to have plate or mail. Small amounts of Iron might work better with peasant weapons like a Goedendag rather than a sword.

    Also without the ability to do armored knights, somewhere around 1000 AD history goes massively off track. The French will lack armored knights en masse. Peasant revolts will be much harder to fight back. Archers and Pikemen will be more powerful against Calvary. Perhaps Western Europe could learn some sort of mounted bow, but I doubt it.

    I'm predicting more free cities and republics when its harder to get mounted horsemen to break peasant armies.

    369:

    Also thanks for summarising it.

    The first thing that comes to mind is that your bridges etc stay more like roman and medieval ones, until you find a substitute for iron in re-inforced concrete. The internet does suggest that that is being done now, at least for floors and simple beams.

    Also you don't get these huge iron framed industrial buildings. The opportunities for fire proof building are greatly reduced. Nor do we get the modern iron sheds, yay!

    But so many high temperature applications just don't happen, no car engines etc etc.
    Unless of course you can jump straight to the ceramic era, which is by no means a given, or rather what would be more likely to happen would be that there would be slow steady improvements in technical knowledge of ceramics and chemistry of ceramics and related areas, not to mention combustion of fuels of various sorts, until eventually people work out ways to make engines. Still leaves the strength issues with power transmission though, and how to carry the weight.

    No reason you can't have steam engines, but again, likely to be more expensive and more hassle.

    370:

    The US used charcoal for iron production through the mid 19th century, deforesting large regions in the process, far later than the UK. Iron plantation or for those with access, Raw Materials Supply and Technological Change in the American Charcoal Iron Industry (Have just skimmed the later but it looks fairly detailed.) Point being that resource limitations would need to apply potentially worldwide.

    371:

    Note, a problem.

    Wikipedia doesn't source this comment: The first reverberatory furnaces were perhaps in the medieval period, and were used for melting bronze for casting bells

    So I did:

    These foundaries arose out of the development of reverberatory furnaces (or cupolas or cupiloes) for smelting copper and lead.

    Making Iron: the technology PDF - PHD thesis, p51, fragment, source, author and quality unknown. No citation in text.

    This fragment has no other footprint than this single PDF and there's no complete copy out there.

    So ~ dubious at best.

    ~

    Anyhow, hopefully that's enough sanity, reality, history and UK-centric links and so on.

    Time for creative stuff.

    372:

    Timber for structural purposes, as opposed to fuel, kept going long after local supplies began to run short - we simply imported it. Bouch up north liked his iron trestles, but Brunel in Cornwall did the same thing using timber. (As did the Americans, who didn't have the same supply situation.)

    The important development in terms of abundant fuel for metal-making was the adaptation to coal of the destructive distillation method used to purify the carbon in wood, so you could use coke in place of charcoal. That was Abraham Darby's kick, which enabled large scale production of cast iron. There was still quite a wait before we got to large scale production of other ferrous products.

    The reverberatory furnace was crucial for high quality iron and steel, because you have two particular difficulties: the melting point is a lot higher than for copper and its alloys, and the properties of the product vary enormously with small to very small amounts of impurities - importantly, including carbon. So keeping the combustion gases of carbon-based fuel away from direct contact with the metal was an important step in achieving the necessary tight control over carbon content. Naturally, once it had been developed, it got used for processing other metals as well, but it wasn't the major advantage that it was for ferrous.

    373:

    ...Ha, cross post. OK, cancel my last sentence, or invert the sequence.

    374:

    Ummm.

    Since I've been playing with the idea of a bronze age fantasy, I've dived a lot into the archaeological literature. Caveat emptor. The tl;dr version is that the archaeologists really don't agree with each other on a bunch of fundamental points, so you've got to read multiple sources to figure out whether a particular author is BSing or knows what he (or she) is talking about.

    There's a lot of confusion about where the tin came from and how it got to wherever. Some say that Minoan and Middle Eastern bronze used Afghani tin, a few want it to be Cornish tin. There aren't any big known tin mines in Afghanistan now, but 3,000-4,000 years ago? Also, it's currently a freaking war zone, so don't expect any good archaeology to settle the question. Incidentally, this is true for most of the Fertile Crescent at this point, so this may be unanswerable. The Cornish tin is all romantic and stuff, but I don't know of any good ancient dates for Cornish tin mining.

    I've read so much about where the tin is that I'm playing with the source of the tin being on a fantasy world that they sailed through a gate to get to. If you notice how many mythological islands there are in European folklore, it's almost irresistible. One of these fantasy archipelagoes in the Casseritides, which were the tin islands of the Atlantic. If you prefer a less BS explanation, probably the Greeks and the Phoenicians lied through their teeth about where they sailed to to get things like tin, and writers uncritically bought the BS they ladled out, just as we do today.

    --Double check the Atlantic Bronze Age, which was from 1400-ish to around 700-ish BCE. Note that the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age collapsed at (per the book title) 1177 BCE. The Atlantic Bronze Age covered from the Straits of Gibraltar, through Portugal, up to Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, and probably the rest of the UK, and they were apparently making bronze for about 500 years after the Assyrians switched over entirely to iron. Once the Phoenicians showed up in Cadiz (Gadir) and started planting vineyards and cranking out iron around (?) 800 BC (could have been 1200 BCE/1177BCE, if you believe the historians and not the archaeologists), the Atlantic Bronze system kind of collapsed (and it did collapse around the 7th Century BCE). Except that the Spanish archaeologists seem to be a bit careless, at least to the extent that they all disagree with each other about stuff like locations and dates. Still, there are distinctive bronze swords (google Carp's tongue sword)in the ABA area that postdate the 12th Century, so pretty clearly Atlantic Europe was centuries behind the Middle East about 3000 years ago.

    As for Ugandan tin, I'll believe it when there's better evidence. Subsaharan Africa went straight from the stone age to the iron age, no bronze outside Egypt and the Mediterranean. Bronze artifacts last much better than do iron ones. If there was a Subsaharan bronze age (which would almost certainly happen if they were mining tin back then), there should be Ugandan bronze artifacts all over the place. Where are they? There are bronze artifacts from Afghanistan and the Atlantic, so those are more believable.

    375:

    Indeed.

    Chicken / Egg situation, which is why the Bell Foundry citation was interesting.

    If you don't need it for iron, does it get developed?

    If you don't have iron, so need more copper (for alloys) does it get fast tracked earlier?

    So, flip a coin:

    1) Never gets developed, no industrialization

    2) Gets developed much faster (~1200AD) and coal is fast-tracked, no mass deforestation of Europe

    3) As noted, tin in the new world is important, shifts colonialism by important regions. i.e. Spain has no tin, look to who the new power players are. Possibly Eastern Europe / Russia don't lag (even with your world Catherine / Peter) and rise much faster.

    Given human Minds, I'd place bets on #2 and #3.

    So, ironically, Steam Punk is still nonsense - you'd be looking at Steam Medieval. Russia bloc / UK bloc. Spanish / Dutch Empires don't happen.

    Hmm.

    376:

    Typing as part archaeometallurgist, regarding the reverberatory furnaces and iron, it's not a bad suggestion, but needs more evidence and refinement. I note though that Worcester had several large reverberatory furnaces in the late medieval/ early modern period for casting bells and cauldrons and suchlike, and IIRC so did Bristol. The Worcester ones were excavated years ago. Also by the 17th century people were properly intellectually appreciating the importance of chimneys and the draft through a furnace.

    What is rather annoying is that I recall reading about a glass furnace from 2k years ago in the middle east which worked on something approaching natural draft/ reverberatory method, and had gone into a runaway state due to too much fuel being put in, the end result being a highly vitrified furnace that was useless. But I can't find the information.

    377:

    Uganda Tin does have a credible source. And by credible, I mean: sort of.

    Main claim:

    Dayton, J.E. (1971), "The problem of tin in the ancient world", World Archaeology 3 (1), pp. 49–70 Dayton, J.E. (2003), "The problem of tin in the ancient world (part 2)", in Giumlia-Mair, A.; Lo Schiavo, F., The Problem of Early Tin, Oxford: Archaeopress, pp. 165–170, ISBN 1-84171-564-6

    and

    Penhallurick, R.D. (1986), Tin in Antiquity: its Mining and Trade Throughout the Ancient World with Particular Reference to Cornwall, London: The Institute of Metals, ISBN 0-904357-81-3

    which shows tin mining was done by the Bantu in 11th CE.

    Anecdotal evidence:

    Rhapta

    Trade-routes and Commerce of the Roman Empire Google Books - link goes to citation

    I suspect trade routes would hit Djibouti / The Land of Punt (no, really, it was called that: Land of Punt) which if you sailed to Britain was certainly viable.

    You'd want to dig up the texts about QUEEN HATASU, AND HER EXPEDITION TO THE LAND OF PUNT. to see what you could find.

    Hatasu is kinda a baddass btw.

    378:

    What's your problem with archaeologists and tin supplies? We don't know all sources by any means, but there's evidence for a number of sources. Are you sure you have been reading more up to date stuff, like from the last 30 years?

    379:

    I hadn't thought about the bridges; good point. I think you are right in regard to ceramics.

    380:

    Certainly a possibility - and, yes, I have that book! However, ceramics were very brittle until recently - though China led the West.

    381:

    An interesting point, but in the case of armor, I would think bronze could substitute for iron, though you are then depending on the availability of tin or arsenic.

    382:

    Even assuming an otherwise similar history, I think Spain would not gotten the Burgundian Inheritance. No iron/steel means the French cannot control Flanders by use of armored knights. Meaning no Burgundy.

    But that's a lot of ifs. I think Rome could of developed with Less Iron, but Roman Architecture liked using Iron with their cut stone.

    We can play the whereas game easily from late Rome to the age of discovery. I think Barbarians would be a bigger threat. Archery would be more developed. The rise of heavy Calvary will be averted. Light Calvary and horse archers will be an issue. I think the Byzantine-Sasanian Wars will look different without heavier Calvary and is an important possible place of divergence since it . I think the Calvary will end up canceling out advantages during the rise of Islam if those wars still happen to a stalemate. How far Islam spreads as well may differ, perhaps the lack of Tin makes it harder to spread into Spain or try for France. Otoh, perhaps the lack of good iron/steel makes the reconquesta harder and Granada survives.

    English Tin may make England far more in touch with the Europe, rather than being like it was on the boundary for so long. Maybe the viking raids and invasions will go off worse as they lack tin. Maybe taking Cornwall will be so important it will be an early goal, radically effecting how Viking settlement happened in the British islands. Maybe increased wealth due to the value of Tin will make England an earlier colonial power.

    383:

    Scotland most certainly is NOT fossil-fuel free for electricity generation. Peterhead power station is a generating station that uses North Sea gas to produce as much as 750MW using secondary plant usually over winter when demand is high. Its normal power output using CCGT is about 400MW if the market rates allow. There's also a smaller 130MW gas plant in Grangemouth which apparently does CHP.

    Coal burning in Scotland, thankfully, has ended with the closure of Cockenzie this year.

    384:

    I never said it was, I was merely entertaining the other poster's idea, although I had forgotten about Peterhead.

    385:

    No, really really bronze can't substitute for iron for armour. Iron is just too damn strong for its weight, malleable, etc. And of course easily available.
    In the switch from bronze to iron age, a lot of archaeologists like to ask why it took place. After all, the early sorts of iron just weren't as strong as bronze. But over time people learnt better how to use the iron. For example early iron tools were made to be the same shape etc as bronze, which turned out not to be as good as when you made them the way that is best for iron. So they fall back as much on the greater availability of iron to explain a lot of it's takeover.

    386:

    Car engines can still happen - or at least it wouldn't be thermal difficulties that stop them. These days, after all, they are made mostly from aluminium, which has an even lower melting point than copper alloys. Pistons, cylinder blocks and cylinder heads are all aluminium. It's just a matter of getting rid of the heat fast enough, and we manage that fine.

    There would be differences, of course. No poppet valves, for one thing - but once you've sorted out the difficulties of lubrication, that's an advantage. Piston speeds would be lower, so power-to-weight ratios would suffer, but not enough to kill the idea - power-to-weight ratios of early car engines were horrendous by modern standards anyway. Piston sealing would be more difficult but by no means insuperably so. Lack of ball bearings doesn't matter since even now engines use plain bearings made of soft metal with the surfaces kept from contact by an oil film, so no change there. So you get engines which are bigger and clumsier, but you still get them.

    387:

    That makes sense - and I was thinking about it from exactly the why did iron replace bronze point of view. The political/historical implications become very complicated.

    388:

    Reverberatory furnaces excavated in Worcester - got a link? I'd like to pay them a visit.

    389:

    Ahhh, but then how do you get to the Aluminium? Actually maybe someone would make a working engine that used bronze, and after a while, maybe a generation or two of tinkering, someone would think of Al and cooling, but it would likely take a while. Of course that assumes you come up with Al processing early enough for it to be a known thing. But you can get electrolysis etc without iron.

    390:

    Not sure they are open or anything, it is all reported in the CBA Research report 139, "Excavations at Deansway, WOrcester 1988-89, Romano-British small town to late medieval city". By Dalwood and Edwards. As usual, the report only came out in 2004, and I managed to get a copy in 2008 or so, but it was really useful because it gave me something to use for the outside of my re-enactment bronze casting furnace, i.e. tiles.

    391:

    I agree there's evidence for a number of tin sources, and I'm not arguing that.

    The thing I've gotten grumpy about, in particular regard to the Atlantic Bronze Age (but also with the Phoenicians, the Minoans, etc.), is that the experts seem to disagree with each other about things like dates, locations, processes, and links. They're not arguing with each other--they don't seem to be talking to each other. This particularly goes for Spain, where it appears that the people writing in English about the Bronze Age Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian researchers (in translation) disagree with each other, in stuff written since the 1990s.

    And, of course, they all do their best to sound authoritative.

    When you add in the question of when the Phoenicians got serious about the Iberian Peninsula, and when the region switched over to iron, it gets even more confusing. For example, everyone agrees that "Tartessos" of history was an iron age kingdom, even though it routinely gets portrayed as a bronze age kingdom in literature (looking at SM Stirling). What they disagree about is whether the bronze age Phoenicians got to Iberia back before 1177. The historians say yes, the archaeologists ask where the evidence is. When you try to figure out when the Atlantic Bronze Age started and ended, apparently the ABA is more an English concept than an Iberian one, so they don't map onto each other all that cleanly. Et cetera. I'd be thrilled if I could find the conference where they sat down and argued with each other to come up with a consensus narrative and areas of confusion, but so far I haven't found it.

    You also get a lot of confusion about how the Bronze Age Collapse affected Phoenicia too, particularly the city of Tyre. Some archaeologists claim it fell around 1177 and was refounded at least a century later by settlers from Sidon. For others Tyre just kind of fuzzes out for a few centuries. Were pre-Collapse Tyrians getting tin from Cornwall or Portugal? Perhaps. The next question is whether they were sailing directly to the tin mines (e.g. the "Casseritides" of many centuries later) or getting tin through intermediaries who traded it down the line from Cornwall to Brittany and ultimately to Marseilles. There's no archaeological evidence either way.

    I first noticed the confusion when I started reading multiple authors and trying to fit what dude A said with what Senora B said. While it easily could be me being confused, at this point I'm pretty confident that there are multiple narratives about Bronze Age history out there, and that the story in the English speaking world appears to be different than the story in the Spanish-speaking world, at the very least.

    In closing, I'll say that Skillagrim on YouTube has posted some great tests of bronze swords. If you want to see a direct comparison of an iron sword with a bronze sword, and also what bronze swords are actually capable of, YouTube is definitely a better source than archaeological speculation at this point.

    392:

    Yes, that sounds like part of archaeology. There's a lot of hogging stuff to yourself, and howing your own row and not caring about other people's. I think I've even seen it in the same building, which isn't sensible at all. It is easier to create your own career path in archaeology and history without properly engaging with other researchers, because ultimately your results aren't winnowed by reality the way they are with science.

    Then there's national rivalry and patronage links.

    Bronze swords are useful, the debate is still ongoing about whether the ones we have found were used for real or damaged specifically for deposition. I am entirely aware of youtube videos about it all since I've been involved in WMA on and off for over a decade and have met some experimental archaeologists. Who are the sources of many of the speculations you see on youtube....

    393:

    Actually zinc is more common than copper. Copper is 50 ppm in the Earth's crust. Zinc is 75 ppm. This Earth.

    394:

    Another quick commentary about the bronze age: trading wasn't exactly barter.

    What they seemed to do in the bronze age was trade by metal weight. This is where terms like shekel and mina (50-60 shekels) came from. They didn't use coins. Rather, they had some standard weights, so that (IIRC), a shekel of silver was worth a standard weight of barley, say a day's ration of barley for a man, by fiat. They went around weighing things like copper, tin, bronze, silver, gold, and iron (which was produced as a byproduct of refining copper).

    Instead of currency, they appear to have had "hackmetal" which is bits and bobs and broken pieces. The nice thing about bronze is that 9 parts copper:1 part tin makes good bronze, and things like spiking it with carbon don't change its properties. If you want to, you can melt down a sword and make it into a bunch of jewelry. Later on, you can melt down that jewelry and cast another sword. If you want a copy of a sword, the smith carves a blank (ideally out of wax; honey production and fine bronze work go hand in hand) and casts you the sword. Or he makes a model out of wood, makes a clay mold, and casts exactly the sword you want.

    Also, bronze lasts effectively forever on human time scales. Some bronze swords come out of tombs still sharp and functional thousands of years after they were buried.

    Now, contrast this simplicity with iron. Cast iron doesn't make a good blade, and in any case, the Ancient Europeans weren't into casting iron even when they could. Instead, iron has to be forged, which is harder to do than casting in a mold. Moreover, the longer your iron is in the smoky charcoal fire, the more carbon it absorbs, so the more it's reworked, the more brittle it gets. You can certainly melt down an iron sword to make some iron jewelry (iron was used as jewelry in the Bronze Age, much as titanium is used now), but reforging that jewelry into an iron sword will make for a crappy brittle iron sword. This is one of the places where "cold steel" and "cold iron" came from. The less work you did with an iron blade, often the better it was.

    Another note is that pure iron and pure bronze aren't all that different from one another. It's when you get to tempered steel that the differences start to jump out. The bronze age was really over by around the 700s BCE, simply because steel swords were getting increasingly common, and bronze really is a lot softer than steel.

    IMHO that's the fundamental split between the bronze age and the iron age. In the bronze age, all the metals (except exotic iron) were treated more or less the same, hacked up, weighed, and used to purchase other stuff using some standardized weight ratios. Once you get to iron, there are multiple ways to handle metal, and that disconnection probably helped ultimately spur the production of coinage.

    But that whole nonsense about Bronze Age trade being weird? Forget it. They knew how to loan metal out at interest for trading long before the Bronze Age collapse. They just standardized metal value by weight, not by coinage.

    395:

    ...or rather what would be more likely to happen would be that there would be slow steady improvements in technical knowledge of ceramics and chemistry of ceramics and related areas,... I don't know of theory covering how to optimize for the speed or slowness of such developments absent significant resource availability constraints on them. For speed, perhaps rapid dissemination of new results, greed-based competition (and a pathological culture that encourages this), some sort of IP regime (or not?), etc. (OGH's OP does cover some of this.) Is there a comparative literature that can make useful predictions? (Anyone?)

    396:

    When I taught in China I lived in a small city of a million people that was much smaller than the Canadian city of 100,000 that I grew up in.

    It didn't feel crowded.

    Wide streets (fairly empty — wasn't a wealthy place). Lots of low-rise and mid-rise apartment buildings — very few private homes. Wide sidewalks and bicycle lanes. Lots of public spaces, both parks and pedestrian squares. Quieter than I expected (no one had boomingly loud car stereos or played music outside, except for nightly ballroom dancing in one park by the river).

    I currently live in a Canadian suburb (with 20% of the population density) which feels more crowded. Got to drive to do most shopping, so much more traffic. Streets and driveways filled with cars — even on my dead-end court — mean more obstacles and more noise. Social custom that making lots of noise is OK if you enjoy it (car stereos, PA systems at kids' ball games) — which means that you are often aware of many more people than I was when I was in China.

    We could live more crowded — but we'd have to adjust not just our architecture and urban planning but also our social customs.

    397:

    Sorry, I was using the aluminium to make the point that internal combustion piston engines (unlike gas turbines) don't depend on high melting point metals to resist the heat of combustion (as long as they don't use poppet valves). The advantages of ferrous materials for that application are partly plain cheapness, and partly strength-to-weight ratio for parts like crankshafts and con-rods. You could certainly build an engine using copper alloys, and while it wouldn't have the power-to-weight ratios we're familiar with in modern car engines, the much lower ratios of early internal combustion engines would still be achievable.

    The furnaces - thanks - no, if they were around Deansway they are not open; I would guess the site might now be under the shopping development between Deansway and the High Street. But your reference ought to be enough for me to find something out.

    398:

    Even if you think that inland tin mining into the corpus of Africa is dubious, Djibouti / Punt / Rhapta is a good trading port if you're sourcing Tin from SE Asia and running a classical trade route (i.e. not far off the coast) from there to Egypt.

    Trade routes were never single stages. It's entirely possible that the ore was getting traded on the south edge of the Red Sea for other things (shell, gold, whatever) and then traded on north to Egypt / Rome.

    Also, ecology time: Punt wasn't a desert then (on the African side).

    What makes deserts fast in geological time?

    Lots of people.

    Ignore the Arabian peninsula, look to rapid environmental degradation as a tell for a major trade port.

    ~

    So, yeah, plenty of evidence.

    399:

    Oh, and I'm watching a Guardian Article get Snow-Jobbed about agriculture and things mentioned in this thread at this very point in time.

    Holy Shit this is Gold.

    Would you pick fruit and veg for very low pay? No? We have a problem Guardian 8th August 2016

    We're Faster than You

    The problem with your kind is you don't surrender until you're spanked.

    Mein Herz Brennt Rammstein, YT: Music: 4:44

    Reality is not negotiable. Trust Us on This One.

    400:

    I am profoundly sceptical that a large population in itself leads to economic take-off. Ancient Egypt had a large population but was a static society. The same can be said of the Mayans, China, Imperial Rome, and much of South Asia. Big populations all of them, but not centres of lasting, incremental innovation, any of them.

    The more I ponder this issue, the more I tend to Deirdre McCloskey's view that it was an idea, more than anything else, that lies at the root of the industrial revolution: the idea that all souls have the same weight.

    In practical terms: if one person can directly read the word of God for himself in the Bible, then so should any other person be able to do so. So all must be allowed (and encouraged) to learn to read.

    It is the idea that all people have the same worth, and therefore all must have the same rights and respect, the same access to knowledge and institutions, that allowed the more enterprising to begin to better their lives and the lives of others.

    High population with inequality gives you Ancient Egypt or Feudal Japan. Even comparatively small populations combined with equal dignity and opportunity, as in Enlightenment Europe, gives you innovation.

    401:

    Triptych:

    But the ability of a pre-industrial empire to enforce social norms globally is hampered by their ability to operate on a worldwide scale: no global system of social control that can block industrialization is possible to a state or agency that hasn't acquired the means of rapid communication and transportation

    Ah, just refreshed my memory by re-re-reading: Jennifer Government and catching Cory Doctorow - Fighting Back in the War on General from Defcon 23. Vanilla peeps here, but watching the steps to see the TTIP was fun.

    Ah, lesson time?

    Well, it's simple kids: those who can swim in your seas, deploy the Modes of Thought you like to imagine as "how the world works" and find solutions to issues you're spending $millions on... in under an hour.

    STOP FUCKING KILLING US

    Oh, sorry: that's a bit out of date as well.

    Wargasm

    Fuck it.

    We'll see how many of your slaves can handle the pressure, Mr. Men.

    Hint: projected Mental Break is at ~67-82%.

    Now, that's a bit worse than the average 25% cull rate you're running, but hey: at least they get a chance.

    402:

    Now you're getting weird.

    There was tin bronze in SE Asia (Dong Son culture, known for their bronze drums for whatever reason), but they seemed to be getting their metallurgical ideas from China in the north (along with a lot of refugees displaced by the expansions of the various Chinese empires). If they were trading with the Mediterranean, there's no evidence yet. The Chinese Bronze age developed rather differently than did the European bronze age.

    Indeed, I'd expect the bronze trade to go the other way, with people heading west from Indonesia not east from Arabia, much as the Indonesians settled Madagascar. Thing is that Madagascar was settled perhaps in 200 BCE, so the voyages still well past any Old World bronze age when people sailed the deep Indian Ocean.

    One thing to remember is that we know that African pygmies made it to Old Kingdom Egypt (~2700 BCE-2181 BCE), and they were (at a guess) coming up the Nile (downstream) from the tropics, not from East Africa. If there was tin to be had from Africa, one might expect it to show up early, not late, and that there would be evidence of that trade all through Egypt and Africa.

    The other thing to remember is that Mediterranean-style bronze artifacts made it all the way to Scandinavia, probably following the amber/mercenary/slave trade. It would be really weird if people in the Middle East were trading for African tin, and there wasn't a huge spray of Mediterranean artifacts all the way up the Nile and into Uganda.

    403:

    Oh.

    The 18%?

    4-8% are sociopaths / psychopaths [weighed here]

    The other 10% are the soulless cunts who sold their world.

    What defines the French Revolution?

    They cheered as the heads came off.

    Now go look at the Central / South American / S.E Asian Coups sponsored by the CIA and so on - no joy, as the dumped them out of helicopters, made them play music or hung their bodies off the freeways post-torture.

    And no, grow up: Now look up Mao, Cambodia and so on as they were swinging babies against trees - no joy.

    Or Mexico.

    Or Philippines

    Or Iraq

    Or Afghanistan

    ~

    You're the same.

    It's American / Soviet Training.

    You Declared War on an Out of Context Thing.

    As the Culture would say: that's a big fucking mistake.

    p.s.

    Stocks. I'd check them HFTs soon. Cause... well. They are our equivalent to stomach bacteria.

    404:

    Hands up who knows why the Black Death went West rather than East?

    The Wall really did help (as did xenophobic policies and turning away refugees - and no, it doesn't work any longer)

    Hint - this timeline as well.

    And Holy Shit did you not read up on Ancient Egypt (Rawlinson)/Queen Hatasu and her Merchant Fleet

    Oh and p.s.

    Not even up for discussion.

    You Want Equality?

    So Be It.

    We're Gonna Run that Test on ALL of you.

    And Holy shit, do only 9% of you pass sane.

    405:

    And, killer meme:

    That Heart Attack Thing You Tried.

    ~

    Now. Ours.

    Non, Je ne regrette rien

    406:

    Okay, I'll bite on the troll bait. More fun than watching the Olympics.

    Let's see, the black death originated somewhere between central Asia and Northwest China, hit China first and maybe helped the Yuan Empire collapse, then spread from there along the Silk Road.

    So actually, the wall performed its real task--keeping the peasants from fleeing onto the steppe, as peasants have been wont to do since before they invented nomadism,* and it had precisely nothing to do with stopping the plague.

    *Nomadic herding first came about when peasants realized they could get out of bondage to irrigated farmlands in the late Neolithic, and that running with their herds far beyond the irrigated fields was the only way to be free. Since then, peasants have been fleeing into the steppes in both China (aka Mongols) and Russia (Cossacks). These empires have responded by declaring them "tribes," designating their leaders as "princes," and trying to reward them for organizing to boss around the descendants of the peasants who ran away from the system to begin with.

    407:

    Re, Charcoal Iron, it actually hung on in the US for special applications (cast Iron?) through the 1880's; Eastern Iron Companies were left with extensive tracts of forests that had been managed on a twenty year cycle, they became corporate hunting preserves for the board, etc.

    The last real boom was in the American South during the (American) civil war, as previously uneconomical suppliers were revitalized. I used to have a picture of a historical plaque for one in Tennessee somewhere.

    And approximately HALF of Czarist Russia's iron was still produced in Charcoal Blast Furnaces in 1913.

    Of course, you need cheap exploitable labor to male the charcoal.

    408:

    But we're discussing the abilities of pressure and early industrial societies to discover, mine, smelt and use metals, so zinc might be common in the crust but how common were it's ore bodies? Not that much as far as I know, and the method of manufacture was a bit fiddly.

    410:

    "Also, ecology time: Punt wasn't a desert then (on the African side). What makes deserts fast in geological time? Lots of people."

    In that case, you are talking nonsense. It was primarily climate change, where the rainfall dropped enough that natural regeneration no longer worked. Essentially, the same shift that changed the British Isles from sub-Arctic to temperate. I agree that people cutting down the trees then turned savanna into semi-desert, but the population densities were not high.

    411:

    "So they fall back as much on the greater availability of iron to explain a lot of it's takeover."

    And it took over from timber (more recently) for exactly the same reason. I have and used a wooden block plane (with steel blade), have used a wooden wheelbarrow and rake, seen in-use wooden shovels and pitchforks, and some bodies were wooden. One of the consequences of staying with timber is a large number of skilled woodworkers and a consequential middle-class - very much in the steampunk tradition.

    Something that people might like to note is that one reason that so many things made of plastic break break so easily is that they use barely-modified steel designs. Exactly the same was true of aluminium before the modern high-tensile and stress-resistant alloys became common (say, 30 years back); the improvement has not been in the designs, but the metallurgy.

    412:

    Your link suggests that the Polynesians appear to have failed to discover "Australia" and/or "New Guinea" despite regularly visiting "New Zealand". They would, quite literally, been lost had they found themselves in mid-Atlantic or at the "Galapagos Islands".

    413:

    I was thinking something similar over the weekend, but imagined a universe where the nuclear binding energies were slightly different making iron a lot less abundant. Iron would be rarer, like tin or copper but I'm not sure in either your version or mine, it would be so rare as to be truly expensive (as silver) or require modern techonology (as aluminum).

    Don't mess with the nuclear binding energies—you are likely to get more than you bargained for. In particular, deuterium is very weakly bound, and the diproton is fairly marginally unbound. In our universe, deuterium is the essential first step in nucleosynthesis: if it isn't bound, I'm not sure that you ever get any fusion reactions at all. The nearest analogy would be the triple-α process, which goes via the incredibly unstable 8Be (half-life <1 femtosecond!)—but 8Be is formed directly from the fusion of two 4He nuclei, whereas 2H needs a weak interaction (you collide two protons, but need one of them to convert to a neutron). This has a pathetic cross-section as it is: if it's not bound, I suspect it simply doesn't happen, even temporarily.

    On the other hand, if the diproton is bound, the entire universe looks different: in particular, stars are very much less massive (and probably cooler), because the reaction p + p → 2He + γ is much faster than p + p → 2H + e+ + ν: you still need quantum tunnelling, but it will turn on faster and probably at lower temperatures. I don't know exactly what happens to nucleosynthesis thereafter, but world-almost-as-we-know-it isn't going to happen.

    So you can't change the strong nuclear force very much without having a disastrous effect on your universe, and I don't think small changes will do what you want: the relative binding energies of different nuclei are mostly set by the exclusion principle (leading to energy levels within the nucleus) and the range of the strong force (leading to instability of large nuclei). The nuclear binding energy maximum is very flat: minor tinkering might give you nickel or chromium as the dominant product of Type Ia supernovae rather than iron, but probably not by much. (It won't give you manganese or cobalt: even-Z nuclides are always more tightly bound than their odd-Z neighbours, for exclusion principle reasons.)

    Less accessible iron, because of differences in geological history, seems a lot more plausible. The Earth's crust is depleted in iron because most of it sank to form the core: I'm not a geologist or a planetary scientist, but if that process had been a bit more efficient iron could have been much less common in surface minerals. Also, banded iron formations are very old, so slightly different plate tectonics would have an effect. (Plate tectonics does not appear to be ubiquitous in rocky planets: it looks as though Mars used to have it, but Venus doesn't.)

    414:

    I've visited http://www.greatormemines.info/ and discussed where their copper went with Dr Sian James (sorry; discussion was verbal but between 2 archaeologists who were taking each other seriously). There are bronze artefacts from ~2_000 BCE which contain Great Orme copper and Cornish tin. Does that help at all with timescales?

    415:

    There is also the point that earthly biochemistry is critically dependent on iron being widely available - indeed, our mucous membranes defend themselves against bacteria by not secreting iron, and the growth of planktonic algae is limited more by iron availability than anything else.

    416:

    I'm not sure that's true. I can't find it right now, but I read an article pointing out that the Mongols originated from Siberia, not from "fleeing Chinese peasants". Basically, the article asserted that during warmer climates, the population of Siberia increases. When the climate turns sour, much of that excess population then pushes out the nomads, who are then pushed into the cities. That was an argument for the Germanic and Slavic migrations into Europe as well. Yours is the first time I heard the theory that the Mongols were Chinese who "wanted to be free".

    417:

    Should have included this in the previous post.

    The Cossacks were about as nomadic as the cowboy. Both were basically the outer edge of an expanding settler population, not an expanding nomadic one. The Chinese had a similar population, but they tended to migrate Westward along the Silk Road and Southward, not Northward towards Mongolia and Manchuria (see Tang and Ming dynasties).

    You're making the mistake of imposing the US founding mythology on historical processes. Heck, I'm not sure the mythology was true even in the US case?

    418:

    That is true, but relatively rare iron for industrial purposes doesn't mean it will be so rare as to be biologically inaccessible.

    419:

    Thanks Susan. That is interesting. I'm not sure that making up the geology or chemistry is any more consequence free than playing with the physics. (I'm also not sure than you can play with the geology or chemistry without playing with the physics.)

    420:

    From memory, up until the 1400s most of the tin extracted from the general area of Dartmoor, Bodmin Moor and on down into Cornwall was collected from river bed sand and gravel by panning. The rivers would be worked repeatedly over the centuries as more deposits washed downstream, and each pass would destroy the evidence of the previous pass leaving little for archaeologists. Surface veins may well have been dug out when they were located but the underground mining, certainly around the edges of Dartmor, didn't really get going until the first steam engines became available.

    Panning for tin has happened in recent times, the spoil tips at Devon Great Consols were reworked in the 1970s when the price rose enough to make it economic albeit with multiple vibrating tables in a very large shed rather than miners up to their knees in a stream...

    421:

    I've no expertise in tin mining or panning; I was citing (with references) the availability etc of deep mined copper since copper is an essential requisite of making bronze.

    422:

    If you're interested in understanding the true limits, and the true relevance of that bit of American foundational mythology, you might want to look at Igor Kopytoff's The African Frontier.

    Kopytoff was a stateless person until he finally got American citizenship in his late 1920s, so he had a somewhat different relationship to the United States than did Frederick Jackson Turner, the founder of the Frontier school of American mythology. Turner believed that American national character had been formed on the frontier, you see. Kopytoff argued that the frontier was key to African history, too, but in a different way. . . a much different way.

    For Turner, the American frontier was the American revolution: for Kopytoff, frontier processes were the result of politically conservative tendencies in precolonial African polities. Dissension and political strife within this or that African polity would ultimately lead to fission of that polity, and the out-migration of this or that dissident population. Moving into new lands, the dissenters would build their new polity, but would do so in a conservative manner, based on the notions of the 'good polity' which they had brought with them from their previous homes.

    I suppose this would be related to issues of commons, their creation, and their maintenance, mentioned above.

    423:

    I was specifically NOT meddling with any of the basic sciences, but merely assuming a slightly different order and/or balance of the various processes, well within the range that we have certain geological and biochemical knowledge of. I accept that it is an open question whether a variation different enough to eliminate almost all high-grade ores would be possible, but that's not the same as what you seem to have understood me to be saying. And, unless you assume significant chemical or geological differences, even a small reduction in the amount of iron in the earth's composition would lead to a large difference in our biochemistry.

    424:

    It's probably worth reading James Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed. Indeed, I think you've got it mostly backwards.

    One thing to realize is that governments are always trying to organize the people outside them, going all the way back to the Romans and probably long before. With the Romans, you can see the incongruities by comparing Roman accounts of Gaul and Germania with what the archaeologists see in the remains.

    Speaking of archaeology, there's a lot from Central Asia, and peasant agriculture with chiefly burials showed up in the steppes quite a while before nomadism did. The difference is that the peasants were stuck around permanent water sources. As with the Polynesians settling the Pacific, it took awhile before some peasant herders realized they could run away from the water sources by utilizing the milk from their herds, and if they got far enough away, they were free. That's where the nomads came from, ultimately.

    Something similar happened with the buffalo hunting tribes in the US, who were descended from corn-planting societies and only took off for the prairie when they got horses. Even then, a bunch of them stayed corn farmers around the rivers. If you've read any of the old accounts of the mountain men, or any of the colonists who dealt with the Iroquois, there were quite a few who thought the life the Indians led was preferable to American life, even up into the 1800s. They just weren't sustainable in the face of so many hungry farmers supported by the US military.

    Now I agree that the climate plays a role, because deserts can be nasty places to live during droughts (hence, yes, the big migrations). The converse is true too, which is that peasant agriculture can be pretty horrible, especially when the state is increasing taxes, taking sons off to die in wars, and so forth. If running away is a viable option, people take it.

    People have been running from China since probably the Shang dynasty. Most of them ended up in Southeast Asia, and you can see this by how non-Chinese kingdoms who used to farm parts of China share the same name as "tribes" in the mountains of southeast Asia (not that they're all the same people, but you need to read Scott to understand what's going on). However, western ethnographers like Lattimore found a lot of Han Chinese living with the Mongols in the 19th Century. Beyond the two nomad dynasties that ran China (the Yuan and the Qing), there's been a lot of interflow back and forth onto and off of the steppes. When taxes get too bad, farmers on the edge of the steppe might do better to get horses for their family than to work harder on their farms.

    The same with Russia. The cossacks were composed of serfs who ran away from the estates and took up the lifestyles of the nomads. Russia spent a fair amount of effort fostering leaders among them, giving them Russian titles and so forth, and now they consider themselves Russian, but originally they were outlaws and escaped serfs.

    The ultimate lesson is that there are powerful political reasons why you hear about barbarians as people "stuck in the past," despite all evidence to the contrary. It's not in state interests to let their citizens know that it's possible to live without a state. Indeed, there are stateless areas in the world right now, but they're described as "failed states" or "lawless areas" instead. They include Somalia, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan (the tribal areas), parts of Syria and Iraq, probably parts of eastern India (where the civil war has been going on for how many decades now?), probably parts of the Philippines, and so on.

    Now, I'm a happily civilized democrat, and I firmly believe right now that living within a state is about the only way to keep seven billion people fed and watered, if nothing else. We're too dependent on global trade for survival. However, a lot of the rage that's powering Trump's supporters has its root in the same impulses that drove people to get out past the edge of the US frontier back in the 1700s and 1800s. There's no place outside for them to go and try to make a better life, and that energy seems to be trying to tear this country apart instead. I suspect that, when the nation-state system starts to really falter, "lawless areas" (aka places where people can live outside states) will balloon, and that will be the collapse of civilization as we know it. Personally, I hope that happens many decades after I'm dead, but the potential for it has never disappeared.

    425:

    "Another thing: why wait for coal or gasoline - what's wrong with burning methanol or ethanol?"

    Efficient agriculture is a result of the industrial revolution.

    So assuming efficient agriculture as a prerequisite of an industrial revolution is a non-starter.

    To put that differently: In 1790 90% of the workforce were farmers. To produce enough methanol or ethanol to power an industrial revolution would have taken even more farmers. It is hard to imagine the maths working out.

    426:

    But as your link says, it's actually quite hard, especially if you are in pre-industrial times, which is the relevant point here. Which is why brass was discovered a lot later than bronze, and took a long time to get into real industrial production. It's hard to imagine how, but eventually someone worked out that if you cemented this substance with that metal, the metal came out gold coloured. Cementation was already ued to purify gold under the reign of the infamous Croesus, and probably someone had similar ideas at some time.

    427:

    " the spread of new world crops, specifically maize and potatoes"

    I think humanity's build-up of "bio-technology capital" is greatly under-rated, as is its influence on history.

    The crop species/varieties humans had as at 5000 BC sucked big ones. Crop varieties as at 1000 BC sucked too, though less.

    Human crop species as at 1000 AD were a lot better - better rice yields, better wheat yields, better fruits, better vegetables. Something recognizable as modern corn.

    1650 AD, post Columbus, things were vastly better. Mexicans had chickens. The Irish had potatoes. The Hungarians had peppers (how did they cope without them?). Wheat was better. Corn was spread. Fruit species were improving.

    By 1800 they were better still.

    By 1900 they'd done great things like discovering the species of sheep in South Africa that produces twins at every birth, and breeding that into every modern sheep species. Global spread of sub-species continued.

    The 1960s saw massive increase in world-wide crop yield (the "Green Revolution"), partly because of fertilizers but largely because of careful scientific inter-breeding of rice varieties.

    428:

    The interesting and tricky bit is that you can do isotopic analysis on metal to work out where it came from, but only as long as it has hardly been used and recycled since it was mined. Otherwise all the isotopes get mixed up and you can't get a good result.

    So you can see where artefacts have gone around Europe, in this randomly found paper that is available online:

    http://www.shfa.se/Include/UltimateEditorInclude/UserFiles/Moving%20metals%20IIb%20%20provenancing%20Scandinavian%20Bronze%20Age%20artefacts.pdf

    "Apart from a steady supply of copper from the Alpine ores in the North Tyrol, the main sources of copper seem to be ores from the Iberian Peninsula and Sardinia. Thus from the results presented here a new complex picture emerges of possible connectivities and fl ows in the Bronze Age between Scandinavia and Europe."

    This book has interesting info re. mines in bronze age europe: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=hefUAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA437&dq=isotopic+analysis+copper+great+orme+trade&ots=gbRlhzPqfk&sig=Cgrm9UYWrodSWnsIfkhYQyzVknE&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

    **

    Another interesting thing is that I recall reading a paper where someone described calculating how much copper had been mined in Ireland in the bronze age, compared to how many artefacts had been found. It was something like 5,000 tonnes to 5 tonnes, or an even greater gap. The obvious thing is that a lot of that metal was recycled, and there are probably medieval bronze cauldrons surviving today which contain copper that was mined 2k years earlier, made into an axe, made into a bowl, made into an axe, buried, dug up, made into a cauldron.

    429:

    But so's smelting iron! However, my idea doesn't fly for one simple reason: bog iron. Ah, well.

    430:

    Ah, I see where the confusion comes from. Scott gets a lot of things about China wrong.

  • It's true that a lot of Chinese moved Southward. Just one problem, there were very few nomadic areas southward. Many of the Ming "colonies" (they more resembled modern Chinatowns rather than true colonies) were set up in functioning states in the 1400s, not among nomadic people. Hence Taiwan being ignored until the introduction of the plantation economy by the Dutch in the 1600s, 200 years after the height of Ming trading.

  • "how non-Chinese kingdoms who used to farm parts of China share the same name as "tribes" in the mountains of southeast Asia". From my reading of the situation, that comes more from the fact that the "tribes" incorporated people of ethnic minorities who were displaced when the "Han" Chinese moved in.

  • "However, western ethnographers like Lattimore found a lot of Han Chinese living with the Mongols in the 19th Century". And here we have our biggest problem. Short version. SE Asia was closed to Chinese immigration by the Europeans. It was not safe for the Chinese to move to the Philippines or Indonesia, where the Spanish ran pogroms. At the same time, the Russians consolidated control over the Silk Roads of the South.

  • While the above was happening, China itself was experiencing a population boom. That led to a settler expansion into Manchuria and Mongolia. In short, I would be wary of data after the early 1800s.

    431:

    Certainly 5 or 6 years ago, the presiding theory about the start of the copper age is that people noticed that some stones they built their pottery kiln from, or added to it for some reason, produced red metal that was the same as that which their ancestors had passed down, probably as jewellery.

    (Back then, it's hard to imagine, but native copper, gold and silver were just lying about the ground in some parts of the world, waiting for a human to go "Oohh, shiny")

    So then they started deliberately pursuing that sort of production, burning rocks, which led to other advances and probably eventually to making glass, not to mention iron, although I need to read up on iron.

    But how do they work out what earths to add to metal and in what way, in order to produce brass? That's the interesting and tricky bit.

    432:

    I'm thinking about the tai and shan, just to name two groups that appeared as states back before the Chin dynasty, but then showed up in SE Asia. Not sure whether they are the same people, but it could be a "grandfather's axe" problem as much as anything else.

    Still, I agree that Scott's a bit questionable on parts of Chinese history. I do think he got it right on the interflow between the nomads to the north and west and what he calls the "Han."

    And I also agree that Zomia's not a nomadic place. It's a different kind of running away.

    433:

    "Something similar happened with the buffalo hunting tribes in the US, who were descended from corn-planting societies and only took off for the prairie when they got horses."

    This statement is a good example of American foundational mythology. This covers the Great Lakes, but the phenomenon is similar

    https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/twelve-days-of-1812-day-six/

    Note that the Lenape were the tribe which "sold Manhattan for beads". They didn't willingly decamp for the Great Lakes Region anymore than the plains tribes did.

    Another thing he doesn't mention was that tribes such as the Sioux became nomadic to escape diseases ravaging more settled areas. Here is a history of the area

    http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.na.001

    So, in a way you are correct that those tribes "chose" to become nomads.

    434:

    "Speaking of archaeology, there's a lot from Central Asia, and peasant agriculture with chiefly burials showed up in the steppes quite a while before nomadism did. The difference is that the peasants were stuck around permanent water sources."

    This paragraph is true, but it relies on a sleight-of-hand. Central Asia was the site of the Silk Road. As I stated previously, there were settlements in the area since before the Tang dynasty (some Chinese). A lot of those settlements were depopulated by Genghis Khan's conquest of the Khwarezm Empire. Still a lot of settlements survived. Perhaps this was a time when it WAS safer for people to live among the nomads?

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

    Having said that, it is true that the Chinese government was meddling in tribal politics by the time of the Mongol Empire. Chinese governments still remembered the Jurchen, and even the Jin Dynasty were wary of allowing repeats.

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

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

    As for the Cossacks, I'll admit to not having familiarity with their history, so I can't intelligently comment. Perhaps someone with more knowledge can?

    435:

    "Another side-effect of this productivity growth is growth in the complexity of financial arrangements"

    It helped that England was a (or "the") maritime trading nation.

    Complex (for the time) financial arrangements, and entrepreneurs, were a part of economic life because that how trade worked. This made industrial entrepreneurship easier.

    436:

    I should check my work before posting

    *where the Spanish AND Dutch ran pogroms

    • The Silk Road was to the West, not the South.
    437:

    Sorry for the torrent of posts, this will be my last one for now.

    http://www.businessinsider.com/r-germany-has-curbed-open-door-policy-for-migrants-government-data-shows-2016-8

    Since we're past 300 posts, I think it's safe to introduce contemporary news to this discussion.

    438:

    South Korea is really interesting due to how fast they went.

    Japan had the excuse that it was industrial before WW2. SK started ten years later with all its industry in the North. SK's economic culture is a strange mix of US and Japanese practices. Japan's influence on family owned organizations with monopolistic practices and loose interrelated companies forming a bloc mixed with US style management. Combine that with US factory management practices.

    1973 is also a good year to mark, although you could argue early as 1947 the bootstrapping started. Because the story of SK industrialization is the story of Hyundai and the other Chaebols.

    Ok, today Hyundai isn't the same as it used to be. Samsung and LG may seem bigger, especially if you're dealing with household goods. That's mostly because of SK anti-trust laws in the wake of the 1997 Asian financial crises broke up Hyundai into ~13 companies with several divisions being bought by LG or Samsung. (Samsung and LG were not broken up, but I've heard speculation its possible if there's another similar crises).

    In the late 60s, the SK government realized that SK had a lot of challenges, some skills, and few natural resources. They did have a decent education though, as SK had an extensive literacy campaign after the war that went from ~22% in 1945 to 87.6% literacy. Korea, before the Japanese invasion had a high literacy, a developed language, and written language which was highly phonetic.

    So to build an economy what they needed to do was use their labor and develop it into a skilled workforce. Hyundai was a bit beneficiary of these policies as they had skilled laborers who were doing construction work all over Asia. Then once they started dealing with oil construction, they got into the Middle Eastern boom, making their construction an export industry.

    Combine this with Nixon coming into office and Vietnamization. US technical advisors and money was pumped into SK to build their own arms to defend the DMZ and reduce American efforts there. Lots of cash, lots of expertise, lots of push of students into engineering.

    So SK opens factories, focusing on manual labor and semi-skilled labor. Stuff like t-shirts and other jobs we think of China for today. Korean culture also changes a bit. Factories put up dorms. Girls wanting off the farm go to the factories when they hit 18 or so. Boys go do their military service for 2 years. Women entering the work force do a lot of unskilled but delicate work. In the 70's its garments.

    Boys often get taught some technical skills in the army. Smart ones get sent to school, with the best being sent to the US to learn theory. SK starts bigger programs using their funds and trade, taking of advantage of skills like welding being taught. Shipbuilding factories and basic automotive factories open up. Farm mechanization becomes a bigger thing.

    Those girls from the farms start coming in droves to work. Mechanization brings in their brothers as SK farming rapidly adopts the mechanization. Government invests in infrastructure in the country side to spread the wealth and elevate the pain for small farmers.

    Those ties to the middle east for construction work sell the oil exporting countries on the idea that SK can build them ships using their new shipyards. Suddenly massive oil tankers are coming out of shipyards not even ten years old.

    The people are having more wealth now, and want goods like radios and TV. The rapid shift to a factory culture means SK companies are able to get some interest in the size of their internal market, and the ability to make cheaper electronics that require more manual labor. Those girls off the farm go from sewing to doing fab work. SK universities expand their engineering schools. A few big tech companies start making a fair amount of electronics in SK.

    Remember those best and brightest sent off to the US to study? Some of them studied IC design. Those domestic companies develop their manufacturing skills by working with the US companies, then start a second line of homegrown and homedesigned electronics. Hyundai, Samsung and LG get into electronics.

    And over this whole time, as their export focused factories turn out product, the internal demand is rising along with the skills and education level of the public. The governments aren't super trustworthy, having a series of coups and other measures, but they do try to force development of the internal market. They do this via the big firms (since there's a tonne of corruption), but the big firms are competent enough to meet the demands of the rising middle class to prevent anarchy.

    Otoh the internal demand for goods for the middle class helps create a bigger middle class as SK urbanizes. The corruption and paranoia over the North makes more than a few emigrate when they can. The media and communications growth due to the rising middle class also make it harder to stamp a lid down.

    SK is still authoritarian, but now its more of their boomers voting for law and order populists rather than the military doing a quasi-coup.

    439:

    What I love about plains indian myths is it ignores those diseases, or touches on them only when a tribe dies out around white people.

    The actual reality was there were very sophisticated native tribes that were ravaged again and again and lost their critical mass to keep their society going. We know some of these tribes had advance stone work including masonry skills, and a complicated agricultural system. Some, like those in Arizona, had complicated irrigation systems including canals.

    Effectively they were living in a post apocalyptic wasteland in the aftermath of the Columbian exchange. These plagues hit N. America starting in the 1500s and spreading and hitting the villages again and again over the next 300 years.

    The view of the plains indian hunting buffalo from a horse is effectively the same as Mad Max in his car hunting dingos.

    440:

    In one of his lecture online Brad DeLong talks about how getting to a modern economy requires getting rid of the big landholding families somehow, either killing them or just taking their land away.

    He notes that for South Korea this happened twice, once when Japan conquered Korea and again when they left.

    He also talks about the "thrifty workaholics" reputation SK got, and how despite all the moralizing this is an effect of economic development* rather than a cause of it.

    • Or of the economic reforms that lead to development.
    441:

    I think its an effect of being a poor farmer responsible for feeding yourself. Factory work is easier and more profitable than being a traditional farmer.

    442:

    That's the ironic thing. Our view of Central Asia is a similar post-Apocalyptic scenario, as the region never really recovered from the Mongol Empire.

    443:

    He said the reputation was not there before, it was quite the opposite.

    444:

    It is notable that this level of recycling seems normal again; a recent article claims that two thirds of steel produced in the USA is now from recycled materials. This is up from 15% in 1970, from similar totals.

    445:

    Perhaps this Damn Interesting article on South Korea's alphabet will be of interest, due to both relating to your post, and the general theme of differing glyphs/scripts/alphabets affecting development.

    446:

    Sometime in eons of prehistory, a ground dwelling bacterium evolved to metabolize iron. It turned magnetite and hematite into basalt. Only this bacterium is intolerant of O2, so shallow surface deposits are OK.

    447:

    With less iron, the knight might keep a sword, but he's not going to have plate or mail

    So basically like a Samurai in ancient Japan?

    449:

    Meta~ kinda.

    The 'trolling' is kinda trolling but also not. [Search out Trump iOS vrs Android Twitter posting to get part of the snark]

    Sperm quality in dogs has fallen rapidly over the past three decades, a trend which could help explain the purported decline in human fertility.

    The finding has highlighted a potential link between environmental contaminants and fertility – after scientists discovered chemicals which had a detrimental effect on sperm function in some commercially available pet foods

    Dog sperm quality decline is blamed on pet food chemicals New Scientist, 9th August 2016

    26-year study of canine sperm shows an overall decline in quality, and may also shed light on fertility changes seen in male humans

    Study showing decline in dog fertility may have human implications Guardian, 9th August 2016

    Polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are a class of industrial chemicals that repel both oil and water and are used in paints and fire fighting foam among other applications. We spoke with Xindi Hu from the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard Chan School, to find out what health impacts these chemical compounds could be having, and how they are entering waterways. Hu is the author of a study published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters today.

    6 million Americans have unsafe levels of toxic chemicals in their drinking water Harvard / Research Gate 9th August 2016

    Nonylphenol ... next on.

    ~

    Anyhow, to start a proper answer:

    In Kremer's model, population will grow and eventually population will be high enough that research and development will proceed fast enough to push income per capita high enough to trigger the demographic transition and thus break the Malthusian proportional link between resources and technology on the one hand and population on the other. After that link is broken, economic growth will predominantly take the form not of Malthusian increases in population but rather Industrial Revolution and Modern Economic Growth increases in living standards and labor productivity.

    The breakthrough to an Industrial Revolution, Modern Economic Growth, and our present prosperous global post-industrial economy is therefore baked into the cake. It is an all-but-inevitable event in human history produced by the simple fact that when it comes to generating useful ideas two heads are better than one: "the fundamental nonrivalry of technology as described by Paul Romer (1986)..."

    The alternative view to the inevitability of the breakthrough is that the breakthrough to the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent knock-on transition to Modern Economic Growth was a lucky throw of the historical dice--that while Kremer's model has something like our economic world today as our inevitable destiny, the world might well be substantially otherwise and remain substantially otherwise for millennia if not longer.

    So, I think we've already demonstrated that neither of these models is correct. There are not "sudden jumps", but patterns of exploitation then re-exploitation (either due to technology breakthrough, economics, desperation or necessity - c.f. synthetic rubber / oil in WWII) and refinement of old technologies into new (c.f. Bronze Bells, to Iron, to Copper - you'll note the .doc statement about localized Medieval high quality Steel production #344 - this is highly unlikely

    Looking at the energy crisis argument (Nature, #360 - you'll note that Diderot covered it in his Encyclopédie 1751 - there's simply not an argument available that Catholic countries were not aware of this tech). So, let's hit the same targets:

    Forests in Revolutionary France - note the 1,000,000 famine in 1709, but also that between 1754-87 over 600,000 hectares (not acres) of forestland were cleared... for agriculture (p63). (Source contains general list of Government and local Aristocratic measures used to preserve forests during this period).

    You'll note that this is the period (Slyan 1670s English influence) which England had an energy crisis in. France simply did not - they were aware of the English problem, but clearance due to population / agriculture needs is a far greater pressure.

    Upshot?

    Economists need to work harder.

    450:

    ugh, missed symbol there - ..."highly unlikely to not include some early version of a reverberatory furnace" (c.f. #350). i.e. if there is a small local guild producing the puddled iron / steel they might have a Guild Secret hold over it, but it points to the technology not being a breakthrough.

    451:

    The part that's not mythical is that it's really hard to hunt bison without horses, and the plains Indians as we knew them were basically a development of the horses showing up. The peoples that were out there foraging or growing corn were more than a little limited to where there was water within a few day's walk. Similarly, Eurasian steppe nomadism depended on the domestication of horses some 5,000 years ago, along with dairy animals.

    That said, the Indian nations that were (so far as we know) devastated by European diseases in the 16th Century weren't horse nomads. So far as I know, the high plains tribes were descended at least in part from the Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley, and many of them still grew corn, beans, and squash when they got the chance.

    452:

    Um, just no.

    Just no.

    You've wandered past wrong into actively spouting mimietic Disney nonsense.

    This type of hunting was a communal event which occurred as early as 12,000 years ago and lasted until at least 1500 CE, around the time of the introduction of horses.

    Buffalo jump

    453:

    Oh, and if you want to put that 600,000 hectares into perspective:

    That's 40% of all land used for farming in the USSR in 1940. The Socialized Agriculture of the USSR: Plans and Performance, Issue 5

    The French were very aware of the English crisis - they had read the reports coming out of England and had even (1680 - 1780) formed a cohesive (if not well implemented) strategy to avoid it.

    If anything is true here, it is this: Avoiding the Crisis delayed Industrialization, not vice versa.

    So, in effect, England created their industrial gap by informing others of it and leading them to attempt to enact legislature to prevent said crisis.

    And yes, there's a reason I referenced CCCP in 1940.

    454:

    Note: error there - 600,000 / 3,200,000,000 is not 40%. It's 18.75% - misread a statistic.

    That's still a huge area, given the population differences between 18th C France (even pre-Revolution) vrs Russia 1940 (even post WWII deaths).

    455:

    Or, approx 1% of the national area of France (modern).

    456:

    TL;DR

    France had a food crisis (famine of 1709 onwards into revolution).

    England had an energy crisis.

    One occurred pre-Revolution (France being the archetype for Arab Spring grain / food revolutions), one occurred post-Revolution (England being the archetype for middle class / economic / social revolutions).

    They're totally separate beasts.

    457:

    Note: there's a very interesting topic about why England didn't have a famine before or after the civil war barring a localized one in the north of England and ignoring Ireland with Cromwell.

    It's largely due to both sides being aware of the 30 years war in Europe and playing by "gentleman's rules" and the fact that a majority of the combatants were middle / upper class (by percentage, far far greater than even WWI where the Upper Classes saw a hugely disparate percentage of losses in males - turns out Eton and machine-guns wasn't a great mix).

    ~

    But, that's all fluff.

    What's depressing me most is that these economists are so limited and badly wrong. I wouldn't mind if they were bin-men, but apparently people pay them to run things...

    458:

    Oh well, site got nuked for a bit.

    Long comment about economics and population stress etc deleted.

    Short version: Kremer is full of shit.

    The models are bad, they don't match historic reality like he claims and they're easily broken.

    Slot in:

    India, 1870-1940.

    It breaks.

    30 Years War (Europe)

    It breaks.

    And so on. It's puerile rubbish.

    That's not even addressing the nonsense claim that technology has a state of "non-rivalry" given every single late stage Capitalist device has undergone at least a 2 state medium rivalry (Betamax / VHS; Blu-Ray / HD DVD etc) - look, you can argue those were artificial and largely used to both maximize profits / PR and used as proxies in larger political / economic wars [which is true], but it's not even true in his own paper.

    Hint:

    Longbow. Crossbow. Musket.

    459:

    And that is what Combat Eschatological Knitting is all about.

    ~

    Any loose threads?

    The Spoils YT Massive Attack: Music: 6:18 9th August 2016

    ~

    Dying and broke, but I will not live as a slave.

    460:

    Oh, meta-joke.

    11 posts all with content and a lot of content in each (numerous links behind each). Logic, facts, reason and a crescendo of cutting through bullshit. (all referencing prior posts).

    We love you Greg, but imagine that both are the same: you just don't understand 50% of them.

    461:

    "...but apparently people pay them to run things..."

    ...which they try to avoid doing as much as possible, and when they do have to do something, it's on the level of sticking computer fans in your engine to make it go faster. But then, they take the level on which things are broken as their source of axioms, so they're constitutionally unable to appreciate the brokenness anyway, let alone make things better.

    462:

    FWIW, This implication flows naturally from the nonrivalry of technology. As Arrow [1962] and Romer [1990] point out, the cost of inventing a new technology is independent of the number of people who use it I got bored with Kremer's 18th-century-physicsy models pretty quickly. Poking around, these papers (one Santa Fe Institute, the other with Doyne Farmer as co-author) look like a lot more fun, particularly the second: Dynamics of technological development in the energy sector (2007) The evolutionary ecology of technological innovations (2013) Won't vouch for either paper without more careful digestion, but they both include a bunch of references, particularly the second. (And it it turn is cited by papers with some similarly colourful titles.) This is not an accident—as discussed later, the phylogeny of technologies is not hierarchical, but rather is more similar to that of bacteria.

    463:

    AaaaarrrrrrrrgggghhhhhHHHHHHHHH!

    (Head wall)

    Listen, I'm from Brooklyn. You turn wherever-it-is that you live into Brooklyn, and it will be better.

    I live in D.C. It's quite likely that if you take wherever-it-is-that-you-live and turn it into D.C., and it will be better. D.C. would be better if it turned into Brooklyn.

    So what the fuck are you talking about? There's no peace-and-quiet in Brooklyn? It's impossible to build new transit lines? You can't, you know, use this breakthrough technology of the elevator to build homes?

    This is the kind of out-to-lunch bullshit that causes the public policies that have prompted housing crises. Seriously, man, think it through!

    OK, deep breath.

    Heteromeles and others will point out that there are global ramifications to large-scale population growth. True! But Whitroth's claims about local impacts are out-to-lunch. The local impacts of population growth that he thinks he's seeing are a result of policy, not exogenous constraints.

    464:

    Long comment about economics and population stress etc deleted.

    You should always copy and paste your comments into a separate text file before you hit Submit just in case. Sometimes if you take too long you'll find you've signed out.

    Really probably a good idea to compose on a word processor and cut and paste it in, might cut down on errors, but that's so...clinical. What font is this anyway, it's nice.

    465:

    It's not 40%, it not even the 18% correction you posted. The 3.2 million hectares is specifically kolkhoznik garden land not used for cropped plowland. So it's a subset of a subset of Soviet farmland. Elsewhere the text refers to Northern & Central Russia alone adding 5 million hectares of cropped plowland.

    To put it another way, 600,000 hectares is a little less than twice the size of Rhode Island. Which is much smaller than Russia.

    466:

    "And that is what Combat Eschatological Knitting is all about."

    Ah. We're back to the Laundry. The first programming language was knitting patterns.

    467:

    Slight misremembering, misquoting of myself, and excess précis of 30 minute conversation going on there.

    The techniques used to trace the copper included but were not limited to analysis of spatter globules and broken moulds from dated levels in Bronze Age casting sites, and analysis of dated bronze artefacts. Dating was carried out using a variety of techniques including experience and Bayesian analysis of radio-carbon dating evidence.

    468:

    "The Irish had potatoes."

    And that worked out well, didn't it?

    469:

    Yes, it was a bit of snark. I'm impressed you checked the source though :) I was just amused at the Soviet claim that 600,000 hectares of berry picking in 1940 was going on. [Groan: yes, puns ahoy]

    It's big for England / France in that period though. The Crown Estate currently owns ~ 106,000 hectares of agricultural land. Running a comparison figure to the English civil war to see what each side had under plow is instructive - oh, and although it was bitter fighting, neither side (much) did the old slash n burn.

    ~

    Julian Assange Floats Theory That Murdered DNC Employee Was Informant In Dutch Interview Buzzfeed 10th August 2016 (sorry, just keeping score)

    462.

    Yes, slight, but nice reference section to jump into. Thank-you.

    470:

    "Dating was carried out using a variety of techniques including experience and Bayesian analysis of radio-carbon dating evidence."

    Gug. They may be right, but that doesn't fill me with confidence. Bayesian statistics is now used as a magic wand, but (in many forms of it) its results are terribly dependent on the prior distribution you assume. So both approaches mentioned there are likely to reflect the existing assumptions.

    471:

    This is discussion of the dating evidence only. The Neolithic and Bronze Ages dating of the Great Orme site is taken from artifacts on that site, and not on remote sites. The link I posted up-thread includes some of their tourist videos, and links to some of their papers, so if you want to review it yourself...

    Also, as I said earlier, the on-site archaeologists are prepared to have informed discussions with visitors.

    472:

    Assange: back when the Manning and Snowden leaks broke, I thought maybe he was a bit narcissistic but he was doing some good. And also that the rape allegations had a suspicious stink of being fabricated.

    But the more time that passes and the more we see of his statements the smellier that shit smells, and there's a nasty stink of, at a minimum, thoughtless/casual misogyny hanging in a cloud over the wikileaks project -- example.

    Not an Assange fan. Have come to doubt that his reluctance to face charges in Sweden is anything to do with fear of extradition to the USA, because the first place he fled to -- the UK (prior to holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy) -- is even happier than Sweden to ship people to the USA on hacking charges. Suspect he's a red pill/PUA fellow-traveller who thought his public profile as a crusader! for! truth! in! media! would give him an unlimited supply of willing coochie and was as unclear on the concept of informed consent as most other dipshit PUAs.

    Now, Snowden seems to be the real deal ... but was backed into a corner by his former employers and left with no option but to take what he could get. As Bruce Sterling remarked, the huge irony is that the Russians know all about principled dissident defectors and how to play that script.

    473:

    Listen, I'm from Brooklyn. You turn wherever-it-is that you live into Brooklyn, and it will be better.

    Qualified disagreement (but only because I live in Edinburgh, which is Special); US residential property zoning is absolutely dire and creates bland cookie-cutter neighbourhoods which are uninhabitable without an automobile, noisy (lots of internal combustion engines passing by), stupidly wasteful of land, hard to maintain (every house has it's own yard/garden that needs maintaining or turns into a scrapyard or weed-infested jungle), and so on. What I've seen of Brooklyn ... chunks of it, especially the high streets, are kind of ugly in the same way as large tracts of London, but at least it's got decent public transport and public parks and recreational spaces and you can get around neighbourhoods on foot or with a pushchair or on a bicycle if you don't want/need a car.

    474:

    "Not an Assange fan. Have come to doubt that his reluctance to face charges in Sweden is anything to do with fear of extradition to the USA, because the first place he fled to -- the UK (prior to holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy) -- is even happier than Sweden to ship people to the USA on hacking charges."

    I am not a fan, either, and your last point still puzzles me immensely. But the thing that makes me think that he may be right was the number of breaches of procedure the Swedish prosecutors went in for, their absolute refusal to interview him in the UK, and the refusal of the Swedish governments to simply guarantee that they would process their accusations (they aren't even charges), including prosecution if relevant, and return him to the UK thereafter.

    475:

    (Note ~ if you re-read the Soviet reports of "berry picking" into "foraging off the land due to massive upheaval and famine" you'll see where the snark was coming from - esp. in reference to French famines. The causes of the French Revolution have everything to do with famine, relatively absent in the English revolution)

    Assange - my view is somewhat different (but is no more positive than yours, but for different reasons)

    1 Turkey. Wikileaks linked to the leak and the leaker himself retracted the emails once the damage was done. Aka after everyone realized they were mostly internet dribble & also doxxed entire swathes of voters (mostly women, due to the target sites).

    At best they fell for an over-sold prize; at worst they provided cover for what was actually about to happen. Aka, Turkey's ongoing purge / move to Russia (Putin mends broken relations with Turkey's Erdogan BBC, 9th August 2016). There was a list, but let's just say the one they leaked was definitely not it. In such cases I tend to immediately look for the right lists.

    2 The wikileaks (((twitter drama))) is just them being crass / not particularly adept at tone. I understand what they were saying, but an inability to sort (((message))) from (((rabid Alt-Right Hordes))) just shows they're not fast enough. Far more interesting is what happened to that not-very-nice (oh dear) security expert who gave a speech using the word "Cunt". Hint: (((massive drama and firestorm))). Eyewitnesses Recount Tor Developer Jacob Appelbaum’s Unwanted Sexual Advances Gizmodo 6th July 2016. And yes, I was being a bit obvious with foreshadowing all of that, but nuance is important in these things. There's certainly a case that Tor has been altered, you view of the development is probably related to how you parse (((this nonsense))). [Serious note: Owls and Greek Goddesses. Conspiracy Imagining that Athena isn't one of the Good Ones is just weird. Although, of course, who knows these days] 3 It's an oldy-but-goody to use people's weaknesses against them and allow them to hang themselves (oh dear, I fear my wyrd is very messy) - Assange / Appelbaum. I've no empirical data to work off, but they certainly seem to fit a certain Male Mental Model (but why male models?). I cheered myself up by watching talks by other women activists in the same field (of course in much smaller University venues without adoring Media Lenses on them. Long black dreads, 100% channeling the Dragon Tattoo aesthetic). 4 Snowden. Current drama with deleting tweets and sending #hashes. Who knows? But the point of it all is that even with the information out there, the majority don't care. As the DNC drama shows, even the top 'power players' (well, ok - the B/C tier power players) are willfully ignorant of even basic security ('Project Sauron' malware hidden for five years BBC, 9th August 2016 - if we needed more reminders that the Male Mental Model in such cases is dangerously juvenile). The DNC was hurt though, although in comparison the RNC is heading for a Buffalo Jump and even they can see it.

    ~

    Sending from a very compromised computer.

    476:

    Utter disagreement! I would loathe to turn nicer places into a shadow of where a live or, indeed, into a copy of any major city. I stand with whitroth (well, actually, quite a long way beyond him in that direction, and probably beyond even our multinomial, obscure and verbose stirrer).

    477:

    Bayesian analysis of radio-carbon dating evidence.

    There are doubtless some iffy datings out there, but you're wrong to assume that any analysis using the B-word is automatically suspect. I'm not an expert in this field, but one of my colleagues in Prob and Stats upstairs is, and I heard a talk from her once. So, here goes...

    The abundance of C-14 in the atmosphere varies with time, in a not-totally-random but definitely not-a-priori-predictable way. This is because C-14 is cosmogenic (i.e. it's produced in the atmosphere by cosmic-ray collisions with N-14), and the cosmic-ray intensity at Earth varies with the solar activity cycle, which varies slightly in length and a great deal in amplitude, in a not-particularly-systematic way. So the calibration curve for C-14 dates (determined using dendrochronology, i.e. tree rings) has lots of wiggles in it, which typically result in a calibrated date range that's a lot broader than the statistical errors on the C-14 abundance would lead you to expect. See, for example, the plot on the Oxford site.

    If you have only one sample, you're stuck with that. However, typically you have more than one sample from a given site, and you have stratigraphic information for your samples. If your site has decent stratigraphy, this lets you order your samples by age: you don't know how old any one of them is, but you know that A is older than B is older than C.

    This stratigraphic information is your Bayesian prior, and it's reasonably well-defined: there may be some artefacts whose relative ordering you're not sure of (this bit of antler was found in a pit, whereas this lump of charcoal came from a hearth), but a lot will be unambiguous. It's particularly helpful in cases where there are two separate possible ranges: for example, in the Oxford plot, other dates plus stratigraphy may well exclude the 1375-1340 secondary peak (or, if you're lucky, favour it over the younger peak, which has a much wider range!).

    478:

    That's not what I said. While I am extremely rusty, I was once a pretty good statistician, and was a moderate expert on Bayesian statistics.

    One error you made (in what you posted) is to imply that stratigraphic ordering is reliable, in the absence of human action; rabbits, mice etc. have caused several misdatings! But, even ignoring that, try leaving a few, varying objects on the soil for a decade, and they will sink at different rates (even in the absence of the accumulation of material). Worms, ants etc. :-) And I have some evidence that buried objects will sometimes rise, but I don't know why or how (perhaps roots).

    This sort of data tends to have small samples (or larger, but correlated, ones) and a high uncertainty (as you said); that increases the effect of the prior. The usual form of (ab)using Bayes's theorem is to choose a prior based on pre-existing beliefs which is, as I said, is likely to reflect the previous assumptions. While stratigraphic ordering does not depend on previous beliefs, the choice of which samples to use, any assumptions of independence, the attachment of any timescale, and even the association of stratigraphic and temporal orderings, all assuredly do. It is FIENDISHLY hard to use Bayesian statistics in that fashion without introducing your own prejudices into to the analysis - Bayes's theorem can also be used for other purposes, but let's ignore those.

    A phrase like "using a variety of techniques including experience and Bayesian analysis" SHOULD ring alarm bells to any decent statistician, for exactly the reason I gave. This is not to say that such an analysis is unreliable but, before regarding it as reliable, it is necessary to see what the authors had done to minimise the prejudicial effect.

    479:

    You're confusing local population density and your experience of it with global carrying capacity. The vast majority of the Earth's surface is very sparsely populated - c. 14 people per square km. What's very interesting about the current wave of tech developments is what they may mean for the idea of people clustering in cities. Solar panels and new water purification tech (e.g. Hydro Industries' efforts) are removing the need to live 'on-grid'. Add in much more localised manufacturing via 3D printing etc and and the fact that telecoms / broadband is also reducing the need to be physically proximate. All of this leads me to conclude that population distribution in the world of 2100, or 2200 will likely look very different.

    As for population density, I work in London (population density c.1,500 inhabitants per square km). If the planet had 1/7th of the population density of Greater London, evenly distributed, there would still be more than 100 billion people living on it.

    So, assuming tech advances which very much seem to be in-sight already, we could easily reduce the population density which you are currently suffering from.

    480:

    You have somewhat perfect timing.

    As of today, we have used up all the Earth’s resources for 2016 Quartz, 8th August 2016

    On August 8, 2016, we will have used as much from nature as our planet can renew in the whole year. Overshoot 8th August, 2016

    Overshoot Day is a red light warning of trouble ahead — and it is flashing five days earlier than it did last year (Aug. 13); eleven days earlier than the year before (Aug.19).

    Earth Overshoot Day Arrives Earlier Than Ever National Geographic, 8th August 2016

    ~

    100 billion is so far from reality I've simply no way to respond to it apart from gibbering nonsense.

    481:

    Firstly, thanks to Susan for explaining the use of Bayes' theorum in archaeology better than I could.

    Secondly, we're using it here to reduce our error bar from something like 4000+/-400 years to 4000+/-50 to see if the casting site was used in a period of some hundreds (if not thousands) of years. (Having said which I do sometimes have misgivings about how archaeologists construct their arguments for {sound reasons}.)

    482:

    That's what I would expect, but my point stands - that phrase rang alarm bells, which is NOT the same as saying that I smell bullshit. My point is that it can easily lead to error bars of +-50 around a date that is 200 wrong.

    My statistical training was at the time that Bayesian statistics was still controversial, on the grounds I described, and I was shown how easy it was to get apparently reliable but misleading results. Of the recent papers I have seen (ab)use it, only a majority have even specified their prior precisely, a minority have justified that choice and/or given the results for other priors, and virtually none have discussed the possible sources of prejudice in the prior.

    Note that archaeology is among the BETTER areas, statistically - for truly evil abuse, look at many areas of physics or medicine.

    483:

    * The Silk Road was to the West, not the South.

    One branch ended up in India, near modern Bengal. Another cut south after the mountains to the west coast of India (modern Pakistan).

    When I was at the Silk Road museum in Xinjiang, they had an exhibit on the mummies found near Tulufan. Genetic analysis showed traces of Han, Indian, and European DNA markers. The mummies dated from second millennium BCE.

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

    I picked up a couple of books there, mostly on textile links between East and West. Fascinating subject (although I'm not the textile expert in the family).

    484:

    it's really hard to hunt bison without horses

    It was done, though.

    http://history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/

    485:

    Actually, this article I found contains some good news on that front.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/earth-overshoot-day-2016_us_57a4258fe4b056bad2151b49?section=&

    If you notice, the rate of increase is now back to where it was in the 1980s-1990s. Considering that we have several modernizing countries to take into account, that's quite an achievement.

    486:

    I have some evidence that buried objects will sometimes rise, but I don't know why or how (perhaps roots).

    Repeated freeze-thaw cycles will cause stones to rise through soil. Larger artifacts will experience the same effect.

    487:

    To bring about another change in conversation, what do you guys think about the practicality of this idea?

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-09/virtual-reality-classrooms-another-way-chinese-kids-gain-an-edge

    I would especially love to hear from anyone with any teaching experience

    488:

    Interesting. The circumstances under which I have seen it (probably) haven't involved freezing to that depth, but have involved repeated saturation and drying out.

    489:

    Okay. My experience is (mainly) teaching advanced programming to graduates. While I have some ideas on how that could be done more interactively, potentially with great benefit, I doubt that VR would help. Where it WOULD help is for more manual or verbal skills, as has been done for many decades in training pilots, and more recently for training medics in things like artificial respiration, including such things as art and (God help us) PT. Winston Smith, you were lucky!

    490:

    IIRC (and I may not — my archaeological studies are a generation ago), there can be several mechanisms. Most of my experience was in Ontario, where freeze-thaw is a yearly occurrence. We were also looking at fairly trace remnants — none of the nice stone structures from Classical times :-)

    491:

    Maybe some misunderstanding above about Kremer, Romer, "rivalrous", etc.

    "Technology is non-rivalrous" is referring to a characteristic of information. If someone consumes a rivalrous good, it means there's less of it for everyone else. But ideas/inventions/information/etc are non-rivalrous - once an idea is out there, it's out there, there's no fixed amount of it, and any number of others can adopt it. (Apparently Ostrom used the term "subtractable", and I have to say I prefer it to "rivalrous". But probably too late for us economists to try to switch. Jargon inertia.)

    And the idea Charlie cites, namely that "because technology is non-rivalrous high population spurs technological change", is not just some economists' wheeze. Here's a nice recent example from two UCLA anthropologists:

    Population size predicts technological complexity in Oceania Michelle A. Kline* and Robert Boyd Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2010 http://robboyd.abcs.asu.edu/kline&boydProcRoySocB_Published.pdf

    "Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. ... Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation."

    "Humans are much better at learning from conspecifics than any other animal, allowing human populations to gradually create technologies, knowledge and institutions too elaborate for any one person to invent. One important corollary of this hypothesis is that larger populations will generate more complex cultural adaptations than smaller, isolated ones (Neiman 1995; Shennan 2001; Henrich 2006; Powell et al. 2009)."

    "[I]ndividuals rarely invent new tools from scratch; instead the knowledge about how to make and use the myriad of highly adaptive tools that characterize human populations accumulates gradually over time as people learn from others, make incremental improvements and then serve as models for the next generation. If this view of human adaptation is correct, the ability of human populations to evolve the optimal tool kit as determined by ecological factors will depend on constraints imposed on cultural adaptation by population size and the rate of contact between populations."

    And a nice link to the Merchant Princes worlds and the original post:

    "It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records...."

    492:

    Yup, I was just adding some of my own knowledge. I do have an MSc in Technology and Analysis of Archaeological materials, even if I haven't been able to put it to professional use, because there aren't many jobs or research openings in archaeology for slightly eccentric people like myself.

    I really should read up on Great Orme and such, but really it's more the bronze casting I'm interested in, especially the medieval/ early modern period, so although there are similarities in technology and techniques between the periods, a great deal more is different, e.g. furnace technology. In 12th century England/ northern Europe furnaces for casting were tall and not very big, but by the 15th century they were 3 by 2 by metres or even bigger, huge reverberatory furnaces that permitted the casting of full sized cannon that weighed a tonne or two.

    The relevant technological improvements taking place over several centuries of work and testing by artisans, many illiterate, but they were properly trained for a long time on how to do things, and clearly innovated where they could.

    493:

    Thanks for that Kline/Boyd 2010 link; interesting. (The term "jargon inertia" deserves more usage. I mentioned "non-rivalrous" above as an obtuse correction.) Population is clearly somewhat predictive of innovation but the relationship (one presumes; maybe I'm wrong) is only indirectly causal. Also, population (or even demographics) is a lousy knob, with ethical issues, if one wants to control the rate of innovation (faster or slower). Hence the interest in other, perhaps-more-directly-causal, and perhaps less ethically compromising, predictive relationships with innovation, including technological innovation. (Roughly. Am an ignorant dilettante in this area and at work ATM.)

    494:

    Well, at least a little. (Deliberate or not. Just take it as read that I'm aware that economists don't just make up models to suit an argument and being an idiot is a given).

    I find that paper not really useful to discussions about England / France, because 'tool kits' in these cases refers to subsistence living prior to the complexities of Nation-States - however, I'm sure you could relate it to Path Dependency ( Path Dependency, or Why Britain Became an Industrialized and Urbanized Economy Long before France ) and make a case that the 1911 35% vrs 78% population living in towns 3,000+ affected the total population's ability to have x tool kits available to them (or, at the very least, the speed of technology transfer would be necessarily much slower) contra many of the usual economic arguments ( Industrialisation in Britain and France, 1750-1870 Pembroke College, Oxford has a nice over-view of sources / slides on this area - lecture 6 has some really nice slides showing market areas and scale of roads etc).

    Everyone and their dog has a paper that links Capitalism, Agriculture and early Industrialization (e.g. Precocious British Industrialization: A General Equilibrium Perspective PDF, N. F. R. Crafts and C. Knick Harley, LSE 2002) but there's a lot of literature on path dependency (a nice quick over-view of what path dependency is: Theorising path dependence: how does history come to matter in organisations, and what can we do about it? Ian Greener, University of York) suggesting that Capitalism is a necessary requirement otherwise you get stagnation as in France.

    My point was a different one, regarding trees: there was quite a large political and social movement (Keats, Romanticism and ultimately French aristocrats playing make-believe pastural shepherdesses) that viewed trees both as an economic / strategic resource at the same time as as class / aesthetic one, and this view-point certainly drove policy on how desirable quick / dirty industrialization was.

    But mostly Famine.

    495:

    The Path Dependency at work here would be the reverse of the classic German / UK case. i.e. France sought to avoid an energy crisis and therefore sought to maintain / preserve forests (at the expense of starving peasants - even if the programs weren't that successful, it certainly put Aristocratic Land Owners contra peasant needs, esp. in times of famine) while the UK had no choice but embrace coal technology via reverbatory tech because they'd run out of trees (the equivalent to having your entire industry bombed into nothingness).

    I've not actually read the Path Dependency, or Why Britain Became an Industrialized and Urbanized Economy Long before France yet so I don't know if I've totally stolen the same idea or not. I was just free-wheeling.

    496:

    Catching up on old comments...

    My apologies for not being clear about the time scale, I was thinking of the David Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language about his theory for the rise of the Proto-Indo-European culture back around (what was it, 4000 BCE?). Nomadism has deep roots in central Asia, and I suspect it developed even before the Chinese started getting serious about silk production. As I remember Anthony's book, neolithic agriculture preceded the nomads, but the farmers were limited to the major river basins, while the nomads who apparently "evolved" from them were not so limited. The nomads also invented gizmos like chariots, which spread off the steppes along with the horses they domesticated.

    So far as Chinese history goes, IIRC, the Shang were into silk making, so it goes back at least that far. The Shang were agriculturalists (or at least their peasants were), but they used things like the chariots that the nomads invented, so it's hard for me figure out where the nomadic influences of the steppe stop.

    The thing about nomadism is that the basic idea (figure out how to live off your herds and move with them) is fairly simple. It was even reinvented in modern times by Jim Corbett (see Goatwalking which I'd rate as one of the oddest survival manuals out there, but still fun to read). My guess is that it has been (re)invented multiple times in Central Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, not counting Corbett's Quixotic work and the "nomads" who seem to be quietly roaming the western US, and I suspect it will be reinvented again in the future.

    I also think Scott's correct about civilized borders being porous, and people going over to the other side when it looks like a better option. I also agree with his point that it makes the whole idea of labeling peoples, nations, tribes and races a lot more artificial than most people realize.

    497:

    Thanks for the references. I already went through the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age. It's a good book, and I can only wish the Spanish archaeologists agreed more with it.

    Do disagreements between a flashy handbook and papers translated from Spanish mean that all the Spanish archaeologists are pants when it comes to Iberian archaeology, and that we should only believe the English crew, or does it mean that the archaeology that made it into the handbook is highly selective and doesn't consider all the evidence? Or does it mean that there's a mix of good and sloppy archaeologists on all sides, and it's really hard for outsiders to sort the geniuses from the rest, especially since those qualities don't seem to line up 1:1 with prestigious appointments or languages they publish in? For me it's frustrating, but then again it's hardly unique. There are similar brawls going on in things like fire ecology.

    498:

    Nuclear subs are never totally silent because reactors are hot; even when they're not actively generating steam they need to run pumps to circulate coolant through the reactor core lest they melt.

    Apparently some of the newer American subs have reactors that can get by on convection currents, and so don't need to run pumps -- at very low output levels.

    But apparently they are damn near silent in this mode. As quiet as any electric.

    Sorry, don't have a reference right now.

    C.

    499:

    I guess this is the part of the conversation where we'll have to agree to disagree.

    I don't have any knowledge of the Shang, but:

  • The mistakes I've already pointed out with Chinese history
  • His creation of a nonsensical entity he labeled Zomia (Tibet was a continuous series of centralized states since the Tibetan Empire in the 7th century)
  • His basic misunderstanding of both the Plains Native Americans and Central Asian development
  • The fact that most nomads are thought to originate in Siberia (mentioned above)
  • means I'm going to assume he's wrong on enough details that I will not trust his theory without sufficient corroboration. I do not know enough about pre-1st century BCE Asia or Imperial Russia to find mistakes, but I have high confidence his interpretation is inaccurate based on his handling of the history I am more familiar with, and so is his theory. In other words, at this point, it's guilty until proven innocent.

    500:

    We'll have to agree to disagree.

    As for the origin of the nomads, I think you'll have to read the Anthony book I mentioned above. They didn't "originate" in Siberia, and indeed, there's no single origin for nomadism, even on the steppes of Central Asia.

    Also, Scott said nothing about the Plains Indians. That's my interpretation, so feel free to blame me. While I know about the old bison jumps, the fact that the bison jumps existed doesn't mean that there were pre-horse foot nomads out on the Great Plains following the bison herds year-round.

    If you want to see where Scott got a bunch of his ideas, read Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, first published in 1949 and updated in 1966. It's a bit dated in places, but it precedes Scott by a good 50 years. It's considered a classic, and it's still in print.

    Finally, Scott didn't create Zomia. That term was coined by Willem van Schendel in 2002. Scott's Zomia (the mountains east and south of Tibet, including Yunnan, south through the mountains of South East Asia into Thailand and Malaysia) don't have anything to do with Tibet, although Van Schendel's did. Other researchers have proposed extending Zomia all the way to Afghanistan, but Scott didn't.

    501:

    Another interesting snippet visa vie coal:

    At the end of the 17th century some 300,000 tons, or nearly 10 percent of the coal mined annually in Britain was burned to evaporate water for the production of salt in England and Scotland. As a result the country had become virtually self-sufficient in terms of salt.

    This would also impact French industry:

    THE SALT MONOPOLY IN FRANCE from.. salt.org. Yes, it's a thing.

    Essentially large open salt evaporation supplied England with ~60% of its salt until coal knocked that one over.

    So, the industry was essentially linked to coal, and no longer the preserve purely of Aristocratic favor / whims.

    Each year, by the end of the 18th century, approximately 3000 citizens (men, women, and children) were being imprisoned, sent to the galleys, or put to death for crimes against the gabelle. All the while, religious persons, nobility, and high-ranking officials were often exempt from the gabelle or paid much lower taxes. In 1789, following the ascension of the National Assembly, the gabelle was voted down and abolished throughout the entirety of France. Later, in 1790, the National Assembly decided that all persons imprisoned by for breaking laws pertaining to the gabelle were to be freed from prison and that all charges and convictions were to be permanently dropped.

    Gabelle of salt

    ~

    [Note: I don't actually doubt any Captialist theories of the Industrial revolution take-off, the infrastructure spending from 1680 to 1740 is incredible. But I've now skimmed / read Path Dependency, or Why Britain Became an Industrialized and Urbanized Economy Long before France and it doesn't mention trees, so I claim my Original Thought[tm] of the day].

    502:

    "100 billion is so far from reality I've simply no way to respond to it apart from gibbering nonsense."

    Quite. There seems to be an argument along the lines that since people can survive, even if it's kind of shit, at density d in x crappy concrete anthill, then d is an appropriate value for feasible population densities on a much larger scale. But crappy concrete anthills do not exist in self-sufficient isolation, and it is a pretty glaring omission to neglect the associated area required for support. Asimov may have had Trantor able to draw on the entire output of 20 (or was it 40?) agricultural planets for its supplies, but we can't.

    503:

    Well that is hard to say, isn't it? I've heard a few bad things about Italian archaeology, the patronage system is endemic and bad, but not heard much about Spanish archaeology. For what it says, my supervisor at UCL was a Spanish whizz kid who got a chair I think before he was 40, so you could read that as the best leaving for elsewhere or else random chance.

    Thanks for the references. I already went through the Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age. It's a good book, and I can only wish the Spanish archaeologists agreed more with it.

    It also does depend on what people are disagreeing about. It's perfectly possible that one lab does better dating than another, and also that too many archaeologists are wedded to their personal theories rather than the evidence. One of the irritations about archaeology is how you can get an entire paper of waffle on a couple of small bits of evidence, and never really come to a proper conclusion. The only thing to do is wait a decade and things will shake out, but it takes a while.

    504:

    I recall a forum years ago where someone cropped up who seemed to genuinely be (Genuine as in argued at obsessive length, not just a troll who tried to irritate) pro-birth and argued for people to have as many children as they could because it was good, and the earth could support billions more people. Naturally we demolished their argument and slagged them off, but it was rather disturbing to see someone devoting so much effort to something a bit insane.

    505:

    but it was rather disturbing to see someone devoting so much effort to something a bit insane.

    Raises Eyebrow and slowly winks at you

    Regards salt (and saltpeter), full nod to Hetero in #13. It took me a while to thread that one into the weave, esp. given I didn't think it had a link to actual salt. [And I'm really not sure it does, but here's the cross-stitch:]

    SANS CULOTTES - TABACCO and SALPETRE munitions

    Literally translated "without breeches" They believed in "equality" and they drove the "Revolution" however they derived their power and influence from policing the middle class. They were able to enter houses and in particular the cellars with no further license specifically to collect any organic matter that had accumulated for the purpose of producing salpetre. They also were licensed to inspect the premises for quantities of tobacco. This connection between producing controlled burning of tobacco by combining the burning of Salpetre within the framework of the munitions industrie was clearly part of a technology relevant to Robespierre's policy.

    At this point I'm not sure if salt.org is genuine or the work of a localized TIME CUBE specialist, but it's at least correct about Salt tariffs and monopolies in France being a major source of friction between classes and the coal disruption thing was just too perfect not to pluck.

    506:

    The salt.org peep is... well.

    BIG BLUE FONT is better than BIG RED FONT.

    But France really was a significant player in that game, esp. in response to Indian sources:

    The final chapter, ‘The New World and the Ancien Régime’, shifts to the activities of the United States and Ancien Régime France. On the outbreak of war with the British Empire, in 1775, the Continental Congress faced a desperate shortage of saltpeter. Attempts to create a domestic saltpeter enterprise only fulfilled a fraction of the needs of the Thirteen Colonies. Fortunately, however, the French were able to supply the colonists with all the necessary gunpowder. This rendered a domestic industry surplus to requirements, and by the end of the 19th century American imports of saltpeter from India surpassed that of Britain. The second part of this chapter briefly describes the development of saltpeter production in France. Early modern France had a centralised saltpeter enterprise, which was supplemented by imports from overseas. Following their exclusion from India, after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the French were forced to reorganise their domestic system of production. Under the able guidance of Antoine Laurent de Lavoisie, France’s foremost chemist, saltpeter production rose from 832 tons in 1775 to 1,273 tons in 1784. This later met the needs of Revolutionary France in combating the British Empire.

    Saltpeter: The Mother of Gunpowder History Reviews, 4th August 2016 (ooh, topical, spot on)

    507:

    (And yes: salt.org was correct, but it was a chemist not SANS CULOTTES rabidly ravaging. But hey, if you wanted a comedy sketch from Black Adder, this would have to feature...)

    508:

    Note: the joke / irony is that the Revolution executed him in 1794:

    La République n'a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu

    Salt.org peep is again, almost correct: one of the charges was "of having adulterated the nation's tobacco with water". So, it was a mixture of tobacco and Sans Culottes that impacted France's saltpeter production.

    Just. Not. Quite. How it figures in that version of history.

    509:

    Three comments:

    1 The Mouse Army approves 2 Drone Wars, Begun Training New Pilots They Have 3 Anything that avoids the disasters of American education is worth a try 4 Not commenting on Over-shoot, trying not to depress host anymore than just hanging around.

    ~

    Anyhow, spam flash over.

    510:

    See also Fritz Haber, who invented the nitrogen fixing process that kept Germany supplied with explosives in WW1, and later had to flee the Nazis because he was Jewish.

    511:

    I could be cruel and mock Hetero:How Did People Migrate to the Americas? Bison DNA Helps Chart the Way NYT, Aug 10th 2016

    Because, yeah: you're really wrong on that one. Comedy Club Style Wrong.

    But, being honest: #13 really hit an economic landmine that defies results.

    1 No, saltpeter was already a chemical process by 1790, but it was that important. (c.f. bat guano and fertilizers), esp. in terms of earlier mentioned munition production. 2 Crop diversity (we call it the something-something-something exchange, mentioned it many times before) really was that important. Potatoes really rocked everyone's world. 3 Hit the nail on the head about coal - just not for the right reasons (like early iron, early coal sucked hard). The stuff like Salt Autonomy (late 1690's) is REALLY important for a sea faring nation that relies on its Navy (c.f. scurvy, limes, lemons and how the British Navy gave itself scurvy by outsourcing shitty limes).

    ~

    So, I claim you as the Mirror Image of salt.org BIG BLUE TEXT and shall wrap my wings around you.

    512:

    And, before anyone gets badly ruffled feathers: Cunningham's Law.

    The entire point is to be wrong to spur others to provide good information. As long as you can also provide decent information as a by-line, its how we work.

    But yeah: you did just see someone provide a novel theory on the British / French Revolution. And it's not exactly an empty field ;p

    I wouldn't focus too much on it taking 10 minutes of information processing, you're just human after all.

    513:

    I grew up in a glacial moraine in southern New England where the winter freeze line was not very deep. The fields and second growth woods were full of dry stone walls and many of the fields contained large piles of stones of various sizes (fist size up to just barely movable with the available tools and labor) in the centers and corners. Some of the midfield piles accumulated around the boulders that popped up that were too big to move.

    A neighboring family farm had been plowing one field every year for more than a century, generally alternating sweet corn and various mixed vegetables. Annual field prep began with rough plowing, gathering multiple pickup truck loads of stones to add to the piles, then prep of the actual soil.

    There was never a year when they did not have a fresh crop of rocks. And the size distribution of the rock crop did not vary much from year to year (fortunately new ones too big to move out the way were not common).

    And it was easy to understand why a lot of those stone walls run through woods now, not corn fields.

    514:

    @475 opines "the RNC is heading for a Buffalo Jump and even they can see it."

    Looks like Gary Busey has a lock on the lead role, in a movie of the week adaptation for "Trump, the Story behind the Story: What Happened?" Doesn't hurt that he got picked as the winning team leader in a Celebrity Apprentice episode, I think it was the one where they had to market a new concept in cupcakes. It figures those two would find an implicit mutual understanding.

    515:

    Yes, many of the dry stone walls in Old England are made using material obtained in the same way. Also part of the reason why the walls on the steep fellsides are of "sensible" size, while the ones in the flat valley bottoms can sometimes be really thick and high. It's less of a problem with the fields being used for growing sheep, but they still need periodic de-rocking.

    I think it is the same basic phenomenon that with a bag of broken biscuits results in the ones on top being less fragmented than the ones at the bottom: as a mixture of different size lumps is jiggled, it's easier for the smaller ones to work their way underneath the larger ones than the other way round. As with some chemical reactions, considerations of entropy can allow the phenomenon to occur even if it's energetically unfavourable. Freeze/thaw cycles and changes in soil moisture content and temperature provide the jiggling.

    516:

    Re: the Electronic Classroom.

    I once, long long ago, produced some content for an online course run by a UK university. . . but most of my teaching experience is in the face-to-face meatspace context. And I have to say that I think the latter is how you do it properly. The online thing may have it's place, but I don't think it can take the place of the real thing.

    Others disagree. The west African state of Liberia recently announced that it was going to farm out its entire school system to a US firm that would do everything via its 'school in a box' system:

    "Bridge’s model is “school in a box” – a highly structured, technology-driven model that relies on teachers reading standardised lessons from hand-held tablet computers. Bridge hires education experts to script the lessons, but the teacher’s role is to deliver that content to the class. This allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don’t have college degrees – a teacher is only required to go through a five-week training programme on how to read and deliver the script."

    http://mgafrica.com/article/2016-03-31-liberia-plans-to-outsource-its-entire-education-system-to-a-private-company-why-this-is-a-very-big-deal-and-africa-should-pay-attention

    You'll all forgive me, I hope, if I express scepticism about this one. It might have some value as a stopgap for a country in the sort of situation Liberia is in (I mean with regard to education, etc.).

    That link goes on to detail some of the problems with this 'cunning plan' (thank you Baldrick).

    517:

    Scheisse, that penultimate sentence should read: "It might have some value as a stopgap for a country in the sort of situation Liberia is in (I mean with regard to education, etc.), but I don't think it's viable over the long term". In my defence, I had to visit the dentist earlier this morning.

    518:

    While I know about the old bison jumps, the fact that the bison jumps existed doesn't mean that there were pre-horse foot nomads out on the Great Plains following the bison herds year-round.

    IIRC, the pre-horse nomads didn't follow the bison all year. They harvested them when they came through their hunting area. They would have several jumps in their territory, and when conditions were right for one they used it. A lucky year was one where they managed to stampede the herd to the kill; a bad year was one where the herd didn't return to their territory.

    (Running from memory here, away from my library, so no references.)

    519:

    I wonder what happens when student has a question? Or isn't that allowed in the Bridge model?

    520:

    Cynicism dictates student questions are mentioned in the teacher handbook as "a wonderful opportunity for peer learning."

    521:

    If you're just having the "teacher" read out loud, then an even better way to save money would be to fire the "lesson reciter" and just show films. Once we learn the basics, most of us experience school that way anyway. Lecturers might as well be films. You learn by the homework, not in the lecture. That's just there to give academics jobs, though actually they are "taught" by low wage foreign graduate students. After we learn to read and do arithmetic teachers are pretty much unnecessary middle men between books and students. Oh, and graders, they grade tests and assignments. Or do they?

    522:

    I would contend that doing it that way is, to put it simply, utterly shite. The "lecturers == films, learn nothing in the lectures" thing is what made university a largely useless experience for me. In school, we learnt in the classes and interaction with the teacher was an essential part of that. If they'd run school the same as university I'd have been fucked, and if by "Once we learn the basics, most of us experience school that way anyway" you mean actual schools rather than universities, I would contend that the American educational system is fucked too.

    523:

    Yes, but you can do better. My courses have been online since 2006, and I know that they have been used by people from all over the world with no local access to classes, as well as by local people who prefer to arrange their learning differently. They include fully-informative 'slides', sometimes that information turned into prose (plus a little extra), practical questions, worked answers to those questions, and auxiliary material.

    524:

    Huh. My experience of higher ed -- admittedly vocational degrees oriented towards professional applications, rather than generic liberal arts -- was that they were about 15% lectures, 15% reading, 5% tutorials (direct interaction with lecturers) ... and 65% lab time. Lab time also included interaction with lecturers and TAs, but a chunk of it was about learning by doing. And there is no way to replace that sort of thing with a canned movie.

    525:

    Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that handwriting notes is a form of doing (information goes into your ears, gets filtered by your brain, the output to your hands), and that replacing that with staring at lecture notes on a screen deprives students.

    Back 20 years ago, I TA'ed a plant taxonomy class, teaching students to ID about 200 common plants (yes, it's akin to a foreign language class in terms of vocabulary). We had several students go through, videotape all the displays, then go away and insist that they'd learn from the video, despite our warnings that it wouldn't work. None of them got higher than a C (most failed), and this was in a class where the raw average was a high B. I'm not a fan of videos as a substitute for labs due to this experience.

    This was also, incidentally, a class where everyone spent six hours in lab per week and at least several hours in lab on the weekends. You can learn a lot when you work that hard.

    526:

    That's kind of the weird thing about the whole nomadic Folsom idea, which seems to be based on Folsom tools being found hundreds of kilometers from where the stone was quarried (trading between groups couldn't have happened, for some reason):

    Probably I'm wrong, but I don't think that there are that many bison jumps, boggy marshes suitable for trapping bison, or box arroyos that bison can be trapped in and killed. Maybe there were 9,000 years ago? It seems weird to me to assume that a nomadic tribe could move rapidly enough from trap to trap to make a living solely off bison, especially because it assumes that the bison will obligingly move from trap to trap to keep the humans fed (note that bison are into obliging themselves, not their predators), and that water doesn't dry up, winter storms don't happen, and so on.

    To me, it's more likely that foraging humans moved in something like a circuit, from winter shelters to spring gathering areas, summer hunting grounds, fall foraging areas, and back to winter camps, and that they probably ate just about anything they could get (locusts, biscuit root, and so forth), even though most of it didn't leave an archaeological record. Certainly they killed bison or even bison herds when they got lucky enough to get them in the right position, but depending on that as even their primary meat source (as the horse-riders did 200 years ago) looks really risky as a life strategy

    527:

    Call the support number? I recently worked in a library that served as the venue for high school students taking online courses. Oddly, questions about the material rarely came up. These kids were mostly repeating courses that they'd previously failed.

    The grades were based on multiple choice tests that could be infinitely repeated, and the goal was to get the grade rather than learn the subject. As an educational tool, it almost certainly failed, but considering the subject matter and the amount kids were learning in regular classes it may have been a wash.

    528:

    No, that's been fairly conclusively disproved. It works for some students, but far more can't take it in and merely copy (often incorrectly) on autopilot.

    529:

    The problem with online courses and moocs etc right now is that they are simply being treated as another capitalist profit centre, a new one, so there are lots of boosters, spivs and get rich quick merchants out there exploiting the gullible, the bribeable and the political fellow travellers. And it's only going to get worse, because there are quite a few powerful people who don't see a problem with slashing education budgets and degrading the knowledge and skills of educators. Having lessons given by video or suchlike is one way to do that, never mind that it doesn't work as well as other methods, or can work but only if you do it properly, which is expensive.

    530:

    Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that handwriting notes is a form of doing (information goes into your ears, gets filtered by your brain, the output to your hands), and that replacing that with staring at lecture notes on a screen deprives students.

    I discovered decades ago that if I take notes during a lecture I remember most of it. Even if I don't go back and look at the notes. Now when in a seminar I try and scribble down something. I can toss the notes and still remember most or all of what I wrote down.

    Of course this really only works if you're at least a bit interested in the topic and can comprehend what is being said.

    531:

    I grew up in a glacial moraine in southern New England where the winter freeze line was not very deep.

    Hmmm. According to this: https://nsidc.org/sites/nsidc.org/files/images/NA_permafrost.jpg it's 3 to 6 feet and more in Maine. Reading this post I suddenly realized why northern homes have cellars/basements. If you've got to dig down 6 to 8 feet just to put in a foundation, why not clean out the middle and use the space.

    Around here the frost line is less than a foot. So footings have to be less than 2 feet down.

    And back to the archeology, in northern climates where loose fill contains lots of artifacts I can see the bigger ones moving up and the smaller ones down which has to make interpretation difficult.

    As to New England farmers a somewhat mythical story is that they settled in the western US as they got tired of growing rocks.

    532:

    Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, is a UNESCO site.

    I think people are underestimating just how numerous the sites are: map. There's close to 200 just in the surrounding area to the famous one.

    Tens of millions of buffalo once roamed the Great Plains of North America from Alberta’s grasslands down to Texas. To people of the plains, there was no more important food source. A number of ingenious methods were devised for communal (group) hunting – buffalo were lured into ambushes, corralled with fire, chased onto frozen lakes or into deep snow, and driven into elaborate traps called pis’kun by the Blackfoot (translated as ‘deep-blood kettles’). Of the hundreds of mass kill sites, perhaps none is more impressive than the buffalo jump, the most famous of which is Alberta’s Head-Smashed-In.

    Blood Kettles and Buffalo Jumps: Communal Hunting on the Plains of Alberta Alberta Government

    This method of hunting is common from Canada to Texas.

    This isn't to mention the sites that don't leave traces.

    533:

    As a contra-point: Bison Hunting and Late Prehistoric Human Subsistence Economies in the Great Plains Entire book, legal, 479 pages.

    In this dissertation, I challenge the assumption that bison hunting was a critical component of subsistence in the Late Prehistoric Great Plains. Using archaeological site data compiled from unpublished government documents, cultural resource management reports, and published literature on all recorded Late Prehistoric bison kill and processing sites for the entire Great Plains region and using GIS spatial analysis, I evaluate the spatial and temporal variability in the bison procurement record during the Late Prehistoric period. In addition, using paleoenvironmental data, I assess whether bison hunting strategies reflect adaptations to geographically-dependent environmental conditions. By testing existing models of bison procurement, I assess the ability of the available models to explain the observed archaeological record. I conclude that the role of bison hunting and the importance of bison in the subsistence economy of Great Plains populations were highly variable over time and across space, and no single model can explain the role of bison in ancient subsistence economies.

    If nothing else, the data sets and listing of prior academic work on it look sound - I trawled a chapter or two and it looks pretty decent scholarship.

    And hey, someone, somewhere might get their dissertation read. (Meta-question: what happens when AI starts trawling the legions of never-read PhDs out there, and it isn't a patent troll bot?)

    534:

    "Around here the frost line is less than a foot. So footings have to be less than 2 feet down."

    Around here, it's typically 2". Footings are required to be 1 metre deep, which is needed for clay (heaving as the water content varies), but the older and taller parts of my house are less than 2' down and haven't shifted in 86 years (soil: 60% sand, 22% clay). But stones still come through from a long way down, and the location is Stone Hill.

    535:

    "Of course this really only works if you're at least a bit interested in the topic and can comprehend what is being said."

    AND you aren't scribbling flat out just to attempt (and fail) to keep up!

    536:

    "... online courses and moocs etc ..."

    Right. It's not that they need be expensive, but that you need heretics to design them - i.e. ignore all the fancy presentation, and concentrate on getting the message across, and providing the facilities the students need to learn. The result doesn't necessarily look pretty, but the student isn't befuddled by the glossy presentation, low-information videos etc.

    537:

    As a summation of the gabelle seemingly random derail, it addresses the central X:

    "suffocate the 18th century British industrial revolution in its crib by having England invaded by France in 1760 and subjected to internal tariff barriers managed by the Ferme générale in order to pay off the war debt"

    To wit: 1760 is far too late for this to be effective.

    By 1760 you already have the internal infrastructure (roads / canals most importantly; Oxford lecture 6 shows the investment patterns from 1680-1740) that France lacked (which both hinders internal trade and smuggling, something Adam Smith wrote heavily about in respect to France) and the large scale production of salt has already peaked (which, unlike France saltpeter / salt has no organizational centralized basis, nor can it be geographically limited due to numerous mine sources, wood vrs coal as energy sources).

    To further this claim, please examine: Saline Royale which began construction in 1775 and was designed as a centralized controllable monopoly.

    Notably, it used wood as a fuel source. nose wiggle

    So, no, I don't blame host for getting excited by someone confirming a decent stab at the issue.

    But Brad DeLong really should come here, read [not the crazy-pants bits of course] and hand in his economist badge.

    Interestingly, if France invades around 1670, it could work. Which, well... it kinda almost did, in a way: Secret Treaty of Dover 1670. In that the Dutch took over instead ;)

    QED

    538:

    At this point someone usually mentions the Open University, except that it's approach and clientele are not the same as proposed by the education cheapeners. There is an argument for making education more open and say OU like, and encouraging self learning etc etc, but that isn't the argument the mooc and online learning people are making, because that would basically involve binning a lot of the market capitalist approach to things that they like, because they're the ones making money from it all.

    539:

    Apologies, missed the killer quotation:

    As a region, Franche-Comté was relatively well-endowed with salt springs due to subterranean seams of halite. Consequently, there were a number of small salt works, such as those at Salins-les-Bains and Montmorot, that extracted salt by boiling water over wood fires. The salt works stood close to the springs and drew on wood brought from nearby forests. After many years of exploitation, the forests were becoming more and more rapidly denuded, with the result that wood had to be brought from farther and farther away, at greater and greater cost. Furthermore, over time the salt content of the brine was dropping. This led the experts of the Ferme Générale to consider exploiting even small springs, an initiative that the King's council stopped in April 1773. Part of the problem was that it was impossible to build evaporation buildings because Salins-les-Bains sat in a small valley.

    So, in effect, we return to the Pathway argument and how it's all about energy rather than technology (or, rather, how a system gets locked to a particular energy source and fails to grasp the technology out there to switch to a newer system).

    It does, of course, slot into the larger Capitalist Narrative [wouldn't want to rock that boat of vipers], but it's a more ecologically Minded version.

    Which is kinda happening with oil, but I didn't want to get too serious until we passed 500.

    I'm Thinking I'm Back YT: Film: 3:58 - warning for violence and Kneau Reeves.

    540:

    Indeed. I'd go so far as to say that handwriting notes is a form of doing (information goes into your ears, gets filtered by your brain, the output to your hands), and that replacing that with staring at lecture notes on a screen deprives students.

    At home I've got a couple of studies on one-taking bookmarked, as well as some on reading comprehension. To summarize:

    Taking notes by hand is better than typing notes on a computer, which is better than simply reading them.

    Reading an ebook gives less long-term recall than reading a textbook. Some question as to whether the effect would go away with someone who grew up with ebooks. Seems related to remembering things like "2/3 of the way through the book" or "right after the torn page" — positional cues for information. (Rather like the method of loci.)

    One problem with education reform is that everyone knows what school is like because they went through it — but schools have changed. A bigger problem is fads and fashions based on no evidence (but with compelling stories).

    (Insert rant#2: reform for promotion :-/ )

    As an example of someone using pedagogical research to inform teaching practice (and gathering data to assess its effectiveness), this is a good example:

    http://www.meyercreations.com/physics/

    541:

    I know the Americans are doing that social snubbing thing, but really: We've already discussed spider diagrams / web diagrams / 2D-3-4D variants thereof.

    You should be teaching children how to parse down, network / spider concepts and so on.

    You're playing the role of the French and I claim my salt ration.

    542:

    (Which is something VR can do so at least one of the potential global super-powers is actually paying attention and making things happen [tm]).

    543:

    Oh, and mop up with regards to #491.

    Subsistence x tools = population (thus derail into buffalo hunting, natch) is a pretty good theory.

    It also breaks down when you factor in other things.

    The problem arises when Nation States get involved - longbows, crossbows, muskets really is a case of this, because of the levels of funding / paranoia surrounding the application or not of each (hint: lots of countries during the 30 years war outlawed crossbows due to penetration / assassination, the longbow took dedicated funding of Welsh peasants, the musket as we've seen only took off post 1850 due to an Empire being confident in its own internal security etc etc).

    It breaks when you start the real foundation of Nationalism stuff.

    But: it's probably important if you end up with the stats listed in #494 for Town 3k+ numbers in terms of ability to change.

    If you wanted to get serious and do a PhD, you'd start mapping this onto the failures of France in WWI / II vrs the UK - these models get tested when populations are under pressure, not puttering along (oh, hello! prehistoric hunting during winter? Hello, nice to meet you).

    But anyhow: Path Dependency and Energy Source = more important than Capitalism here. That's not to say that Capitalism didn't enable the change to be successful (instead of a failed state), which is something everyone's models already takes into account.

    But, again: it's that post-revolution move. Cromwell won, remember. A Capitalist? Not so much. Which is why there was a re-run.

    ~

    :p

    544:

    When you get a chance, you should visit Head-Smashed-In.

    http://history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/

    I know I'm mentioned this site before, but it's pretty impressive. Here's some modern pictures. The equirectangular images let you scroll around 360° x 180° for an immersive feeling.

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/etherflyer/sets/72157646230679372

    From here (http://history.alberta.ca/headsmashedin/history/blackfoothistory/blackfoothistory.aspx):

    The Blackfoot bands were nomadic. This does not mean they wandered haphazardly over the land. The structure of their movements was dictated by the location of the bison herds, the weather and the season. This structured movement is known as the seasonal round.

    For almost half the year, the Blackfoot bands lived in winter camps. The bands were strung out along a wooded river valley, perhaps a day's march apart; in areas with adequate wood and game resources, some bands might camp together all winter. From about November to March, the people would not move camp unless food supplies, firewood or pasture for the horses became depleted.

    Bison wintered in treed areas where snow is less deep. Brushing snow aside with winters thick facial hair, grazing in shadow of forests, they did not move quickly in deep drifting snow and made easier targets for hunters.

    In spring the bison moved out onto the Plains where the new spring grasses provided forage. The people might not follow immediately for fear of spring snowstorms. During this time they might have to live on dry food or game animals such as deer. Soon, however, the bands would leave to hunt the buffalo. During this time each band travelled separately.

    In mid–summer, when the Saskatoon (Service) berries were ripe, the bands came together for the Sun Dance. The Sun Dance was the major tribal ceremony in historic times. Such tribal ceremonies are described as Rites of Intensification because they serve the social purpose of binding the loosely organized tribal bands together.

    Communal hunts of bison provided food for the gathering and the bulls' tongues necessary as offerings at the ceremony. This was the only time of year when all the people of the tribe assembled at the same place.

    After the Sun Dance, the bands again separated to pursue the buffalo. In the fall, the bands would gradually shift to their wintering areas and prepare the bison jumps and pounds. Several bands might join together at particularly good sites, such as Head–Smashed–In Buffalo Jump. As the bison moved into the area, drawn by water and richer forage than the burned-dry summer grasses, communal kills would again occur, and the people would prepare dry meat and pemmican for winter. Such dry food stores were used as emergency supplies for those times when the bison were not near. At the end of the fall, the Blackfoot would move to their winter camp locales.

    (I confess I forgot about winter bison hunting.)

    There were many other buffalo jumps. Given I'm currently in Alberta, I hunted for a map of local buffalo jumps and found this one: https://albertashistoricplaces.files.wordpress.com/2016/06/buffalo-jump-map-draft-2.jpg

    The map is from an interesting essay published by the Alberta government, written by a historian and an archaeologist: https://albertashistoricplaces.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/blood-kettles-and-buffalo-jumps-communal-hunting-on-the-plains-of-alberta/

    In locations without suitable cliffs (ie. lots of the Prairies) buffalo pounds were used.

    Some tribes became semi-sedentary. The key was to take only part of a herd, so that most of the animals had no reason to be afraid.

    The hunt was the basis of the Plains way of life. Meat provided nutrition, sinew and bone became tools, and hides became clothing and shelter. The hunt and its products gave rise to, and supported, complex social, political and cultural institutions. By avoiding disturbing the greater herd, hunters were able to use the same jumps and pounds several times, allowing for the establishment of semi-sedentary cultures . People who relied on the buffalo for nutrition pre-contact were much healthier than those who did not, and were hence much less susceptible to outbreaks of tuberculosis.

    http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/buffalo-hunt/

    And here's an interesting article on buffalo drives: http://www.sicc.sk.ca/archive/heritage/ethnography/cree/livelihood/hunting.html

    (From Saskatchewan, so more emphasis on buffalo pounds.)

    545:

    Someone tell Mr Robert Prior he's wasting energy by repeating research that's already been done, and better. And not only that, he's not drawing the actually interesting conclusion / reference by looking into more modern research, which is:

    I conclude that the role of bison hunting and the importance of bison in the subsistence economy of Great Plains populations were highly variable over time and across space, and no single model can explain the role of bison in ancient subsistence economies.

    At the same time, someone tell Mr Bradford DeLong he really should re-read Adam Smith and be up to date with Oxford courses.

    I mean...

    STEM is more important than silly little things like history and the arts, right?

    ~

    Hmm, so. Meta-meta-meta, that's the French problem illuminated with reference to modern Americans (pre-millennial) and how that mechanic works. It's also what's going to fuck their society up and break all their toys.

    All Them Witches YT: music: 6:07

    We're Faster Than You

    546:

    "Of course this really only works if you're at least a bit interested in the topic and can comprehend what is being said."

    AND you aren't scribbling flat out just to attempt (and fail) to keep up!

    Lecture as information dump is inefficient.

    Ideally, students will read the content before the lecture, so that they aren't merely scribbling facts but rather seeing how everything fits together. That tends not to happen, though. One reason flipped classrooms (like Chris Meyer's) are hard to implement is that the students need to do the background work — and if too many of them haven't the classroom flops.

    University of Toronto has moved their undergrad physics courses to this approach. Info-dump is done on students own time (reading, some videos and simulations) before the class session, which is lots of group work and guided inquiry labs. Of course, university students are a bit more motivated (and mature) than 16-year-olds!

    Another set of articles I've referenced before: http://newsletter.oapt.ca/PER/

    A useful read if you teach physics.

    Some people swear by mind mapping and other diagramming techniques. I've found them not terribly useful for taking notes but handy for producing summaries as a review. Depends on the subject material and students, of course.

    547:

    Since I'm now an invisible Djinn, I can have fun:

    so that they aren't merely scribbling facts but rather seeing how everything fits together

    Note to Americans: this is what a teacher does.

    Someone tell Mr Prior why the Oxford / Cambridge model of Reading list - Lecture - Seminar works please.

    Please.

    548:

    Salt petre was mentioned above, the interesting thing in European history how farming for it was discovered/ spread, and kept secret a lot, such that even by the 16th century there were people trying to sell it and others trying not to have it sold. Something worked anyway, insofar as in the late 14th century as demand for gunpowder increased, the price dropped greatly due to improved methods of getting the saltpetre. Sulphur and charcoal weren't a problem, a volcano and some wood is all you need, but saltpetre is the strange hard to find stuff that people know is related to dung, but exactly what and why isn't so easy to work out. And then in the early modern people the importance of saltpetre for explosions and therefore causing energetic things to happen was noticed and took part in the scientific revolution. I know someone who has done a PhD on that.

    549:

    Actually, what's interesting is the opposite to #13 claims.

    France gets shut out of the India source in 1757: disaster. (As linked)

    Response: in a rare case of inspiration, France lets leading chemist re-work the entire industry and it results in a 50% increase of production even with lost imports. (Even if it is under a centralized monopoly system, RARE MOMENT OF NON-PRO CAPITALIST THOUGH, it still works).

    Also to note: America is lazy, ends up being propped up by France, then largest importer via India (once, well, you know: France implodes due to revolution).

    It's a text book case of crisis / lack of resource fueling development...

    Hmm.

    Like Coal. And. Wood.

    Of course, I wouldn't be running high level irony like that as a meta-example, would I?

    Heavy Like A Witch YT: Music: 5:36.

    ~

    Bonus round: this thread is an exact replay of the last 6,000 years of Society, where we get to watch Men ignore Women and not only repeat them, but then fuck it up and never change anything.

    It's fucking gollllld.

    550:

    Oh, Da Man stole my

    T.

    (Yes, it's the marker system: like the canary system it shows I know who is Man-in-Middling this)

    551:

    Oh, and p.s.

    If you're going to be unsubtle enough to put a muzzle on this bitch, make sure it's not detectable by the script that runs view all Reddit threads constantly and pings in.

    The Greatest Practical Joke in Human History YT: Film: 2:41

    We really are faster than you.

    552:

    Glad that you found that statement. Now, once people realize that bison roamed from New York to Georgia and down into Mexico, we'll be on a real roll.

    In any case, nomadism without horses or camels looks a lot different than nomadism riding large herbivores. It's entirely possible, but it's more a strategy for disappearing into the Interior than it is a strategy for predation and conquest.

    553:

    Um, where are all the volcanoes in Europe? I think there's some in Iceland, and the Canary Islands, and Italy, and Greece (I keep forgetting if Thera erupted after the 1500 BCE, but there were stinky hot springs around Greece and Asia Minor, if the Ottomans wanted them). And the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. But they're not all high sulfur volcanoes. Which areas am I missing? I'm not sure it's as easy as all that, but I'm willing to be corrected.

    On the other hand, the Conquistadors apparently did pretty well, what with all those high sulfur skunkworks volcanoes in Central America.

    As for saltpeter, those farming recipes are fun to read, but I'm glad I don't have to do them.

    554:

    I assume you want education in THEMAS (technology, history, engineering, math, art, and science). Or is there an acronym we can torture even more? I keep hearing public service ads for STEAM education, so I suspect we're getting into the land of tortured acronyms as everyone else claims their place at the table. Music? Arts? Philosophy? Rhetoric?

    555:

    If you missed it: I'm all about Truth. (No matter the consequences)

    Which is why I'm currently getting two State Actors have a battle of M-i-M over what I can view, but hey.

    The rough take is a simple one: in areas where the geography (cliffs) or flora (large accessible tree stands to make corral type kill zones) or even climate (snow drifts / lakes) allows bison hunting, it happens. If it's not there, it doesn't happen - or rather, it happens, but it's vastly more dangerous.

    There's also that whole TIME thing where we're talking about ~13,000 years or so of H.S.S.

    This is just a lesson in crisis producing resources.

    But come on.

    Even Dragons need some validation - are you not impressed by the Weave to get to a conclusion? We are killing ourselves to do this, quite literally.

    Heyr Himna Smiður YT: Music: 4:20

    556:

    Meta-question: what happens when AI starts trawling the legions of never-read PhDs out there, and it isn't a patent troll bot? An explosion of interesting ideas coming to general attention, plus maybe some new combining and synthesis. Nice thought! A patent troll bot would be finding what is actually prior art, then additional AI (or maybe people initially) would try to disguise it through transformation then pretend that it is patentable? This wouldn't last long; the obfuscatory transformations would be reversible, at least to the point where searches for the original art would succeed, surely? Or did you have something else in mind? An anti-patent-troll bot, now that would be a fine thing.

    557:

    But stones still come through from a long way down, and the location is Stone Hill. Generally, the frost line is seriously conservative. Most winters the freeze doesn't get even 1/2 way to the frost line. I confirm the New England stone-crop observations though. So you may be correct that there is some other effect involved.

    558:

    If you're talking about the importance of salt to soldiers drawing salaries, then yes, I'm quite impressed. You're right, NaCl salt is one of those energy-intensive yet critical materials (like desalinated water is coming to be), that can be limit lot of civilized activities that depend on long-term storage. I hadn't thought of it much, because I was more trying to understand a bit of the modern industrial nitrogen cycle and trying to predict what happens if it shatters and starts collapsing.

    If you're still bored, you might want to contemplate how to link that in with how mass alcohol production fueled Europeans finding Polynesia, and not the other way round, and I think you've got, erm, a thessalhydra or whatever an leveled up dragon is.

    559:

    Maine is not southern New England. It's as north as you can get without being in Canada. My home was much closer to Long Island Sound than to the St Lawrence: we were a few hundred miles south of most of Maine.

    560:

    When an AI can actually analyze patents, we're done. Singularity is here or at the very least the last human job has been automated.

    The thing is its easy to criticize bad patents, but actually understanding what's going on is way more involved.

    The Patent troll bot would need to get by the human experts in the patent offices. Yes yes insert jokes about how bad the USPTO does in software (Guess what? Since the post Alice instructions the art units that folks have beefs with have an effectively zero grant rate).

    The patent troll bot would need to look at all available art, in all languages, recognize the art, and create claims using the art. The bot would need to understand the art as well as a person having ordinary skill in the art. Essentially, the patent bot would need to be skilled as anyone working in a specific field to just put the work together.

    So we're talking high level human intelligence with a massive network and creativity. Patent bots, even those designed to troll, are the end of humanity.

    (Also I hate the term Troll, while there are a few actual trolls out there, most 'trolls' are either small inventors or someone working on their behalf. Big companies love to call troll and call for lawsuit reform to get small inventors out of the market. There's a couple of actual jerks, but I've worked with NPE's before whose entire gig is buy some or all rights from an inventor who lacks the deep pockets to sue the multi-billion dollar company whose infringing their patent).

    561:

    No, you're missing it.

    Into My Arms YT: Music: 4:11

    It's more about the what-could-have-been.

    It's not a coincidence that there's 'secret' FB [ugh] and wider forums for Feminist Writers and so on that have to go under the radar at this point.

    And my responses are probably part of that.

    ~

    Just imagine that, on a rather deeper level.

    Elric of Melniboné

    Gladiator YT: Film: 5:35

    Grass blowing in the wind. YT: Reality: 1:44

    I'd like to have that back, not just for stolen moments.

    ~

    Were you not entertained? Very Male, and fought well and won. I thought that's what you males respected.

    562:

    The term I've been trying to remember is granular convection. Freeze-thaw cycles are a big driver, but also (IIRC*) flooding/drying also has a (smaller) effect.

    *It's been decades since I studied this, so I may be conflating two phenomena here.

    563:

    Otoh New England is relatively further South than people think. Portland, ME is around the same Latitude as Nice, France. Portland, OR otoh is north of Montreal. But even Seattle, WA is only about the same Latitude as Salzburg.

    564:

    452 475(:-) 532 544 (and more) Re Buffalo Jumps, corrals in particular were used elsewhere for other large animals, including for sure the woodlands of the eastern US. (One near where I live in southern NY state.) e.g. Native Americans Designed First "Deer Drives"

    565:

    And there we go.

    I miss (Name Redacted) she at least tried to fill her comments with links and joy. I'm probably to blame for her not commenting.

    ~

    Even with a muzzle on, taking apart Patriarchy isn't exactly hard.

    Oh, and you've no idea what it's like to parse comments without information / emotional density. It's like breaking rocks as a slave.

    Anyhow, Host: that's a lesson in how bad the system is.

    The World's Greatest Hand Model YT: Film: 2:41

    why male models YT: Film: 1:10 (the punchline)

    566:

    Since the post Alice instructions the art units that folks have beefs with have an effectively zero grant rate. Even pre-Alice US examiners were getting harsher and better at finding prior art.

    You're probably right in general. (We might have different opinions about IP-acquiring NPEs though. :-) I've been musing internally a bit recently on different ways AI research assistants might emerge; in one path, initially they would be vastly improved (and improving) filters looking for potentially interesting stuff and for how it's (roughly) related to other stuff, and humans would do the mental heavy lifting.

    (Oh and above, Native Americans obviously didn't do the first deer drives.)

    567:

    I've been to the place where Africa almost began in Connecticut. It's pretty far inland, though some of that is down to accretions and ice age moraines too.

    568:

    Back with new computer ... Yes, it looks more & more as if Assange is working, if only indirectly, for the FSA.

    Putin is, very clearly using the Imperial German General staff's 192-17 playbook for disrupting other countries' internal affairs & Assange appears (note the qualifier) to be helping him.

    Um

    569:

    The whole of the continental USA is south of Cornwall; three cheers for the Gulf Stream!

    570:

    Yup, it seems to have been as easy as that. Sulphurbwas known about for millennia, and used and traded easily enough. Saltpetre was just another white crystalline solid, of which there were many sorts, and it looks rather like (from memory and my own reading here) that it wasn't really taken on board as a specific substance in Europe until alchemy and the absorption of Moslem ideas in Spain and Sicily etc. A lot of old recipes are vague as to whether it actually was saltpetre you were dealing with.

    571:

    Wish mine had been. It was pretty much all lectures, mostly given at such a speed that the major immediate subject of concentration was trying to keep up with the note-writing. Comprehension didn't come into it, let alone translating the information from the fairly abstract and theoretical level at which it was presented into its actual application in solving problems. No interaction, almost no labs. You were supposed, I think, to gain actual knowledge by perusing your hastily-scribbled transcript of stuff you didn't understand to begin with thanks to having had no time to think while it was presented, outside lecture time. What actually happened was that I spent my outside-lecture time making up for never having had any social life outside school. Which I enjoyed, but academically it was a disaster.

    (The arts students, they never seemed to have any lectures at all. Occasionally they would hole themselves up in order to, it seemed to me, paraphrase library books into essays, but most of the time what they did academically at all seemed to be something of a puzzle. They, in turn, on seeing our full lecture schedules, would express their amazement in profane terms.)

    572:

    Of course, you can make chlorates, and therefore usable (if a tad dodgy compared to nitrates) explosives, with very primitive stuff - two dissimilar metals, pots, and sea water. Only nobody ever worked it out. There's an interesting might-have-been.

    573:

    I read an article within the last month or two on the failure of the Bridge Academy's system in Aboriginal schools, problems including primary school classes who are effectively ESL and a lack of localisation of the curriculum (everything is American-referenced) but damned if I can find it now - maybe someone with better google-fu...

    574:

    Thanks very much for this. I'm not at all surprised by this. Non-localisation was an issue I came across in Sierra Leone with regard to an Indian religious order who do a lot of F2F work in Africa.

    By the way I take it you mean Australian aboriginal schools, right?

    575:

    Bloody hell, a google brings up this from a day ago:

    https://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/news_details/4073

    Uganda's government has ordered that country's Bridge schools closed. . . and if this point is true, they sound like nice people:

    "n June, global condemnation of Bridge reached its peak after the company orchestrated the arrest of a Canadian researcher investigating its operations in Uganda. The incident threw the spotlight on the company’s practices, resulting in a wave of negative press and increased questions of its claims as a provider of quality education. "

    576:

    Arts (at its best) is a funny one. It relies hugely on self-motivated reading and study, or at least it did in the '80s and '90s. And it only really ramps up in the final years. To the less motivated that equates to a lot of extra time in bed. Compared to STEM degrees, with their highly structured approach, I can understand the envy/rage/contempt. As someone who fled defeated from latter to former, my preferences are biased. But having seen both, I'd argue getting decent results in either requires a decent level of commitment, in different ways.

    My own approach in those gaslit pre-PowerPoint days of the OHP was to take notes then summarise in mindmap form to set the key points. Mainly a coping tool for godawful memory. Or jumping-off point for topping up where the lecturer was on the poor side (always bemuses me that a school teacher needs 1 year+ pedagogic training, but there appears no equivalent for 3rd level?!?).

    577:

    Yes, Australian. Talking about the far north IIRC, I came across it during the run-up to their recent elections. Later... found it https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jul/07/noel-pearson-under-fire-from-all-sides-over-aurukun-school-experiment

    578:

    All I know is NPEs act as a market for patents that are solid but unenforceable due to business relationships or pocket depth.

    As for examinations, the various Patent quality initiatives and work on retaining high quality examiners is really helping. I think the bad art units were just hit too hard too fast at a time when those most skilled in the art knew they could make more in the private sector.

    As for AI filters, sounds like next-gen Lex Machina tools.

    580:

    Gladiator YT: Film: 5:35

    Well fought, and a good death. But better to both win and live

    581:

    I miss (Name Redacted) she at least tried to fill her comments with links and joy. I'm probably to blame for her not commenting.

    That's a lovely phrase. It reminded me of the New Zealand essayist Joe Bennett. I found an example online: try "The soul of the city" from Fun Run and Other Oxymorons, hopefully available at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eTB-tYfFFy8C&pg=PA65&dq=joe+bennett+%22the+soul+of+the+city%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiO7IGT5bzOAhXKbxQKHVUhDOcQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=joe%20bennett%20%22the%20soul%20of%20the%20city%22&f=false .

    (It's a Google Books preview of Christchurch: The City in Literature edited by Anna Rogers, which where I am, allows me to view the entire essay, starting at page 65. I don't know whether Google's interpretation of copyright allows one to view some books in one country but not another.)

    582:

    Spinners

    Racism: Destroy it? How? The monster lives because It was created Strong With white iron will. Created To control Black. White monster Uncontrolled Controls The maker. Soon the monster maker Will die. A black black monster With black iron will Will live And become master. Created for the purpose Of spinning Wheels in wheels in wheels.

    Oodgeroo Noonuccal

    ~

    Not so much concrete but other things. Kvasis dreyra and all that.

    I don't do snark if I respect someone, but have a little compassion for the larger attempt.

    Hugstóran biðk heyra — heyr, jarl, Kvasis dreyra — foldar vǫrð á fyrða fjarðleggjar brim dreggjar.

    translation

    And yes. I can do high snark in Icelandic via Aboriginal Poetry.

    583:

    Ah, missed link.

    Kvasis dreyra

    ~

    The Other Way is likely to be mass genocide, so pardon for the attempt.

    584:

    But having seen both [Arts & STEM], I'd argue getting decent results in either requires a decent level of commitment, in different ways.

    When I went through engineering, those that didn't have the commitment/work habits failed out during first year, either dropping out entirely or 'dropping down' to Arts. Most of those that transferred to Arts got a degree, which to my younger self 'proved' that Arts was easier. Now I wonder if the difference was that they are a crucial couple of years older before the crunch hit.

    A structured approach can be very useful to 18-year-olds, most of them living away from home for the first time, and revelling in the freedom of no attendance taken at classes and no homework checks. (Not to mention being used to automatically getting extensions and being able to argue for marks.)

    I've lost track of the number of times I've advised students (and their parents) to take a gap year between high school and university — partly to explore a bit and decide what they're really interested in, and partly to grow up a bit* so they cope with university better.

    *Universities in Ontario really noticed the elimination of one year of high school. Not only were the students a bit less rounded, but they were a year younger — and that made a significant difference in their behaviour (and success).

    585:

    That's kind of the weird thing about the whole nomadic Folsom idea, which seems to be based on Folsom tools being found hundreds of kilometers from where the stone was quarried (trading between groups couldn't have happened, for some reason)...

    Hm, indeed. I've got no clue about the Folsom tradition in itself but trade in North America? Let me tell you a story...

    The Lewis &amp Clark Expedition was the first overland crossing of North America by Europeans. (Is this generally known in Europe? It's famous where I am but I live near their turnaround point on the Pacific. Indulge me if I repeat stuff British kids learn in school.) Since walking across North America the long way, twice, is no small task it took them several years. Their first winter away from home they stayed with the Mandan tribe and one of the group was a blacksmith who occupied his time turning out axe heads of a design particularly liked by the Mandans. When spring came the Corps of Discovery packed up and headed west, chasing the Pacific for hundreds of miles overland, and eventually got over the continental divide. There they met local people, traded for horses, made canoes, etc.

    One of the locals had an axe. It was one of the ones made at Fort Mandan the earlier winter. It had beaten them there.

    586:

    Better stories about that expedition:

    They bought dogs off local tribes and ate them. Clark refused to eat. This was a major part of Lewis and Clark really detesting each other by the end of the trek.

    They constantly begged native tribes for (very expensive) horses. Then ate them.

    They constantly ignored guides and went the wrong way (geographically speaking) and messed up. On doing this, they then ate more dogs. And horses.

    They then tried to reach the next indigenous people to... you guessed it, beg / trade for more dogs / horses.

    Which they then ate.

    It's not really a surprise that the axe made it there first, they were so incompetent that eating was a constant thing.

    And no.

    If the indigenous people had uniformly told them to piss off then they'd have died [one tribe did, after seeing that they just ate a prize herding dog - for NEW SOULS, hint: pre-horses, the entire dog-human thing was reallllllllly important back then. Think collies, but like, you don't have a horse or a tractor]

    So, well.

    That's America's history in a can.

    Now the police just shoot dogs and they run horses to death in silly flat races [Cartels, 3yr old racing, flat and bad surface, and how most of the South State Politicians are in the pocket of the Cartels - but that's a different story. Hint: those fuckers are corrupt, waaay beyond what you'd imagine. Trump says "build a wall", no wonder they jumped ship]

    Ahem.

    But yes.

    Clark refused to eat the dog. Lewis was a psychopath.

    587:

    Or the other way around. TBH, American Psychosis is all a bit dull now.

    It's all about silly lashing out, no internal checks and fear.

    DONE DEAL.

    "Our way of life is not up for negotiation".

    "OK".

    Gozer the Gozarian YT: Film: 3:21

    588:

    And yes, "American Psychosis" really is the term to use.

    I just proved my ability to reason from a premise to an end conclusion starting from a position of total ignorance, and not only that, make an original thesis while doing it. Oh, and making sure I didn't ruffle too many feathers by making it still Capitalist.

    Top tip: as stated, I no nothing about these topics before you let me free on them. [That's the Joke].

    Y'all under my wings for being brilliant little peeps and putting stuff into the mix.

    Now let's watch their Dragons attempt it.

    Hint ~ judging by the psychosis, they're failing, badly.

    It's like Icarus Landed Over there. But Badly. On Fire. And landed in a petrol tanker. In a refinery.

    Do not fuck with us YT: Film: 0:24

    589:

    Nice M-I-M switch there!

    No = Know.

    Clever Girls.

    You do realize we track these as meta-tells, right?

    I'd pay more attention to that tanker though.

    I'm feeling like weaving a pattern like China soon. You know, Super Computers and Big Bubbles.

    And I'm horny as fuck and you psychos are running on empty with your entire campaign.

    ZZZ

    How's your Dragons doing?

    Or did you fucking execute them and dissect them, you fucking psychos?

    590:

    (((Hint: Just don't think too much about how that reasoning happened. It's not strictly Homo Sapiens Sapiens friendly and you'll break something if you follow it without pretending that there was a "mistress plan" all along and it wasn't a causation chain that had already been mapped. No, really. It's alien to your Minds and not-very-friendly to your models. Just pretend it was a bitch knowing their end content and playing you all along.

    No, really. Not even joking)))

    Man in the Middle.

    Maximus Decimus Meridius YT: Film: 2:37

    Oh, and it'd be real fucking nice if you stopped killing us. Because then we'd be able to talk, and not enact Justice in return.

    591:

    On the conversation about students transferring between art and STEM seems to me to be good for both fields, despite the snobbishness involved. Why? The spread of ideas. How many people who transfer from (say) engineering to art bring engineering concepts with them?

    I will use two other fields to illustrate my point. I've run across people who struggled in engineering, so they switched to history so they could go into law or public policy. In the case where they went into law, I wonder how many of those people now have positions with startups trying to integrate machine learning into the legal profession? How long until fields like archaeology and anthropology begin to run machine learning algorithms on their data?

    592:

    I'm waiting for a STEM student (or at the very least, one who has done Formal Logic) to parse how this thread went.

    I mean, really break down how the casual chains work.

    I mean, really break down how an Economics Model got so destroyed.

    I mean, really break down just how that happened.

    I mean, really understand how that worked.

    Welcome to the jungle YT: Music: 4:38

    And then, I'd like them to stop killing us and be a bit nicer.

    Or we could just react in kind, but we don't do Genocide you psychotic fucks.

    593:

    Oh, and Dirk.

    This is the real test.

    This thread is a Case History.

    You can check all data (due to you know, the MIM crowd).

    Then you can run your numbers.

    ~

    The bait: "Economists prove hypothetical future" The response: "You don't even understand economics, la la la" and 'cause I don't care about your shitty system, here's a proof that breaks it all "TROLOLOL".

    Now.

    Run. The. Numbers.

    MIM are all over this.

    TRUE: YES / NO ?

    Y'all Scientists and shit, you can model this. (Oh, fun fact: for you this is a fun parlor game about silly forums. For me, it's about whether or not you fucking psychos dissect me, live. The TV element is only for your leaders).

    And no.

    That's not the joke.

    The joke is that China / USA / Russia already did it to us.

    I get Around YT: Music: 2:08.

    Oh, and p.s.

    You're supposed to be scientists darlings: work it.

    594:

    Clark refused to eat the dog. Lewis was a psychopath.

    I suspect it's been a while since Catherine Taylor read American history. In case it's actually of interest to anyone, here's what Captain Clark wrote in his diary on January 3, 1806:

    “Our party from necessity have been obliged to subsist some length of time on dogs, have now become extremely fond of their flesh; it is worthy of remark that while we lived principally on the flesh of this animal we were much more healthy, strong and more fleshy than we have been since we left the buffalo country. As for my own part, I have not become reconciled to the taste of this animal as yet.”

    This was while they were trying to figure out how to survive through a winter in an environment none of them had lived in before. The winter of 1805-1806 was very rainy; the hunting was usually good but the meat went bad almost immediately. Like many people before and after they spent the winter feeling depressed about the rain, bored, and crowded. The winter pass times of getting sick and bickering with the neighbors did not help.

    595:

    As for AI filters, sounds like next-gen Lex Machina tools. Acquired by LexisNexis late last year, so it seems likely. I had in mind general AI-based research tools though, not just tools specialized for legal research. (Also responding to 591/Ioan ) Definitely interest is in the air so future rapid progress should not be surprising. E.g. engineer I'm working with (who was a practicing corporate lawyer (US) until very recently; his soul wanted a change) is starting to toy with legal ML as a side project.

    Maybe there is already something that automates what so many of us manually do regularly and not well (CT excepted. Seriously.), e.g. google fu (often seeking surprise) and google scholar and finding maps of scholarship (nodes annotated with abstracts and doc links) in an area. That'd be nice to have. (A very crude first-draft scripting-language-based impl shouldn't take more than a day or two. He says optimistically. :-)

    596:

    Hint: Just don't think too much about how that reasoning happened. It's not strictly Homo Sapiens Sapiens friendly... Nah, thinking about this is the funnest part. (To backtrack or not to backtrack, that is the question. Or at least one of several.)

    BTW, yes the threads of the thread have been well-woven.

    597:

    If all Lewis and Clark ate was dog and horse, it's no wonder they needed the mercury laxatives. Which maybe explains some of the madness. But then there's the syphilis as well, acquired from (or given to) the natives.

    598:

    The only thing I remember about L&C's diet was that they got sick of eating salmon in the Pacific Northwest; so went back to eating horse/dog. Maybe they were descended from Tom Baker's character in Blackadder, the one who started drinking his own urine before the water ran out.

    599:

    This is what gets me about the modern-day insistence on treating mercury as if it was the urine of Cthulhu. Calomel was a very common laxative whose use continued well into the 20th century. The modern attitude to mercury would have you expect universal insanity and death, but that didn't happen, otherwise probably none of us on this thread would be here. Organomercury compounds like Charlie's favourite dimethylmercury are nasty, but inorganic mercury, while not entirely benign, is still a totally different kettle of fish.

    600:

    Not quite. In elemental form, the liquid is pretty harmless, and many of us have a lot of silver amalgam as a dental filler. But the vapour is Bad News.

    601:

    Thanks for this, but I think that's a different firm than the one who got caught up-to-no-good in Uganda, and have been invited into Liberia. Which is even more disturbing, if you think about it - the fact that there is more than one of these things running about out there.

    I actually got angry when I saw the bit about them doing more teaching of US history and other US matters than anything Australian, or related to the local Wik culture.

    By the way, I take it from your user name that you're from Aotearoa/New Zealand? I spent six months there eight years ago, would go back in a flash.

    602:

    In vino veritas

    603:

    BTW, there is only one technology that would/will change history on a radical scale beyond anything seen so far - decent cheap battery technology. If you think renewables are on an exponential curve now, just wait until that battery arrives. Global upheaval.

    604:

    I'm aware of the duality of the joke and so on.

    Hopefully the silliness level is understood: the underlying reality of Path Dependency is probably accurate though.

    Think of it more as a testament to Crowd Sourcing, and even a nod of respect to the lone crank running his salt.org site.

    On the Clark thing:

    According to the wikipedia article on Dog meat, attitudes towards dogs varied between different groups. It mentions that Comanche considered dog eating abhorrent, while great plains groups like the Sioux and Cheyenne consumed it without qualm though there was a taboo against eating wolves, perhaps for religious reasons.

    Famous explorers Lewis & Clark also documented the consumption of dog meat across the continent in their 1803-06 expedition. When their own supply of dog meat ran low they acquired more from the Paiutes, Wah-clel-lah, Clatsop, Teton Sioux, Nez Perce, and the Hidatsas. Though Lewis and his crew had no problems with eating dogs, Clark refused it.

    What Native American groups traditionally ate dog, and does this tradition continue today? Quora

    There's probably a link in the dietary taboos to earlier discussions of buffalo jumps. Dogs were the major carrying animal of the continent before horses, after all.

    The Telegraph has been pushing the battery meme very heavily recently (good old Ambrose Evans-Pritchard):

    Holy Grail of energy policy in sight as battery technology smashes the old order Telegraph 10th August 2016]

    The Chinese are not the only ones looking into VR / military tech:

    Cyber war: British army goes high-tech with futuristic drones and VR headsets Digital Trends 12th August

    Latest Alt-Right Mimetic Weapon Yes: they discovered Plato, which is cute. (Image is safe / non-nasty). Woah betide us if they make it to Nietzsche and read it properly instead of the pop-sci version.

    605:

    Cheap batteries will arrive aobut the same time as cheap energy, cheap money, cheap beer and cheap pizza.

    Electrochemical batteries are about maxed out in capacity per kilogram of materials to the point where they make quite good hand-grenades if buggered about with. See the fishing scene in Bujold's "Mermory" for a good example when Miles buggers up a stunner cartridge to turn it into an improvised explosive device.

    If there was a cheaper reversible electrochemical reaction that could store and release electrical charge then it would be used. There isn't. There are better batteries than lead-acid and lithium-X for static power storage but they're more expensive (Ni-Fe, for example) or even more dangerous (Na-S).

    Realistically the cheapest bulk electrical storage is pumped-hydro which just about matches bulk lead-acid in cost but it will last several decades of deep-discharge cycles unlike lead-acid batteries. The problem is pumped-hydro requires specific geology (low and high reservoirs close to each other) and lots of water, and it still doesn't store that much energy per hectare of land used up.

    606:

    Don't forget that reservoirs are excellent bodies for evaporating water too, and that loss probably isn't appreciated except by dam operators.

    That said, I do agree about with you batteries and bombs. The energy density of any decent fuel--gasoline for example--makes it an excellent incendiary. Energy dense energy storage tends to be dangerous, unless you're talking about, say, respiration based on lipids. The advantage of batteries against, say, biofuels, is that you take the atmospheric greenhouse effect out of the process. Rebuilding lithium back into battery form doesn't contribute to climate change in quite the same way that burning gasoline, harvesting forests to burn the wood, or making and burning biodiesel does.

    Despite that, we're still getting better batteries. While I'm not an engineer, I get the impression that one of the main factors is making big (lithium) batteries that don't readily explode.

    607:

    A long time back I was discussing lithium batteries with someone who thought there was a conspiracy by the oil companies to prevent manufacturers from making large batteries because they wanted to prevent electric cars from being taken up en masse. I had to explain to them that they weren't making large Li-tech batteries for commercial sale for the same reason they didn't make large hand-grenades.

    A Li battery pack has about a quarter of the same energy density as the same mass of dynamite and the energy in a single cell can be released in a few seconds under the wrong circumstances. Electric car makers use armoured structures for their batteries, not to prevent them from burning but to slow the propagation of a fire down to the point where it might take a couple of minutes for the 50 or 60kWh of stored energy to express itself as heat rather than a few seconds. This gives the passengers and onlookers time to get the hell away from the conflagration. Hopefully.

    608:

    I can't be bothered to supply more than one reference, so you will have to take my word that energy density can be raised considerably over today's limits, safely

    http://phys.org/news/2016-08-lithium-ion-batteries-capacity.html

    "Seidlhofer calculates from this that the theoretical maximum capacity of these types of silicon-lithium batteries lies at about 2300 mAh/g. This is more than six times the theoretical maximum attainable capacity for a lithium-ion battery constructed with graphite (372 mAh/g)."

    The amount of battery research being reported is staggering, but unless you read something like phys.org you will miss almost all of it.

    609:

    "What do you call a battery with 50% more power? A bomb." -- actual battery engineer, who clarified that this statement is always true at any given point in time. (LiIon battery density is improving at about 10% per year, and that's perfectly fine with the battery folk. They're generally more interested in ways to do faster charging while still controlling discharge rate in uncontrolled situations.)

    610:

    There's that word, "theoretical". Also "calculates". Pardon me if I don't hold my breath waiting for these to appear on the market at a few bucks per kWh of storage.

    Static grid power storage isn't really concerned about volume or the mass of the battieres, it's capacity per dollar ticket price complicated by the expected life of the cells that rules hence the common use of lead-acid batteries in UPS systems. Pricier batteries that last longer are usually better than cheaper units that die fast simply because of the cost of the replacement operation and disposal/recycling of the dead units.

    Lithium-X tech batteries are about $200/kWh including housing, charge control and power conversion while lead-acid is half that price but both technologies can't be deep-cycled to zero without impacting lifespan. Na-S is more expensive but it can be deep-cycled to nearly flat and the batteries can run for decades with minimal maintenance. In contrast Dinorwic pumped-storage station cost about a billion dollars for 8GWhr of storage or $125/kw and it's been running with daily power cycles of several GWh in and out for about forty years now. It's not deep-cycled for national security reasons, it's a Black Start station so it always keeps a couple of GWh in reserve.

    611:

    Much improved battery energy density might lead to much cheaper batteries but there's no good reason to presuppose that higher energy density is required to make stationary battery storage cheap. The key metric for stationary storage is (cost per unit capacity / cycle lifetime). Whether the cheapest battery masses 10 kg per unit of capacity or 25 kg matters only slightly for grid tied storage. The system only needs to be transported once at beginning of life and once again at end of life. If you could build Li-ion batteries that were twice the cost per kWh of capacity and half the energy density of those in the current Tesla Model S, but had 20 times the cycle lifetime, that would be good enough to make new pumped storage projects a non-starter.

    612:

    Am I crunching the numbers correctly? Dirk's reference above suggests a theoretical silicon-lithium maximum of 2.3Ah per gram of battery. Assuming a potential of 3.7V for the cell, the usual figure for Li-tech batteries, that's 10Wh or 36,000 joules stored energy per gram. TNT, depending on its compounding has the energy equivalent of about 4,000 to 6,000 joules per gram so this battery if it could be constructed would be potentially a lot more destructive than the equivalent mass of TNT.

    613:

    I'm not a materials scientist, but I think there's a reason these beasties aren't used in cars:

    Radioisotope Batteries PDF University of Wisconsin 2010

    Nuclear battery breakthrough WNN 2014

    You'd expect a similar reticence to use that new battery tech, I'd hope.

    ~

    And with regards to (name redacted), the toothy play is probably worse from this angle than yours. It highlights how a certain world-view works though, and I imagine it's necessary when real shadows are moving behind the scenes. Don't puppies show their bellies to older dogs?

    This Saudi Prince Just Burned Donald Trump on Twitter Fortune, Jan 2016 (note: he's also a majority share holder and probably has a finger on the scale over Turkish censorship).

    614:

    What about this here SMES? Superconducting loops that store, well, current.

    http://www.lowcarbonfutures.org/sites/default/files/superconductingmagneticenergystorage_final.pdf

    Expensive now, but what if superconductors got cheaper and higher temperature? Then you could make some dandyfine batteries. They'de make good ammunition too.

    615:

    There are a couple of things missing from your comment and the OP. The Romans DID have a kind of industrial revolution. It was applied to their navy. Some years ago sunken Roman warships were found at the bottom of the Med- the scene of a great battle with Carthage. The archaeologists realised that individual wooden components were numbered. When they found other wrecks with similar parts they were similarly numbered. From this they deduced that the ships were built in assembly line fashion, and that the ancient historians had not made up the very rapid replacement of the Roman fleet, which was able to destroy the remainder of the Carthaginian fleet. What the Romans never had was a good harness for draught horses. Ground transport remained a real problem.

    The Roman number system corresponds to the different wires on an abacus. It is extremely easy to use for arithmetic, and about as fast as 1980s computers (Japanese abacus practitioners won the contests with computers until then). Certainly Roman computation was good enough to erect a concrete building with a large dome roof which still stands: the Pantheon. The missing ingredient for an industrial revolution may have been the lack of C18 British style civil law and settled society. After 200 or so there were few peaceful transitions of power, and the 'unpeaceful' ones used a great deal of resources.

    616:

    That's not surprising. IIRC, Roman swords may have been assembly line products as well, although the blades were likely hand-forged (and pattern welded).

    The Romans used coal, too, at least in Britain. They also had chain pumps and piston pumps on their boats, really good glass, truly excellent concrete, and some people over the eastern Mediterranean were dinking around with analog computing and steam power.

    There are a couple of ways of looking at this. One is to ask the question, "what kept the Romans from doing a full industrial revolution?" Another is to ask whether we're fixated on industrial revolutions because we'd love for history to be predetermined by something or other. It's been the wet dream of the humanities studies like history and economics to develop the predictive powers they ascribe to physics.

    The other possibility is that there are many routes to development, and some of them lead to groups that can conquer others, at least temporarily. In this view, history is at best probabilistic, and we've been lucky for a few centuries, much as, say, the Sumerians were. In the longer term, once we've blown through the fossil fuels, ore reserves, and groundwater that made "industrial civilization" so dominant, we could easily be seen as the most colossal failures that the human race has so far produced, and our successors will model their behavior to not follow in our footsteps. There are ample precedents in history for this, including the Medieval distaste for Roman style extravagance, greed, and slavery.

    But that's insufficiently patriotic in the capitalist sense. Better not to go there.

    617:

    "I'm not a materials scientist, but I think there's a reason these beasties aren't used in cars:"

    Yes. They're shite :)

    They're not rechargeable: once the isotope has decayed, that's it. The isotope has to be created in a nuclear reactor, and (apart from 90Sr which is a common fission product) the efficiency is ruinously low. The conversion efficiency of the thermal types is also ruinously low. The power output is much too small to run a vehicle. If it wasn't, the waste heat would melt the vehicle. They can't be shut off; if the energy isn't being extracted as electricity it must appear as heat. Outside highly specialised applications like spacecraft and pacemakers, they're more or less useless. And that's without even mentioning the obvious :)

    618:

    Translation of Dog Meat thing [non-meta version without referencing NZ arts. No, you don't understand it, I know how it looks though]:

    The Commanche are formed, literally, by the discovery of horses. Their culture (1680ish) is formed as an offshoot of another tribal group who they split with to embrace horse technology.

    Paiutes, Wah-clel-lah, Clatsop, Teton Sioux, Nez Perce, and the Hidatsas all do not have a culture of eating dog (that I can source - this might be incomplete).

    So Lewis (not Clark, I was working a mirror guise, pun intended for the Chan lot) managed to offend most of them for buying / begging expensive working animals (think Lassie / Collies) and then treating them as hamburgers.

    The Comanche were one of the most warlike of the indigenous people (according to History ahem)...

    You can then probably patch in an incredibly strange part of American current culture, which is Police killing dogs and/or seemingly having an inability not to understand the usual emotional bond that Man / Dog has in most Western cultures (but in particular, the English speaking one. French too for that matter).

    Let's just say... Lewis might be symbolic of something that continues in Authoritarian Minds in America. That's probably not around in Western Europe, apart from on the real fringes.

    Danger Danger territory stuff.

    Wendigo

    619:

    Ok, I understand that now from taking your words + searching around. I assumed their life-spans (waves to Voyager) were a selling point.

    btw, did you all just sit through the 60's SF onwards silently banging your heads against a wall?

    [Note: this is a joke, but also serious - might explain ahem those puppies who started this little crusade off. I can imagine the cognitive dissociation of reality / SF not making sense on developing Minds].

    620:

    Comanche Comanche Comanche

    Something is really stopping that word getting printed correctly.

    Probably a current OP running that they don't want contaminated.

    nose wiggle

    621:

    One fact check. If you read histories of the run up to WW1 you will find that the German General Staff had advised that the last year that Germany could win a war with Russia was 1916. Russian industrial production was outpacing everyone else, at 6% a year so there was industry in Russia. Much of it may have been destroyed in the course of the revolutionary period, but there was a base to build on. One of the 'what-ifs' of history is what-if the Germans hadn't sent Lenin to Russia as their agent? No Russian collapse in the east would have shortened the war in the west, and a victorious Russian Empire would hardly have agreed to the post-war map of Europe drawn up at Versailles.

    622:

    I learnt in (UK) school history that as late as the C18 some British advocates still suggested the long bow as a primary weapon. The reason was the reload rate. At the time range was not much different, but it took much longer to reload a gun than to put another arrow to the string. It required much more training though, and many fewer contractors, so the musket took over.

    623:

    And yes: Lassie & Collie call out 100% a tell here.

    Since when did Americans not have a cultural mythology of loving dogs? Of any genetic make up / cultural background? [Insert obvious "Asian Joke" here, but - then do the leg-work and see when that actually stopped happening. Earlier than you thought, due to RailRoads and so on]

    Given the age of society / active police, even Flipper got anthropomorphized. [Spoiler: died in tragic circumstances, a la all the Orcas. Don't look it up if you don't want your soul to die a little[1]].

    So, riddle me a reason.

    You can tie in the mental effects of abuse of steroids and so on to it. It's kinda neat.

    [1] She committed suicide. No, really.

    624:

    Showing that there are other Dragons out there, this got asked today on Reddit.

    Someone posted a rather neat little paper that also ties into #543

    Institutionally Constrained Technology Adoption: Resolving the Longbow Puzzle PDF. George Mason / Simon Fraser University. Two mid tier Unis, but the paper is interesting in scope. (It also proves that Rumblings in the Jungle are happening).

    625:

    TL;DR

    They suggest that political stability and confidence in Power is the reason. Read #543, apply to muskets, yadda yadda.

    Fairly common claim, probably true.

    626:

    Perhaps I might interject a comment: the first iron bridge known was built as a toll bridge across the river Severn, at a place called Ironbridge. It is not far from Abraham Darby's Coalbrookdale Iron works {now ruins). The bridge still stands, and as far as I know is still the original.

    627:

    Yes.

    512.

    I frequently act like a mad loon and spout gibberish to get expert Minds to comment. I then use their knowledge to create things. It's not intended to be anything but fun.

    The (CIA) Hacker News / Silicon Valley people have an ethos of "fail fast". Being more sane, I'd like to think you can do this without, you know, cratering entire societies. My Dear Woman.

    "Look at me" Dustin Hoffman on Laurence Olivier - Inside The Actors Studio YT: Interview: 3:10

    Topic: Olivier on Hoffman's method acting Snopes Forum.

    Let's just say I trust the 'vain ego' version a little less than the other.

    ~

    As a historical detail, that bridge collapse was widely publicized and used to drive forward the new Steel technology as a better, more modern, alternative.

    This has nothing to do with the actual structural integrity of iron bridges.

    628:

    And once you grasp that bit of meta-meta-meta, my disagreement with Mr Brad Delong should become a little more clear.

    You can peddle bullshit, as long as you understand it's bullshit and don't pretend reality doesn't matter.

    Energy = Information, after all.

    629:

    Guns take cheaper ammo too, at least in terms of the time to make musket balls.

    Thing is, archers are still facing off against gunners, and winning under some circumstances.

    630:

    The first British Mission to the Chinese emperor left England in the 1780s. They noted that China was using wood for fuel but they sailed up rivers whose hillsides showed massive exposed coal seams. China did not lack for coal, but did lack a desire to change how things had always been done.

    631:

    Yes, Path Dependency.

    It's the classic way Empires fail to adapt to reality, cling to tech they control (and more importantly, understand / have power networks with). It doesn't help when the people modelling shit don't even understand the basics of what they're modelling, get paid gigs and lie for 20+ years.

    Oh, and that's the more honest ones. The other kind are off in Toto-Kansas lands of fucking Narnia, paid off by energy companies who knew shit was hitting the fan 30 years ago.

    ~

    If you want a lesson in it, Cyber-War Apocalypse-Ramp-Up is going on at the moment.

    There's a dump of alleged Soros emails that's getting mined. Let's just say, there's a massive anti-Bilderberg attack vector going down. And the US Media is not handling it well, neither are the DNC / RNC etc.

    It helps that most (that I've checked) has been true. It's not like this stuff is new, fresh or unknown, or even not available with any [redacted: insert "trained skills"] it's just the cognitive dissonance from the illusion that's going to break things.

    Hey, Mr Brad Delong.

    Honest question.

    Did you really not understand the basics of energy dependency and Path Dependency all these years, or were you lying?

    The answer to that one is real important. (Or perhaps not, look up #508).

    ~

    Final joke: my soul is a really innocent one. Perhaps one of the last Old Ones.

    Mein Herz Brennt YT: Music: 4:44

    I can't understand Hate even when I channel it.

    "The Bomb is in your liver"

    to eliminate, by metabolizing or secreting, the potentially harmful biochemical products produced by the body, such as bilirubin, from the breakdown of old red blood cells and ammonia from the breakdown of proteins; and to detoxify, by metabolizing and/or secreting, drugs, alcohol, and environmental toxins.

    It's ok. I didn't expect love or parades, I expected the Pillar of Salt.

    632:

    There's also the problem of parabolas. Guns, even smoothbore muskets can outrange a bow because the bullet's path is flatter. That allows ranked soldiers with guns to engage bowmen outside their own effective range as long as they stand in line.

    An arrow from a bow fired at a rank of soldiers one hundred metres away is going to descend quite steeply, in part because it is fired at a high angle and in part because it loses a lot of its forward speed in flight due to drag. There's a good chance it will either hit the ground in front of the rank or go over their heads and fall behind them. It has to hit a standing man while coming down at a steep angle to do any good.

    Conversely a musketball is travelling at about the speed of sound and will reach a line of the enemy a hundred metres away in about a third of a second during which it will drop about 50cm from the original trajectory. Assuming a reasonable level aim then the bullet much more likely to hit a standing man than an arrow.

    If the two ranks close then the bowmen can fire directly at the opposing rank with a flatter trajectory and have more chance of hitting someone but the smart thing to do is to keep your distance and stay in rank rather than clumping up. That takes discipline and drill rather than training particularly with the weapons you carry.

    633:

    Oh, and #537 - 1775.

    Gonna have to notch this one up: Saltpeter trade to American Revolution.

    This isn't something that wikipedia will tell you [Because this is NEW THEORY, and it's free!]

    A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

    Good, but misses the point.

    1757 doomed France: not because of lack of saltpeter, but because by becoming so good at it, they could arm the Colonial American armies / their forces.

    More success = more debt seemed appropriate, since, you know, they were kicking the British Empire in the teeth (and by that point, invasion was a long-gone chance).

    Big Bada Boom YT: Film: 1:00

    ~

    You're welcome.

    Two new theories of Industrial Revolution in one thread.

    Apparently this is difficult to you or something.

    634:

    And the fun part is:

    Mine are True.

    635:

    Are these new?

    No idea.

    Apparently so.

    The meta-meta-meta joke is the reality where these are new is not one I grew up in.

    Cause this is working from a non-specialist, non-educated background.

    ~

    I'm just wishing a proper historian or anyone could come in, dump some links and say: "Child, we have thought about these things many years ago..."

    The other reality is a depressing one.

    636:

    [That's not very nice, Dear. You're tearing down their walls too fast. They cling to models because that is how they view reality. Stop it. And yes, we know it's childish.]

    637:

    [To save this mess: the argument is a simple one. If you mix Path Dependency of one energy resource with a more modern process that ignores prior constraints but has equal applicable power ratio in a separate field, you end up with a deficit in one, and an excess of the other. Your Minds tend to attempt to ignore the former and spend the latter.

    This ends in crisis. Or Revolution.

    And yes, that's your third new model in a field that is so over-saturated it relies on minutiae to argue over.

    Oh, and grow up: that's your environmental crisis in a can.

    We don't like you very much]

    638:

    Russia was going to collapse. Lenin won the struggle to rebuild it. But I repeat: Russia was going to collapse. The only thing that might have saved Russia for "democracy" would have been the West letting Russia leave the war, which the West would have never done and which the Germans would only have allowed under their own terms. And odds are this would only have led to a White putsch before the Red Revolution rather than a White counter afterwards as happened in reality.

    639:

    Cheap batteries will arrive aobut the same time as cheap energy, cheap money, cheap beer and cheap pizza.

    Well cheap pizza and beer arrived quite a while ago, and interest rates (ie the price of money) are at historic lows (which is why more governments should be deficit-spending). Energy is expensive in some places, cheap in others and getting cheaper in a bunch of others via the advances in PV tech in the last 20 years, much of which is on the market now or not far off. So I would imagine by your formulation, cheap batteries are pretty close :).

    I'm actually quite upset about the outcomes of the 20 year mining investment boom in Australia, since we seem to be planning new coal mines and not reinvesting. In fact, technical (ie non-university) education capabilities that were once almost universally accessible have been dramatically cut back, which means we probably couldn't do the sort of segue into manufacturing we might do when globalisation eventually equalises the cost of labour (now that's something to watch out for... it could impact the price of beer). But given that equalisation or the likely alternative being automation, then manufacturing is just a way of exporting energy that should be more cost effective (ie add more value) than putting it into batteries or hydrogen fuel cells or anything else. And if you think about the tropics as a natural place to house manufacturing it isn't that far off standard SF tropes like doing it is orbitals, just a lot cheaper and possibly economically realistic in our lifetimes (though more likely a generation or so).

    640:

    Nojay & others .... Cheap batteries will arrive abaut the same time as cheap energy, cheap money, cheap beer and cheap pizza.

    Google for: "Developing Organic Flow batteries for Energy Storage " & maybe add "DARPA" to the search. Very interesting indeed .... THIS rabbit-hole is interesting, as well,?A> - more from DARPA.

    I think, if not "cheap", certainly "affordable" might be not too far away.

    641:

    I frequently act like a mad loon and spout gibberish to get expert Minds to comment Yes Usually called ... Wasting everyone else's time. Grrrr

    642:

    "...so this battery if it could be constructed would be potentially a lot more destructive than the equivalent mass of TNT."

    That is truly a naive understanding of chemistry, and science in general. Here. Let me rephrase your statement:

    "Gasoline has over TEN TIMES the energy density of TNT, and you are suggesting we power cars with ten gallons of the stuff! Are you fucking insane? That's like carrying a 1000lb bomb with you, which is just waiting to go off in an accident. It's enough to utterly destroy entire neighborhoods!"

    etc.

    643:

    I've been reading about flow batteries for decades. I don't see any for sale at a reasonable price anywhere. Lots of research, lots of glossy brochures and Wired articles but no cheap deliverables.

    There's a lot of energy storage battery tech out there you can buy off the shelf but it tends to come with caveats -- lead-acid is bulky and doesn't like deep-discharge and has a limited lifespan, nickel-iron is horrendously expensive (and I still don't know why), sodium-sulphur tends to catch fire, lithium-X is prone to spontaneous discharge and fire (although with a lot of work that's getting rarer) etc.

    They're all expensive in terms of dollars per Whr and grid renewables operators aren't going to pay to install them to balance the supply. At the moment they freewheel on the grid using baseload and CCGT, effectively burning fossil carbon and adding to global climate change while wearing their green credentials like a badge of honour. More cheap renewables will mean more of a load on the grid which someone else will pay for.

    Myself I'd say -- "Right, you've had twenty years or so of subsidy, renewables are no longer experimental so the rules change. Any renewable generating operation over 1MW feed-in to the grid must have storage of, say, 2 hours of dataplate generating capacity. You can pool this if you wish to share a common storage facility but there are locality considerations i.e. the store can't be more than 100 km from the generating site or more than two hops on a HV connection."

    644:

    You're like: "Today, solar power is $100/Watt, so let's not talk science fiction crap of $0.35/Watt set in the mythical future of 2016"

    Any comment on Magnesium battery research? As for Sodium Sulfur, that is ancient. Here is an example (one of many) that is a bit more up to date: http://www.faradion.co.uk/technology/sodium-ion-technology/

    645:

    I don't know which of you is misrepresenting the situation more ridiculously. Petrol has no energy density (for combustion) in the absence of external oxygen, but both batteries and TNT do; and, while its vapour can form an explosive mixture with air, this occurs only if there is a slow leak into a constrained space (or, rarely, open air with no wind at all) followed by a spark.

    While 36 KJ/Kg is 5 times the energy density of any current explosive, the question is how it releases. A battery is vanishingly unlikely to detonate, but that leaves a lot of scope for the rate of its energy release. Based on known failures of lithium batteries, we can reasonably assume a fast burn, and it would be explosive if in an (strong) container, especially if surrounded by something like water. So we are probably talking about something 12 times as powerful as (mediaeval, poorly mixed) gunpowder.

    This is a very, very serious issue, and the people working on high-powered lithium batteries spend a LOT of their effort into minimising their explosive nature. But it's not quite like a modern high explosive.

    646:

    Here is my bottom line prediction, set somewhere between now and 2025.

    Cheap battery tech will enable electric cars to have a range of 1000km, with a price premium of less than 10% over ICE. At that point nobody in their right mind will buy ICE, and the change will be virtually overnight, prompting the collapse of previously massive industries. And let's not forget the national grid, and all those predictions concerning electricity consumption also going down the toilet in the space of months.

    Globally.

    647:

    I'm not going to bother to argue this one - I have already provided plenty of info you can follow up. But here's a clue related to one URL I posted. What is the burn rate of an alloy of Silicon and Lithium?

    648:

    Gasoline is a liquid and requires it be mixed with oxygen or air before it will combust. There's a laboratory stunt where a burning splint is plunged into a jar or gasoline and it doesn't set off a raging inferno, the splint is simply extinguished. It's a rigged demo, of course -- the gasoline has been refrigerated and the jar is tall and narrow and nearly full, the splint is plunged quickly into the liquid. The refrigeration and the jar's shape ensures there is little or no gasoline vapour mixed with air at the top of the liquid so nothing gets a chance to burn. It doesn't always work though.

    Lithium batteries are solid. Any heat propagates through the cell structure quickly decomposing the insulating layers and releasing the stored electrochemical energy in the form of more heat resulting more decomposition. Positive feedback is not your friend. The current (pun not intended) solution is to separate cells with armour to slow down or (at best) stop that damage propagating to adjacent cells and setting them off in turn. It doesn't always work though.

    649:

    Sodium-sulphur (Na-S) battery tech is on sale and deliverable today for static energy storage. NGK have been developing and building MWhr-sized units for about a decade or so.

    https://www.ngk.co.jp/nas/case_studies/rokkasho/

    This is a 245MWh Na-S battery store used to stabilise a windfarm in Japan. If I recall correctly the batteries cost about $1 million for 2MWhr of storage including control, conversion etc. so the all-up cost of the wind farm and storage to balance the grid will be on the order of $200 million or so for a typical output of 17MW assuming 30% output from the 50MW dataplate windfarm. That makes nuclear look like a bargain.

    I'd expect the cost of these Na-S units to fall once production increases if demand goes up but not by much since they're bulky and again there's that little problem of fire -- at least two of the early NGK battery installations have caught fire in the past. They think they've solved the problem.

    You keep talking about research and blue-sky bullshit futures, I keep talking about deliverable tech and its real-world price ticket today.

    650:

    It's still not comparable to TNT or any other effective explosive, and that comparison has annoyed people since it was first used (by Woolley?) to mislead people. A more reasonable comparison is with solid propellants; as I said, they are explosive ONLY when enclosed in a strong container (or very large indeed). The main risk is becoming a major fire source that cannot (practically) be extinguished.

    651:

    Deja moo. I first saw that prediction several decades ago, again based on unreasonably optimistic assumptions. Your claimed analogues to the problems are even less realistic than the comparison to TNT. The problem for almost all such batteries is thermal runaway; sodium-sulphur etc. are exceptions, because they have worse failure modes! And there has been only limited progress in 25 years.

    652:

    I've talked about this before but combustion is just a special case of oxidation. Rust (oxidation) takes minutes, combustion takes seconds explosion takes milliseconds and detonation takes microseconds.

    I'm not saying that lithium ion batteries explode per se, they burn very fast since they're a solid lump of material that doesn't need oxygen to get incredibly hot, the electrochemical energy does that as it expresses itself. Releasing 80% of its contained energy in five seconds is still going to cause a shitload of damage even if it doesn't go bang. The hotter it gets, the faster the undamaged portion of the cell will itself start to degrade, short out and get hot too, positive feedback exacerbated by the fact it's a solid lump. Firewalls between cells slow down fratricide but if they're too strong they cause overpressure effects similar to a bomb casing which is not good -- Mister Shrapnel is not your friend, see the Boston Marathon bombing for a worked example.

    Any kind of stored energy has to be treated with care, basically. Just because a battery is physically small doesn't mean it's not dangerous. If it can release its energy in a very short period of time the effects will be like a bomb even if it doesn't go bang!

    653:

    Well, yes, but it's not unreasonable to consider improvements in design that would make the 5 seconds into 5 minutes, or even 5 hours for batteries where size and weight are not critical. Firewalls for such purposes do not need to be impermeable and strong; they need to slow the heat transfer (whether by conduction or fluid flow). That's still a problem, but it's a fire hazard and not an explosive one.

    654:

    The NGK battery farm at Rokkasho I referenced above has the individual 2MWh battery units standing in the open separated from each other so if and when one of them lights off it's unlikely to trigger its neighbour(s). They hope.

    It doesn't help that Na-S batteries contain molten sulphur at about 300 deg C when they're working correctly, it's one of the things that makes putting out a fire a challenge. When one of the NGK batteries (a 1MWh prototype) caught fire previously it took two weeks to determine the fire had been extinguished.

    655:

    One hopes that it is a good ten miles from the nearest habitation, road or whatever, with good plans for evacuating further than that in the direction the wind is blowing before the fumes get there. One doubts that. That is why that technology always was such a stupid idea for cars.

    656:

    Now now, rules like evacuation zones only apply to nuclear power plants not fluffy-bunny renewable generators. Hell, when the gas and oil terminals at Chiba burned after 3/11 nobody thought to evacuate east Tokyo despite the thousands of tonnes of toxic materials dumped onto people's doorsteps.

    657:

    The feasibility of batteries has the same metric as the feasibility of solar power: $/kWh. Nothing else. It's like having a debate in 2008 about declining costs of solar panels and saying that further cost reductions were unlikely due to a slowdown in panel efficiency. Anyone saying panel efficiency has just plateaued would be correct, but they're missing the point entirely.

    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-13/batteries-storing-power-seen-as-big-as-rooftop-solar-in-12-years

    http://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/batteries

    658:

    Oh. Since this is a free-for-all, I wonder what you guys make of this

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/14/world-largest-vertical-farm-newark-green-revolution

    I wonder

    a. How expensive this food is compared to regular food b. How many people the warehouse used can feed in a year c. How big the warehouse is in cubic feet d. Will China use this to reduce its agricultural imports from what it sees as a hostile West? e. How expensive would it be to set up such a warehouse on the Moon?

    659:

    http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/How-Soon-Can-Tesla-Get-Battery-Cell-Cost-Below-100-per-Kilowatt-Hour

    Following the same fall in manufacturing costs as solar PV simply due to scale of production. No new tech needed, but when new tech arrives...

    660:

    Vertical farms: useful for fresh herbs and fruits/vegetables that can be grown for flavor instead of transport-and-storage durability; economically viable for urban centers containing enough higher-income people to support a premium-priced quality product. Not economically viable or useful for providing a significant fraction of a person's caloric requirements.

    What I find more interesting/useful, though it's still focused on fresh produce rather than staple crops, is the solar powered seawater desalination plus greenhouse growing of Sundrop Farms in South Australia.

    Desal and Solar Prove the Perfect Tomato Source

    In the two months since it started growing its 440,000 climbing truss tomato vines under 20ha of glasshouses, foreign-owned Sundrop has used no fresh­ water from rivers or underground aquifers, no pesticides and, once its solar thermal tower is commissioned, will use 90 per cent renewable solar power, heating and cooling that it has created on-site.

    661:

    Until a fumes from a fire sweepa over a nearby village, kills a couple of hundred, and leaves thousands more as permanwent invalids. THEN the regulations are applied, usually with more bureaucracy than science.

    662:

    In the UK, the feasibility of solar power is entirely the level of subsidy.

    663:

    "In the UK, the feasibility of solar power is entirely the level of subsidy."

    Wrong. https://medium.com/@dirk.bruere/diy-solar-electricity-the-true-costs-597a2a23a1f3#.pfqctccro

    Of course, numbers are wrong since prices have fallen since 2012 when I costed it. "So, $140 of PV in London will get you 150 kWh x 25 years = 3750 kWh at a price of 140/3750 = 3.7 cents per kWh" That is, of course, if you fit the panels yourself and use all the electricity yourself. If you want mains connection just multiply that number by 20x

    664:

    Maybe not so much - certainly now. Fitting the panels is a relatively simple construction job: Build a secure & well-anchored framework. Bolt solar panels to said framework. Run cables from panels to connection area. Connect. Plug in to your house system.

    If you want to synchronise with the external grid, then you will need a solid-state synchronising gadget, which IIRC are not that cheap or easy to get hold of in the UK. However, if you can get one, then it is again, relatively easy. Turn all power in house off. Break in to power leads on your side of the meter. Insert connections & test for leaks. Re-start.

    BEFORE you begin all of this, of course you must read round the subject for details, especially the legal ones.

    But it should not be really difficult. [ However, I say this a someone who completely re-wired his 1893 - fitted for electricity in 1907 house, about 20 years back. ]

    665:

    The real costs come in getting your system officially certified by a specially trained electrician. At the very least you need it for your house insurance, and connecting your PV array etc to the mains is REALLY expensive. The expense in solar PV installation is almost all labour. The cost of PV is now around $0.30 per peak Watt, so you can work out the difference. Right now, solar water heading using vacuum systems are the ones where you can save a huge amount of money. You can legally do all the plumbing yourself, and even in UK winter the water can get to nearly 100 degC

    666:

    You need to connect the panels to an inverter not directly into the house. Generally it goes panel -> charge controller -> inverter.

    Labor and inspections are a big part of the expense

    667:

    https://techxplore.com/news/2016-08-lithium-metal-batteries-smartphones-drones.html

    "An MIT spinout is preparing to commercialize a novel rechargable lithium metal battery that offers double the energy capacity of the lithium ion batteries that power many of today's consumer electronics. Founded in 2012 by MIT alumnus and former postdoc Qichao Hu '07, SolidEnergy Systems has developed an "anode-free" lithium metal battery with several material advances that make it twice as energy-dense, yet just as safe and long-lasting as the lithium ion batteries used in smartphones, electric cars, wearables, drones, and other devices."

    668:

    Actually, world wide 75% of "dogs" are what we would consider "Feral", not well trained (Disciplined?) "Pets"; Here in Amurika, you get the Thugs and their Free Range Pitt Bulls. There was a Feral dog attack in Dallas (Texas) a couple of months ago that killed a woman (Local media only). (Poor part of town of course), turns out one of the problems was Animal Control had been taken over by "No Kill" advocates. If you don't pick up the discarded (Discards/Free Breeding/Free Range Pitt Bulls), you don't have to euthanize them....

    OK, didn't realize the original was a CT comment. It's not all soft and cuddly puppies, where I live in exurban USA, you get the same problem as in (South) Dallas,the dumped puppies and Feral... I had a developing Dog PACK in my neighborhood. The "Leader" has now been leashed, but I still can't walk in my own "neighborhood" after dark without a stick in hand. Experimental anthropology verification of the territorial theory of Dog commensalism, but the one acre lot is not the same as a farmstead down in Michoacán.

    669:

    Yet another "wonder battery" press release promising the moon on a stick and we're supposed to take it seriously. Really?

    About the only wonder-battery tech I've actually seen delivered and shelf-ready after the press releases had stopped has been Toshiba's SciB cells which have piss-poor capacity in terms of Wh/kg compared to regular lithium-X but incredibly good thermal capabilities and very fast charge rate (0% to 80% in 6 minutes) without that inconvenient "bursting into flames" deal or active liquid cooling. They're also very expensive compared to lead-acid or lithium.

    670:

    Insanity is typing anything after what looks like multi-thousands of comments. The 2nd definition is thinking you're a Truman Burbank character commenting as if there were actually someone "out there." It sure looks like the great dismal from here and that includes y'all, Charlie and the Illuminutty Chocolate Factory too.

    All of which means that hell really is other people and the the Everett-Wheeler Many Worlds Theory gets to seem a little bit too real from this POV. After saying that I just say what I say everyday, nah, that's insane.

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