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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • The USA is huge. IDK what country you’re from, but I’ll use France as a point of comparison because it’s large and the capital isn’t really in the center.

    Bayonne->Paris is about the farthest you can be from the capital while still living in mainland France. That’s 770 km.

    This is shorter than the distance from Washington DC->Atlanta, which is in one of the original 13 colonies. It’s pretty close to the distance from DC->Indianapolis, but that’s still within the 1776 USA borders (albeit, an unorganized territory of the 13 colonies).

    Add in the Louisiana purchase and various conquests westward, and a Californian visiting DC can be like visiting Paris from Kuwait.

    It’s reasonably common for USians to visit their state capital at some point in our lives, but visiting DC is definitely an upper-middle class vacation unless you happen to live in a nearby state already.



  • But those are just words for “a group of a special size”

    Some eastern languages have totally different counting words depending on WHAT you’re counting. One set of number-words for flat things, another set for long things, another set for printed/bound things, another set for things with handles…









  • I mean, the earliest known currency is almost exactly as old as the earliest known cities. Farmers would deposit a large amount of grain at the local temple (which were effectively the tax collection sites of the time) and were given clay tokens on exchange, which could be used in place of actual goods at tax time.

    This system was set up because of the nature of farming: you make a lot of product in a short time, but most of the year you’re just waiting for your crop to grow. These tokens allowed farmers to pay their tax duties up front, and then have physical proof that they’d done so when paying taxes outside of harvest season. But it was only a matter of time before people started trading those tokens amongst each other. “Give me a goat and I’ll give you these tokens so you don’t have to pay tribute next season.”

    Before that, villages were pretty much just hand-to mouth communities of just a few families. Surviving, sure, but not in the kind of complex society where one needs to draw equivalence between extremely different forms of labor.





  • My cubicle office job often involves going downstairs to the lab so I can take measurements with equipment far too expensive for me to have at home, and even too expensive for the company to lend out to employees’ home offices.

    A lot of return-to-office work is bullshit, but making absolutist blanket statements like that just weakens the argument rather than helping anybody.