Examples of bad grammar.

From memory one hypothesis was that tin had become an essential trade good that was required for making bronze, and therefore using bronze for many of the times’ high-level technological innovations, especially construction tools, weapons, and for ships.

However, tin is rare, and at the time, there were only a few disparate sources of tin. It’s suggested the middle east sourced most of its tin from China via the silk road, and Ancient Greeks were getting theirs from deep inland European sources (possibly near Hungary, Brittany in France, or Cornwall in England).

This was fine during settled and undisturbed times, as the very long, convoluted trade routes prospered and grew.

But they were very susceptible to disruption during unsettled times, and it wouldn’t have taken taken much to be disrupted by large movements of nomadic warring raiders or groups of peoples, or particularly terrible famines or natural disasters located across critical trade routes.

And as states and cities likely isolated themselves behind city walls to protect themselves from the strife of the time, this only would have decreased trade even more, and suddenly they would no longer have the ability to make the essential tools and weapons their societies had become reliant on, in the numbers required, right when those nations needed them most.

This would have been especially ruinous if those nomadic raiding tribes, or groups of unknown origin like the Sea Peoples, had access to iron technology, which required only one more easily sourced metal, iron. Pure copper weapons, due to lack of tin to make bronze, would have been fairly ineffective against iron or bronze equivalents.

It’s a hypothesis, and not “proven”, but I’d say it’s a fairly plausible explanation for what likely happened.

Not really that weird.

It’s a common occurrence.

It’s a passion project that someone or a team spend a lot of time and energy on, likely thinking that the advantages of implementation will be so obvious that it’ll just be out into production based on its self-evident merits or improvement on existing practices.

Then it hits the concrete wall of reality, where there’s actually lots of friction and barriers in the process of trying to get the project into production and implemented. Management just doesn’t want to go ahead with it for whatever reason, and people don’t seem to be as enthusiastic about it and clamoring for it as the dev/team thought they would be, despite it solving a number of common issues they have with a product/service.

So the dev/team can either go home and forget about it, starting a new project, or write a manifesto remembering and defending the project they’ve spent many hours on.

It almost reads like a PhD thesis defence. At least that PhD then gets recorded, filled and archived, and despite it potentially having no immediate real-world impact, possibly someone down the line might access the extensive work and research already done here, and use it to further their own project, and fingers crossed that project has more success in making a real-world change than this one.

TL;DR: I imagine his management don’t want to go ahead with implementation for whatever reason, but because the research and any coding was done during his time at Google, he can’t just go and create his own app or implementation, or approach another more willing company for implementation. But by providing the research and element summaries, and points for how a better system might work, he not only memorialized his hours of work on a “dead end” project, but allows others in a less captive situation the advantage of taking his summary and using it to actually try to get change happening elsewhere.

Or on purpose, in this case.

Rebranding at this level sounds very much like purposeful destruction of an existing resource and company, rather than an attempt to make the company any better, successful, or more profitable.

I’m starting to wonder if the Saudis have told him they’ll reimburse any of his personal losses from his stock buy, in return for sinking and destroying the company.

It just seems like the Musk buy, once it happened, has been too effective a means of destroying a platform that was previously used extensively by protestors and activists to organise mass group activity against governments and authorities.

It would certainly be my answer now to those regular Reddit questions like “what’s the one conspiracy theory you actually believe is true?”

Yep. I wasn’t aware that I had a habit of just ending a conversation with co-workers and walking away (and honestly believing and remembering it had finished) when it was getting into difficult or emotional territory.

Several years later I found out I had undiagnosed autism, but at the time, was confronting but extremely helpful when the supervisor scheduled a meeting with me and a co-worker to make me aware of that behaviour, and especially that this particular co-worker considered it extremely rude and disrespectful towards her. It had never occurred to me that walking away might be taken that way, but also more importantly, that those conversations weren’t actually finished.

The co-worker felt much better after learning that it wasn’t disrespect towards her, but me apparently not being able to deal with difficult or emotional conversations, and my brain appearing to completely excise those memories of the end of those conversations at the same time as removing me from the situation.

If I’d found out about it by social media, or overhearing others calling me a misogynist (probably because it was the female coworkers that tended towards emotional or confronting conversation) or weird, I can imagine getting instantly defensive and me not believing them, or thinking that they were over exaggerating, misinterpreting etc. Basically, that the problem was them, not me.

It would have been an impossible leap, while feeling attacked “socially” and indirectly, for me to realise on my own, and then admit, that my brain was doing something weird and unusual, and that I couldn’t trust it’s recall in those situations.

After chatting to a few gen z, if I was to assume a characteristic of this generation, it’s that most seem to have completely given up, or not even started, the fight against the deterioration of online privacy, exposure to ads, and companies “rights” and/or ability to harvest personal data from them no matter what they want. It’s just part of life to them.

It’s just accepted, and whenever I’ve raised the issue with them, they’ll generally just reply with defeatist/pessimist/‘pragmatic’: “well, the alternative X, y and z apps/websites you’ve suggested likely all have hardware backdoors forcibly installed anyway”

So I think the willingness to fight, and picture a different way of having things, really is focused on those within millennial and gen-x age bands.

Edit: the point being, gen z therefore appear less likely to move away from existing structures, like Snapchat and Reddit, over increased ad promulgation, personal data harvesting, or bad company behaviour.