we get some justification why M’Benga gets a demotion.

This one is funny because I’ve been thinking “oh, this is what does it” many times over, starting with “secret daughter in the transporter buffer.” Maybe this time it will stick?

Medieval peasants worked more and harder hours than modern people.

A bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Yes, 50% child mortality skews life expectancy statistics heavily, but any 40 year life expectancy estimate is clearly filtering out at least some portion of childhood deaths. By our best estimates: of the 48% of people who survived age 10, slightly less than half were dead by 45. Of those who clear 45, less than half reach 65.

Those early deaths aren’t driven by “inferior physiology”, but disease and malnourishment (as the previous commenter noted). It was possible to live into your 80s, but you had to be very, very lucky to pull it off.

Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.

There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.

Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.

It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.

I’ve been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.

I don’t remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I’ve had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.

Lemmy does not currently have an equivalent to Modmail where a moderation team can all send or receive messages.

Brighter lights

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Are you seriously drawing equivalencies between being imprisoned by the government and getting banned from Twitter by a non-government organization? That’s a whole hell of a lot more than “a little more gentle.”

If the USA is trying to do what China does with regards to censorship, they really suck at it. Past atrocities by the United States government, and current atrocities by current United States allies are well known to United States citizens. US citizens talk about these things, join organizations actively decrying these things, publicly protest against these things, and claim to vote based on what politicians have to say about these things, all with full confidence that they aren’t going to be disappeared (and that if they do somehow get banned from a website for any of this, making a new account is really easy and their real world lives will be unaffected).

Trying to pass these situations off as similar is ludicrous.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

Trying to enforce anything new right now, just before Trump goes into office, accomplishes nothing and guarantees that Trump will just reverse it. Publicly deciding not to enforce leaves the incoming administration with a less obvious choice PR-wise, and thus the possibility that they might choose to “own the libs” by actually enforcing the ban.

They are largely powerless at this stage, and preparing for an idiot to take over their job. Why not?

How did you do this?

I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Varitek?

That scene is a triumph of Federation ideology.

Finding the wormhole was a lucky accident, but everything else which lead to that apparent deus ex machina came about from Starfleet doing exactly what was needed to get the Prophets on their side: not with the intention or expectation of that ultimate result, but because it slotted right in with what the Federation wants to do anyway.

Sicko and his crew communicate with these strange life forms in they find, and make an effort to not only understand them but respect their wishes. They offer enormous practical support to Bajor and attempt to encourage them to join the Federation formally, but they respect the wishes of the Bajorans even when highly inconvenient (such as the abrupt pivot away from Federation membership that preceded the Dominion War). In short, Sisko and the government backing him legitimately earned the trust of both Bajor and the Prophets by being explorers, diplomats, and excellent allies. The military payoff they got is hardly the point, but they earned it.

Would any of the other races have earned the favor of the Prophets the way the Federation did? The Klingons, Romulans, and obviously the Cardassians would have taken over as brutal occupiers if they felt the need to get involved with Bajor at all. The Ferengi would have ruthlessly exploited Bajoran resources in their own way (which we know the Prophets were no fans of, see their temporary rewiring of Grand Nagus Zek), while the Borg would have simply consumed everything they found useful. Here, it’s the uniquely decent actions and values of the Federation that win out.

This is one of the many things that Strange New Worlds (and Lower Decks as well) have got right. Space battles in SNW are beautifully animated, but they aren’t overwhelmed with excess visual spectacles and they tend to be fundamentally simple: you shoot at us, we shoot back or try to find some helpful obstruction to hide behind, etc.

Even Prodigy’s big space battle in their finale manages the task to some degree, despite it’s scale. I remember watching it felt oddly sluggish, as the ratio of ships on screen to weapons being fired was surprisingly low, but it definitely made it easier to keep track of whatever specific event the camera was focussed on.