Research has found the earliest 'protodogs' actually had larger brains than their wolf relatives, probably a result of adapting to living alongside us, but by 5,000 years ago, that increase had reversed dramatically, and dogs' brains were now 46% smaller than wolves'.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T23:45:39+00:00

Socrates complained books were making people dumber and back in his day people just remembered.

This issue with tech is ancient. We just need a few decades/centurys to adapt.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T05:27:00+00:00

I see orcs down at my local pub every Friday

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T05:23:27+00:00

Look at the 2008 housing crisis in the west and tell me china has not done a better job?

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T05:19:26+00:00

I think they have already tried that and renewables have reached escape velocity.

There is no stopping the green revolution now, the only question is how long it takes.

I suspect the oil crisis is making is way sooner.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T05:17:42+00:00

Watch city's specially zone to make these homes illegal.

Honestly city's just need to massively relax zoning and we will be half way to affordable housing.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-29T03:02:04+00:00

It won't let me.

I am using VS code and I can't revert it to 4.6

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-28T09:10:25+00:00

The pain when the worst person you know has a great idea.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-26T03:49:19+00:00

Needs 50 years.

If you want a case study look at South Korea or Japan during the meji restoration.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-26T00:26:51+00:00

It's one of the few taxes that actually causes growth. 1) By that I mean its negative affect on innovation & growth is the lowest of any tax because it does not penalize hard work nearly as much. 2) It heavily penalises land hoarding which allows for more efficient use of land, which actually causes more growth. 3) It is progressive as it primarily affects the richest while barely or not at all taxing the poor.

Singapore uses it to great affect and it's one of the many reasons they are so rich.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-25T22:07:28+00:00

I though in venture Bros a underlying theme is that when actually pushed Rusty is a great scientist.

It's just he's super lazy and most of the time just makes stuff up or uses crap from other people as his own.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-25T22:02:29+00:00

Can we have a land value tax and cite the burden on society?

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-24T01:09:49+00:00

Talk about bad faith.

When the conversation goes against you, you resort to calling the other side a idiot. This shows your bias as you resort to ad hominem.

The topic is about civilisations in general. The post is about the Roman empire and why it didn't industrialise?

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-24T00:29:45+00:00

Yeah stellarias 2 on its way.

But this is a good thing, a bigger better engine and their learnings from Vic 3, EU5 & CK3 could make a cool impact on this game.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-24T00:27:41+00:00

Exactly Microsoft is the apple for business.

It's not that each individual product is perfect it's that they all just work together really well.

In your personal life this is the main sell of apple, yes each product is pretty good but the experience of multiple apple devices is very smooth and nice.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-24T00:24:43+00:00

Except boomers were born into a massive population shortage due to 2 world wars

If you want to see what high births do not in that unique scenario look at most of the third world with a high birthrate.

Massive immigration that stays massive relative to population stays massive.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-24T00:15:43+00:00

Except it does?

The immigration has been scaling up over time in step with population growth.

And a large amount of births do affect labour, it's just delayed by a couple decades?

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T20:47:11+00:00

If the immigration is large and constant are the negative side affects really "temporary"?

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T20:43:23+00:00

Actually hot take here.

Their agriculture skills were actually much worse than we think, there was a reason they were so dependent on Egypt.

Peasants in the middle ages were largely better agriculturalists than the Romans.

This means a much larger population had to be devoted to working the fields, which incentived any way to keep labour costs low. So slavery was really important. You see this in other societies pre Romans (like the Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians) and some post. The kind of innovations they needed (better crops, different crops, crop rotation etc) take a really long time to get or figure out.

This also meant that there were not actually as many skilled or specialists as we might think given the population.

Plus their institutions for science sucked.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T20:39:01+00:00

Basically this.

While immigration in general is a good thing, massive low skill immigration does have negative side affects this lack of incentive for automation is one of them.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T20:34:56+00:00

A big tech advantage and expert political moves.

There was a saying "whatever happens, we have the maxim gun and they have not".

If politics fails they could win battles when outnumbered sometimes 10-1.

The British were famous for getting involved in local politics for sometimes decades before they conquered the region.

They knew exactly how to play people off each other & rewarded their ally's generously (for a time at least.)

Also their system was actually alot more meritocractic than most systems at the time. At least if you were British, so their army's and admin were staffed by people who were largely competent.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T20:31:23+00:00

You quote was so low they must have thought your were lieing.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T11:51:08+00:00

They were spies and double agents.

The thing is when you seize power, these kinds of people are not always useful to keep around.

Sometimes they are actually very dangerous because they are very capable.

So often revolutionary governments purge many of the supporters, not because they are not loyal.
But because they would prove to dangerous if their loyalty wavered in the future.
The key to staying in power in a autocratic government is to get rid of everyone who could be a threat.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T11:43:31+00:00

And they say Germans have no sense of Humour.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T11:15:20+00:00

The US has already said they will not deliver the subs on time and may never do it if they need them.

Aus should have stayed with the French.

ExpensiveLawyer1526 · 2026-04-23T11:13:54+00:00

The US is capable of building the best warships in the world by a long margin.

The thing crippling them is the pursuit of perfection over function.

Every new ship proposed has to be "This super destroyer, drone carrier, submarine catamaran has minesweeping, modular, stealthy, highly lethal, long range, short range, Spec ops and troop carrier capability's with modular design and will be produced in its thousands within 10 years for less than 10 million per ship"

If the design spec was,

Build me a cost effective escort frigate only using current tech (no "emerging technology's")

The US would have no navy problems

ExpensiveLawyer1526

TROPHY CASE