> Each lord had a veto power over the king and over each other law (I will use the term “lord” for those landed free men. Even the serfs could not be denied their right without adjudication. Land was not held as a favor from the king; title was allodial. A man’s home truly was his castle.
This is so bad it's basically a total lie. Let's start with how he does not discern between free, landholding men, minor nobility and great aristocrats, three classes of men who would have absolutely no problem realizing that their lives, political power and the law that actually was applied to them were very different from each other.
The vast majority of men living in the middle ages did NOT actually have a fortified private manor aka castle, but a hovel that was protected from violation by other people most probably by the local lord or gentry, who as it happens was the biggest danger to your freedom as well as the judge over what rights you had.
>It seems, instead of the pinnacle of governance and protection of liberty, the constitutional form represents a significant step back from the liberties afforded to even the lowliest members of early mediaeval society.
That's not a point, that's straight up pure fantasy. The lowliest member of mediaeval society, unfree people, had more rights than we do now the same way that chattel slaves in the American South had more freedom then than as black people today, shoulders brutally weighed down with responsibility for their own life instead of a simple pleasure of having a master take on that dastardly responsibility.
The author has cherry picked data points, badly misunderstood concepts used in those cherry picked points, and then wildly conflated vaguely related things to create a utopian version of his entirely unhistorical mediaeval heaven.
Vlaada Chvatil games just tickle something for me. Space Alert is hugely fun, probably best due to the chaos and also the fact that at least we can see the inevitable failure that's coming together, and nobody is the lonely runt, but so is Galaxy Trucker, Dungeon Lords, and as a quick social game, Codenames.
Imagine having to tell the economy it can only grow as fast as a specific rare metal is mined for money to continue to make sense. The gold standard was a system breaking up by its inherent contradictions, as another poster has phrased it, when Nixon went off it.
>Imagine having to tell the economy it can only grow as fast as a specific rare metal is mined for money to continue to make sense
This is only the case if you have full reserve banking.
Under gold-backed fractional reserve there is no requirement that there be enough gold to back all the notes in circulation promising gold.
There are certainly problems with fractional reserve banking but gold backing is not a fundamental weak point here. Even IRL if everyone demands real dollar notes there is not enough in the banks and the FDIC reserves to pay it all out on demand if everyone recalled their deposits, they could not even run the money printer fast enough to cover it.
Yet somehow world trade still goes on, despite there being more value of goods in trade than currency than can back it.
Side note for completeness: theoretically all trade of any size happen with even a single gold coin by increasing velocity of money.
The growth rate of the economy wasn't limited by the rate of gold mining - people would just adjust prices relative to gold. And by most accepted measures I'm pretty sure the US economy was growing faster when it was on a gold standard.
This isn't correct. The gold standard caused a lot of problems with money shortages; in the 1800s they were called panics. The shortages powered William Jennings Bryan to the Democratic presidential nomination after his "Cross of Gold" speech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
Were those panics ultimately bad for growth? The US in the 1800s was one of the fastest growing economies we've ever seen in all of human history; growing from ~0% to ~20% of the world economy. It isn't often someone outpaces that. The gold standard clearly didn't limit growth in any concerning way if you are associating it with one of the top 10 all time growing economies. In fact, dropping the gold standard has been associated with the economic weakness that characterises the modern US as they mean regress and the Asian powers regain economic ascendancy.
Panics and crisises aren't automatically a bad thing. If people are doing something wildly stupid they need to stop and undertake alternative activities. Something has to make them do that; if it is a panic then that is better than persisting with stupidity. Besides, the US still has regular crisises. There is one every 10 years or so. They just don't see as much upside between them as they used to.
> The shortages powered William Jennings Bryan to the Democratic presidential nomination after his "Cross of Gold" speech.
If Trump says something does that automatically make it true in 100 years? No. Politicians aren't automatically right and neither are voters. People get stuff wrong in policy all the time. Popularity and truth are different.
And Wikipedia suggests that most people disagreed with him regardless, he lost the election and the US proceeded to adopt a gold standard. Which still doesn't tell us much about its policy merits I might add.
If you don't think panics are a bad thing I don't know what to tell you. Can you point to a panic that was good?
My point about Bryan is that the gold standard was causing so much pain that he rode his solution to the nomination. That his solution (bimetallism) was terrible helps explain his loss.
All panics are "good" in the sense that they represent the economy reorienting themselves to maximise returns. As you accidentally stumbled over, they are associated with the period of US history with the highest growth rate. The argument is basically that they are a necessary mechanism to purge inefficient actors from having capital. It isn't pleasant if the market tags a person as inefficient, but that is how to get to high growth.
It isn't like getting rid of the gold standard has helped the US grow, since then we've have seen them mean regress from being an unchallengeable global colossus to arguably the #2 economy. The government printing money at will and handing it out to asset owners who by rights should be going broke is a component of that.
If you'd like a computer metaphor, possibly think a program unexpectedly spitting out a stacktrace. The stacktrace is not, in and of itself, the problem. The problem is the thing causing the stacktrace and the stacktrace is actually helpful for diagnosing. In the case of economies, panics don't draw attention to the problem but actually fix it directly.
> ...that he rode his solution to the nomination
A lot of nominees around that time thought the gold standard was a good idea, which doesn't prove anything either. The opinions of nominees more than a century ago aren't really evidence. It is an appeal to authority except he wasn't an authority in any meaningful way. He didn't know much about economics and turned out not to represent the consensus of ordinary citizens either.
The US has not actually put leaving the gold standard to a vote as far as I know. In fact I don't think the current situation is a result of big deliberations, at Bretton Woods people thought they were agreeing to a gold standard and as the US's economy is eclipsed we might easily see a rethink of the global trade system where it comes back.
> Imagine having to tell the economy it can only grow as fast as a specific rare metal is mined for money to continue to make sense.
It makes intuitive sense that the gold standard would have limited economic activity, but did it actually do? If the gold standard had been constricting economic activity, one would expect GDP growth to have accelerated after the gold standard was eliminated, but as far as I can tell that didn't happen.
Is it really that clear that Google has more power here? Whom would users blame if suddenly half their pages are falsely accused of being "untrusted"? Probably the browser, not LE, right?
That's not leverage that a CA can use. If half the internet suddenly displays TLS warning interstitials, it doesn't make people mad at the CA, and it doesn't make people mad at their browser: it just _trains them to ignore such warnings_. That's a bad outcome all around, and one that a CA whose core purpose is improving security for end-users cannot condone.
It's not horribly unusual for a system that can be called democratic with every right to exclude those that have repeatedly stated, and shown in action, that they would not actually abide by any result that goes against them. It's the paradox of intolerance right there -- it's not those defending the rules of democracy that are damaging it.
We could adapt the comparison and imagine Kodak realizing the digital business just enough to adapt a bit, but never shift their focus: Just enable digital photography to make the business case for any newcomer unviable, so they'll run out of money before they start to turn a profit, but not innovate enough to create the digital photography age we have today -- it would stay a niche market, for people for whom traditional film really wouldn't work, just like it was in the years leading up to the shift.
And then let's strain the comparison, when even overcoming a genius general like Hannibal is no longer enough, and you shift from a strategy of "who cares how many losses it takes, Rome has more men" to the crisis of the third century, and barbarian coalitions coalescing into what would become the huge tribes and proto-states of the Migration Period, when that strategy wasn't even viable for any day-to-day conflict, given the severe military manpower constraints Rome faced, and destroying your enemy in an attritional battle made way for hurting them just enough that they were amenable to a tolerable negotiated settlement.
One could imagine the widespread adoption of smartphones as the point where the original market strategy of ignoring digital photography as much as economically feasible would end, and the digital photography era would finally start.
Or we could take the real example of Philip Morris successfully adapting to the declining popularity of (and increasing legislation against) cigarette smoking and the approach they've taken to cannabis (in places where it's legal).
Oh, you can, generally, it's just not fine to poison the whole region's water supply doing it, which less rich countries care less about, and which makes it expensive.
I'm not sure that is actually a bad thing. Being a competent employee and writing a professional-looking resume are two almost entirely distinct skill sets held together only by "professional-looking" being a rather costly marker of being in the in-group for your profession.
No, the whole process is revealed to be meaningless busywork. But that step has been taken for a long time, as soon as automated systems and barely qualified hacks were employed to filter applications. I mean, they're trying to solve a hard and real problem, but those solutions are just bad at it.
The technical information on the cv/resume is, in my opinion, at most half of the process. And that's assuming that the person is honest, and already has the cv-only knowledge of exactly how much to overstate and brag about their ability and to get through screens.
Presenting soft skills is entirely random, anyway, so the only marker you can have on a cv is "the person is able to write whatever we deem well-written [$LANGUAGE] for our profession and knows exactly which meaningless phrases to include that we want to see".
So I guess I was a bit strong on the low information content, but you better have a very, very strong resume if you don't know the unspoken rules of phrasing, formatting and bragging that are required to get through to an actual interview. For those of us stuck in the masses, this means we get better results by adding information that we basically only get by already being part of the in-group, not by any technical or even interpersonal expertise.
Edit: If I constrain my argument to CVs only, I think my statement holds: They test an ability to send in acceptably written text, and apart from that, literally only in-group markers.
For some applications it feels like half the signal of whether you're qualified is whether the CV is set in Computer Modern, ie was produced via LaTeX.
A riot where he specifically told them in the speech before "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." ?
This doesnt seem to change the fact there was a riot at all?? Surely you at least admit its a stain on the movement that this was the only non-peaceful transfer of power in a looong time, and if you consider how many western democracies have peaceful transfers of power, this is a huge abboration and absolutely not normal
Sure, it obviously wasn't great and obviously Trump handled it horribly. I'm just a little sick of people deliberately ignoring facts because it suits them politically.
Even Trump claiming the election was stolen wasn't new. Hillary Clinton did the exact same thing.
After being told to "fight like hell" that day or else they "wouldn't have a country anymore"? And that since trials in a court of law hadn't worked, "let's have trial by combat"? And when informed that the crowd couldn't get close to the stage because of their weapons and the metal detectors, Trump snapped at his staff that they're "not here to hurt me"?
Somehow, though all the plausible deniability winking and nodding, his fan base got the message; You can see it plainly throughout their communications and postings before and throughout the attack.
Because "fight" can only ever be used to mean a physical altercation?
More or less right after the "fight like hell" part of his speech:
"So we're going to, we're going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we're going to the Capitol, and we're going to try and give.
The Democrats are hopeless — they never vote for anything. Not even one vote. But we're going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones because the strong ones don't need any of our help. We're going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country."
It's clear (even through his rambling) that he meant they should march down there give the Republicans/Pence the guts (or whatever) to send it back to the states to recertify.
> Trial by combat
That was Giuliani, apparently, who said that.
“Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of, but if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail,” he told the crowd that day. “So, let’s have trial by combat.”
Yes, clearly he's talking about an actual trial by combat.
Honestly though, what were they even "protesting" about? If you say against a rigged election, you need way more than "I think it happened" you need evidence - which they tried very hard to find and never did, not to mention the supposed election rigger left office 4 years later, much more peacefully and smoothly than Trump did. I dont even understand what the hell they were supposed to be mad about, what was he trying to do if not overturn the election?
Trump actually outlines that in the speech before the riot, although he does it in such a meandering Trump-y way that it's hard to parse. He wanted Pence to send it back to the states to have a better look at things, although that would have been messy as hell.
"So as an example, in Pennsylvania, or whatever, you have a Republican legislature, you have a Democrat mayor, and you have a lot of Democrats all over the place. They go to the legislature. The legislature laughs at them, says we're not going to do that. They say, thank you very much and they go and make the changes themselves, they do it anyway. And that's totally illegal. That's totally illegal. You can't do that.
In Pennsylvania, the Democrat secretary of state and the Democrat state Supreme Court justices illegally abolished the signature verification requirements just 11 days prior to the election."
"More than 10,000 votes in Pennsylvania were illegally counted, even though they were received after Election Day. In other words, they were received after Election Day. Let's count them anyway."
There's a ton more. Some true, some not, etc. The annoying part is the media completely disregarded stuff like this, which only enraged his base more.
The real issue in my opinion that we don't have enough systems and transparency in place to be 100% sure our elections are fair. We should have random audits.
Hijinks with what same states pulled with their election laws during COVID shouldn't happen. Hillary Clinton claimed Trump stole the election from her, so this isn't a new feeling - Trump just had an actual support base he could rile up. Unfortunately for all of us, with the political system being so partisan I fear nobody can even propose more election security without coming off like a crazy person.
> He wanted Pence to send it back to the states to have a better look at things
"To have a better look at things" is a very euphemistic way of saying "to override the vote counts." In fact, Trump had a very specific plan for what Pence should do, involving slates of fake electors that Pence should seat, in place of the actual electors chosen through the electoral process. Those fake electors would then cast their votes for Trump, overturning the will of the voters. The whole thing failed because Pence refused to go along with such a blatantly illegal scheme. That's why the rioters that Trump whipped up set up a gallows outside the Capitol to hang Pence on.
> Hijinks with what same states pulled with their election laws during COVID shouldn't happen
Allowing people to vote without endangering themselves during a pandemic is not "hijinks."
> the Democrat state Supreme Court
It's the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Period. Not the "Democrat state Supreme Court." They made an entirely reasonable decision, based on their understanding of the law: any ballot put in the mail before the election deadline was valid. There was a legal dispute over this, the court made a ruling well before the election, and those were the rules for the election.
> Each lord had a veto power over the king and over each other law (I will use the term “lord” for those landed free men. Even the serfs could not be denied their right without adjudication. Land was not held as a favor from the king; title was allodial. A man’s home truly was his castle.
This is so bad it's basically a total lie. Let's start with how he does not discern between free, landholding men, minor nobility and great aristocrats, three classes of men who would have absolutely no problem realizing that their lives, political power and the law that actually was applied to them were very different from each other.
The vast majority of men living in the middle ages did NOT actually have a fortified private manor aka castle, but a hovel that was protected from violation by other people most probably by the local lord or gentry, who as it happens was the biggest danger to your freedom as well as the judge over what rights you had.
>It seems, instead of the pinnacle of governance and protection of liberty, the constitutional form represents a significant step back from the liberties afforded to even the lowliest members of early mediaeval society.
That's not a point, that's straight up pure fantasy. The lowliest member of mediaeval society, unfree people, had more rights than we do now the same way that chattel slaves in the American South had more freedom then than as black people today, shoulders brutally weighed down with responsibility for their own life instead of a simple pleasure of having a master take on that dastardly responsibility.
The author has cherry picked data points, badly misunderstood concepts used in those cherry picked points, and then wildly conflated vaguely related things to create a utopian version of his entirely unhistorical mediaeval heaven.