It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.cia.gov/the-world-...

It begins:

“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”

[1]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... [2]:https://acoup.blog/2019/07/19/the-lonely-city-part-ii-real-c...

You could make it as a mod to CK3. Instead of a royal household, you manage a peasant one.

Most of the same mechanics of personnel and resource management, decisions and succession still apply.

The "Dynasty" part comes from being able to have children and pass the village along to them if you play long enough. But everyone in game is a peasant of some sort. Nobility is mentioned but never directly visible.

I wouldn't call the game accurate exactly. But it is fun. I especially enjoyed having a ground-level view instead of the birds-eye view of most city builders.

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean.

> I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive

The author addresses this in the first paragraphs before getting in to the meat of it.

> So the models we’re going to set up are going to be most applicable in that space: towards the end of antiquity in the Mediterranean. They’ll also be pretty applicable to the European/Mediterranean Middle Ages and some parts – particularly mortality patterns – are going to apply universally to all pre-modern agrarian societies. I’ll try to be clear as we move what elements of the model are which are more broadly universal and which are very context sensitive (meaning they differ place-to-place or period-to-period) and to the degree I can say, how they vary. But our ‘anchor point’ is going to be the Romans, operating in the (broadly defined) iron age, at the tail end of antiquity.

https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

He's a professional historian who ... unthinkable i know ... cites his sources in every article.

‘You can learn a surprising amount by kicking things. It’s an epistemological method you often see deployed by small children, who target furniture, pets, and their peers in the hope of answering important questions about the world. Questions like “How solid is this thing?” and “Can I knock it over?” and “If I kick it, will it kick me back?”’

"Using force is always right. But can I apply enough force"

It is the question.

The answer is 'yes'.

Ozymandias

By Percy Byesshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

> In the aftermath of the crash, experts proposed various measures intended to reduce the risk of pilot suicide, including a rule that there must be two crewmembers in the cockpit at all times. …] Shortly after the crash of flight 9525, the European Aviation Safety Agency began encouraging the policy in Europe in order to gather data about its effectiveness, but after the trial period was over, the results were not encouraging. […] the policy leaves the cockpit door open for longer periods of time, increasing the risk of hijackings, which historically have been much more common than pilot suicides anyway.

This seems to be the crux of the matter.

I’ve seen it argued that the only sensible post-9/11 security measure was reinforcing the cockpit door. Extra screenings, shoes off, no liquids - all this seems secondary at best, security theatre at worst, when compared to denying an adversary control of an airplane.

Having said that, I’ve also heard the theory advanced that even a reinforced door isn’t needed: passengers mental models have shifted from compliance to active resistance, and 9/11 may be impossible to repeat as a result.

Can i recommend a rereading of the last 3 part, the one about medical conditions killing pilots careers and how it incentivise them to hide a lot of conditions?

It’s a reference, of course, to “Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson, http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lvta.html.