Monthly Archives: December 2017

Dec 05

This is the very pragmatic reason for supporting equal access to opportunities for all citizens, leaving aside any…

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This is the very pragmatic reason for supporting equal access to opportunities for all citizens, leaving aside any concept of justice or fairness. You get more innovation that benefits everyone.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/opinion/lost-einsteins-innovation-inequality.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/opinion-columnists
Dec 04

If the future is better than the past, it will be because of people like this.

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If the future is better than the past, it will be because of people like this.

Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society

“It is an honor and a great responsibility to be part of the network that gathers the best of the best of women (and some great men) from across the Middle East, Asia, and Africa and now Latin America, who have the same issue to fight, who face radicalization and foster sustainable peace. I found a diversity of expertise. We have the common goal, and I am learning from them and they are learning from me. It was a blessing to have women from different ages, backgrounds and religions come together. I want to have that wisdom to represent my community.”

https://buff.ly/2AAaJeP
Dec 04

These are interesting thoughts.

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These are interesting thoughts.

One thing the article doesn’t take into account: the establishment of mechanisms by which people who can’t personally weather a shock have effective assistance made available to them (such as a government-provided health service, retraining for people put out of work, and the like). I suspect this is because the author is writing in a context where these things don’t really exist and are not likely to exist any time soon. But in some countries, they do, and they provide a brake on the tendency of societies to become more unequal for the reasons outlined here.

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

If you want to know how wealthy you really are, ask what kind of financial shock you could weather.

If you want to know why inequality happens without any seeming outside force, it’s because people who get hit with a random financial shock end up dropping an economic level, and much of the wealth they lost gets redistributed among everyone else. That’s true for both random shocks like flat tires, and coordinated shocks like economic downturns or a mortgage crisis.

And then changes in bargaining power happen, and that’s what shapes societies.

https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6dc1d2f
Dec 01

Some good info on the OP.

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Some good info on the OP. It takes a lot of infrastructure, and consistent demand, to make brickmaking feasible. (Since I work for a company that makes masonry blocks, I have both some knowledge of and some interest in this topic.) So if you chuck brick buildings into your setting, you’re implying a lot about the state of industry.

Adobe (sun-dried) bricks are a somewhat different proposition.

Originally shared by Derrick “Quite Clever” Sanders

Here’s a weirdo topic that is probably of some interest to fantasy gamers (of a certain stripe) as well as those of you with some historical and archaeological curiosity.

Bricks. Ancient Romans could make bricks. They built lots of buildings out of them. However, in medieval Europe we see brick construction become sporadic. My understanding is that the making of the bricks themselves became guild secret.

I’m hoping that the esteemed Ara Winter can hook us up with some primary documentation on this one (and I bet he can). Or maybe Amanda Rachelle Warren?