Quotulatiousness

August 25, 2020

The Bronze Age Changes with Archeological Evidence

Filed under: Architecture, History, Middle East, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Cynical Historian
Published 22 Feb 2019

Check out the full collaboration playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

Up until the 19th century, the Bronze Age was merely a time of legends, where the Bible and Iliad told fantastic tales of brutality and triumph. But archeology changed that, and that’s what I want to talk about today, how the Bronze Age was rescued from legend.
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references:
Stephen L. Dyson, “Archaeology and Ancient History,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 59-66. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X

Marie-Henriette Gates, “Archeology and the Ancient Near East: Methods and Limits,” in A Companion to the Ancient Near East, edited by Daniel C. Snell (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2005), 65-79. https://amzn.to/2BrsBqO

Alan B. Lloyd, “Chronology,” in A Companion to Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, edited by Alan B. Lloyd (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2010), xxxii-xliii. https://amzn.to/2LqGZnM

John Marincola, “Historiography,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 13-22. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X

John Van Seters, “Historiography in Ancient Israel,” in A Companion to Western Historical Thought, edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 15-34. https://amzn.to/2PAC5Vz

Tim Whitmarsh, “Ancient History through Ancient Literature,” in A Companion to Ancient History, edited by Andrew Erskine (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 77-86. https://amzn.to/2PCf04X
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Wiki: The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.

An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage.

Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in Western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, with the Chalcolithic serving as a transition. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas (such as Sub-Saharan Africa), the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic.

Bronze Age cultures differed in their development of the first writing. According to archaeological evidence, cultures in Mesopotamia (cuneiform script) and Egypt (hieroglyphs) developed the earliest viable writing systems
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Hashtags: #history #TheBronzeAge #archeology #BronzeBonanza

August 23, 2020

Trudeau’s hopes for re-election hinge on promising “an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Line wonders who the hell the Liberals think they are:

It may have been easy to miss amid the news coming out of Ottawa, but as the government lost its finance minister, appointed Chrystia Freeland to yet another job, prorogued parliament, halted testimony into its latest scandal, prepared for the announcement of a new Conservative Party of Canada leader and braced for a likely second wave of COVID-19, the prime minister promised to announce a transformative agenda. One that promises sweeping social change, and a wholesale re-invention of our economy in line with the greenest ambitions. We here at The Line have but one question.

Who the hell do these people think they are?

It is obvious to anyone who has been reading the news and possesses even residual brain function why the prime minister would like to be talking about a plan for transformative change. Talking about all the amazing things he could do for Canadians with borrowed money beats talking about his government’s bumbling of the WE file and the departure of now-former finance minister Bill Morneau.

Promising an organic chicken in every pot and a solar panel on every shed is obviously more appealing to Trudeau than repeating the last month. But it is astonishing to us — as jaded as we have undeniably become — that the government is talking about this instead of the necessary steps needed to shore up this country ahead of a likely second wave of COVID-19.

This government has a mandate to respond to the emergency, by mere unlucky virtue of being in power at the moment the virus hit. It is the duty of every Canadian government to safeguard the wellbeing of the population, full stop. But the emergency, contrary to what you may believe if you’ve been reading Liberal Party HQ memos, is not over. We have an urgent need to secure more medical equipment, to harden our long-term care facilities, to prevent any further lockdowns from derailing a fragile economic recovery, to ensure the resiliency of critical supply chains, and to shore up our health-care system. This is what every Canadian official should be focused on right now.

[…]

But can anyone maintain faith that the Liberals will stick to their knitting when we hear buzzwords like “transformative” social change? Sweeping climate-change reforms? Engineering a new green economy? They are all fine notions — let’s put them to the people and vote on them. Until calling that election is feasible (mid-pandemic, it is not) this government simply does not have the mandate to undertake such far-reaching efforts.

It’s easy to forget now, but only nine months ago this government was reduced to a minority of seats in parliament. The Liberals lost the popular vote, and saw one million of their own prior voters abandon them. They are only in government because the Conservatives, to the surprise of no one, found several novel and exciting new ways to fail.

August 22, 2020

Debra Soh’s new book is “a cancel-culture grenade”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jen Gerson knows that any positive mention of Debra Soh’s The End of Gender: Debunking Myths About Sex and Identity has a strong resemblance to square-dancing in a minefield. Cancellations may fall like raindrops on the career of anyone so unenlightened as to even acknowledge the existence of such a work:

For that, at its heart, is what Soh’s book is: a lucid discussion of the best science we have to date on the nature of gender and sex, written for a lay audience. What gives the title its sizzle is not the content, but rather the cultural climate in which it is being published.

It maps the depth, scope and scale of current Culture War trenches in this particular theatre of battle. The End of Gender stomps on tripwires like the gender binary, whether transgender women are women, autogynephilia, Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, bathroom bans, and more.

It’s a cancel-culture grenade.

That’s not because these subjects ought to be contentious. Soh’s approach and tone are largely neutral. Rather, the controversy the book will inevitably incite is a reflection of a culture that has been warped into a state of existential terror by the very notion that these ideas can be responsibly discussed.

Soh begins by defining her terms.

So much of the debate around the most difficult topics of sex and gender stem from the simple fact that we are misusing the basic language. For example, sex and gender are not interchangeable concepts, even though they are often treated as such.

Sex is a term of biology. One’s sex, Soh argues, is determined by his or her gametes. With the exception of rare intersex disorders, 99 per cent of the population has a clearly defined biological sex that slots into one of two dimorphic categories: male or female.

Gender is more complicated. It’s now popular to state that there are more than two genders, but Soh disputes this. She argues that gender — or the set of characteristics that signal one’s sex to society — is also dimorphic. For 99 per cent of the population, gender correlates with sex. Further, even when expressions of gender are at odds with one’s biological sex, this, too, is mediated by biology. Whether one presents as gender typical or gender atypical is the result of prenatal testosterone exposure.

Soh notes that claiming to be gender non-binary, or gender fluid — or any one of a thousand variations that transcend the limiting concepts of male and female — is increasingly trendy, especially among teenagers and young adults. It seems to be the latest form of identity experimentation.

There are two reasons for this trend.

The first is that seeing the world through an intersectional framework encourages progressives to reverse the traditional hierarchies of race, sex and power. Therefore, claiming a marginalized identity — like genderqueer non-binary unicorn — accrues status within progressive peer circles.

The second is that the culture has undergone a massive awakening to transgender rights over the past decade. This has contributed expressive categories and vocabularies for people who otherwise might have struggled to find the language to explore their most authentic selves. As the cues, like cosmetics and dress, that we used to signal our gender are socially constructed, gender expression is limited only by our creativity.

QotD: Sex-differentiated status hierarchies

Filed under: Health, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Jordan Peterson had this to say about sex-differentiated status hierarchies:

    Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls. Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.

“whatever that means”. Heh. Shivvy way to say, “which means nothing”.

When JP discusses sex differences, he could be reading CH posts. Whatever one thinks of the criticisms leveled against him (some are valid), he does have a decent grasp of the sexual market and how men and women navigate divergent routes through an ocean of mate prospects to get what they want.

However, this is one of the rare instances when I disagree with his premise. He’s generally correct that, at least within the bounds of our current cultural arrangement, women have two status hierarchies available to them while men only have one. Our gynarcho-tyranny not only encourages but aggressively impresses upon women the urgency and even moral duty of succeeding in male domains (leaning in), while simultaneously encouraging men to sacrifice their status within their own male domains to make way for more women (and consequently rendering themselves less sexually attractive to women who are now their equal or higher in social status).

Women who do succeed in the man’s world can expect to ascend the intrafemale status ladder (more precisely, the intra-feminist status ladder), but where JP is wrong is assuming these women don’t also suffer an SMV status loss the near-equivalent of the SMV status loss suffered by men who succeed at girlie games of one-uppance.

Just as girls aren’t attracted to effeminate males, and other men are repulsed by nancyboys, the inverse is as true: men aren’t attracted to masculine, status-striving girls, and other women don’t subconsciously look up to mouthy careerist shrikes with the same mix of envy and admiration that they look up to physically beautiful women.

CH, “Sex-Based Status”, Chateau Heartiste, 2018-06-04.

August 21, 2020

QotD: Our overprotective culture

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Our society has become an overprotective mother. If you protect people, you reduce their competence.

There’s a rule of thumb for dealing with elderly people in old age homes: Never do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves. It sounds cruel, but it’s not cruel.

This is one of the pathologies of our culture. A major pathology, and this is associated with a kind of immaturity and a kind of fear and this Oedipal mother problem, which is, “I don’t want you to suffer any distress right now.” Fine, but what about tomorrow and next week and next month? You might have to suffer a lot of distress right now so that you’re better next week and next month.

Jordan Peterson, “Christie Blatchford Sits Down With ‘Warrior For Common Sense’ Jordan Peterson”, National Post, 2018-02-07.

August 18, 2020

Don’t worry your pretty little heads, normies, the enlightened ones are planning “The Great Reset” for 2021

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on how the great and the good of the world are figuring out the road ahead of us:

… most of the chaps who matter in this world are people you’ve never heard of — by which I mean they are other than the omnipresent pygmies of the political scene: In a settled democratic society such as Canada, for example, if you wind up with an electoral contest between a woke mammy singer with a banana in his pants and a hollow husk less lifelike than his CBC election-night hologram whose only core belief is that he has no core beliefs other than that party donations should pay for his kids’ schooling, you can take it as read that the real action must be elsewhere.

A lot of those chaps you’ve never heard of turn up in this video from the “World Economic Forum” — ie, the Davos set. After five months of Covid lockdown, you’ll be happy to hear that all the experts have decided that 2021 will be the year of “The Great Reset”:

I see my chums at the Heartland Institute headline this the “World Leaders’ ‘Great Reset’ Plan“. But, if by “leader” you mean an elected head of government accountable to the people, there is a total dearth. Indeed, it’s a melancholy reflection on the state of “world leadership” that the nearest to anyone accountable to the people in this video is HRH The Prince of Wales, in whom one day in the hopefully extremely far distant future the executive authority of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, etc will be nominally vested but which cannot be exercised without the consent of the people’s representatives. Yet even that token accountability is, as noted, in the future. So right now he’s just another guy who’s a “world leader” because he gets invited to Davos and you don’t — and, even if you were minded to show up anyway, you’d need a private jet because all the scheduled flights have been Covid-canceled and the world’s airports are ghost towns.

As is the custom among our big thinkers, the blather is very generalized. “Now is the time to think about what history would say about this crisis,” says the head of the IMF. If you say so. Personally, I was thinking that now is the time to eat a meal in a restaurant, if they weren’t closed.

But, why is it history’s job to say something about this crisis? Why, don’t you “world leaders” of the here and now say anything about it? “It is imperative that we reimagine, rebuild, redesign, re-invigorate and re-balance our world,” declares the UN Secretary-General.

That’s almost a full set, but he forgot “redefined”. “Possibilities are being redefined each and every day,” says the chief exec of British Petroleum, who as is his wont sounds like he’s in any business other than petroleum.

There is, of course, an inscrutable Oriental, who is chairman of something called the “China Green Finance Committee”. He’s there as a not so subtle reminder not even to bring up the subject of China, whose lies amplified by their sock puppet at the WHO are the sole cause of the present crisis – and whose death-grip on our future is the thing that most urgently needs to be reimagined, rebuilt, re-balanced and redefined. As I’ve mentioned many times over the spring and summer, twenty years ago we were told to forget about manufacturing — from widgets to “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts, that’s never coming back; from now on, we’re going to be “the knowledge economy”. Yet mysteriously, with the 5G and the Huawei and all the rest, China seems to have snaffled all that, too.

August 16, 2020

This is a “hockey stick” graph you can believe

Filed under: Economics, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Brian Micklethwait says this graph, unlike the more famous (debunked) “hockey stick”, shows one of the most important moments in human history:

If that graph, or another like it, is not entirely familiar to you, then it damn well should be. It pinpoints the moment when our own species started seriously looking after its own creature comforts. This was, you might say, the moment when most of us stopped being treated no better than farm animals, and we began turning ourselves into each others’ pets.

Patrick Crozier and I will be speaking about this amazing moment in the history of the human animal in our next recorded conversation. That will, if the conversation happens as we hope and the recording works as we hope, find its way to here.

I’m not usually one for podcasts, in the same way that I’m not an audiobook user: I find I’m unable to do other things while listening to the spoken word, and it’s always far faster to read a text than to have it read to you. In this particular case, I might try to make an exception, and give up hope of doing anything else productive while I listen.

August 15, 2020

QotD: The worth of a human being

Filed under: Economics, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A lot of things happened, more than half a century ago; suddenly I’m among the shrinking number who recall this. For today’s Idlepost, I will remember an article I read in a popular science magazine, back then. I’ve forgotten both the title of the publication, and the date of the number. I can, however, say that I was in high school then.

According to this article, the worth of a human being was 98 cents. The authors showed how their figure was arrived at. They had combined current market prices for the materials in an average human frame of 130 pounds. (Details like this I remember.) A sceptic, even then, I recall noting that they excluded hat, mid-season clothing, and shoes, from their total; and that they didn’t mention whether they were citing wholesale or retail values on the flesh and chemicals. Most pointedly, while accompanying my mother to a supermarket, I checked the prices for beef, pork, and broiler chicken, choosing the lowest grades. All were over 10 cents a pound; and so I concluded that the overall price of the meat alone, per human, would exceed their estimate.

Given background inflation rates, I think the total value in 2020 may approach twenty dollars, or even twenty-five. I’d have to recheck chemical prices, to be sure. Though perhaps the total might be reduced, closer to one dollar again, for babies.

David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.

August 13, 2020

QotD: The discovery of anaesthesia and antisepsis

Filed under: Health, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The first demonstration of the ether gas was performed at Massachusetts General Hospital in October, 1846, by a Boston dentist, William T. G. Morton. For the first time, surgical operations could be performed painlessly. Within two months, the invention was known and being applied in every capital of Europe, and in little more time it became commonplace internationally. The number of surgical operations vastly increased, as it was no longer necessary to hold patients down, and act very quickly.

Joseph Lister first used carbolic acid (phenol) to perform sterile surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, in August, 1865. This would have the effect of vastly increasing the survival rate from these now commonplace surgical operations. But the news took years to circulate, and by the twentieth century surgeons were still working with infected equipment in filthy environments. Indeed, I have read accounts of the horrors of battlefield medicine in the First World War: men with survivable injuries, lost by the hundred thousands from ignorant, unnecessarily unhygienic medical procedures.

As Dr Gawande points out — in passing — both advances made life easier on patients. But the second saved lives on a — vastly — greater scale. The first was unique, in making life easier for doctors, who no longer had to operate on screaming, writhing customers. This also, incidentally, hugely increased their trade, and thus their income. Washing up, effectively, only added nuisance.

I already knew this history — my mommy was a ward matron, after all — but until the comparison was spelt out, the full significance was lost on me. I had read the “official” versions in several standard medical histories. They assume the slow spread of antisepsis was a problem of communications. Gentle reader will note that this is a lie. Methods of communication did not slow in the generation between the two inventions.

David Warren, “Heaven, Hell, & Alder Hey”, Essays in idleness, 2018-05-09.

August 12, 2020

QotD: The circle of recycled life

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

1. Somewhere in this great land, a concerned and responsible corporation is having their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U.S. Post Office.

3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. Post Office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.

4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.

5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.

7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.

9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.

10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into … recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements “Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.

Gerard VanderLeun, “The Circle of Recycled Life”, American Digest, 2018-06-01.

August 11, 2020

The Vanishing Aral Sea

Filed under: Asia, Environment, History, Religion, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 22 May 2017

The History Guy examines the Aral Sea and the confluence of geography and history.

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David Warren offers an unusually contrarian view of the Bronze Age collapse

Filed under: History, Humour, Middle East, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sea Peoples? Faugh, Mr. Warren isn’t buying any of that old rope. It wasn’t earthquakes, famine, plagues, or even multiple waves of heavily armed undocumented immigrants landing on the shores … it was mere “progress”:

Migrations, invasions and destructions during the end of the Bronze Age (c. 1200 BC), based on public domain information from DEMIS Mapserver.
Map by Alexikoua via Wikimedia Commons.

When did the Bronze Age end, and the Iron Age begin? The ages of plastic, silicon, and graphene may have succeeded even the latter, but I’m still not comfortable with iron. Neither were the Cypriots, nor the Egyptians, incidentally — some thirty-something centuries back. Before even that, iron was freely available in a globalized world. I once took a modified fishing boat from Cyprus to Mersin; I wouldn’t encourage swimming it. But the voyage is not far, and too quick with a motor. Even in a row boat, it would have been easy to smuggle ferrous materials, either way.

Yet for centuries, such “highly sophisticated” societies as those of Cyprus and Egypt, stuck with copper and bronze; with gold and silver adornments. The rest of the world might have been with the progressive agenda, but they were not. I speculate that they didn’t like the way iron rusts; there’s something cheap about it. But whatever the objection, they stood their ground. There are old iron objects to be found in both places, but few.

Much later, when the “lifestyle” advocates for the new fashionable metal had won out, and the tide of iron was flooding, it is interesting that the craftsmanship of objects is relaxed. Even ceramics become dull, boring, repetitious; skills are forgotten. We have craftsmen who obviously don’t give a damn any more, just like today. We have the encroaching realm of “productivity,” quantity. Soon these places are easy to knock over, by the conquering savages always lurking about.

We have conservative societies, overwhelmed by technology; and no longer trading on their own terms. In the larger Minoan sphere, we have barbarization. Dynastic Egypt will survive only in Coptic fragments. Greeks, Romans, and finally Arabs will be trashing the place. Ancient civilizations fall.

I regret “progress.” We should resist it heart and soul.

August 4, 2020

Ontario’s COVID Alert app

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist explains why he has installed the Canadian government’s COVID App on his phone, despite the privacy concerns such government tracking apps present:

The Canadian COVID Alert app is ultimately as notable for what it doesn’t do as for what it does. The voluntary app does not collect personal information nor provide the government (or anyone else) with location information. The app merely runs in the background on an Apple or Android phone using bluetooth technology to identify other devices that come within 2 metres for a period of 15 minutes or more. Obviously, the distance and timing are viewed as the minimum for a potential transmission risk. If this occurs, a unique, random identifier is stored on each person’s device for a period of 14 days. After the 14 day period, the identifier is deleted from the device.

The identifier does not identify a specific person or location information, and is not sent to any centralized database. If a person tests positive for the virus, they are given a key code to input into the app. Once the key code is inputted, anyone that was identified as being potentially exposed over the prior 14 days receives a notification that this has occurred and they should consider testing and/or self-isolating.

From a privacy perspective, this is very low risk. Indeed, the government’s position – confirmed in the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s analysis – is that there is no collection of any personal information and therefore the Privacy Act does not apply. The Privacy Commissioner rightly points out this raises some concerns about the state of the law (arguing it should be sufficiently robust to allow for reviews of this kind), however, the use of random identifiers ensures that identification of individual is very unlikely. Moreover, the Privacy Commissioner’s review concludes that “there are very strong safeguards in place” with security of the data, commitments limiting use, independent oversight, and a pledge to de-commission the app (including deletion of all data) within 30 days of the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada declaring the pandemic over.

The Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner was also engaged in the review process. Her recommendation letter points to commitments for potential ongoing issues, including ensuring that the app is effective, that there is monitoring of third party components such as the Google-Apple Exposure Notification System, and public transparency associated with the app and its use.

While the app passes legal muster, its introduction reinforces the problems with social inequities that COVID-19 has laid clear. Much like the connection between socio-economic status and infection risk, the app itself is only accessible to those who can afford newer Apple and Android devices. That obviously means that those with older phones or no wireless access at all are unable to use it. While I don’t think that is reason to abandon the initiative, the government should be exploring alternatives to allow all citizens to implement these safeguards.

August 3, 2020

Recycling is a SCAM!

Filed under: Asia, Business, Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 29 Jun 2019

Recycling is a disaster. This video was sponsored by Loonie Politics! Sign up using the code word “McCullough” for 25% off! https://looniepolitics.com/register/

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August 1, 2020

Why incompetent people think they’re amazing – David Dunning

Filed under: Business, Education, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TED-Ed
Published 9 Nov 2017

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How good are you with money? What about reading people’s emotions? How healthy are you, compared to other people you know? Knowing how our skills stack up against others is useful in many ways. But psychological research suggests that we’re not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we frequently overestimate our own abilities. David Dunning describes the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Lesson by David Dunning, directed by Wednesday Studio, music and sound by Tom Drew.

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