Women may have done half the labour but they didn't spend all their time weaving cloth and making clothing. You're forgetting about all the food preparation and preservation that women did. Women cooked meals, baked bread, preserved fruits and vegetables, and brewed beer, in addition to all the farm work they did (feeding chickens, collecting eggs, milking cows, working vegetable gardens, harvesting). Of course, women didn't do all of that work alone, they taught their children how to do it and supervised their labour. Large families were preferred because children are inexpensive (cheap to feed and clothe) relative to the labour they produce under proper supervision. Expensive entertainment and education for children was still centuries away.
Cooking was always divided in all cultures. Men too often left the village for long enough that they had to cook their own meals. Weaving and tailoring was often men's work.
of course harvest would be all hands on deck to farm, and preserving the harvest was part of that. However mostly that was not done.
women's work is mostly using a drop spindle - it took every woman in the village 10-12 hours a day, every day, working a drop spinele to get enough thread for their clothing. This was however an activity compatible with stopping to nurse a baby or otherwise care for kids.
you are thinking 1800s when the spinning jenny made thread in a factory. Or slightly before then when the spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all) which greatly freed up women's lives.
not to say that women couldn't do other the things. Different cultures had different splits. but most were making thread - we know because we know how much work that takes and how much clothing someone had (not much!)
History is long - I'd call 14th century slightly before. The end of the medieval period does reach the 14th century, but most of the time period we are talking about didn't have it, and the culture effects of it would (as always) take longer to settle out.
> spinning wheel (which should have been invented 1000 years before it did if inventors thought about it at all)
Nope. You can invent it, but if there is no economics to drive its adoption it won't spread.
Medieval thread production and thread consumption was roughly balanced so there was no great economic incentive to engineer it.
A spinning wheel is significant labor from a craftsman which means you need to have excess cash to buy and maintain it--farmers surely didn't have that. In addition, if you suddenly generate 10x the amount of thread, that doesn't mean that it can be consumed--weaving doesn't magically get faster. There isn't a lot of trade beyond a single village, so there is nowhere for excess thread to go in order to become money. All this is even before you have engineering limitations--spinning wheels didn't create great thread for weaving from most fibres.
(Side note: In fact, the excess thread from spinning wheels basically didn't get consumed initially. It just created a surplus of rags. Which then led to printing because there was suddenly a cheap supply of something looking for a usage to consume it all ...)
Contrast this to later: The invention of the flying shuttle suddenly kicked up demand for thread which then needed the spinning jenny which then needed the cotton gin. That was all "demand pull"--there was pent up demand that would result in profit if you could fill it. And, even still, a LOT of "inventors" went bankrupt inventing all those things!
I think you are completely right about demand pull being a deciding factor in adoption of new inventions. Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
Although I would question if multiple hours of daily labor isn't itself a significant demand pull? I assume everyone wants to free up time spent on monotonous tasks, but maybe this is wrong.
> Many question why Rome never entered the industrial revolution, especially considering that they invented a steam engine[0].
They simply didn't have the metallurgy.
A more interesting question is why China didn't kick off into an Industrial Revolution given that they effectively had all the same technologies and perhaps actually had a few more.
There were some cultural issues like considering philosophy more important than trades and technology. However, the general issue seems to be that demand and supply were balanced enough that there simply wasn't a huge incentive.
The Aeolipile was not a functional steam engine - it was essentially an unpressurised two-spouted kettle that span on an axle. It had no way of maintaining enough pressure (no valves) to do useful work and the metal working techniques of the day weren't good enough to contain useful pressure without exploding. Real steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode.
The first practical application of steam engines was pumping water out of deep coal mines (which the Romans didn't have or need) where it didn't matter if the engine was both underpowered and massive. Even after these engines became commercially viable, it took another 70 years or so for the engines to become small enough to be mounted on vehicles.
> steam engines only came about after people had spent centuries building cannons that didn't explode
That's an interesting insight. I had not thought about the possibility of a scientific understanding of pressure developing prior to the steam engine. If you have some pointers to read up on this, I'd love to learn more.
Also, there were demands for pumps in antiquity, particularly in hydraulics. Lot's of labor was invested in building aqueducts and underground waterways. I always saw the Aeolipile as a tech demo showing that heat can be used as a power source for mechanical motion, but this is probably because I live after the steam machine, knowing it's true potential. I've long wondered why the idea wasn't expanded upon by the Romans or later the Greeks or Egyptians, but I suppose it wasn't convincing enough on its own.
I don't have specific links to this but it's more general reading of tech / military history over the years. I'd love to see a definitive study of the tech tree behind steam engines, but I do know that making bullets/shells precisely fit gun barrels took a long time, and this is analogous to making pistons in engines that don't lose pressure. The first mine-pumping steam engines were the size of small houses and stupidly inefficient, but, assuming lots of coal, they were still cheaper than having people / animals working water pumps all day. And they provided a good opportunity for engineers to properly iterate the technology with commercial pressure. They had a lot to learn though trial and error about how to optimise the things, e.g. adding condensing chambers that separated out initial water heating from power generation. This was all way beyond what the Romans could have achieved.
As you say, with retrospect we can see the Aeolipile as a tech demo, but at the time it was an interesting novelty with zero practical application.
Historians have come up with a lot of theories. There is no way to answer for sure though. General thought is they didn't even try because they had slaves they could force to do the hard labor, so there was not point. England developed steam engines in a world where slaves didn't exist. The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology as a society like England did, and so they mostly didn't try to develop technology (except as it related to winning wars - anyone who wins wars was a big deal)
However it isn't clear if the Romans could have developed the metals needed even if they tried. There are a lot of parts to better metal alloys that they didn't know and trial and error is a slow process when you don't have why something didn't work.
> The Romans (their blacksmith god was disabled) also didn't value technology
The Romans were engineers par excellence.
They worked both steel and glass in this time frame. Look at how they built Pompeii for the local conditions. They built the Colosseum with lead clamps and rebar to prevent it from collapsing with earthquakes (it eventually collapsed because everybody stole the valuable lead as Rome failed). Their art was better than anything produced until the Renaissance happened. I can go on and on ad nauseam.
Romans most certainly did not look down on engineering and technology.
England developed steam engines in an era where slaves were increasingly expensive and less socially acceptable than before and , contrarily, in an era where exploitation of the poor was still very normal and acceptable.
Hephaestus/Vulcan was disabled, yes, but also was very powerful (governing volcanos and fire in Italy isn’t a weakling’s domain). They absolutely valued technology… to say otherwise is wild.
There was this synergistic interaction between coal and iron ore deposits, trains and the steam engine. Having a portable steam engine meant that you could build trains, which meant that you could transport coal and iron ore to the steel mills, which meant you could build more steam engines, which meant that you could build more trains and expand the rail network. The fact that these things followed one another wasn't a coincidence.
And then later they realize the tar that comes out of making coal coke can be used to treat railroad ties to prevent rot, letting you lay larger networks of rail.
I can understand it for casual users who just want something simple that works for basic tasks, but what does macOS offer a power user that Linux doesn't, and which makes it worth sacrificing the ability to run your machine the way you want?
I consider myself a power user. What I don't consider myself is a "configuration hobbyist" which some people seem to conflate with power users. I use my Mac to get all kinds of work done. I write shell scripts and I have tons of 3rd party command line tools and open source software that I've installed via Homebrew. What I don't have is a customized desktop environment with power meter widgets and stock tickers in the menu bar and anime girl desktop backgrounds.
I used Linux for 10 years and I got tired of updates breaking things and having to edit configuration files just to get the system back to "normal." The Mac just gives me "normal" and loads of productivity (as well as battery life) out of the box, and it doesn't compromise on the command line power that I want.
I prefer a Dark Forest theory [1] of the internet. Rather than being completely dead and saturated with bots, the internet has little pockets of human activity like bits of flotsam in a stream of slop. And that's how it is going to be from here on out. Occasionally the bots will find those communities and they'll either find a way to ban them or the community will be abandoned for another safe harbour.
To that end, I think people will work on increasingly elaborate methods of blocking AI scrapers and perhaps even search engine crawlers. To find these sites, people will have to resort to human curation and word-of-mouth rather than search.
It would be nice to regain those national index sites or yellow page sites full of categories, where one could find what they're looking for only (based) within the country.
This is the view I mostly subscribe to too. That coupled with more sites going somewhere closer to the something awful forum model whereby there is a relatively arbitrary upfront free that sort of helps with curating a community and added friction to stem bots.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. An invite only platform where invites need to be given and received in person. It'll be pseudonymous, which should hopefully help make moderation manageable. It'll be an almost cult-like community, where everyone is a believer in the "cause", and violations can mean exile.
Of course, if (big if) it does end up being large enough, the value of getting an invite will get to a point where a member can sell access.
I like the design of Discord but I don't like that it's owned by one company. At any point they could decide to pursue a full enshittification strategy and start selling everyone's data to train AIs. They could sell the rights to 3rd party spambots and disallow users from banning the bots from their private servers.
It may be great right now but the users do not control their own destinies. It looks like there are tools users can use to export their data but if Discord goes the enshittification route they could preemptively block such tools, just as Reddit shut down their APIs.
I can't remember the last time I was on the Reddit front page and I use the site pretty much daily. I only look at specific subreddit pages (barely a fraction of what I'm subscribed to).
These are some pretty niche communities with only a few dozen comments per day at most. If Reddit becomes inhospitable to them then I'll abandon the site entirely.
This is my current Reddit use case. I unsubscribed from everything other than a dozen or so niche communities. I’ve turned off all outside recommendations so my homepage is just that content (though there is feed algorithm there). It’s quick enough to sign in every day or two and view almost all the content and move on.
You can find those things on eBay now. Yes, they’re expensive, but that’s because the exhausting work of combing flea markets and estate sales has been done for you, so that value has been priced in.
What people are really complaining about is that the hobbies of thrifting and collecting have been overrun by professionals. That’s going to suck for any hobby that involves buying and selling.
The best icon is the original MacWrite icon by Susan Kare [1]. No superfluous details, simple, and communicates the act of writing perfectly.
Susan’s suite of original icons for the Macintosh set a high watermark for legibility, usability, and comforting design. We really haven’t returned to that level of ease of use ever since.
Flat bottom woks need a lot more oil to stir fry properly, due to the lack of pooling. Flat bottom woks on electric cooktops (radiant or induction) also tend to have essentially nonexistent heating of the side slopes, preventing you from using the technique of splashing soy sauce (and other cooking sauces, as well as cooking wines) in a wide arc so that it reduces rapidly to form a sticky coating for the food. Instead, all of the sauce will just run down to the bottom where it joins the rest of the liquids coming out of the food, contributing to boiling/steaming rather than stir frying.
Heat pumps do not do well when it's -40 outside. You can say "fine, but how often does it get that cold?" but consumers are not going to be happy with a heat pump if their pipes freeze during an extended cold snap.
I live in Southern Ontario and I have a heat pump with an auxiliary natural gas furnace for emergency heating. The heat pump shoulders most of the heating load but the thermostat does kick on the furnace when the heat pump starts falling behind.
It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree, so the thermostat usually calls for the furnace to start up before things get that bad.
Canada's climate is really different when it comes to the extreme cold.
Heat pumps are getting better at lower temperatures, but in an environment like Canada you still want auxiliary heat to be safe.
> It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree
That would be an undersized heat pump in any regard. The installer would be at fault for screwing up that badly.
You're right that efficiency falls off at lower temperatures, 8 hours to move 1 degree would be from the installer sizing the unit wrong.
It's not just the efficiency of the heat pump that is at issue, it's the insulation of the house. As the outside temperature plunges, the house begins cooling off much more rapidly. This means the reduced efficiency of the heat pump (operating in cold outdoor temperatures) needs to produce more heating than it would at higher temperatures, and it's just not capable of that. My house was built in the 1980s and its insulation has always been more than adequate for the original natural gas furnace to be able to heat.
The heat pump I have is only a few years old and cost $12,000 installed (before tax credits). To be able to rapidly heat the house when it's -40 outside would require a system costing several times that! Much cheaper just to use a furnace for those few days per year.
air source heat pumps, though they're improving won't do well in extreme cold; even if they can operate they'll still be running at much lower efficiency.
For temperatures significantly into negative territory a ground source heat pump would perform far better, where it can draw on a source of heat that will always be at least above freezing.
A hybrid system doesn't seem like a bad trade-off though..
That diversification is a bit of a smoke-screen though. The most popular index funds are cap-weighted. This causes the allocation of capital within the fund to become increasingly dominated by those few winner-take-all companies.
When index funds grow to huge levels of assets under management, their own asset allocations come to make up a significant portion of the market cap of the stocks in the portfolio. Thus the cap-weighted investment strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
> Thus the cap-weighted investment strategy becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Either you’re doing the math wrong or you’ve skipped some steps.
Let’s say you have companies X and Y, each with 50% of the market. X is a winner, and the stock price goes from $10 to $45. Y is a loser, and the stock price drops from $10 to $5. The new weight is X=90% and Y=10%.
But this cannot be a self-fulfilling prophecy for index funds, because the index funds do not have to buy or sell any shares of X or Y to keep up (I mean rebalance, specifically). In this scenario, the index funds are just holding. (By “holding” I mean “not rebalancing”.)
This is… an oversimplified scenario. But it illustrates the problem here with the “index funds cause a small number of stocks to be winners” theory. There are alternative theories that make sense, but not this one.
(What makes the scenario more complicated is when you think of buybacks, dividends, delisting, etc.)
Obviously, but the point here is that cap-weighted index funds convert new money into buyers-at-any-price of their components.
When they're more concentrated in specific holdings, and have enough new money, wouldn't that artificially support higher prices for those holdings (above what the market would otherwise bear)?
Why not flip the argument, and say that the index fund is propping up stock B because of it's buy-at-any-price nature? What makes you think that valuing it at 10% of A isn't higher than what the market will actually bear?
The sensible and consistent way to this is that... Index funds don't really have any effect on relative stock prices. If stock A is overvalued or undervalued, it's due to active investors being morons.
Don't index funds trail market changes though? I thought their allocations are reactive. In other words, the Mag 7 are being bid up by people trying to beat the market. I don't see how index funds could move prices.
I do understand how they can stabilize allocations where they are, which I think is the concern. Zombification rather than a positive feedback loop.
If the business can get rid of their engineers, then why can't the user get rid of the business providing the software?
A lot of businesses are the only users of their own software. They write and use software in-house in order to accomplish business tasks. If they could get rid of their engineers, they would, since then they'd only have to pay the other employees who use the software.
They're much less likely to get rid of the user employees because those folks don't command engineer salaries.
So instead of paying a human that "commands an engineer salary" then they'll be forced to pay whatever Anthropic or OpenAI commands to use their LLMs? I don't see how that's a better proposition: the LLM generates a huge volume of code that the product team (or whoever) cannot maintain themselves. Therefore, they're locked-in and need to hope the LLM can solve whatever issues they have, and if it can't, hope that whatever mess it generated can be fixed by an actual engineer without costing too much money.
Also, code is only a small piece and you still need to handle your hosting environment, permissions, deployment pipelines, etc. which LLMs / agentic workflows will never be able to handle IMO. Security would be a nightmare with teams putting all their faith into the LLM and not being able to audit anything themselves.
I don't doubt that some businesses will try this, but on paper it sounds like a money pit and you'd be better off just hiring a person.
It’s the same business model as consulting firms. Rather than hiring a few people for 65k each, a VP will bring in a consulting firm for 10M and get a bloated, half-working solution that costs even more to get working. The VP doesn’t care though because he ends up looking like a big shot in front of the other execs.
There are lots of developer agencies that hire developers as contractors that companies can use to outsource development to in a cheaper way without needing to pay for benefits or HR. They don't necessarily make bad quality software, but it doesn't feel humane.
Unless we're talking about some sketchy gig work nonsense, the "agency" is a consultancy like any other. They are a legitimate employer with benefits, w2, etc. It's not like they're pimps or something!
Those devs aren't code monkeys and they get paid the same as anyone else working in this industry. In fact, I think a lot of the more ADHD type people on here would strongly prefer working on a new project every 6 months without needing to find a new employer every time. The contracts between the consultancy and client usually also include longer term support than the limited time the original dev spent on it.
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