BahRamYou
1mo ago
If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap
In that case you wouldn't be considered poor by 1900s standards. The "dream" for a lot of people back then was to own land and be a farmer. The reality for most working poor was being a factory worker, a household servant, or a tenant farmer on someone else's farm. And that's assuming they could get a job at all and weren't just unemployed, like many were, leading to a lot of surplus men looking to sign up for the army.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I mean, what exactly are you missing? Be specific. They had coal and gas to keep themselves warm, not that different from today. They could get stuff delivered literally the same day, actually faster than today. They had books, newspapers, comics, movies, and West End musicals to keep themselves entertained, often in much higher quality than what we have today. They had doctors who could come pay you a house call at a moment's notice. They had police who would take on a serious, lengthy investigation to solve a burglary, let alone a murder. They had a trustworthy news service to keep them up-to-date on world events. They had a stock ticker to let them make real-time stock trades for the sort of thing that any normal, non-day trader needs to do. It was a very comfortable middle-class life!
The only thing I'll grant you was that life for the lower classes was much worse then, since so much of their life was built on the backs of the working poor. But it's not like a normal, middle-class professional really needed to think about how the Royal Navy did their signalling.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I think Vienna, Paris, and New York were all pretty good places around 1900, no? Or really any capital city of a western nation. I don't think London had any exclusive technology that the other countries didn't have. Instead there was a big effort to connect the world, via telegram, steamship, and zeppelin.
That feels like a market failure. It shouldnt be that hard, in a country of 350 million people, to turn up a few good QBs each year. I suspect the problem is that most non-pro teams are focused on a weird combination of "good sportsmanship" and "we need to win right now, so lets just run it every play." There's no youth development systen like the big pro Soccer clubs have in Europe.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?
This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”
They had most of the things we take for granted like electricity, flush toilets, fancy clothes, subways, cars (for the rich) or fast horse-drawn taxis for the not-so-rich. They also had things that would be considered luxurious even today, like multiple mail deliveries per day, or (briefly) an underground pneumatic tube delivery system . And of course, vastly higher trust and social capital than we have today.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
The problem there is the Japanese oil crunch. With Britain, the Netherlands and the USA all embargoing Japan and guaranteeing each other's colonies, there weren't really a lot of good options for the Japanese.
Well, the oil they wanted was in the Dutch east indies, not the American Phillippines. So they could have just gone for that without attacking the USA. I do agree that the US would have likely gotten involved eventually, but just delaying that a bit could have made a difference. Notably, it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way around- Hitler wanted to show support for his new ally.
If. Historians are split on whether the logistics could be stretched far enough to let Rommel reach the Suez, even with ~unlimited troops due to no Barbarossa.
Well, there's no way to know for sure of course. But Malta is a small island. In 1940 it was defended by a grand total of 3 biplanes. So if the Italians had gone for it they probably could have taken it. Or Germany could have taken it in 1942 with greater numbers. Then with Malta gone, Axis shipping in the Meditteranean becomes much safer. Plus with no Barbarossa they'd have the entire air force at their disposal for support, and could focus more resources on building ships, so logistics overall would be better. There's also the option to go after Turkey and/or Spain, opening another land route.
I'm not trying to see this would be easy or guaranteed. But I do think it was possible.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
no ICBMs yet, but nuclear bombers are still almost unstoppable
Bear in mind that 1940s fission bombs were not all that powerful. They were devastating to Hiroshima because that was a densely packed city of thin wood and paper. The brick/cement buildings of Germany were actually pretty resistant to bombing, which was part of why the strategic bombing campaign never worked as well as the allies hoped. So it's plausible we could have gotten a 1984 style world where they are regularly getting hit by nuclear bombs, but people survive and life goes on.
The most plausible scenario i've seen is where Germany simply avoids declaring war on the USSR, and coordinates better with Japan to avoid provoking the US. Instead they focus on the Mediterranean and taking apart the British Empire. If they could take Malta, Gibralter, and the Suez, that would pretty much lock up the entire med, protecting their southern flank and forcing the British to reroute shipping around Africa. Then they offer to come "liberate" Iraq, Iran, and India, which were all sympathetic to the Axis. At that point it's no longer a "world" war, it's simply a war against the British being fought in the middle east, so there's no particular need for the US or USSR to get involved, and the logistics for the Uk become nightmarish. No need to invade Britain, you can just ignore them, or build up a huge fleet of next-gen type XXI submarines to strangle them.
I feel like Trump is just too old and tired now. Not as much as Biden, but he's clearly lost a step compared to what he had before. There's no energy, no zingers, no new ideas, nothing but repeats of his old slogans.
On the other hand Harris is also just... a shockingly bad candidate. She was terrible in the 2020 primary debates. She didn't understand the issues, she didn't have any charisma, and her most memorable moment was... attacking Biden for being racist. I couldn't believe that he still chose her after that, and then now basically gave her the nomination. She would have been destroyed in a proper primary.
So this is a weird election where most of the focus is on the VP picks, because they're a lot more articulate than the actual presidential candidates. I guess the strategy will be for both candidates to just limit their appearances as much as possible. Very odd.
I won't vote because I hate the stupid charade that my one vote is supposed to matter, and because politics is the mind killer, so not voting keeps me sane. But if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose one of them I'd pick Trump.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
That's just reddit, it's where misanthropic nerds go to hang out. The compassionate people are still there in real life local government meetings, spending hours arguing fiercely for why the homeless should be allowed to do whatever they want and the rest of us just have to take it.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
To be fair... it's not really socially acceptable to say "I wish I didn't have kids, so that I could spend more time drinking/sleeping around." But that might be true! people are complicated.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
That's a good breakdown. But I have to say, when you lay it all out like that... it sounds of grim, doesn't it? Not to go all "men's rights activist" but... it sounds like the typical modern man is in a marriage where he needs permission from his wife to go outside, feels guilty for everything, and relies on parasocial internet relationships to replace real-life friendships. Pretty dark. As a cope he says "Oh, I no longer need to spend time with real life frends like I did when I was in my 20s. Now that i'm older, it's so much more satisfying to stay at home by myself." And then he drinks himself to death.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
or it's gone.
Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
think, if you live in the suburbs, one of the only ways to build a functioning social network in your middle years is by having kids and connecting with their peers' parents.
This is true, and is also what I hate about the suburbs. There's no authentic, direct, adult connection. it's all "oh little timmy is in the same club as your little jimmy, and isn't that nice?" It turns all the adults into glorified babysitters who have no identity of their own outside their kids.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
I also remember that time from middle school. But uh, isn't that just a temporary phase? Most guys eventually learn to balance having a girlfriend with having friends. It's incredibly cringe how some guys will betray their closest friends and become completely pussywhipped by a girl they just met the day before. We don't need to encourage and reward that sort of behavior. But it seems like so much of modern American life is built around this ideal of "the nuclear family" where the father comes straight home from work, sits in "the family room" with his kids, watching TV, and has no friends or hobbies outside the house.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.
I'm not a parent but I've been on the other side of that way too often. I definitely get that impression, from people that I used to think were my friend, that now they think of my friendship as something temporary, trivial, and meaningless. The only thing that matters to them is their children.
It's... I don't know, I'm conflicted. Maybe you and them are right, that family is something "higher" that makes everything else seem small in comparison. But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult. They can now only socialize in approved "play dates" with other parents of children the exact same age as their own. And that's, like, 2 hours a week. Most of their time is spent in "family time" which I strongly suspect is just them sitting on the couch watching inane g-rated cartoons with the kids.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.
Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Fair point. It's easy to think of "the USSR" as being a singular country, but it really wasn't. It was the Russian Empire. So you could slide them into that side of "winners of the global imperialism game" alongside the English, French, Dutch, etc. But they were kind of different in that they didn't have any wealthy, 1st-world "core" to the country the way those other countries did.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Welll, what's the point of comparison? Compared to the UK and USA they were decidedly backwards. Compared to Russia and Eastern Europe they were more advanced. Compared to the rest of the continent... I don't know, that's a tough question. Probably not a huge difference, but France and the low countries might have been a bit more advanced since they weren't suffering from WW1 reparations. I know the Germans seized a lot of material from the occupation of those countries, which was absolutely critical for them to keep their war economy going.
At any rate, its important to keep in mind just how pre-modern this country was. It was not, for most average people, a country of cars driving through cities the way Nazi propaganda films made it look. It was a country of people living in rural farms, where they didn't have electricity or radios, and had to take a train to the nearest city if they wanted to watch a news reel.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Assuming Germany won the war, they'd inevitably find that there just weren't enough Germans to populate the enormous swathes of land they conquered, even including their optimistic reclassifications of the Danes, Dutch and so on as German. This would probably necessitate moderation. The Allies moderated their post-war plans (to render a diminished Germany a deindustrialized wasteland), it's reasonable to assume that a post-war Germany would also moderate.
My take from Wages of Destruction was that the problem was more short-term. Between war production, the blockade, the bombings, and the linger effects of WW1 and the great depression (plus them just being kind of a backwards low-tech economy to begin with), they were really struggling even to feed their own people. Conquering a bunch of farmland was one of those "yeah, in the long run this will help, but in the long run we're all dead" kind of things. There was so little food to go around, they had to make some hard decisions, and there was a certain cold logic to it. Full rations for the soldiers and key factory workers, half-rations for the civilians and prisoners from the people they liked, slim-to-nil rations for the people they didn't like. But OK, maybe they would have moderated in a hypothetical future where the war was over, the blockade was lifted, and there was plenty of food to go around.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
1, 2, and 3 are not all that different given the economics and politics of the.
Basically every wealthy country followed the same idea, of not just free-market capitalism, but imperalistic capitalism. The way to get rich was to conquer some 3rd countries, take their resources, and then sell them back manufactured goods at an inflated price. Then you use your high-tech manufacturing to dominate the world, forever.
Britain especially, but also France, Dutch, Belgium, and some others had all emerged as "winners" of the great imperialism game of the 19th century. They had nice little empires for themselves, and were raking in the cash. Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan were "losers"- potentially strong nations which had lost their chance to grab an empire and were now falling behind. Russia was sort of a weird case where it had a ton of land and resources but was still undeveloped and uncolonized, so it had the chance to either emerge as a great power in its own right or get colonized by someone else.
Once you're in that kind of system, there's an obvious dividing line for how the alliances would shake out. Britain et. al. wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism. Germany and the others still wanted to do capitlism, but rearrange the map a bit to grab some colonies for themselves. Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone. Nobody was thinking "let's just develop our service sector and leave the 3rd world alone in peace" because that just wasn't how people at the time thought, at all.
BahRamYou
1mo ago
Hey, i had a job at 13. It sucked, but it was still a real job. I dont know why you think its impossible for 13 year olds to be useful (but somehow also smart enough to do college prep classes)
BahRamYou
1mo ago
First, I think it's not at all obvious that a time-travelling 13-year-old would actually prefer it now. Maybe some would, but it would vary. I think a lot of them would really chafe at the lack of freedom now, and being forced to do everything digitally instead of physically. Immigrant children aren't always wide-eyed with glee at being brought here by their parents, you know.
Second- we mostly don't have factories anymore. At least, not factories that higher large amounts. Almost everyone now works in some sort of service-sector jobs. And many of those jobs are now crying out for lack of workers! McDonalds is closing early and raising prices almost everywhere, because they just can't find the staff. That's not a job that requires a college education, it just requires someone to work hard and be willing to learn.
In your idealized world where everyone spends their entire youth in school and is not allowed to work. Well, that was kind of what life was like for women, when they were restricted from most jobs. They didn't like it, it made them both bored and completely dependant on their husband. Allowing people to gain job skills and financial independance is a good thing!
It's obviously propaganda. I don't know how you look at the guy on the left or right and think "yep, that's what an average typical American/South Korean looks like."
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