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Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 2, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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They lived by hunting and by growing corn and squash.

In your reply, you focused on hunting but what about "growing corn and squash"?

Busy? Yes. But exciting? In what galaxy could you say growing corn and squash is exciting? That's a resounding no, to me. That significantly downgrades B as an answer, IMO.

What this is though, is productive. (We even call it "produce" in stores)

Some of these things sound dull or dreary, but I'm just not seeing how you can call doing all of these things dull and dreary. Beautiful pottery? Fine sashes? Turquoise jewelry? The picture the author is painting does not really communicate dull and dreary to me. I can see how they might be painstaking and hard, but they're still describing fashionable and pretty things. "Dull" is very much downgraded as a choice to me. What about hunting? Really hard to think dull and dreary here as well.

What all of these things have in best common is they involve producing. Fine jewelry, container chotchkas, or hunting or growing food to eat.

You are productive when you pour a sack of polyethylene pellets into the hopper of your injection molding machine and produce a thousand water bottles an hour. You are unproductive when you spend a week or two weaving a basket so tightly that it just about holds water.

Sure, but "they continued this way until 1200 AD". That should put you in an old timey frame of reference. I don't know much about the time before 1200 AD but I bet baskets that hold water would be hella clutch.