General CE Chat

MrMarcello said:
Stumbled across this Quora legend. https://www.quora.com/profile/Roger-Carmichael-6

His answer to What is the stupidest thing done by a Roman Emperor? is brilliant.

A lot of people don’t know this rare historical fact, but Augustus Caesar tried to kill all the ants in the entire Roman Empire.

Yes, Augustus was a great man. Yes, his public works revitalized Rome. Yes, he ushered in a grand imperial age, but, he also tried to kill all the ants. This was allegedly done in order to protect crops.

He gave cash prizes to anyone who would kill 50 ants. This actually caused the ant population to explode, because everyone from Brittania to Egypt and from Hispania Ulterior to Asia Minor started ant farms. The city of Rome was actually blockaded by thousands of ships carrying nothing but bags of dead ants.

Then Augustus knew he messed up. He immediately stopped paying people for ant corpses to prevent the empire from going bankrupt. All those ant farmers who had sailed to Rome now started to grind up their ants and pass it off as blackberry jam. They sold many jars and killed hundreds of people with the poisonous jam. Many of the ants were, in fact, still alive, which led to an ant infestation all over Italy.

Although he wanted to protect crops, he ended up doing the opposite as the explosion in ants resulted in all of the food being eaten. Millions died because of the ant fiasco. Fortunately, the Romans were just; Augustus was forced to run around the city of Rome completely naked for 3 hours as a punishment. He got a terrible sunburn.
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I googled this.
 
MrMarcello said:
Stumbled across this Quora legend. https://www.quora.com/profile/Roger-Carmichael-6

His answer to What is the stupidest thing done by a Roman Emperor? is brilliant.

A lot of people don’t know this rare historical fact, but Augustus Caesar tried to kill all the ants in the entire Roman Empire.

Yes, Augustus was a great man. Yes, his public works revitalized Rome. Yes, he ushered in a grand imperial age, but, he also tried to kill all the ants. This was allegedly done in order to protect crops.

He gave cash prizes to anyone who would kill 50 ants. This actually caused the ant population to explode, because everyone from Brittania to Egypt and from Hispania Ulterior to Asia Minor started ant farms. The city of Rome was actually blockaded by thousands of ships carrying nothing but bags of dead ants.

Then Augustus knew he messed up. He immediately stopped paying people for ant corpses to prevent the empire from going bankrupt. All those ant farmers who had sailed to Rome now started to grind up their ants and pass it off as blackberry jam. They sold many jars and killed hundreds of people with the poisonous jam. Many of the ants were, in fact, still alive, which led to an ant infestation all over Italy.

Although he wanted to protect crops, he ended up doing the opposite as the explosion in ants resulted in all of the food being eaten. Millions died because of the ant fiasco. Fortunately, the Romans were just; Augustus was forced to run around the city of Rome completely naked for 3 hours as a punishment. He got a terrible sunburn.
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I'm not sure ants do eat crops, not grain anyway. Maybe they eat sugary ones like grapes or figs. Or it's a mis-translation and he actually tried to kill the locusts. Or it's just true. I'm up for the ants, hooray.
 
The only way that story could live up to 2020 standards would be if it turned out Robert Downey Jr. was the guilty party.
 
MTF said:
Thanks for the post, very interesting to read about how it is beyond "Orbán is becoming a de facto autocrat". On question that comes to mind: I'm kind of a believer in the idea that its not the people's love for democracy that keeps a democracy and a republic standing. More often it is that there are 2 or more competing elites that find in a democracy a state of equilibrium that is acceptable to all, instead of recurrently engaging in internal conflict. Are there no other elites in Hungary that are historically powerful enough to push back, and are not backers of Fidesz?
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This is a (very, very) long article about subversionn of a supposed liberal democracy. I'm just quoting the first 2 paragraphs here.
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3144-india-liberal-democracy-and-the-extreme-right

Indian liberalism makes a formidable claim: that the Republic is grounded in such a structurally elaborate and ideologically hegemonic liberal-democratic institutional framework that political forces of all hues are forced to consent to this framework, stake their claims and test out their fortunes within it, go in and out of the corridors of power through procedures of electoral democracy, and thereby further strengthen the liberal framework itself. It is further claimed that since all political forces, from the communist to the fascist, are compelled to accept the norms of universal franchise and multi-party elections, they are further compelled to move closer to the liberal centre as soon as they begin to participate in the exercise of governmental power. For the political centre of this power is itself circumscribed by equally powerful institutions of the civil bureaucracy, an independent judiciary, a freewheeling fourth estate, as well as a vibrant and highly articulate civil society. And, indeed, more than enough empirical evidence is available for one to construct a plausible narrative of post-Independence India on such premises. Its plausibility is what gives to the claim such persuasive power.

On the other hand, the basic trajectory of Indian political life over roughly the past quarter century — 1990 to 2015 let us say, especially as it comes into sharper relief after the elections of 2014 — indicates a steady rightward shift that is both quantitatively and qualitatively so significant that it is not so much the right that moves closer to the liberal centre, occasional tactical concessions notwithstanding, but the liberal centre that keeps moving further and further to the right. The Indian polity of today seems to be undergoing a historically unprecedented process: the irresistible rise of the extreme right to dominance in vast areas of culture, society, ideology and economy, albeit with commitment to observe virtually all the institutional norms of liberal democracy. This will to a "long march through the institutions" and to capturing total state power not through frontal seizure — as was once customary for revolutions of the left as well as the right — but through patiently engineered and legally legitimate takeover of those institutions by its personnel from within, while keeping the institutions intact, raises a very different kind of question: is there really an irreconcilable contradiction, an unbridgeable gap, between institutions of liberal democracy and takeover of the state by the extreme right? In other words, can the extreme right rule and pursue its own agenda through liberal institutions?
 
The Violent Origins of Finnish Equality

Abstract
Why is Finland today an equal country? We employ newly collected historical data to document that Finland was extremely unequal in terms of income and land distribution until a violent uprising in 1918 which was a major turning point in Finnish inequality. We show that high inequality partly originated from the famine of 1866-1868 which increased the concentration of land and power to large landowners. Regions with more exposure to the famine also had worse labor market outcomes and more coercion by the early 1900s. Using unique micro-data on casualties of the Finnish Civil War, we demonstrate that the famine contributed to insurgency participation through these factors. Although unsuccessful in replacing the government, the insurgency led to significant policy changes, including radical land redistribution and a full extension of franchise. A more drastic shift towards equality occurred in locations that were more affected by the famine and that had higher levels of pre-conflict inequality and more insurgents. These results indicate that equality has not been a persistent feature of the Finnish society inherent in its culture or values but is instead an outcome of institutional changes.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3741493
 
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children-of-men-1.jpg
 
@2cents



First Obama, now Holywood messing up the Soviet role there. Normally funny but given the situation with Iran now ...
 
berbatrick said:
@2cents



First Obama, now Holywood messing up the Soviet role there. Normally funny but given the situation with Iran now ...
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Oh dear. Looking forward to hearing about the Soviet-backed Iran-Iraq alliance of the 1980s in a few years.
 
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-01-04/america-is-pumping-out-too-many-ph-d-s
America Is Pumping Out Too Many Ph.D.s

"A handful of angry, downwardly mobile English Ph.D.s aren’t by themselves enough to overthrow the institutions of society, but they can make hugely outsized contributions to unrest and discord if they are so inclined. Remember, these are very smart people who are very good at writing things, and well-schooled in any number of dissident ideas. Those are the kind of people who tend to lead revolutions. "

Oh.
 
Toronto area porch package thief gets his car stuck in a snowbank while trying to flee. The frantic digging while being laughed at by the filmer is hilarious.


Very Canadian how the filmer offers to get him a shovel at the end. (Package thiefs are fecking scum though. Well, like any thief.)
 
Can Wall Street help us find the true price of water?

A chronically underpriced commodity starts trading like gold and pork bellies

"With nearly two-thirds of the world's population expected to face water shortages by 2025, water scarcity presents a growing risk for businesses and communities around the world," said McCourt in a release announcing the new market, which it referred to as "liquid and transparent."

"Climate change, droughts, population growth and pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come," RBC Capital Markets managing director Deane Dray told Bloomberg Green after the CME water market began trading. "We are definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops."

But as Diane Dupont, a long-time water economist at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., points out, in most cases, the water itself costs nothing for municipal and large industrial users, and that creates problems of its own.

"Typically, they're paying a very low fee," said Dupont, author of Running Through Our Fingers: How Canada Fails to Capture the Value of its Top Asset. "They're not paying the value of the water."
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https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/water-futures-price-1.5866538
 
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