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Personally I find planning for a holiday pretty entertaining. I'm travelling on the 15th too; going to China, and the number of places I have written down is ridiculous and I will probably will not be able to visit them all. If I were in Madrid I would at least visit the following:
- Royal Palace of Madrid (official residence of the Spanish royal family; reserve a ticket in advance for this one)
- Church of Saint Anthony of the Germans (17th century baroque church with some spectacular floor-to-ceiling frescoes, you can't really miss this one in my opinion)
- Royal Basilica of Saint Francis the Great (18th century church, baroque style, possesses the fourth largest dome in Europe. Here are some of the paintings you can find on the interior).
There's also the Temple of Debod, an Egyptian temple moved straight from Aswan to Madrid, the Cerralbo Museum, a private mansion containing the private art collection of the Marquis of Cerralbo, alongside a bunch of other museums and palaces that are worth visiting if you have time.
If you're willing, a trip to Toledo is just a 30 minute train ride away. It's a historic town that's on the UNESCO register; its centrepiece is the Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo, a High Gothic church (one of the only three in Spain) featuring a gigantic carved altarpiece. I'd say it may be worth your time; there are many other historic sites, synagogues and even former mosques in the city from the Moorish period. Just walking around the old town and checking out whatever you can would probably be rather fun.
So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?
$100,000 in 1959, please and thank you.
This probably comes off as unnecessarily cantankerous, but I fervently refuse to use DoorDash, UberEats, Hungry Panda or any other kind of food courier service since 1: I am annoyed by their """bikes""" on the footpaths all the time speeding by pedestrians at rates that may hurt someone if a collision occurred, and 2: I am steadfastly convinced that this refusal to actually go outside, touch grass and do things for the sake of pure "convenience" is part of what is wrong with people today. In similar fashion, I don't order anything online and don't drive either. I take the train and walk everywhere in the city. I do this even when working late and when it would be inconvenient to get food later in an early-morning city like Sydney.
When other people go out, they barely seem like they're even there. I'm not immune to this myself since the superstimulus is strong, but every single person on the subways and sidewalks is stuck on their phones, moving at the speed of a Roomba, and possessing almost zero awareness of the people around them. I walk an order of magnitude faster than them and want to slap them on the back of their heads sometimes. Everyone's caught up in their own world, they're so utterly atomised, it's increasingly rare to have any kind of spontaneous pleasant interaction with people when you're going out aside from what's strictly necessary; mostly I'm only capable of finding the kind of scripted, perfunctory interactions with a cashier or service industry worker that nobody wants. When there are spontaneous interactions, it's people asking me for help finding directions or carrying their bags for them (or other self-serving reasons for pursuing interaction), or some insane belligerent person who I don't want around me, it's always something inconvenient or abrasive and barely ever something that improves my day. The world around me feels empty even when it's not, most of the people I come across may as well be zombies, and it decreases my own motivation to actually engage with it. Nobody is actually interested in talking to other people. The sci-fi authors of yesteryear writing about themes like loss of humanity were right; their only problem was failing to make their stories sufficiently boring and insipid to mirror reality.
Things were not like this just a generation or two ago (depending on where you live, in many parts of Asia and particularly rural parts of the West you can still find the last remnants of a more social dynamic). While there are benefits to technological convenience and the current-day Industrial Society which I happily make use of myself and take for granted, such as TheMotte, with the exception of medical science I'm not convinced it has made people happier or more fulfilled on the whole - if anything, I lean the opposite. And I am definitely certain that for any average, reasonably healthy person it doesn't outweigh the benefits of owning all that excess wealth.
Hmm, I think it's definitely true the average (as in the mean) man does more dangerous and arduous work than the average woman. The workplace fatality rate for men in 2023 (that was the year I could find consistent numbers for) was ~7-8x the maternal death rate that year.
Not only that, but the workplace fatality rate for men exceeds the maternal death rate + the female workplace fatality rate by a huge amount. For example, I looked into the BLS numbers surrounding this a while back and the number of men killed during 2018 by occupational injuries caused by transportation incidents, contact with objects and equipment, falls, slips and trips, exposure to harmful substances or environment, and fires and explosions is 4,119 men killed. This excludes injuries caused by "Violence and other injuries by persons or animal" as that category includes deaths by self-inflicted injuries on the job. Even excluding that, the number of male deaths exceeds the number of women killed in ALL occupational deaths (413 women) AND maternal deaths (658 women) added together (1,071 women).
Just to give you a sense of how large that margin is, in 2018, the number of men killed in occupational-related transportation incidents alone (1,929 men) exceeds the number of women killed in all occupational deaths and maternal deaths added together.
However, I'm less convinced that the average (as in the median) man does as much dangerous work. About 65% of men work some kind of management/service industry/sales job, and I don't think these jobs cause as much pain as birthing a baby. Even if the do, there's just as many women working them as men.
Define "dangerous". Work is something you do for most of your life, whereas childbirth is a very transient condition (especially today). Management/service industry/sales jobs are highly disparate types of work with highly differing demands, the stressors encountered there definitely impact health, and just because women are as likely to participate in that large category of work does not mean they are subject to all the same stressors. It's been brought up fairly often in the context of the wage gap, but even within the same occupational categories your median man is likely to work more, take more strenuous and demanding jobs, and prioritise flexibility less, which results in women having higher satisfaction with their jobs (a consistent finding within the literature).
Occupational deaths do happen in these jobs; proper numbers are hard to come by but have a gander at this BLS list of fatalities by occupation. Deaths in private sector jobs under categories like "professional services" (585 deaths), "financial activities" (108 deaths), "information" (31 deaths), "administrative and waste services" (497 deaths), "educational and health services" (168 deaths), "leisure and hospitality" (253 deaths) etc collectively exceeded maternal deaths in 2018. No breakdown by sex is provided, but as mentioned in the previous section, women can only make up 413 of these deaths at maximum, suggesting a large sex disparity in mortality within these occupations. But even discarding that, the indirect health effects of constant stress results in elevated levels of cortisol over a long period of time, poor sleep, and so on, increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, infections, strokes, etc. These kinds of pressures are endemic in many kinds of professional and service industries and is not a trivial source of health issues; for example WHO made an attempt at estimating the number of ischemic heart disease and stroke-related deaths linked to long working hours for the year 2016, finding that the worldwide number of deaths from long working hours was 745,000 from only these two causes of mortality. Men made up 72% of the deaths, and if you do the maths that means men represented 536,400 of these deaths and women represented 208,600. In contrast, worldwide general maternal mortality for the year 2016 accounted for an estimated 309,000 deaths. And there are undoubtedly more sources of death from long working hours than just those, and there are other job-related stressors which don't just amount to things like "death by lobotomy via a falling metal pipe". It is likely not the case that job-related mortality in even these kinds of management/service jobs is less of an issue than maternal mortality is for your average American woman of the same social stratum, and it is not the case that the prevalence of this mortality is the same between the sexes.
The costs of obligation manifest in many ways which aren't immediately obvious. In general I tend to think people overweight things that are obviously unpleasant but transient compared to stressors that cumulatively accrete over one's lifespan - and in general I think the latter tends to have a greater overall impact on health and wellbeing in spite of the fact that they're often overlooked as sources of mortality. Attrition is important; it's the difference between feeling intense temporary grief vs. clinical depression. Unexpectedly getting kidney stones, while more painful in the moment, would not impact my overall life as much as being stuck in a job I dislike. I have a sedentary job which sometimes requires me to work a lot of overtime and weekends during crunch time (in fact I did so earlier this month), if asked to make a tradeoff between spending large swaths of my life slogging away at an inflexible, stressful job and giving birth to 1.5 kids at any given point in my life I'm inclined to say that at least personally, I think the latter may be a superior value proposition. That's not to trivialise any of it, but I don't think this conception of unpleasantness actually aligns with how people experience it for the most part.
EDIT: added more
So, has anyone else watched Vince Gilligan's new series Pluribus yet, and if so, what do you think of it?
Personally, I'm currently a bit lukewarm on it so far. It's still early days so I won't pass premature judgement on it, but a common complaint is that the show past episode 1 doesn't seem to have enough compelling material per episode to justify its runtime, and frankly I agree. Episodes are long and drawn-out, with much of the second and third episode being focused around a core repeated cycle of "Zosia (or some other stand-in for the hive) tries to do things for Carol" - "Carol gets aggressively angry at Zosia" - "[insert bad thing] happens" - "Carol feels bad" - repeat. The story beats are so repetitive.
I understand that this show is in part meant to be a tone piece and that the long extended shots are meant to build atmosphere, but the vibe isn't good enough to carry the show on its back alone (sometimes the show is so sterile and clean-looking that it comes off almost like stock footage to me), and there are plenty of shows which achieve a thoughtful pace while also moving the plot along in interesting and compelling ways. Severance, season 1 in particular, comes to mind as an example. The problem's not so much that it's slow and more that it's not intriguing, that the extended scenes don't achieve much for how long they are, and that there's a lack of economy in the writing. So many scenes exist to achieve only one goal; e.g. the extended scene where Carol tests the thiopental sodium on herself and watches the footage from it just accomplishes one very simple aim, and yet it takes so long.
My barometer for whether I like a show or not is whether I'm interested to see the next episode, and frankly I could drop this at any point and not really have much of an urge to see what happens next. There's a serious lack of compelling mysteries within the show to drive viewer interest, with the only question I can think of amounting to "How are they going to progress this?" which is a question that moves the focus from something within the story to something outside of it, namely the writers' intentions. In addition, there's so much philosophical ground you could explore (Does disconnecting a member from the hive amount to lobotomy or even murder? Is "de-integrating" the hive, like Carol wants to do, tantamount to killing a hyperconscious, hyperintelligent organism that might have more moral worth, strictly speaking, than any human in existence? And it does claim to be happy), but the show just doesn't engage with much of that. At least, not at the moment.
Carol as a protagonist is quite unagentic, which means that much of the series consists of long sections of her engaging in pointless filler like sleeping on the couch, getting impotently mad at the hivemind, wanting her Sprouts back, etc, while not probing the hive or asking questions that a more interesting protagonist would when placed in such a situation (Episode 4 features more of this, to be fair). A common defence is that her behaviour is realistic given the situation she's put in, but a more important question IMO is if she's a compelling protagonist to watch, and I don't think that's the case - her characterisation and behaviour is paper thin, and she doesn't particularly get up to anything that makes you hugely like her or root for her either. She is demonstrated to be an absolutely miserable person even before the soft apocalypse occurs, and it doesn't make her a particularly enjoyable or interesting character to follow when you're in her shoes all the time.
Yet another element that makes it worse is that she only has a bunch of eternally jovial yes-men to interact with the whole time, and this makes the premise wear thin very quickly. All the interactions feel as deep as a puddle, and this may be the point, but it also makes for a very shallow viewing experience. Most of the other human characters aren't much better either. I was fucking flabbergasted by how easy it was for them to accept life with the hivemind looming over them without thinking too much about what it implied, and in fact outright aggressively attacked anyone who suggested doing anything about it. They seemed almost like ridiculous caricatures, completely in denial, who had been set up just so the writers could knock them down.
I don't think it's a bad show, not yet at least. But the unending positivity towards this show makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills, and I often see such criticisms of the writing being addressed with thin, condescending dismissals along the lines of "You only think the show is uninteresting because you have TikTok brain", or worse, "People don't like Carol because she's a woman" (which is the way the entire Gilligan fandom has been dismissing criticism of the writing of female characters ever since people had the temerity to dislike Skylar White). I'm not saying it's impossible to like the show for valid reasons, but any and all criticism has not been not treated well.
Off the top of my head I have one from East Asia: Mongols > Chinese, Chinese > Vietnamese, Vietnamese > Mongols.
The last of these three is the most tenuous due to persistent ambiguities about the success of the Mongol Empire's first invasion of Vietnam, as well as about whether the Yuan dynasty's later campaigns into Vietnam should be considered Mongol expeditions due to how sinified and multi-ethnic the dynasty and its armies were (though if "Roman armies" are admissible as a coherent ethnic group really anything goes). But it's the best I can do at the moment.
Today I read The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. I think it makes a very good case in favour of the idea that premodern China was not a stagnant, conservative, pacifistic Confucian state indifferent to warfare as it is usually imagined in popular conceptions, but was actually an exceptionally dynamic place that was receptive to new technologies and ideas both before and after the Renaissance hit Europe. In fact, even after the development of the musket and the Renaissance-style star fort, East Asia was no paper tiger; it adopted and modified European-style firearms quickly, and managed to maintain its military might against Europe until as late as the seventeenth century.
It's well known that while the Chinese developed gunpowder during the Tang and used it in increasingly creative ways during the Song Dynasty (with Europe having come across it relatively late), Europe was the first to refine it into the classical cannon style. What's less known is that guns in China were actually developing concurrently in a similar fashion to those in Europe, growing longer relative to muzzle bore, until the existential wars that rocked the Ming Dynasty ended around 1449 and the Ming enjoyed a long period of peace - meanwhile, warfare in Europe grew progressively more intense. What seems to have been a decisive early Chinese advantage was quickly eroded, and to a large amount of historians on the topic, this is viewed as the beginning of European hegemony.
In reality it's not nearly that simple. Once the Portuguese introduced their cannons to China in the 1510s, the Chinese learned rather quickly from it. During the first Sino-Portuguese war, Chinese artillery was inferior to that of the Portuguese, but the following year the Portuguese suffered a serious loss to the Chinese, with every account of the war suggesting that Chinese artillery had improved to the point that it was a decisive factor in their victory. As the Portuguese attempted to collect water, they were pinned down for an hour by heavy firepower, and after they made it back to their ships Chinese gunners blasted them so fiercely that Portuguese guns were incapable of answering. This marks the beginning of a rapid military modernisation in East Asia that brought them well into parity with Europeans during 1522 through the early 1700s.
The Chinese seem to have innovated not only in the design of artillery, but they also innovated in many serious aspects of how firearms were used, the most notable being their usage of drilling and coordination. Most historians seem to think that volley fire for firearms was developed twice; the first being in Japan during the 1570s, and the second being in the Netherlands in the 1590s. But Japan was in fact not the progenitor; volley formations have a long history in China, being described in texts as early as 801 (it initially used crossbows). After the introduction of muskets this strategy was applied very quickly - in 1560 there are already military texts that demonstrate the Ming Dynasty were firing arquebuses in volleys; it is likely this was a common strategy before then.
Possibly the East Asian state most affected by the musket, though, was none other than Korea, who developed advanced musket strategies after the Imjin War and ended up with one of the most effective musket armies during the seventeenth century. Their musketeers were exceptionally lethal in battle with extremely high levels of accuracy, and were feared by pretty much everyone participating in the East Asian sphere at the time. Two of the most expansionary European forces in this period took on East Asians on the battlefield - the Dutch against the Ming and the Russians against the Qing and Korea - and they both lost. When the Dutch actually ended up facing off against the Ming loyalists, of an initial army of 240 European soldiers only 80 escaped, with the remainder either hacked to death, drowned, or captured. European military advantage over East Asia was actually a very recent development in history.
While Europeans had big advantages in defensive fortifications and shipbuilding which the East couldn't quite emulate, Qing China in particular had far superior logistics, with the Kangxi Emperor's careful planning being instrumental in defeating the Russians during the 17th century. This advantage allowed the Qing to consolidate their power and establish an unprecedented period of dominance in East Asia during the high Qing period - which ended up being a double-edged sword. Without external threats, the Qing developed a gay and retarded bureaucracy incapable of responding in an effective centralised manner. Britain came back newly industrialised and pretty much wiped the floor with Chinese forces during the Opium War, and while Japan centralised and threw out their ancien regime (and, as an aside, destroyed a ton of traditional Japanese culture as a side effect of this culture shift, involving the iconoclastic destruction of many feudal castles and historical Buddhist temples), China was still funding armies that had been established in the seventeenth century which had metastasised into powerful interest groups in spite of their effective uselessness. Their shipbuilding and artillery after the Self-Strengthening Movement was actually superior to Japan's, but their internal politics were so dysfunctional they were unable to mount a capable response during the Sino-Japanese war. The rotting corpse of the late Qing held on until 1911, and at that point China was a source of global entertainment and derision: an article from the NYT in 1895 claimed "China is an anachronism, and a filthy one on the face of the earth". Well, it certainly didn't remain that way for long.
As an aside I'm quite stunned by how ridiculously advanced the Song Dynasty was for its time, to the point that I think it represents one of the most dizzying heights achieved by a premodern civilisation. More people lived in urban centres during the Song period than at any other time until the late eighteenth century, and 10% of the country was urbanised, a metric that Europe would not reach until 1800. Their production of iron around 1100 was equivalent to the output generated by the entire continent of Europe in 1700, using refined techniques that would only occur in Europe centuries later. The Song utilised automation in textile production to an extent that exceeded medieval and even early modern Europe, in fact it wasn't even until the eighteenth century that Europe achieved such devices.
There were significant advances in gunpowder, printing, anatomy, the discovery of tree dating, rain and snow gauges, rotary cutting discs, the knowledge of magnetic declination, thermoremanent magnetisation, magnetism in medicine, relief maps, all kinds of mathematical innovations and discoveries (including effective algebraic notation and the Pascal triangle of binomial coefficients), steam sterilisation, pasteurisation (of wine), artificial induction of pearls in oysters, effective underwater salvage techniques, all kinds of silk processing devices, including reeling machines, multiple-spindle twisting frames, and others, smallpox inoculation, the discovery of urinary steroids, the use of the toothbrush and toothpaste, a method for the precipitation of copper from iron, the chain drive, the understanding of the camera obscura phenomenon, and new types of clock mechanisms.
They may even have been the first people to become anatomically modern, developing the "modern overbite"; for context, throughout most of history people's top and bottom incisors met tooth to tooth instead of overlapping each other, once food started being cut into small pieces this changed. In Europe this shift only started occuring during the eighteenth century when the fork and knife came into common usage, during the Song Dynasty it was already common at least among the upper class.
Anyway, it's a rather interesting book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in a comparative history of warfare.
I don't really disagree with that, rigidly planning out every moment of your vacation is an absolute and utter slog. But I never really have an exceptionally clear idea of what I would want to do on a day by day basis; I don't plan things out for the purposes of prescriptively defining what my vacation should look like. My kind of planning looks more like keeping a register of what's there so I can make an informed decision of where to go in the moment (which doesn't exclude exploratively walking around and seeing what's there, either).
It's also particularly important to understand what's in your vicinity when you're vacationing in a more rural area, since unlike a city it's harder to just walk around and stumble across things spontaneously.
That being said, I do get the sense I like to travel in a significantly more hectic way than most people. I get bored very easily just kind of lazing around for a significant portion of the time; beach and cruise vacations are exceptionally unappealing to me.
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