Possibly, but what we think of as land ownership today — land as a commodity that can be freely bought and sold, and as something that gives the owner near-total control over how it’s used — is actually a fairly recent development.
In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top: in Denmark, for example, nobles had a monopoly on hunting and timber in their forests, but peasants still had rights to gather firewood, berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on.
Village fields were also often organized under the open-field system, where land was divided into strips. Each household got a mix of good and poor soil, and in some places those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair. It’s a very different picture from modern private property.
There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid. But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today's systems. The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries. Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land. Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years. This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.
> There were some premodern societies where land possession was very fluid.
Yes, commons, rotating field systems, and similar arrangements show that.
> But. There were plenty of others where land ownership worked almost exactly like today’s systems.
Not quite. Transactions existed, but they were embedded in systems of obligation and sovereignty — kings, emperors, or lords claimed ultimate rights. That’s a different structure from modern absolute private ownership.
> The oldest clay tablets talk about buying and selling land, systems of laws protecting land ownership, court cases involving land disputes, and surveyors laying out stone boundary markers that were meant to stay put for centuries.
Those records exist, but even in Mesopotamia rulers could reallocate or confiscate land. Ownership wasn’t as secure or absolute as a modern freehold title.
> Incan quipu cords were records of who owned which piece of land.
Quipus tracked obligations and allocations. Land under the Inca was held communally and redistributed, not privately owned.
> Asian rice terraces have been individually owned for thousands of years.
Some land was inherited and sold, but there were also systems of redistribution (for example, the Chinese equal-field system). That’s not the same as permanent, alienable freehold.
> This urban legend that private property is not an ancient concept is really wonky.
It’s not an urban legend. Property has always been a bundle of rights that varied across societies. The modern model of land as a freely tradable commodity giving the holder near-total monopoly is comparatively recent.
> Then, you're arguing for feudalist land ownership customs?
>This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.
How so? Very respectfully, perhaps you should read with more care.
See here:
>those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair.
Which stands alone as an argument for feudalist customs, but I also argue that it frames the rest as an argument-in-favor. Such as this, seemingly positively highlighting community "customary rights".
>In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top:
Critique my answer, but accusing a bad faith argument doesn't hold up.
No one who reads for comprehension would credibly interpret the post as anything but an argument for feudalist customs. To be generous: even if the over-arching intent possibly is to change modern legal customs via any necessary argument.
That may be, but highlighting feudalism is a morally perilous way to go about it.
I disagree with the perspective entirely, but if someone is going to advocate for it then they should find a less morally backwards method than highlighting the ostensible fairness of the feudal era.
It's also not falsifiable. Dang can disclaim it but Gruber's next step would just be to write "of course dang would say that."
If all Dang did was deny, then yeah, it would be quite reasonable to not trust him. But presumably Dang is able to provide a reasonable alternative explanation and has the receipts to back it up.
I sometimes give to panhandlers, but it’s mostly for my own benefit. I don’t believe my actions do anything to solve a problem, but I also don’t want to desensitize myself to the misery of others so much that I can easily ignore them. As far as I know, there is ample evidence that homelessness can be solved if there is sufficient political will to implement a structural solution.
> there is ample evidence that homelessness can be solved if there is sufficient political will to implement a structural solution
The unresolvable problem of homelessness is this: how do you house these people without concentrating poverty? The reason this is unresolvable is because if you build housing only for the homeless, that is by definition concentrating poverty. If you try to house them in multi-family housing, those who live there who work and pay taxes will move out, because unfortunately many of the homeless bring anti-social tendencies with them (and nobody wants to live next to a person addicted to drugs, even if they're on the path to recovery). This experiment happened in both the Netherlands[0] and in St. Louis[1].
This isn't an easy solution that just requires "political will". It's a very complicated problem that requires the study of incentives, mental health, economic factors, etc. (all mentioned in the original article).
Restaurants MUST throw away food because it would look bad to have homeless people around the area, public image and all. I am against this wasting of food.
I've had friends collect waste food from restaurants for the homeless under the Food not Bombs banner in Dublin. After a couple of days the Guards (Irish police) put a stop to it. Quite a few restaurants and bakeries did donate, although many did not.
One way to solve this might be to institute some kind of cultural practice of largesse. That is, if it becomes disreputable to throw away food and a kind of hour of charity is created, that might help.
The devil is in the details, but this may be one way to go about it, even if not daily, even if not perfect.
There are cultures around the world where it is really, really bad to throw away food. People with extra food that won't be eaten as leftovers will offer it to less fortunate people who live or work in the neighborhood.
There's logistical issues, like: restaurants are busy and usually can't spare somebody to go find somebody to take excess, having excess is unpredictable so setting up a system is hard, having 8000 loaves of bread or whatever is too much (nobody wants to eat that much bread), etc.
Also if the restaurant/grocery/etc. is getting rid of food, it's usually in the neighborhood of not being suitable for consumption anymore. If it's not suitable for consumption, you can't really make a great case for then collecting it and giving it to somebody to eat, even if they're hungry and poor. So you need someone to have good food, care for it safely, but not want to use/sell it but still go through a lot of effort to get it to somebody who can use it.
There absolutely is some room in there for like "yeah we're getting rid of this because we don't want to sell it but it is still absolutely safe to consume", but it's just a difficult needle to thread in an area of society where there's never enough money or manpower.
N=1, but my girlfriend sells bread and when there are events she gladly gives a lot more than one slice because she knows otherwise it would be just thrown out.
Gathering and distribution for that would be complicated, have to keep all the gathered items food safe while you gather and then distribute. It's much simpler to operate a dedicated kitchen with donated/discounted supplies on many axis.
The son of a friend is with a group that collects unused restaurant food and distributes it. I think it's in the Davis CA area. If you want more details i can find out, but I'm guessing you just want to know if they exist.
I am not sure, definitely unheard of in my country. If you know of a country that does this (or maybe a state in the US, or just a city somewhere) I would like to know for the sake of restoring some faith in humanity.
That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.
We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual.
That sounds great and all, but how? How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job? How do you prevent unconscious biases from causing you to unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual?
There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity.
I think there is a very well founded belief that organisations that claim to be pure meritocracies struggle with diversity.
I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas.
That’s probably true, if the hiring process truly is based on merit and nothing else. We have no way to tell if that’s the case here.
> How exactly do you ensure that you only hire the best person for the job?
I understood Scale’s stance as: « out of the candidates we have in front of us for any opened job position, we’ll select the one providing the best immediate value on their concrete field - as opposed to the one offering less of a direct outcome but more « indirect » value, such as helping make our workplace a diverse, intercultural and safe place. »
I’d bet this article answers very concrete decisions they had to take internally recently and the article’s writer simply decided to turn his opinion into a company « value ».
The exact opposite stance would’ve been possible (as in « we’re an intercultural, diverse place to work and we try to make the world a better and safe place for everybody, one hire at a time »), and companies usually mix a bit of the 2.
Don’t assume evil intentions or a big « socio-political » plan. That just looks like a company leader trying to make an opinionated decision public, so anyone working there could subscribe. Better in my opinion than nothing.
The MEI (as opposed to DEI) acronym is however unfortunate as it can easily raise unneeded binary conflicts, as seen on this forum ;)
You can prevent discrimination by anonymizing interviews. You can't discriminate on the basis of race and gender if your interviewers can't discriminate between men and women, and between ethnicities. If bias was really the cause of the lack of "diversity" then anonymization will solve this. And if it doesn't then bias was not the cause of the lack of "diversity".
You are assuming that diversity for diversity's sake is a worthwhile pursuit to begin with. When the metric becomes the target it ceases to be a good metric.
I read somewhere something to the effect of this: Some languages solve deficiencies in the language by adding more features to the language. This approach is so common, it could be considered the norm. These are languages like C++, Swift, Rust, Java, C#, Objective C, etc. But two mainstream languages take different approach: C and Go strongly prefer to solve deficiencies in the language simply by adding more C and Go code. One of the effects of this preference is that old (or even ancient in the case of C) codebases tend to look not that different from new codebases, which as one might imagine can be quite beneficial in certain cases. There is a reasonable argument to be made that at least some of the enduring success of C has to do with this approach.
That's not entirely true. Continental European law tends to be far more detailed than Anglo Saxon law, but still relies on precedents set in previous cases when there are ambiguities in the law, and when it comes to metering out punishment and damages.
No one only needs to be familiar with lawyers themselves to speculate about what they might do. They are a cautious bunch. This is distinct from dispensing legal advice.
A personal anecdote: I was charged with adding a cookie banner to my company’s website after having successfully resisted having one for many years. The reason given to me by the new owners of the business being that the marketing department wanted to try some new stuff, and the lawyers told them that it required consent on the part of our users. I was also told that I shouldn’t spend a lot of time on this, and to therefore use an off-the-shelf product (OneTrust), and to not customize it any way. When I remarked that the default texts for the banner sounded very scary and implied that we did a lot of things that we weren’t actually doing, I was told to leave them unchanged, because we had to assume that they had been vetted by (OneTrust’s) lawyers, and that it would be too legally risky to change them. My argument that OneTrust’s offering was a one size fits all that had to be compliant with the sleaziest, most ad-tech compromised media sites out there, but that we were not that, failed to make an impression.
A couple of observations:
1. Players like OneTrust and the consultants who specialize in this, are highly incentivized to play up the risks of not being compliant. My layman’s estimation of the legal risks is that the risk for good faith actors is actually pretty low. If the authorities find that you are not in compliance, you will most likely get a chance to rectify this, and possibly a slap on the wrist. Those scary fines measured in percent of global revenue, is not going to be what you face for an honest mistake.
2. Those businesses that rely on invasive tracking, and therefore really must use these banners, benefit from everyone else mistakingly believing that they too must compromise their UX with these banners. It makes what they do seem normal and acceptable.
When working in an environment where there are serious consequences to being late, everyone has an easier time accepting that hard choices have to be made to get a solution out the door before the deadline. The paradigm shifts from “we want this particular solution, how long will it take?” to “we have this hard deadline, how can we solve it?”.
In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top: in Denmark, for example, nobles had a monopoly on hunting and timber in their forests, but peasants still had rights to gather firewood, berries, nuts, mushrooms, and so on.
Village fields were also often organized under the open-field system, where land was divided into strips. Each household got a mix of good and poor soil, and in some places those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair. It’s a very different picture from modern private property.