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Comment by srcthr | Hacker News Reader

And of course as is typical of late stage western cultural elitism there are 4000 words on sex and two for the mines. You'd think the place where slave lifespan was measured in years rather than decades would make for a more interesting story.

A man drowning in the dark, trapped by a rock fall, seeing the crushed head of his foreman on the left and his best friend running on the right.

But that would mean forcing readers to imagine a life where economics and not perversion were the driving force of history and we can't have that.

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Without economics we'd all starve to death.

Edit: I submit "Alone", the TV show where survival experts are dumped out in the wilderness one by one, where they all starve and eventually get pulled out for losing dangerous amounts of weight. And this is despite bringing along survival gear made by an advanced economy.

Not sure why the down-votes, but I will point out they start in late fall, in areas uncolonised by people in 2000 years- which might infer some hint as to the desirability of said location.

They were also severely restricted in what technology they could bring. But they still had fish hooks, survival clothing, advanced bow and arrows, an advanced saw or hatchet, fish line, and fire starter.

Only one was able to make fire without a fire starter. After watching Alone, I bought myself a fire starter, to carry when hiking.

I remember one father/son team. The son had some sort of fisheries degree, and considered himself a fishing expert. Father and son would fish, the father caught fish regularly, the son couldn't catch one. A lot of the fishing experts turned out to be not so good at fishing, the same for the hunting experts.

What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters. They'd spend all their calories building a magnificent log cabin, and then were too weak to continue. Season after season they'd do this. Or they'd spend time carving toys. Or they'd burn down their shelter with a bad fireplace or poison themselves with the smoke.

The point is, humans have evolved to need an economy for mutual survival. Can't realistically do it alone, from scratch.

> What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters.

Seems expected when you consider that most people have never built a shelter, and those that have aren't often doing it on a regular basis using whatever happens to be lying around. Same for fishers and hunters who are highly skilled in the environments they regularly work in. You can only expect them to struggle when placed in new environments with new added restrictions. You'd just hope they'd struggle a bit less than an novice would in that situation.

The contestant montage often showed them building things. They clearly had decent skills at sawing and other carpentry. They also clearly did not watch previous seasons and learn :-/

The most consistent failure was in way overestimating their ability to do hard physical labor without food.

It's clear from watching the show that the path to victory, given woodcraft skills, is doing as little physical exertion as possible. Build a minimal shelter, spend all the rest of the effort obtaining food.

P.S. I wouldn't last a week on that show.

P.P.S. Anyone building a shelter out of 8" dia logs is doomed.

I wouldn't last a day on that show, but modern man, in our pining for the olden days .. grossly underestimates the % of time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories to survive.

For the fauna it's a full time job, too.

    Normally, Aboriginal groups were easily able to find enough food for their entire clan in three or four hours of hunting and gathering each day.  They know which fruit and animals are available at certain times, how to gather or hunt successfully and how to store foods.

https://svacs.libguides.com/c.php?g=933180&p=6746395

How do we know this to be true?

There are still aboriginal people alive today that gather fod in the traditional manner - when I was 20 or so the Pintupi Nine wandered in, some stayed a few left and returned to the desert.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

There are still many people living hybrid lives, using modern metals and traditional knowledge to gather food, eg:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

A key point here is 30+ thousand years of getting to know and shaping the landscape - promoting plants and animals over others, learning the movements and habits of animals, seasons of plants, not having closed in winters, etc.

how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group in particular favorable climate that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia, or some other Asian countries which have been populous for many centuries.

> how come famines were a thing then if this is so easy?

What infomation do you have on pre European landing famine in Australia?

> my guess is that you probably picked a particular sparsely living group

The Swan Valley quote above applied to Western Australian and Central Desert groups prior to being shunted off traditional lands by European settlement (an area comfortably three times larger than Texas) - it continues to apply in areas where traditional practices on traditional lands continue.

https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...

> that eventually probably got wiped out by a hungrier group.

Recent genetics has confirmed what was also the local oral history, that people arrived, fanned out, and stayed where they first settled:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21416

This runs contrary to the views espoused for decades by Windshuttle in Quadrant.

> furthermore, hunting for three hours no freaking way can sustain population density of say Indonesia

?? Pre Dutch contact Indonesia ?

I specifically linked to the example of Australian hunter gathers.

You can take it that my earlier comment doesn't apply to Iñupiat, Yupik, Aleut, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, etc peoples of Alaska.

> time & effort humans had to spend on simply acquiring enough calories

so you are reducing "humans" in the comment you are replying to, to Western Australian and Central Desert groups? that's not the majority of humans, who really did have to fight for calories

Exactly. You don't have to go back very far to find a lot of famines even in the "developed world".

Look back in history before the invention of nitrogen fertilizers (only about a century ago).. we spent nearly a century harvesting guano off uninhabited rock islands in order to produce fertilizer & gun powder. We even past laws to encourage it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guano_Islands_Act

I read an article years ago where archaeologists studied the bones of pre-Columbian Native Americans. They found evidence of repeated famines.

> What's kinda sad is how bad most were at building shelters.

What's funny is how good that one first season guy was at doing everything, especially shelter, and then after only a couple days to have an indefinite setup, just missed his wife and immediately left. "Everything looks good, just don't have Barbara!"

Sounds like he was carefully going through the hierarchy of needs and hit companionship and bailed.

Edit: Was season 2, Mike Lowe, 21 days, and apparently more so planned to leave by 3 weeks because he wasn't allowed to hunt big game for health, but ultimately "I'm okay with the storyline they told. I was happy to go home to my lovely wife." Still a very interesting mastery of the wilderness to watch. Guy was doing arts n crafts and making random gizmos.

If you want to see it done differently watch season 8.

Spoiler alert: the winner built a simple hut, shows how to do it on his YouTube channel afterwards too. With a properly chimneyed fireplace though he had to improvise because his area did not have enough clay in the soil.

He's had the channel for a long time. I knew his channel before. His bow was a simple longbow he made himself. He regularly goes elk and boar hunting with his bows. He also tried fishing but had a bad spot but got lucky encountering a deer. He built a smoker with an automatic bear alarm. They really don't show a lot of him on the show if you compare. I think basically because he just did so well overall. He did carve toys to bring back to his sons too.

> to see it done differently watch season 8

It's season 10 now, and they're back to making spectacular log cabins and then tapping out!

A lot of people would, yes. Our economics has allowed people who would otherwise die, to live. Medicine, food distribution, research, construction, etc.

A large portion would be fine. Maybe unhappy, maybe not, but they'd survive. Most people are completely clueless about how little "Mother" nature gives a shit. The outdoors will kill you very quickly, especially if you're alone. If you have even just a small group of people, the odds change drastically.

Not to mention, "simple" things like vision (aids), hearing (aids) and ability to read and write.

> If you have even just a small group of people, the odds change drastically.

Yup. Bob is good at making gill nets, Ted is good at gathering berries. Fred is good at making a cabin. Sam is good at bow hunting. They trade their surpluses. A small economy. None have the skills needed to go it alone.

> None have the skills needed to go it alone.

Yet the idea of a "self-made millionaire" is pervasive and people were pretty quick to hate on the "You didn't build that" observation.

If you ever open a business, you'll discover that nobody gives you anything. You've got to pay them.

Any surplus left over is yours, and yes, you did build that.

Any failure (and 80% of businesses fail within 5 years) you own the failure and its debts, too. The people who you paid for their services, you still owe any unpaid debt to them.

> If you ever open a business, you'll discover that nobody gives you anything.

You'll also discover that you couldn't have done any of it alone. That your business would have been impossible without your education, which involved countless others, or the roads and bridges built by others, or the internet which was built by others, or the investors and banks who gave you the money to get your business started which were built by others. Even the things you paid for directly and upfront, but which your business absolutely depended on were built by someone else and any success you have would not have been possible if they hadn't done all the work needed to get to where they could provide you with what your business needed from them.

That's the point. Nobody does it alone, because that would be impossible. As the man said "The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

That also means we fail together too. If you borrow a bunch of money to start a business and can't pay it back, that burden isn't just on you. The employees who depended on your business for their income also carry some of the burden of your failure. The customers who depended on you are also impacted. At a larger scale, when a business fails, we all lose out on what could have been if it hadn't. Our economy loses diversity. Most new businesses will fail, but the failures are never just about one person either. In fact, many times the things others have built, including the environment a business operates in, are a direct cause of that business failing.

And yet millions of others got an education, roads, internet, etc., and went nowhere.

Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either. You have to pay the loan back, with interest.

BTW, employee back wages have first dibs on your assets should you declare bankruptcy. The back wages won't be much, anyway, as the law is pretty specific that a business cannot be late on payday.

> And yet millions of others got an education, roads, internet, etc., and went nowhere.

And millions of others are highly skilled, talented, intelligent, hardworking, and creative, but don't all find success.

This is why luck plays a massive role in the success of any business. That doesn't mean things like skills and initiative aren't important, or that people can't shift the odds in their favor (see for example https://fictivekin.github.io/pmarchive-jekyll/luck_and_the_e...) but ultimately, some people who should succeed don't because they were unlucky and others who do succeed would have failed if things entirely out of their control just happened to go differently.

> Investors don't give you money. They buy a piece of the business. Banks don't give you money, either.

Banks and investors give you money, with the expectation that they'll profit by doing so, but more to the point they give you opportunity. Plenty of people get turned away by banks and investors and if they manage to pull enough money together to get started they can still succeed, but others fail because without that opportunity given to them, they couldn't even get things off the ground.

Employees lose a lot more when their job is lost than just the wages they are owed (which they also don't always get) especially the ones who took more risky forms of compensation, but even outside the realm of compensation there are costs.

I'm curious how far you want to go with "you didn't build that". How about taking away the Beatles' success because they didn't make their own guitars? How about taking away gold medals from Olympic athletes? How about telling Picasso he didn't paint that? How about taking away the Oscars from actors because it was all other people? Maybe take away Hamilton's F1 World Championships?

Isn't the success of those people so unfair and undeserved?

If you paid a contractor to remodel your bathroom, and then sold your house for a higher price, is the contractor entitled to a piece of that action?

Just don't tie yourself together by rope while on mountains. One goes down, everyone goes down.

Deep Survival is a great read. I picked that up from it.

Human infants will die without physical touch. We are social creatures by our DNA.

The worst punishment in older times was banishment. It was usually a death sentence.

It's reality TV. You might as well submit Predator (1987) as evidence. (I'm not disputing that human cooperation is useful and necessary in the real world.)

I’m very confused what your point is? It sounds to me like you either think the topic of this article is so trivial that it shouldn’t have been written or that any article on the time period has to cover everything that happened then. But I don’t really believe either of those could be true.

I’m sure an article about the horrors of being a slave in a Roman mine would do fine, it’s just that it probably wouldn’t be able to rely on archaeology in Pompeii, which had little relation to mining. There was an article from a typical ‘western cultural elitism’ outlet that did well here and elsewhere recently about terrible conditions faced by illegal miners in abandoned South African mines, so I really don’t think the reason for the focus is preferences about topic so much as, you know, that you can have different articles about different things.

"Late stage" or "late capitalism" always suggests to me that the user has inside information on the sell-by date. I don't disagree about the proportion of attention.

I suspect it's a combination of looking around and going "this can't possibly be stable" combined with a degree of wish-fulfillment.

It has more to do with the idea that the system has evolved and advanced for a while. It's not so much about the system ending soon, as it is about it being deeply entrenched and widely adopted, its long-term negative consequences having had time to manifest, and/or being the late stages of a deliberate long-term agenda.

That might be reading into it too much. I'm pretty sure it's just a joke that capitalism is cancer. As in, "late-stage cancer".

Synonymous terms have been used in leftist/Marxist literature for a long time, that's always where I assumed it came from: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/05/late-ca...

Is "this" capitalism?

It's funny that the phrase was coined in 1902 and fell out of fashion by about 1970 and was revived in the 2010s. I guess what's old is new again.

It's people who believe Marx's thing about how "boom-bust" cycles will eventually destroy capitalism. Unfortunately, Historical Materialism is utter and complete bullshit.

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