It wasn't a straight jump from Columbus or the Iberian unification, the Enlightenment and the late Middle Ages overlap a lot. I'd say from 1200's things began to 'instituonalize', from first proto-parliaments, to Iberian Fueros, to different merchants and thinkerers eroding the Ancient Regime a little by supporting capable people with the money of rich people (Maecenas? in Latin).
Doesn't seem nearly as black and white when you consider the Mayans were themselves way ahead of all of Europe with their use of elastomers, effectively creating vulcanized rubber over a thousand years before Charles Goodyear.
Hard to consider this that sophisticated in the twenty-first century but their use of the number zero also predates Europe by hundreds of years.
The Mayans used the corbeled vault, which is much more primitive than the arch. There's a reason people who invented arches never went back to the corbeled vault.
Compare any of the Mayan buildings with the Roman Coliseum in sophistication. I've been through Chichen Itza and spent some time looking closely at the construction of it and the neighboring buildings. I encourage you to do the same.
The Roman "style" of aqueducts used arches so they could cross valleys while maintaining a constant slope. I don't think the Mayans had that, and the Mayan aqueducts didn't seem to be very long, like 200 feet vs the Roman miles long ones.
The Romans also had hypocausts, which were a method of piping in heated air under the floor to warm the house.
In the 90s the same people who today refuse to admit the Mayans were, on the whole, less advanced than the Romans were 100%, absolutely, no-contest foaming at the mouth to lynch Samuel Huntington for being an unrepentant racist, I mean, for releasing "Clash of Civilizations"
The Medieval Iberia still used similar conducts to heat the cities and villages. It's impressive how much of the Roman empire (from the street layouts to home architecture) into the cities.
It should be noted that while in general metallurgy was less advanced in America, there also was a domain where it was more advanced than in the rest of the world.
There is one metal that has been discovered by the South-American natives, before the contact with Europe, and which was unknown elsewhere: platinum. The Europeans have learned from them about platinum.
Moreover, not only the South-Americans had discovered platinum, but they had also developed a technology to make objects of platinum. This is no small achievement, because platinum was impossible to melt or forge with the means available at that time.
The South-Americans had worked around this, by inventing a form of powder metallurgy. To make things of platinum, they sintered platinum powder and nuggets with gold.
This technology has been lost after the Spanish occupation, so the Europeans have developed techniques for platinum processing only much later, around the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century.
While platinum itself had been unknown in the rest of the world before the contact with South America, some platinum-group metals had been known, i.e. the natural alloy of osmium with iridium was known in the ancient Egypt, Greece and Roman Empire, in the form of nuggets that were mixed with those of gold in alluvial deposits. However none of the ancient Mediterranean people discovered any method for forging or melting the Os-Ir nuggets, so they were called "adamant", i.e. "untamed" (which has been distorted in the modern "diamond"). This was the original meaning of adamant/diamond. Only after the wars of Alexander the Great in India, the Europeans have learned about what are now called "diamonds", which were then named by the Greeks and Romans "Indian diamonds", to distinguish them from the Os-Ir diamonds. Later, the knowledge about Os-Ir nuggets has been forgotten and the references to them in Hesiod, Platon or Pliny the Elder have been mistranslated until now.
The Mayan discovering platinum and maybe working it a bit had no perceptible effect on their civilization, if only because a few bits of it did not provide an opportunity to use it.
Iron and steel, on the other hand, are transformative to civilization and the Romans made extensive use of it. For example, nails make it easy to build wooden structures.
(Gold and silver are also rather useless for pre-industrial civilizations, as they are not strong enough. Their usage was confined to decoration and currency.)
Platinum was worked mainly in the territory of present Colombia and Ecuador.
Some jewelry may have been traded until North America, but they would have been certainly rare by the Mayan.
Because the South-Americans did not have iron or iron alloys, but they had rather abundant gold and silver and platinum, the usage of precious metals was not confined to decoration and currency. For instance the use of nails made of gold-copper-silver alloy was frequent and also various tools were made from such a gold-copper-silver alloy (named "tumbaga" by the Spaniards).
Pure gold, silver or copper are extremely soft, but their alloys can have a decent strength, even if not comparable to steel.
The discovery of platinum in South America had a significant impact on the entire human civilization.
Initially the Spaniards have despised the metal because, unlike for the gold and silver that they took back to Europe, nobody would give anything in exchange for the unknown platinum, and they also did not know how to work the metal into useful things. Hence the Spanish name of the metal, "platina", as a diminutive of "plata", i.e. silver, as at that time it was much less valuable than silver.
Nevertheless, platinum samples have been taken back to Europe, and eventually, in the middle of the 18th century they have arisen the curiosity of the chemists, who began to study its properties.
After it was established that platinum is an ideal material for vessels used in chemical research, due to its resistance to chemical reagents and high temperatures, platinum has played an exceedingly important role in chemistry around the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century, i.e. during the time when the majority of the chemical elements have been discovered, frequently during analyses performed in platinum vessels.
Other early important use of platinum was for the standards of mass and of length of the metric system, which ensured an accuracy and reproducibility of the measurements much better than anything before that.
I have mentioned these things precisely because they are very little known by the general public and even by those who are supposed to be professionals in such domains. Because of this, references are scarce.
References about the platinum technology in South America before the arrival of the Europeans:
"Ancient Platinum Technology in South America, its use by the indians in pre-hispanic times", by David A. Scott and Warwick Bray, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 1980.
"Metallurgy of Gold and Platinum among the Pre-Columbian Indians", Nature, 1936.
About the knowledge of the natural osmium-iridium alloy in the ancient Mediterranean world, there are several archaeology articles with chemical analyses of Egyptian gold artifacts, most of which contain as inclusions small nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy, whose cause is the fact that the gold was collected from river deposits, where the gold nuggets and the Os-Ir nuggets accumulate together, so when the gold was melted it incorporated the Os-Ir nuggets. (For instance: "The analysis of platinum-group element inclusions in gold antiquities", N.D. Meeksa, M.S. Titea, a British Museum Research Laboratory, London WC1B 3DG, England)
These archaeological finds match perfectly the description of adamant from Plato (in "Timaeus" and in "The Statesman"), where adamant is described as the "knot of gold", which is found together with gold, but it cannot be shaped like gold, because it is too hard and impossible to melt. The same description of adamant is provided by Pliny the Elder in his tenth book, which adds besides it the description of the Indian adamants, which are completely different from the classical adamant, being octahedral crystals, not metal nuggets, which matches what are now called diamonds.
The earliest reference to "adamant" is at Hesiod, who describes how Gaia has made a sickle blade from "grey adamant", for the castration of Uranus, which makes no sense as a reference to modern diamonds, which are neither grey nor suitable to be forged into a blade, but it makes perfect sense as a reference to the grey Os-Ir alloy, the hardest metal known to Hesiod, which humans were too weak to forge, but surely a huge goddess like Gaia should be able to forge. Other references to Os-Ir adamant are in Aeschylus (Prometheus is bound with chains made of adamant; another use that makes perfect sense for a metal, but which would be impossible for fragile diamond crystals, which cannot be forged into chain links) and in Theophrastus.
There are a few other articles about the history of platinum and platinum-group metals that have relevant information about all these things, but I do not remember now the titles or authors.
The fact that by searching the Internet you can find a lot of incomplete or even completely incorrect information about many things proves that one should never trust the answers given by an LLM for any really important question, because an LLM will provide the information most likely to be found in its training sources, while truth cannot be based on democracy. On the contrary, much too frequently the majority opinion is more likely to be incorrect, than the minority opinion.
To be fair, the Romans had so many cultures they could draw their technology from- the Chinese, the Indians, the Middle East, etc. The Roman Empire was kind of a group project with three or four groups.
The Mayans were essentially isolated on their continent.
Wait, what?? I loved Colossus as a kid, read and enjoyed all three books, and still have an original movie poster I got at a yard sale when I was a teenager. I read the books again a couple years ago, and they're still enjoyable, if now quite dated.
> Clearly the stock market isn't rational, and prices of stocks are not tied to financial fundamentals.
Stock prices are tied to anticipated future earnings, not past or present financials.
> only people with disposable income can afford
Anyone can invest in stocks with $100 or less. As for disposable income, anyone that can buy beer, drugs, or lottery tickets has disposable income that can be invested in stocks.
> part of the funnel that increases the wealth of the rich at the expense of the poor and middle class
Corporations make money by creating wealth, not "funneling" it from other people.
In the 1980s, my dad was the head of the finance department at a small college. He taught finance classes, and he taught how free markets worked. Student after student would come to him, and say this amazed them. They said they had never heard of a case for free markets.
I attribute this to the complete lack of any school teachers or professors having any business experience whatsoever.
None of my K-12 grade school classes said anything about free markets. None offered any accounting instruction, or finance instruction, or anything about managing money.
This site has turned into a worse version of reddit, which is what I would come here to get away from (I stopped commenting there long ago, and barely visit at all at this point).
It's really unfortunate that what was a place to talk about tech and startups (and therefore capitalism and investing) with people living that experience is now yet another another online progressive cesspool.
I find it reassuring. More people are waking up from our collective trickle-down, "free market hypothesis" fever dream and are starting to understand that there's nothing natural or rational about the stock market - it's just an elaborate wealth allocation machine that showers wealth on those who already have wealth (and showers more wealth on you, the more you already have). The stock market is about as natural or rational as the most Communist land redistribution program, except it runs in the other direction. Money is political, and politics is about power! Too many people are still brainswashed by elite propaganda to think a machine designed to increase the power of the rich is somehow a mechanism as natural as the sun and wind.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Nothing you said has anything to do with the post in question; it's just an angry, uninformed, emotional screed.
Writing a song is just the beginning. Then there is all the massive effort with the arrangements and polish for it (see George Martin). I doubt the Beatles would make the effort unless they thought a song was worth it.
being “worth it” and being “a hit” are two different things. the parent is trying to point out they made songs knowing full well those particular song would never be a hit, but they definitely thought it was “worth it.”
many artists do things often knowing they won’t make money from that piece. and some artists believe money should never drive why you create a piece of art, different reasons should be at the forefront, should be the driving force, some force other than widespread success.
the beatles were well known for making thing they did not water down for the masses, knowing it would likely not be a commercial success. and conversely they were also known for intentionally watering things down so the masses would take it. it’s one part of why they have stood the test of time.
How do you conclude that? Is it hard to believe that Paul would write a song, and then realize it wasn't good?
> some artists believe money should never drive why you create a piece of art
Yes, and I'm acquainted with a few of those. They are proud that their art is something nobody else likes. They criticize others for "selling out", meaning making art that others like enough to be willing to pay for it.
They're just trying to justify their lack of talent.
I'm not impressed.
BTW, the Beatles very much enjoyed their money and success.
I wrote a short paper on that 25 years ago, but it went nowhere. I still think it is a great idea!
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