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OneTruePecos posted:Certainly you have, cancer and heart disease each kill more than that every four months. Heart disease and cancer are part of our day to day life and have always been the killers of humanity (people who die of old age often die of heart disease). We just aren’t use communicial diseases anymore, and are struck down out of no where
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Jul 19, 2020 20:56
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It has explained the importance of public health in a way few things could.
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Jul 19, 2020 21:06
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My point is that, no, it doesn't put historical catastrophes in any kind of perspective, because it's orders of magnitude removed from them. Covid-19 has barely moved the overall death rate in the US. A lot of corona deaths would have been nursing home pneumonia deaths a few months later, for one thing. It's not nothing, but the excess mortality is nothing like what was seen in historical pandemics. The US has a population of ~330M. The death rate from corona so far is something like 1 in 2500. It's not at all uncommon for someone to not know anyone that has died from it. Go ahead and double that to take us through the end of the year, which is not at all realistic, and say the first year mortality is 1 in 1250. That's grossly overstating what the real mortality will be for 2020 in the US, in the worst year there will be for it. The black death from 1348 - 1351 works out to something like 1 in 8 each year for four years, and it didn't go away after 1351, it continued to pop back up every few years. So, imagine COVID-19, but 150 times worse, for four years, and that's just the part of it people remember. sbaldrick posted:We just aren’t use communicial diseases anymore, and are struck down out of no where This is true, it's amazing how quickly death due to communicable disease practically disappeared from the collective consciousness of much of the world. I had grandparents that lived through the 1918 influenza, and an uncle that was in one of the first polio vaccine waves. ETA I just realized this is the ancient history thread, so substitute Justinian Plague numbers as desired. OneTruePecos fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 22:52
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Jul 20, 2020 00:17
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I remember back in May I think it was, my family and I had rented a car to take care of something out of town and were on our way back home. This was when Tokyo was still in very full lockdown, and we were driving through the west side of Shinjuku where there's lots of big buildings, always very crowded, and it was completely empty of people. Seeing that I realized that this was what it was like in Rome, but for centuries not months. Seeing that really brought home why people would strip the marble off of temples, loot and sell off statues or whatever else they could find, and inevitably let things fall into disrepair and ruin. Living in an abandoned city, who gives a gently caress about Mitsui Sumitomo's skyscraper's facade? Who has the time or expertise to maintain a skyscraper, much less hundreds of them? It was a very interesting experience to me.
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Jul 20, 2020 00:37
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Jul 20, 2020 00:38
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OneTruePecos posted:My point is that, no, it doesn't put historical catastrophes in any kind of perspective(...)
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Jul 20, 2020 00:46
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The point is not that covid is terrible--it objectively is nowhere near as bad as many historical pandemics--but the fact none of us have experienced anything like it before. AIDS is the only other pandemic of recent memory and is really not comparable, you can't catch AIDS going grocery shopping. This is also at least partly why East Asia handled it relatively well (with uh, one notable exception  ), they have experienced multiple near-pandemic outbreaks in the past few decades so they were more prepared.
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Jul 20, 2020 00:49
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Grand Fromage posted:The point is not that covid is terrible--it objectively is nowhere near as bad as many historical pandemics--but the fact none of us have experienced anything like it before. AIDS is the only other pandemic of recent memory and is really not comparable, you can't catch AIDS going grocery shopping. This is pedantry, but if this thread isn't suitable for pedantry, what thread is? The virus itself is HIV, not AIDS - AIDS is what you're declared to have when you've had the virus for long enough that it overwhelms your immune system and you start getting opportunistic infections that your immune system would normally stop in their tracks 
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Jul 20, 2020 01:08
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Kylaer posted:This is pedantry, but if this thread isn't suitable for pedantry, what thread is? The virus itself is HIV, not AIDS - AIDS is what you're declared to have when you've had the virus for long enough that it overwhelms your immune system and you start getting opportunistic infections that your immune system would normally stop in their tracks I'm aware, yes. Covid is also the name of the disease, the virus is SARS-CoV-2. I did not use the name of the virus in either instance. 
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Jul 20, 2020 01:13
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Didn't we have a fair amount of close calls with pandemics, and just covid19 is the one that managed to breach the world's defenses and went full global? A lot of hard work went into keeping this from happening every few years. I think I've even seen some people blame the weakened CDC after the administration kneecapped it for the epidemic not being contained, since it turns out that the CDC had international importance, although I'm not sure how true that is. It's probably not something you could prove as the one cause, but it certainly didn't help. I ran some numbers a little while back, and calculated that the coronavirus killed more americans than 9/11 and the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan put together, which is spooky enough I don't really want to see how much I have to finagle to get an equivalent amount of deaths.
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Jul 20, 2020 02:05
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Yeah. There are always diseases going around that have the potential to get out of control, but the circumstances have to be right. Pandemics don't emerge historically until the Roman period because diseases simply couldn't travel fast enough. The speed of travel in the empire plus the vast long-range connections helped carry diseases around quick.
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Jul 20, 2020 02:11
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah. There are always diseases going around that have the potential to get out of control, but the circumstances have to be right. Pandemics don't emerge historically until the Roman period because diseases simply couldn't travel fast enough. The speed of travel in the empire plus the vast long-range connections helped carry diseases around quick. I think it’s hard to say that with total certainty. Plagues are easy to overlook in the archeological evidence; we wildly underestimated the toll of the plague of Justinian up until 15-ish years ago, and this was a relatively well-documented pandemic that was nearly as devastating as the Black Death. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few decades we realized that actually there had been a Bronze Age pandemic that we’d overlooked, or one in early imperial China.
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Jul 20, 2020 03:26
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah. There are always diseases going around that have the potential to get out of control, but the circumstances have to be right. Pandemics don't emerge historically until the Roman period because diseases simply couldn't travel fast enough. The speed of travel in the empire plus the vast long-range connections helped carry diseases around quick. the contact pandemic in north america moved pretty darn fast, and they didn't have roman-level roads everywhere
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Jul 20, 2020 03:44
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Steely Dad posted:I think it’s hard to say that with total certainty. Nothing in history is certain, it's always conditional on evidence, yes. Tunicate posted:the contact pandemic in north america moved pretty darn fast, and they didn't have roman-level roads everywhere Why look to roads? The real secret of Roman travel was having the Mediterranean right in the middle of the empire. It was always faster to take a ship and in the Roman world you could cross most of the empire by water. Contrast that with the comparable Chinese empire, which was all land with virtually every water route running west to east. Going north to south in interior China was a nightmare. The Americas had sea and river trade routes stretching across most of the continents, even if you leave out that there were also Europeans sailing around everywhere as additional plague vectors. Also, the time scale is different. The American pandemics were multiple waves of death over a couple of centuries, it wasn't a single outbreak that killed everyone all at once. The Antonine Plague crossed the empire in a couple of years.
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Jul 20, 2020 03:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:Didn't we have a fair amount of close calls with pandemics, and just covid19 is the one that managed to breach the world's defenses and went full global? A lot of hard work went into keeping this from happening every few years. I think I've even seen some people blame the weakened CDC after the administration kneecapped it for the epidemic not being contained, since it turns out that the CDC had international importance, although I'm not sure how true that is. It's probably not something you could prove as the one cause, but it certainly didn't help. totally -- and American Presidents have also been sounding the alarm that the country was not prepared since George W Bush at least. Bill Gates and Michael Osterholm have been struggling to get better plan in place in the event of an epidemic of this scale. Like I read a book published in 2017 which described a fictional scenario in which a "Shanghai flu" emerged from China causing a global ventilator shortage and large scale death and costing the world trillions of dollars in lost economic output, with a vaccine not being distributed for 18 months. Of course that book's author assumed the USA would be led by a competent leader that would take charge, make hard decisions, and follow the best scientific advice. And well, lol.
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Jul 20, 2020 06:43
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The USA has made many hard decisions! They were just all, universally, the wrong decisions.
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Jul 20, 2020 08:10
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Now I'm wondering if, without a knowledge of germ theory, there's much public health stuff you could do beyond a general "clean water, wash out the sewage" (which I know is actually a big part of public health itself).
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Jul 20, 2020 08:57
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People absolutely knew about quarantining and contagion long before germ theory.
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Jul 20, 2020 09:56
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Moving all the workanimal poop, off the streets... I don't expect the romans to do the medieval german thing and just pave it over eventually, continously rising the street level.
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Jul 20, 2020 11:15
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Miss Broccoli posted:Ancient aboriginals were not a civilisation or empire in the sense you are thinking of. Australia is a continent the size of Europe and at the time of Captain Cooks arrival there were hundreds of independent nations. Their societies didn't value conquest like say, the Romans. The aboriginals who greeted captain cook in botany bay would have had no living memory of the islands just to the north of Australia, or of Tasmania, or even something like Uluru, but the nations in those areas would have. You wouldn't expect someone in pre-medieval Poland to know about England, that's the scale of distance we are talking here. It pisses me off to no end that the colonization of Australia is widely thought of as the invasion of one country, when the reality is that it was an invasion (and in most cases the complete destruction) of hundreds of nations. Some cool Aboriginal oral history that survived and have been validated include places now under the sea and their subsequent flooding ~13000 - 10000 BCE, Volcanic eruptions from ~10000 to 5000 BCE, and a meteorite impact ~2500BCE . The last uncontacted Aboriginals didn't meet with colonizers until 1984, which is after I was born. They were first contacted by their own people who had been rounded up to depopulate what is the world's largest inland weapons testing range. They hadn't seen each other in 20 years but were able to recognize their "missing" family members by their footprints. I'm not able to explain it well myself but I have noticed that Aboriginal family structures that I've been taught about are Einstein-level genius in terms of genetic health for small populations.
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Jul 20, 2020 12:57
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The Sausages posted:I'm not able to explain it well myself but I have noticed that Aboriginal family structures that I've been taught about are Einstein-level genius in terms of genetic health for small populations. do you think you could find a link? because this touches on two of my pet interests, anthropology and genetics.
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Jul 20, 2020 16:18
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The Sausages posted:It pisses me off to no end that the colonization of Australia is widely thought of as the invasion of one country, when the reality is that it was an invasion (and in most cases the complete destruction) of hundreds of nations. Thank you for those links, these are very interesting articles.
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Jul 20, 2020 20:06
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEKIW3pUUk
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Jul 20, 2020 23:22
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Squalid posted:do you think you could find a link? because this touches on two of my pet interests, anthropology and genetics. I've never really looked for the topic online until today, I haven't seen anything like an analysis of how their practices affect genetics so you could be opening up a nice can of worms there but here's what I've found: Wikipedia  University of Sydney Learning Module has some videos explaining the basics. Almost off topic but the whole "skins" thing also reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick - which was in part inspired by a lecture from anthropologist Robert Redfield. I'm not an anthropologist but I'm enjoying learning more about this sort of thing. The Sausages fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Jul 21, 2020 |
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Jul 21, 2020 02:44
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 caption this
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Jul 21, 2020 08:48
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Arglebargle III posted:
"So then he turns himself into a pickle, funniest poo poo I've ever seen."
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Jul 21, 2020 12:53
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Arglebargle III posted:
"Once we add some fat outline to this impact font, the emperor will finally have his image macro"
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Jul 21, 2020 12:55
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Arglebargle III posted:
"We have purposely learned him comic sans, as a joke."
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Jul 21, 2020 13:48
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Arglebargle III posted:
"Christ, what an rear end in a top hat..."
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Jul 21, 2020 13:48
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“To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Kato-chan & Ken-chan.”
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Jul 21, 2020 14:21
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Arglebargle III posted:
"Does he know that it means DO NOT STACK?"
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Jul 21, 2020 17:36
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Arglebargle III posted:
"The circus is in town." "It is?"
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Jul 21, 2020 21:46
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Arglebargle III posted:
and it was the most I ever threw up, and it changed my life forever.
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Jul 21, 2020 23:07
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So after diving down an internet rabbit hole I just read the portion of the Historia Augusta on Elagabalus and it was absolutely hilarious. Laugh out loud moments include the author saying Elagabalus’ name Varius was given to him by schoolmates because his mother was a harlot and he had “various” fathers (no clue how this works out in Latin), sending agents around the country to find men with the biggest dicks, etc. I was wondering if anyone could recommend any books or articles on the topic of the Historia. I read the wikipedia page and it’s fascinating that we don’t know what the deal is with this weird book.
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Jul 21, 2020 23:21
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Imagine if someone in the 2000's collects together all the gossip from supermarket tabloids in the 20th century into one volume and in the 3700's it's basically the only primary source available for scholars studying the 20th century. Princess Diana would be considered to be the greatest ruler of our age.
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Jul 22, 2020 00:33
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Imagine if someone in the 2000's collects together all the gossip from supermarket tabloids in the 20th century into one volume and in the 3700's it's basically the only primary source available for scholars studying the 20th century. Known universally as the people's princess and famed for de-mining the continent of Africa,
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Jul 22, 2020 00:53
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Continuity RCP posted:Known universally as the people's princess and famed for de-mining the continent of Africa, That's where all the rare earth's went.
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Jul 22, 2020 00:55
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After her tragic death the world sent the first missions to the Moon to scatter her ashes, which is why all current Princesses of the Moon claim descent from Diana.
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Jul 22, 2020 02:02
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This is the premise of the Diana: Warrior Princess RPG.quote:"Diana: Warrior Princess is an indie role-playing game written by Marcus Rowland and initially published by Heliograph Incorporated, based on an article describing the setting which originally appeared in Valkyrie magazine. It is distributed as a PDF via Steve Jackson Games. It describes a fictionalised version of the twentieth century as it might be seen a few thousand years from now.
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Jul 22, 2020 02:13
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