AnimeIsTrash posted:

Can recommend me a good biography of Simon Bolivar?

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Foreign lands are the substrate in which the American military industrial complex grows wars for profit. The people who profit off American wars essentially turned a occasional spasmodic national outpouring of violence into something that could be grown and provide wealth to enrich a tiny elite, just as much as Indian tea or Gabonese palm oil. The world is our war plantation, and it's turned out a heck of a crop over the years.

vyelkin posted:

Utterly insane that society ever settled on that level of constant physical labour being preferable to having your shirt be a little stained or wrinkled.

vyelkin posted:

Utterly insane that society ever settled on that level of constant physical labour being preferable to having your shirt be a little stained or wrinkled.

StashAugustine posted:

dudes rock

Fish of hemp posted:

Who cares, that labour is done by women.

gradenko_2000 posted:

in the Doomsday Econ thread, it came up that the sheer amount of labor required to farm food was so incredibly high that it seems ludicrous for people to consider the possibility that they could revert to or become subsistence farmers, for whatever reason that they might deliberately want to pursue it

in that same vein, the following are excerpts from Robert Caro's books on LBJ, describing how people in Texas hill country washed clothes before washing machines became a thing

gradenko_2000 posted:

in the Doomsday Econ thread, it came up that the sheer amount of labor required to farm food was so incredibly high that it seems ludicrous for people to consider the possibility that they could revert to or become subsistence farmers, for whatever reason that they might deliberately want to pursue it

in that same vein, the following are excerpts from Robert Caro's books on LBJ, describing how people in Texas hill country washed clothes before washing machines became a thing

MikeCrotch posted:

The 2 biggest labour saving devices in history were the washing machine and the steam shovel

Pretty big argument for the home washing machine being one of the key elements of women's liberation in the mid 20th century

War and Pieces posted:

guns condoms and electricity are the three pillars of modern feminism

War and Pieces posted:

guns condoms and electricity are the three pillars of modern feminism

vyelkin posted:

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Some Guy TT posted:

[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

quote:

By 1900 there were commercial laundries in all major cities and in many rural and suburban districts as well. They offered diverse services, from "wet wash" (which meant that the drying and finishing were done at home) to fully finished (usually by hand) laundry. Some of these laundries were located in poor neighborhoods and were patronized by people who had no facilities for doing laundry in their own residences. The heyday of the laundry business seems to have been the decade of the 1920s. Between 1919 and 1929, gross receipts for power laundries virtually doubled; they declined somewhat during the Depression and war years, increased again immediately after the war, and then went into a long period of decline, from which they show no signs of recovering. During the most prosperous years for the laundries, surveys undertaken by home economists demonstrated that, although few households (and only those with the highest income) "sent out" all their laundry work, very few families (and this was true even of poor ones) made no use at all of the commercial services. The items most commonly sent to commercial laundries were men's shirts and collars and "flatwork"-handkerchiefs, sheets, tablecloths, and napkins.

[...] Although no one seems able to be precise about how the industry was born, all commentators agree on what killed it: the electric washing machine. Wherever and whenever electric washing machine sales went up, commercial laundry receipts went down. The decline of the commercial laundry is, in fact, one of the few instances we have of a household function appearing to be well on its way to departing from the home-only to return. Helen and Robert Lynd noticed this in Middletown in the mid-1920s. After noting that "the advent of individually owned electric washing machines and electric irons has ... slowed up the trend of laundry work ... out of the home to large-scale commercial agencies,' they remarked in a footnote:

This is an example of the way in which a useful new invention vigorously pushed on the market by effective advertising may serve to slow up a secular trend. The heavy investment by the individual family in an electric washing machine ... tends to perpetuate a questionable institutional set-up-whereby many individual homes repeat common tasks day after day in isolated units-by forcing back into the individual home a process that was following belatedly the trend in industry toward centralized operation.

Some Guy TT posted:

[Modern History] Guns Condoms and Electricity

Orange Devil posted:

Do the Amish still do that poo poo, because lol and furthermore lmao if they do.

Some Guy TT posted:

guns huh

War and Pieces posted:

guns mean that any woman can reliably kill any man at any time

War and Pieces posted:

guns mean that any woman can reliably kill any man at any time

quote:

One major effort, carried out by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea during the Korean War, between 1951 and 1953, claimed the United States had released bacteria and infected insects into North Korea and China. The charges were fabricated but received wide circulation and were only proved false in 1998 by Soviet Central Committee documents published by University of Maryland scholar University of Maryland scholar Milton Leitenberg. He obtained a copy of a cable to Mao Zedong, sent after Joseph Stalin’s death, that read, “The Soviet Government and the Central Committee of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] were misled. The spread in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.”

Slavvy posted:

I thought weaponised disease in Korea was an actual thing though? Didn't they like drop a bomb full of diseased bats or some stupid poo poo like that?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Yes. Jeff Kaye has done a lot of research about this

Some Guy TT posted:

yeah this is why i was curious about a washington post piece just casually treating it like well established fake news but when i try to follow the bread crumbs i get led to a website thats not especially clear on where its sources came from