I have a good friend who was adopted in slightly similar circumstances...to replace a lost child, to fit into a mold of what his parents wanted him to be, implicitly taught to be ashamed of where he came from...and he believes adoption should be outlawed. The minute he got his own autonomy he sabotaged all the…

"Letting"?? No. It was not that woman's prerogative to swoop in, a desperate wannabe mom, and save this child from a life she knew little to nothing about other than what she'd seen a few times. She helped break up a family - did you miss the part about how the mother constantly visited and was very much a part of the…

Also in Mexico and it is the saddest thing I have ever seen.

There's a long history of orphanages taking children whose parents cannot afford to care for them (I'm aware of this happening in Korea but am sure it happens elsewhere too). Unfortunately, this does mean that kids with parents who love them get adopted and shipped halfway across the world. Terrible.

Where do the dinosaurs fit into all of this? Were we riding them yet?

the internet is unlike anything in human history. humanity as a whole has never had a collective, central point of information. previously knowledge has always been kept locked up behind gatekeepers so to say... anyone from the 80s/90s? remember getting books from a different library?? yea, good luck if the librarian…

This is such a better analogy for the internet than the usual "wild west" one that I hear all the time.

hoverboards too

Leave it up to the jetpack nuts to squeeze their issue into something that happened 7000 years ago!

As the graph shows, the population density increased after the grand opening of the first Pottery Barn.

It's possible that we just haven't yet invented a social system that can handle the internet

It looks surprisingly similar to the rate of technological development when the church started their bookburnings.

I've always thought that the story of Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu was at least partially about the transition from a hunter-gatherer civilization to a settled, agricultural one. Given the similarities to the story of Adam and Eve and their "fall," I've felt like that story was also about that transition, to some…

"the erosion of women's rights" You really think cave-women had more rights? That's HILARIOUS. Women went from being raped and used as property to.... being raped and used as property....

Jane Jacobs argues (and I was initially aghast at it, but was later convinced it had merit, if not convinced wholly) that large-scale agriculture did not allow for cities (or mega-villages), but cities necessitated the agricultural advances. It was based on market towns developing. Not a proper specialization in…

Well, it's probably a lot more complicated than that. They were also beset with environmental problems. But yeah, some anthropologists like Kuijt believe that their belief systems were a big part of the problem. It reminds me less of the left-right debate and more of the debates we have today over new technologies.

I suspect that if it wasn't for this gap we would have jetpacks by now.

Well, the Sumerian culture came much later than these pre-literate Neolithic settlements. So by that time, they probably were well-aware of the pitfalls.

I think there was some lines from the Epic of Gilgamesh (Or some other Sumerian writing.) that seemed to indicate that ancient people knew exactly what they were getting into upon transitioning from hunter/gatherer culture into agricultural civilization. I can't remember them exactly as I only heard them once but they…