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Also from the article, modern medicine: "We have firearms, but we also have emergency services," he said. "It's easier to kill, but easier to save lives."

by qiqing 6y ago

iguy 6y ago
This is true, and both make a difference. But worth knowing that the murder rate dropped, over centuries, to be extremely low around 1900 say. At this point medicine wasn't very useful at saving lives, and while guns (even machine-guns) existed, they weren't in the hands of every street-corner criminal. So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. Trying to figure out the impact of modern medicine etc. is more relevant for trying to understand e.g. the rise & fall of crime since 1960.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. We'll see how nations of soy-boys fare in the next major war. The Chinese PLA is undermined with one-childs, "princelings", and untested hardware so that it's questionable if they can fight. The US Army struggles annually to find normal-weighted applicants. I know one delusional Gen Z who wanted to apply at 320 pounds. Sadly the recruiters can be court-martialled for missing their quota, so they're under intense pressure to convince superiors to accept applicants with disqualifying items like tattoos, serious vision problems, etc. but who can still do a pushup. Japan basically lost WW2 because most Americans at the time had high school education and familiarity with farm equipment, so almost anybody could be trained to fly an airplane. Meanwhile Japan started training boys at 14 like ninjas and just ran out of trained pilots after Midway (they had 10,000 fighter aircraft and nobody who could fly them except as kamikazis.) The next major war will likely be between China and India over the Himalayan headwaters, which the CCP is damming for the notorious Xinjiang region, and this war will probably go nuclear.

Also from the article, modern medicine: "We have firearms, but we also have emergency services," he said. "It's easier to kill, but easier to save lives."

by qiqing 6y ago

Also from the article, modern medicine: "We have firearms, but we also have emergency services," he said. "It's easier to kill, but easier to save lives."

iguy 6y ago

This is true, and both make a difference. But worth knowing that the murder rate dropped, over centuries, to be extremely low around 1900 say. At this point medicine wasn't very useful at saving lives, and while guns (even machine-guns) existed, they weren't in the hands of every street-corner criminal. So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. Trying to figure out the impact of modern medicine etc. is more relevant for trying to understand e.g. the rise & fall of crime since 1960.

redis_mlc 6y ago
> So there was enormous real progress over the time-span separating us from the medievals. We'll see how nations of soy-boys fare in the next major war. The Chinese PLA is undermined with one-childs, "princelings", and untested hardware so that it's questionable if they can fight. The US Army struggles annually to find normal-weighted applicants. I know one delusional Gen Z who wanted to apply at 320 pounds. Sadly the recruiters can be court-martialled for missing their quota, so they're under intense pressure to convince superiors to accept applicants with disqualifying items like tattoos, serious vision problems, etc. but who can still do a pushup. Japan basically lost WW2 because most Americans at the time had high school education and familiarity with farm equipment, so almost anybody could be trained to fly an airplane. Meanwhile Japan started training boys at 14 like ninjas and just ran out of trained pilots after Midway (they had 10,000 fighter aircraft and nobody who could fly them except as kamikazis.) The next major war will likely be between China and India over the Himalayan headwaters, which the CCP is damming for the notorious Xinjiang region, and this war will probably go nuclear.