To be fair when it comes to this kind of research comparison with modern hunter gatherer societies is the closest thing you can find to evidence, some things never enter the archaeological record.
Perhaps we'll never find conclusive evidence pointing to any one of the theories on these missing-finger handprints.
Right. With no written documentation or known modern descendants of the culture, it’s all speculation. I don’t know why they’d leap to conclude it was intentional religious sacrifice vs. accidents or amputations following injury.
Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they’re paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They’ve also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn’t great.
I don’t like the idea of requiring folks have chips on them & needing bank accounts to access transport. Worse if a for-profit payment processor gets to skim a little off on every transaction.
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.
Bruh, those payment methods are ubiquitous in developed countries, like those in Europe.
the advantage of credit/debit cards is that you don’t need to fucking buy some obscure city specific card for public transport or need to figure out the tickets, you just tap your card when you get on.
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.
It’s not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they’re replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.
That’s why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don’t like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it’s very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don’t fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can’t buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late…
As an alternative I’d propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don’t want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that’ll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn’t keep vagrants out.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won’t be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country’s population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
You have to renew your driver’s license every 10 years. That means in the worst case scenario, the image they’re using of you could be 10 years out of date.
Those images are also not detailed enough to be used for facial recognition. Sure, it could help narrow down the list of suspected people, but they’re crazy if they think they’d be able to pinpoint someone based on what they looked like 5-10 years prior.
I suspect these powers are being used for something else more sinister. Immigration, for example, to clamp down on people who have licenses and are delivery drivers, or taxi drivers for example.
It’s not the kind of search where they need to be very precise; certainly not pinpoint accuracy. t’s just another tool to narrow their searches that rely on other details.
And if you’re a fully grown adult, not undergoing radical facial reconstruction, it seems unlikely to be that the relative distances and orientations of your eyes, nose, and mouth are going to change very much. My driver’s license photo is at least a decade old and even though my face looks different on the surface due to age, changes in weight, and changes in hair color and length I’d bet my key features are still in relatively the same places.
Of course they could also be using this for more sinister purposes. No argument there.
Just makes me wonder how many Palestinians they’ve murdered in similar circumstances, and we just didn’t hear about it because they weren’t Israelis, so it was treated as if it didn’t matter.
I mean, the answer is loads. There was a hospital where they had to move all patients away from the outer rooms because the Israeli army were using snipers to pick off staff who came to attend to them. Uniformed doctors who were engaged in treating their patients were shot with no warning.
Absolutely insane. We have serious dysfunction in our civilization that great concepts like this 15min city is being poisoned by social media with the help of algorithms trying to optimize for profit. This is the real conspiracy, that our systems of power are utterly rudderless and irrational.
I’m sad that this comic is still needed. I thought we figured this out a while ago. I remember being super weirded out at a colleague saying he worshipped women. That moment and probably things I read around the time solidified in my kind to treat women and other genders the same as I’d men.
On a tad bit related note I remember reading that it was common for people to be buried with all of their possessions and that women occasionally had hunting equipment buried with them.
I’m just adding it here because I feel it’s connected to the idea that eating lots of meat is naturally manly. Apparently it’s just an exaggerated fantasy that’s part of our own modern culture and the reality seems to be that we were effectively ‘flexitarians’ and that women to some extent hunted too.
Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.
The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.
This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.
While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.
Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.
Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”
For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.
I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.
theguardian.com
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