oofManBang

Ahh, silly me, I should have just starved on the streets until someone recognized my value.

> It continues to baffle me that Google gets harassed by the courts for being a better actor in almost every area it participates.

Doesn't mean much in a duopoly. Anyway, there's no real alternative to using google services which basically ruins the phone.

Ships carried literal tons of fresh water. I'm not sure the details of treatment or how it was provisioned—provisioning beer was such a massive logistical task we have mountains of records, but we have a paucity of corresponding records for water—but we have sufficient records of what happens when that fresh water disappears or becomes tainted to know it was of paramount importance.

Keeping water fresh is not quite as difficult as you might think. For one thing, wood has naturally antibacterial properties; it can be trivially sealed with pitch and tar (which also has antibacterial properties), and it just takes one quartermaster to babysit it.

If anything, beer is a way of preserving calories and boosting morale. The fact that drinking a gallon of it translates roughly to drinking 97% of a gallon of water and does end up being quite hydrating just doesn't imply that people didn't also drink water sans beer.

Again, the claim is not against people drinking beer or water, it is against doing so out of some general fear of drinking water.

Perhaps I was too strident in my criticism of your substantial comments; I apologize.

However, I am still unconvinced that people in the past viewed beer as a replacement for potable water rather than a food-like complement to it. If water was generally regarded as less safe than beer, why were so many people brutally executed for messing with it? Why do we have so many sources noting with far more sensitivity than most have today to where you can find and drink water without boiling? Surely it is not a coincidence that springs whose water you didn't need to boil later grew towns and cities? Why do we have so much evidence of what amounts to seasonal boil advisories? Why was disease so strongly associated with the presence of armies if people weren't consuming the water that forms the natural vector for transmission?

I have no doubt the confidence to which we can say water was safe could be exaggerate in order to dispel the myth that people didn't generally drink water at all, but even today people drink from water sources that would make you or I sick without becoming ill themselves. Perhaps there is room for degree of safety that might explain how water can both be safe and unsafe.

My concern is not with doubt in the consumption of beer (or wine, or later liquor) but with the widespread impression that people in the past simply didn't drink water. Such a poor understanding of what you clearly understand is a complicated topic harms our ability to empathize with our ancestors.

Point of order, beer was stored in a higher alcohol percentage (which is where we get IPAs from) which does extend its shelf life significantly. The gallon was heavily watered down to serve.

Which is basically identical to lite beer we drink today. Hopefully with more flavor, but I don't actually know.

I don't really care about knockoffs (hell, I would happily shop on a site that ONLY sold knockoffs for basically everything but electronics), I just want to spend as little time actually looking through products as possible. Google is good for a lot of things but finding good places to buy stuff is not one of them. The entire process of making a profile and entering payment information is sufficient to ensure I don't buy from your site at all.

Tbh, amazon should probably be run as a public service. We've long since passed the point where their profit incentives benefit anyone but shareholders. By about fifteen-twenty years by my estimate.

> I have no conceptual issue with Amazon serving ads against search terms.

I do. Ads have zero positive. They lower everyone's quality of life and stuff our heads full of useless crap like brand awareness. Truly a cancer on society in every conceivable way.

You might enjoy a fella named marx. Labor is labor, my friend. It should be mostly devoted to things that enrich the lives of us and those around us. It is normal to want to work. It is the alienating nature of selling our labor for a pittance that ruins our lives.

> I’m constantly witness to colleagues in the tech industry posting on LinkedIn about how great their employer

Whatever happened to dignity?

dril

True. He hasn't actually built anything since the very first days.