now wondering if capitalists - say, merchants or ship captains, or something, ever looked into this, bc in ye old days ships had low but > 0 chance of sinking. There might have been some sort of scheme for spreading risk to lower pain. Might have happened in London, if anywherehttps://twitter.com/sonyasupposedly/status/1239289351634182144 …
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2/ for those not catching the joke, capitalism has been dealing with disasters and catastrophes for a long time. In 1686 the owner of Lloyd's Coffee House in London started engineering risk pools to reduce the pain of ship losses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lloyd%27s_of_London#17th%E2%80%9319th_centuries:_Formation_and_first_Lloyd's_Act …
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3/ For those interested in this topic, I strongly recommend Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk Paperback by Peter L. Bernsteinhttps://www.amazon.com/Against-Gods-Remarkable-Story-Risk/dp/0471295639 …
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4/ speaking of "the gods" I recently finished Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different from ours and The Narrow Corridor, and have bounced back into The Odyssey (Lombardo translation) I tried it twice before in my life, made zero headway now? loving it https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0872204847/ …
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ⓘ Dogs don't have thumbs Retweeted Pirkka-Joose Sempé 28 5'3''
5/ ...and speaking of Greeks...https://twitter.com/pjsempe/status/1239292989001826306 …
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Pirkka-Joose Sempé 28 5'3'' @pjsempeReplying to @MorlockPFunny thing, insurances and risk sharing exists since at least Athenian naval trade. They had "nautika" for that, and rules that stipulated that if captains had to throw away barrels of gold to prevent the ship to sink in, the cost of the barrel had to be shared on all traders1 reply 0 retweets 15 likesShow this thread -
6/ Getting back to The Odyssey: earlier I approached it as an adventure story and - honestly - as an adventure story it sort of sucks. Literary technology re plots etc has come a long way in 2500 years. This time - and maybe this has to be with being 48 - I'm approaching it >
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7/ as a story about the eternal unchanging nature of humanity. There is nothing new under the sun! Within the story a bard sings a tale of the god Hephaestus who catches his wife Aphrodite cheating on him, and he rages at her, calling her a hose faced bitch.
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8/ If Neal Stephenson's Seveneve's played out, 5,000 years from now humans could watch 20th century sitcoms and dramas - in translation - and while some aspects would be weird and culturally dependent, most would make perfect sense.
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Replying to @MorlockP
A big part of the beauty of that book is the examination of what a society looks like when its heroic epic/messianic text isn't just story, but actual recording.
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