Medieval peasants worked more and harder hours than modern people.

A bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Yes, 50% child mortality skews life expectancy statistics heavily, but any 40 year life expectancy estimate is clearly filtering out at least some portion of childhood deaths. By our best estimates: of the 48% of people who survived age 10, slightly less than half were dead by 45. Of those who clear 45, less than half reach 65.

Those early deaths aren’t driven by “inferior physiology”, but disease and malnourishment (as the previous commenter noted). It was possible to live into your 80s, but you had to be very, very lucky to pull it off.

Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.

There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.

Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.

It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.

I’ve been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.

I don’t remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I’ve had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.

Lemmy does not currently have an equivalent to Modmail where a moderation team can all send or receive messages.

Brighter lights

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Are you seriously drawing equivalencies between being imprisoned by the government and getting banned from Twitter by a non-government organization? That’s a whole hell of a lot more than “a little more gentle.”

If the USA is trying to do what China does with regards to censorship, they really suck at it. Past atrocities by the United States government, and current atrocities by current United States allies are well known to United States citizens. US citizens talk about these things, join organizations actively decrying these things, publicly protest against these things, and claim to vote based on what politicians have to say about these things, all with full confidence that they aren’t going to be disappeared (and that if they do somehow get banned from a website for any of this, making a new account is really easy and their real world lives will be unaffected).

Trying to pass these situations off as similar is ludicrous.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

Trying to enforce anything new right now, just before Trump goes into office, accomplishes nothing and guarantees that Trump will just reverse it. Publicly deciding not to enforce leaves the incoming administration with a less obvious choice PR-wise, and thus the possibility that they might choose to “own the libs” by actually enforcing the ban.

How did you do this?

I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.