saw a post that claims that STEM smart people are smarter than humanities smart people because “any math student who speaks english can flip through an english book and understand it, but i’d like to see an english student do college math.” i have to say 1. holy disingenuous comparison batman, and 2. as someone who ta’d the english side of an english/biology fusion class, no the fuck they cannot. forget a collegiate level, we were struggling to teach these STEM major upperclassmen how to identify what’s on the page and articulate the themes on a high school level. the course texts were two YA novels and a handful of short stories. meanwhile all the humanities students were chugging through the biochemistry at what my colleague reported was an extremely respectable level. turns out that understanding what you’re reading is a skill just like any other, AND one with transferable applications
Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.
So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.
So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.
This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.
Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”
The origin point for nearly all of those “you work harder than a medieval peasant” memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times, so I won’t belabor the point here. Schor bases her estimates of medieval working hours on a 1935 article by Nora Kenyon, and an unpublished article by Gregory Clark, and in both cases ignores the authors’ careful efforts to distinguish between total days worked and instead just cherry-picks the lowest number, even as the authors caution that those numbers likely don’t represent someone’s total employment. Kenyon notes a set of day-laborers working 120 days per year which makes it into Schor’s work, but Kenyon’s final suggestion that the normal annual working year was 308 days does not, for instance. I can’t get at an unpublished article, but Clark has continued to write on the topic and in his 2018 “Growth or stagnation?” presents a detailed argument for a 250-300-day work-year with no sense that this is a revision of his previous positions, leading me to suspect similar cherry-picking as with Kenyon.
In short, Schor’s works is quite shoddy and we shan’t rely on it.
Now part of the complication there is that for the European Middle Ages, across so much area, what we see is a lot of confusing evidence – statutory minimums, required labor on a lord’s land and so on – which may or may not represent a full working year. What we don’t typically get is someone just telling us how many work days were in the agricultural calendar. But as you may recall, we’re anchoring this discussion in the Roman world and in a rare instance where the ancient evidence is better, Roman agricultural writers just straight up tell us how many working days there were in a year on the Roman agricultural calendar: 290 (Columella 2.12.8-9). He allows 45 days for holidays as well as inclement weather and another 30 days for rest immediately after the crop is sown, to recover from the difficult labor of the final plowing.
The medieval work calendar is not meaningfully different. As noted above, Both Clark and Kenyon end up with similar working-day estimates from the medieval evidence as Columella’s figure. The medieval number is probably slightly lower: the medieval religious calendar might have around 45 feast days but workers might also be expected to spend Sundays in religious observance, which might pull the work-year down to around 270 total working days, plus or minus.
By all evidence, those working days were both less rigid but also longer than modern working hours. On the one hand, peasant farmers are essentially self-employed entrepreneurs, making their own hours. They can arrive in the field a bit late, sometimes leave a bit early. It was certainly common in warmer climates for workers to take a midday break (a siesta) to avoid exhausting themselves in the hottest part of the day. I will say, anyone who has done functionally any outside work in a warm climate will recognize that a midday break can allow you to work more than just pushing straight through the heat of the day because you tire more slowly.
So on the one hand the work hours are somewhat flexible. On the other hand as functionally anyone who has ever worked on a farm or spoken with someone who has will tell you, the working day in absolute terms is long, essentially starting at sunrise and running to sunset. And this is certainly the implication we get from our sources. Because of atmospheric refraction, there are actually slightly more than 12 sunlight hours per day on average (it’s around ~12.3 or so, depending on latitude), though this of course varies seasonally. The bad news for our farmers, of course, is that the shortest days are in the winter when the labor demands are lower. While festival calendars feature events throughout the year, it is not an accident that major festivals in a lot of pre-modern agrarian cultures are concentrated in late Fall, winter and early Spring. For the Christian calendar, that includes things like All Saints Day (Nov 1), Martinmas (Nov 11), the regular slew of December holidays as as the holidays of the Eastertide in early spring. For the Romans, you have major festivals like the Parentalia and Lupercalia in February, the Liberalia in March, the Cerialia in April and the Saturnalia in December.
So in practice the average maximum working day might actually be a bit longer than 12 hours, but we should account for breaks and general schedule flexibility. We might assume, for comparison, something like a ten hour work day. By that measure, our peasants probably put in somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 working hours per year. By contrast, your average ‘overworked American’ has 260 working days a year, at eight hours a day for just 2,080 hours.
So to answer the question: no, you do not work more than a medieval (or ancient) peasant (despite your labor buying a much higher standard of living).
Bret Devereaux, "Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVb: Working Days"
In case you’ve ever wondered what being an environmental biology student is like
Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.
tags too good to leave in tags @hyperrbolic-orange
also way too valuable to leave in tags! from @carolinanadeau
you should be well informed not well opinionated. When it comes time to vote or form an opinion on a nearby protest you can research, but having an uninforned opinion is worse than no opinion. Having an informed opinion is good though. And so is helping people. You don't best yourself up for not helping people who live far away or donating to every mutual aid thing, you cant drive that far you have work, you cant donate to all of them, work doesnt make much. Not worth besting yourself up about. Knowledge is the same, get it when you can, but dont form an opinion when you dont have any context.
All of the "adult material" was purged off of this site because Apple and Google threatened to take the app off of their stores because consensual bare breasts offended their puritanical rules.
But the GrokAI that is now infesting Xitter is making non-consensual pornography of murder victims and CSAM of children so young they're still in diapers and Apple and Google are silent.
And that's because it was never about the nudity, it was about who is permitted to have agency and power.
Getting a job while being chronically ill is very hard. I cant find a job that will hire me because i cannot stand for long periods of time. After 15 minutes my legs give out on me therefore in a cashier job i will not be able to complete my job because part of the job is standing for long periods of time. 4 hours to be exact.
What job do you want to do? What are your worries?
I truly do not unterstand why supermarkets in the USA are like this. In Germany everyone is always sitting. Where is the problem? What is the advantage of making cashiers stand?
I’m tempted to try to figure out some kind of plot for the Scholomance where the risk factor of being eaten as a freshman is substantially increased for American enclavers relative to English enclavers until one of them twigs that it’s because the mals can hear them three floors away because of the American Voice.
(Not the accent. The volume. Although idk when the volume thing happened. Love you guys but you are SO loud, you can hear American tourists coming from, almost literally, a mile away.)
Sometimes I’m talking to a child like hey I’m not mad. I’m not even disappointed really. Your classmates however are going to beat you with sticks if we don’t do something about this.
when writing an essay it's important to remember the rule you do not have to write things in order.
when writing an essay it's important to remember the rule you do not have to write things in a well-phrased way on the first pass
when writing an essay it's important to remember that it doesn't have to be perfect but it does have to be in on thursday.
white americans when you tell them that the idea of climate change as an impending disaster is a reductive first world perspective because it’s a tangible reality for many in the global south already:
maybe if you see south and southeast asians dying in the heat and latin americans dying in floods and all you think of is imagining a reality where YOU are affected, then you should rethink how you see people of color. if you cannot see climate change as a real disaster until it is other americans dying in the heat and the floods and not just black and brown people, then don’t talk about climate change until you can acknowledge the grim reality of climate change for everyone.
"I confessed, to the wrong priest" is my favorite line in Wake Up Dead Man, because it's so subtle and yet so kind. Martha has been so dismissive of Jud the whole movie. Not outright mean, of course, but she clearly saw him as a tenant who sometimes gave her a hand rather than a priest, and put him down when he seemed to overstep by acting like one. The line is an admission that not only Jud is a priest, he's a priest who does share the beliefs she's built herself over for decades. Even disillusioned by Wicks's self-serving hypocrisy, he still allows her to see her faith as a moral pillar. It's saying "I should have trusted you, and if I had, maybe none of this would have happened".
It's the "because you are a good nurse" of the movie.
