I agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?
Nice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
And yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.
The term "Old English" is completely misleading in this context given how distant modern English is from that language. Both were spoken in England, that's about it. Applying the same logic to "France", should we then consider Gallo-Roman works like Ausonius's Mosella (c. 370 CE) to be "French" literature?
The Beowulf manuscript dates from around 975 CE and is written in what might be better termed Anglo-Saxon. How much can you understand from this random sentence: "þa me þæt gelærdon leode mine, þa selestan, snotere ceorlas"? ("So my vassals advised me well…) I personally can't understand a single word or even relate it in any way to the English I know.
On the other hand, the Sequence of Saint Eulalia was composed in "Old French" in 880 BCE and seems rather intelligible to me. I also just took a random sentence from the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100 BC) and can understand all of it: "Seignurs, vos en ireiz. Branches d’olive en voz mains portereiz, Si me direz a Carlemagne le rei Pur le soen Deu qu’il ait mercit de mei." I'd even go so far as to say that's closer to modern French than Shakespearean English despite being written in Anglo-Norman … Which also means it should probably count as being English literature if Beowulf qualifies…
I guess the lesson here is simply to remember that reality is always a lot more granular than we first expect and that any sweeping judgements on languages, countries, etc. over the span of millennia make very little sense. By that criteria, the linked article was pure clickbait to begin with.
Interesting mix of wood too. The 1619 viola has a very tight grain spruce top and the maple back has a beautiful curl. Same with the 2019 Beilharz cello and the 1785 Storioni violin – the curly maple really shows. The back on the 1705 Goffriller cello seems very plain on the other hand, and suprisingly so does the 1717 Stardivari's. The 19th century Hopf violin has nice curly maple, but the grain on the top seems extremely loose. Any idea how do these compare musically? And does someone know if Stradivarius ever used curly maple and when curly maple was first used for musical instruments?
In Italian, corporativismo has a distinct meaning that is unrelated to the concept of commercial corporations. It refers to a system of collaboration between social groups, represented through joint associations of employers and workers. Essentially, it is a state-aligned alternative to independent trade unions, a "national syndicalism" of sorts.
Muskotrumpia may excel in performance-based state capture, but fascism it is not. The anti-state culture of the U.S. clashes with the "everything for the state" ethos that defines fascism. We're simply entering textbook Caesarism territory.
In Western Europe at least, cows are kept in pastures, which are permanently dedicated to that use and not used as fields to grow crops. All in all, cows are probably only low carbon in premodern rural contexts in West Africa and Asia for instance.
> Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
How and why? Even as arbitrage is easier to effect as ever? The point of the bimetallic system was that gold wasn't available in high enough quantities for the needs of the economy (monetary mass) and was too valuable for small-denomination coinage. Those aren't problems we currently have…
One of the biggest problems with contemporary monetary theory is that issues at the retail level (wages and household spending) are difficult to address without creating inflationary asset spirals, including most notably of real estate, but also of stocks, other financial assets, and collectables (wines, art masterworks, memorabilia, etc.). One can in fact look to markets and auctions for such assets as one of several signs that monetary policy is in fact misfiring, in my opinion.
Matt Ridley isn't someone whose views I generally subscribe to, but in a Feb 2019 Intelligence Squared (UK) debate with Johan Norberg and David Runciman, Ridley made a throwaway comment that whilst "[m]arkets in goods and services for immediate consumption such as 'haircuts and hamburgers'work very well and efficiently in delivering innovation and efficiency ... markets in assets (goods for hoarding and resale) are 'so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all'".
This apparently appears in his book The Rational Optimist, I'm finding via a FastGPT query:
I strongly suspect Ridley was citing his own work in that debate, so thanks for prompting me to look that up.
There are various ways in which such iniquities might be addressed. Among the traditional approaches are various income supports, minimum wage, universal basic or guaranteed minimum incomes (UBI/GMI), on the wage side, a land value tax (tax on the unimproved value of land), an asset or wealth tax, and/or a transaction tax (particularly aimed at HFT).
Another possibility though suggests itself in my comment above about status as legal tender. That is, different currencies might be recognised as legal tender (discharging debt) only for a specific set of transactions. Normally we shy from this on efficiency grounds, but it seems to me that there might be a role that could be played especially in separating financial transactions markets from those in quotidian consumption. There are some early variants of this, largely in the form of expiring financial assistance, e.g., a debit card whose balance expires after a given time (1--5 years or so. In the US I believe SNAP benefits (grocery assistance) works this way, and I've heard of similar projects elsewhere. A health savings account in the US (a tax-deferred put-away plan for healthcare expenses not otherwise covered by insurance) is a similar mechanism.
And keep in mind: we're not limited to specific classes of specie (e.g., copper, silver, gold, iron, etc.), but could create and retire entire sets of currencies at will, though I'd suggest at the very least starting with a limited set, and targeting general areas of financial activity, again, wage/retail, wholesale, fiance, government spending (possibly at multiple levels), and international exchange being more obvious candidates.
Related concepts are of insurance or financing of specific assets or transactions. We're in the midst of finding out what uninsurability will mean for real estate markets in disaster-prone areas (wildfires in the US West, hurricanes along the US Gulf Coast and Southestern Seaboard). Paul Baran, co-inventor of packet-switched networks mentioned insurance redlining and its effects on inner-city homeowners and small businesses in a 1968 monograph, "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number":
James Burke discussed a similar situation (reluctance of funding syndicates to underwrite fancy "new unprooved" technology) in severely retarding adoption of lateen-rigged sailing ships, in the TV series / book Connections. (These had been used for about a thousand years by Arabic and Indian sailors, but weren't adopted in Europe until the 1500s or so.) For specific types of transactions, mandating payment in the appropriate monetary type in order to qualify for insurance or certification might work.
The net effect would still be porous, but even porous systems can be managed so long as they impose sufficient frictions. And yes there might be exchanges between currency systems, but so long as those are also somewhat managed (e.g., with reporting, taxes/fees, etc.) this need not be a free-for-all.
And in the meantime, it would be possible for central banks to inject money into specific sectors of the economy, at least distinguishing between, say, wage/retail, wholesale, and finance, and quite possibly even more finely.
