Interesting Links for 01-11-2017

[andrewducker]

We’re surprisingly unaware of when our own beliefs change

(tags: belief psychology memory )

Why isn’t the media publishing the full list of allegations against Tory MPs?

(tags: media libel Conservatives )

On compromise and the American Civil War

(tags: usa slavery history war civilwar )

Philip Pullman's swearwords are a useful lesson for children

(tags: swearing children language )

The effect of piracy on book sales

(tags: sales publishing books piracy )

Why putting the clocks back is bonkers

(tags: time sun UK )

Comments

[calimac]

US Civil War: Kelly is sadly ignorant of history when he claims that compromise could have prevented the war, but it's his critics who are historically ignorant when they chide him for calling Lee "honorable." Not that they're wrong on the terms that they give, but they're painfully unaware of what he meant by that or how properly to respond to it. Maybe I'll go into this in a post of my own.

Piracy: Cory Doctorow claimed years ago that legitimate free copies, at least, didn't hurt his sales. But he didn't offer a mechanism to explain this. (Loss leaders, perhaps?) It's always puzzled me because it seemed counter-intuitive. This story sounds more like what I'd expect, and the fake pirate edition is very clever, though not a trick you could pull off repeatedly (the pirates will be on to you). Of course the author points out that the e-book environment has changed over the years, but I can date reading Doctorow's claims to less than ten years ago.

GMT and BST: This amounts to claiming we should just move the time zones west. The USSR did that; has anybody researched how well it worked? The big problem is that, since our schedule has caused
"noon" to stop meaning noon, if we never turn the clocks back, then "1 pm" will gradually start meaning noon, and then gradually stop meaning noon, and the cycle will begin all over again. No, what it's really an argument for is that "summer time" should be in the winter and not in the summer.

[zotz]

You know, we could all just get up at an earlier hour during the summer without having an endless argument about how many epicycles to implement.

The Civil War

[danieldwilliam]

I am far, far from an expert on the US Civil War but I have read a goodly number of books on the subject.

I'm not sure there was a compromise there to be had that would have satisfied sufficient people in either the South or the North or the fringes of the US.

I think there could have been a compromise in 1860 that avoid a war that year but it would have left in place the main economic causes of the conflict, which is that the economic model of the South was driven by the growth of slave holding.

By the 1850's the real money in slave holding not in forcing people to produce commodities but in selling slaves from established plantations to new or expanding plantations. In order to do that you needed an expansion of plantations. For that you needed steady growth in the demand for commodities such as sugar, tobacco and cotton and, crucially, the increased supply to meet that increased demand had to come from expanding slave labour production on the North American continent so you could easily sell slaves. The economic logic of the rich and powerful in the South relied upon an expansion of slavery in to new territories in North America (Kansas, Missouri, Oregon,) and preferably in to existing States of the USA.

The second factor is that it is very, very difficult for a slave labour commodity economy to exist in the same free trade area as a high tech, skilled labour capitalist economy.

One could have cut a compromise in 1860 that allowed the South to secceed on condition that slavery was confined to the existing South but I don't think the Southern slave holders would have kept to the deal (see Bloody Kansas) and eventually they would have come in to armed confrontation with the North.