Moved from @Crul@lemmy.world

  • 39 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2023
  • Crul@lemm.eetoVideoEssays@lemmy.world•Work. - Historia Civilis [33:16]English
    1·
    1 year ago

    Comment by u/Shalmanese on reddit post (r/videos)

    As someone who has held this channel in formerly high regard, it’s especially depressing to watch them engage in a form of serf trutherism where they portray medieval serfdom as some place of idyll when that goes against all of our historical consensus.

    Historians have covered extensively the misconception that any non-work time was time for leisure. The video correctly points out that medieval peasants didn’t have much of a use for money… because they had to produce almost everything required for their survival themselves in a non-market economy. The reason for fast days and slow days is because peasants needed enough time to tend to their own crops or they would literally starve and there was a maximum that an extractive feudal economy could extract from them without widespread depopulation. The 40 or 50 or 60% of the time peasants spent “working” was to earn them the “right” to rent enough land that they could grow non-market crops to barely feed themselves a high carb, low nutrient diet and hang on (and not even then most of the time as the numerous famines indicate).

    In addition, until relatively recently, women’s work has been a blind spot in much of the accounting of how work was performed. Just clothing alone was estimated to take a family 3000 hours a year of labor to produce a bare minimum quantity which is over 8 hours of work each day, every day for a single person.

    Highly recommend checking out the collections of essays Bread, How Did They Make It? and Clothing, How Did They Make It? on Historian Bret Deveraux’s blog for a far more realistic depiction of the political conditions of serfdom.

    Not in any way arguing that our current system is humane or justified but arguments against the status quo shouldn’t be founded on fallacious history that the rich in the past were some wise and benign influence and only under capitalism have they been evil. The wealthy throughout time have been bastards running extractive economies to primarily benefit themselves at the hands of the oppressed and that is important to recognize.

  • Crul@lemm.eetoProgramming@programming.dev•As a beginner, how should I go about learning difficult concepts?
    2·
    1 year ago

    How long would you say it took you before getting a fundamental understanding?

    I would say years, as with any complex activity.

    I’m still forgetting things I learned 3 or even 4 times like how to do a for each loop.

    You can forget in 2 different ways:

    1. Forget how to use something, so you need to look how to do it.
    2. Forget that something exists, so you cannot even look for it because you are not aware it’s a possibility.

    You will forget-1 everything which you don’t use on a daily basis. That’s what internet is for. Forgetting in the 2-nd sense is much more rare and you should do something if that’s the case.

    all of it feels too advanced and I get lost on how to begin

    This is a bias most of us have, you overlook how easy is for you to do things that previously were impossible and focus on how hard are the things you still don’t know how to do. And computing is so complex right now that there always be “infinite” things you don’t know.

    Try showing what you know to someone who doesn’t know how to code and you will get an idea of how much you have learnt :).

    Anyway, I don’t really have good advice :/, just wanted to confirm that what you feel is expected. Good luck!