For centuries, judges settled cases by asking God to help honest people win duels or complete impossible tasks like touching hot metal without getting burned.
Yet in many ways, given the limitations of the time, they could offer the best path for resolving a dispute, despite the potential for abuse.
It’s a trite point, but worth considering: Many aspects of our legal system could seem equally absurd to historians hundreds of years from now.
Kiyo Sato was an 18-year-old Japanese-American living in Sacramento when WWII broke out and the government decided she and her family couldn’t be trusted.
while it’s easy to look at something like the internment of the Japanese during World War II and lump it in with the Salem witch hunts in the category of “Weird Things People Did In Olden Times,” you have to remember some of the people involved are still around. You can ask them about it!
Source: Why Modern America Scares Me: By An Internment Camp Survivor (page 1)
many defenders of Japanese internment are using it as a platform to suggest we do something similar with Muslims
the impulse to exclude, lock up, or kill an entire category of people “just in case”? That shit isn’t going anywhere.
Source: Why Modern America Scares Me: By An Internment Camp Survivor (page 2)
Source: The 1931 Histomap: The entire history of the world distilled into a single map/chart.
Over 100 years ago in America — before Social Security, before IRAs, corporate pensions and 401(k)s — there was a ludicrously popular (and somewhat sleazy) retirement scheme called the tontine.
At their peak, around the turn of the century, tontines represented nearly two-thirds of the American insurance market, holding about 7.5 percent of national wealth. It’s estimated that by 1905, there were 9 million tontine policies active in a nation of only 18 million households. Tontines became so popular that historians credit them for single-handedly underwriting the ascendance of the American insurance industry.
The downfall of the tontine was equally dramatic. Not long after 1900, a spectacular set of scandals wiped the tontine from the nation’s consciousness. To this day, tontines remain outlawed, and their name is synonymous with greed and corruption.
You buy into a tontine alongside many other investors. The entire group is paid at regular intervals. The key twist: As your fellow investors die, their share of the payout gets redistributed to the remaining survivors.
Milevsky’s point is that it’s time for tontines to return again on the private market. He envisions tontines competing against annuities and longevity insurance and all the other products available to people hoping to smooth out the last stretch of their lives. He’s certain many people would find them appealing.
Such a system would be cheaper to operate and would always, by definition, be fully funded.
Source: Wait but Why, on Facebook
Meet Emma Morano, the one human left from the 1800s. Three facts about Emma:
1) When she was born in November 1899, there were about 1.5 billion people on Earth. Now every single one of those 1.5 billion people are gone – except Emma – and there are 7.4 billion entirely new people here.
2) As a baby, Emma could have been held by someone alive during the 1700s, and today, she can hold babies who will be alive in the 2100s (and possibly well beyond), making her the rare person who will interact with a set of people who were alive in five different centuries.
3) When Emma was born, there were no cars yet, and she’s now approaching a time when no one is driving because of self-driving cars – meaning she has witnessed the “people driving cars” era in its entirety.