Sounds like someone finally woke up/got woke.
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That doesn’t add up.
At the beginning, it claims that it started more than 10,000 years ago, but in the middle, it claims that it started around 1,500 years after the beginning of agriculture in each region. So less than 10,000 years ago, and in line with mainstream anthropology.
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As usual this seems like more a case of bad science journalism than bad science. The source paper is interested in the delta between the emergence of agriculture and wealth inequality in various geographic regions, and hardly spares a thought about how long ago agriculture started outside of that. (That said, I have not taken a super close look at the originating paper.)
Even then, the WSU article isn’t totally off base, since plant domestication started something like 11.5kya, and the paper is using plant domestication as the milestone for “agriculture” for their purposes.
From the summary:
Significance
Growth of wealth differences among households has been a long-term though not universal trend in the Holocene. Marked increases typically lagged plant domestication by 1,000 y or more and were tightly linked to development of hierarchies of settlement size and land-limited production. We infer that the social upscaling (growth of polities in population and area) that typically began one to two millennia after agriculture became locally common, and continued in some areas throughout the Holocene, interfered with traditional leveling mechanisms including enforcement of egalitarian norms. Settlement hierarchies rewired human interaction networks, enabling greater wealth inequalities among households in the highest-ranked settlements. We define “polity-scale effects” to estimate the average effect of development of settlement hierarchies on site-based Gini values.
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I have a bit of savings for retirement, been thinking about spreading it out to another bank (maybe two more!). I have little faith in that FDIC insurance lasting much longer.
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It’s always worth having savings in more than one bank. Even if everything is fully insured, and there are no problems at all with the FDIC, it still takes time for a bank closure to be processed and for insurance to pay out. That wait will be much less stressful if it’s not your only source of cash.
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A credit union has historically been safer. And have their equivalent of FDIC insurance. Up to $250,000 per account.
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I’m still considering a backup account from this list:
The impact of DOGE or other regime actions on the SSA can take a long time to resolve:
The regime has them in the crosshairs, too:
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Yeah, they dropped our credit rating because we didn’t raise the debt ceiling. The thing is, though, all that bullshit about a debt ceiling is, frankly, unconstitutional. It’s just that no one with standing has ever sued over it, and I’m not sure who would have standing to sue. But anyway, once again, it’s the 14th Amendment that’s important here (I’m starting to think Republicans really hate that amendment):
14th Amendment, Section 4.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
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If Congress has already approved spending; it’s bullshit that they need to go approve it twice.
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It’s not just bullshit. It’s unconstitutional. Once the spending that created the debt is approved, the Constitution obligates us to pay it, regardless of some arbitrary debt ceiling that conservatives pretend will reduce the debt. And of course, the only time the GOP opposes raising the debt ceiling is when a Democrat is in the White House.
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Robert Reich makes an excellent comparison to productivity which utterly underscores the super sorry state of the federal minimum wage. (and may not even include basic cost of living rise)
Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social
A reminder that if the minimum wage had kept pace with worker productivity gains since the 1960s, it would now be nearly $26 an hour.
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Well, Republicans create most of the debt, they just think it’s Democrats’ job to clean up their mess. Just like they start the wars, wreck the economy, etc.
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