Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine

I just need to get out of my system how weird Pokémon Conquest is

You all know Pokémon, right?  That game about cute animals battling each other that’s so popular with kids and young adults.  I’ve been a fan all my life and recently got into the DS game Pokémon Conquest because it was described to me as Pokémon meets Fire Emblem.  So far so good.  The game is set during an alt-history warring states period in which all the warriors of Japan use Pokémon to fight each other.  The “Kingdoms” of Pokémon Conquest are all elementally-aligned and so take the place of the traditional Pokémon gyms.  There’s the fire kingdom, the water kingdom, the grass kingdom, and our heroes have to defeat them all to reunite Japan.  

The moderate amounts of insanity begin early on, however when we find out that Nobunaga is also a Pokémon trainer and is trying to conquer Japan himself.  In Japanese culture Nobunaga was once described to me as “George Washington Hitler” due to the complex and often contradictory role he is seen in.  On the one hand he was the Great Unifier who’s successes in uniting Japan lead to the direct predecessor of the modern Japanese state and the end of the Sengoku period.  This characterization can lead to positive portrayals.  On the other hand he is often viewed as needlessly, even gleefully cruel and portrayed in some media as a diabolical schemer taking pleasure in the pain of others.  So when I saw him in a Pokémon game I did not know what to expect.

Insanity ramps up when the game reveals that your assistant, an unconfident girl with a Jigglypuff named Oichi, is also the secret sister of Nobunaga.  Nobunaga reveals that his signature Pokémon is the Gen V legendary Zekrom, so I guess that’s how he conquered Japan, by using a legendary Pokémon.  But I couldn’t get over my laughter at how the game decided that the shy assistant girl would be the sister of the main antagonist, like sure that’s storytelling plot twist #1: have a secret relationship.  But it seemed so out of the blue and didn’t really add much to how I saw either character.  It didn’t add dimensions to Nobunaga because we barely see him, and it didn’t add dimensions to Oichi because she barely has character and neither she nor anyone else acts differently because of this revelation.  It felt like a twist for twist’s sake.

The highlight of this game’s weird and wacky insanity was when your main character evolves.  Yes that’s right, in this game Pokémon aren’t the only ones who evolve.  After a bunch of events happen the main character evolves into a cooler version of themselves, with all the evolution sound effects and music that you’d expect from a Pokémon evolution, and they aren’t the only ones that can do that.  Oichi herself can evolve too, as can some of the other main characters if certain conditions are met.  I wonder if this power will ever carry over to the main games?  I should ask my friends if anyone ever evolved in Pokémon Legends, Arceus.

The finally hilarity for me was the finale where you reveal that the continent you’re on bears more relation to Arceus (the Poké-God) then to historical Japan, and Arceus itself comes down and basically says that your main character should be the one to defeat/catch it.  OK sure, whatever, catch ‘em all.  But God himself coming down and saying “catch me bro” just put the final pin in the corkboard for me, I think this game is a comedy and I wish it had gone all out on it.  Maybe it’s because I’m not 10 anymore, maybe this would feel like a stirring epic if I’d played it as a kid, but I couldn’t keep a straight face through any of it.  There are some things that are just instantly hilarious to me, and mixing Pokémon with history is one of them.  I still giggle at how Lt. Surge apparently fought in wars with his Raichu, and now we can add him to the long list of war-fighting trainers from this game.

Pokémon Conquest: how Eevee and Jigglypuff reunited Japan.

Why do companies give out dividends in the first place?

I took a class on economics in high school, and as part of that class we had a classroom discussion on the stock market.  In that discussion, one of the most confusing parts for me was dividends.  It seemed crazy that companies will just give you free money if you buy their stocks, what do the companies get in return?  Other folks my age were more cynical, they thought that dividends were just how rich people paid themselves to avoid taxes.  Well dividends aren’t free money, and they aren’t *entirely* a tax dodge, they actually play an important part in the stock market.

As stated in a previous post, dividends are one way that a stock has value to an investor.  Even if a stock doesn’t currently give out dividends, there can be an expectation that they will in the future, and as stated the expected value of all future dividends (divided by uncertainty, multiplied by money now>money later) is part of what gives a stock value.  So if companies want their stock price to be high (and thus the value of their company to be high), they will often give a dividend to prop up the stock price.  But why would they care about a high stock price?  The important thing about stocks is that they are a source of money that the company controls.  The company can do a lot of things with stock: it can pay employees in stock, it can raise money by selling stock, it can purchase other companies with its own stock. Money is power, if a company has a whole lot of value because they have a giant stock price, then all sorts of methods to raise money and acquire assets become available.

So dividends aren’t a scam and stocks aren’t a ponzi scheme.  Companies pay dividends in order to have a higher stock price, which they want in order to finance their company’s expansion should the need arise.  These dividends are part of what give stocks value, and they are one of the reasons that no matter what Bitcoiners tell you, stocks are not ponzi schemes.

Why would investors invest in non-voting shares?

I said yesterday that stock has value in part because the investor is owning something real, a tiny part of a larger company.  With that ownership usually comes the right to vote on the direction of the company, but not always.  Some companies like Google, New York Times, and WWE have a dual-share system whereby only certain shares are “voting” shares and all others have no right to vote on the direction of the company.  Or in Google’s case, many shares are voting shares but thanks to “super-voting” shares two people (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) hold 51% of voting rights and can never be outvoted by investors. Why would an investor buy shares knowing they don’t come with any rights?

Well first of all there is still some small amount of rights that come with a share, your ownership must be compensated if the company gets bought.  And of course the share may still come with a dividend or an expectation of a dividend.  But without the ability to change the company by voting, the shareholders have no input on the dividend or the direction of the company in general.  I think that for large shareholders, they still have an expectation that they can move the direction of the company even without voting rights.  BlackRock and Vanguard Group, for example, are some of the largest holders of Google stock, and if they were to exit the company in a hurry it could crash the price.  Now these companies don’t want their Google investment to fail, they want Google to succeed so they succeed with it, but if they believe that the company is hopeless they can always exit in a hurry.  And because they are major investors (and their exit would crash the stock price), they have the ability to talk with Google higher ups on the regular.  This gives them an interpersonal line of communication to voice their grievances and request changes, even if they have no legal recourse to change Google’s behavior.  Google in turn doesn’t want to upset major investors, and so may acquiesce to some things in exchange for investor assurances.

These sorts of interpersonal dynamics go on all the time in the world of finance behind closed doors.  We can read countless examples of them from the 20th century since people retired and wrote tell-all books, but I doubt we’ll get any about Google until those books are written in the future.  But interpersonal relationships between investors and management can be as or more important than the legal framework that regulates them.  Large investors have some amount of power and access with a company, even if using their power by selling the stock would hurt the investor as much as the company.  Meanwhile management wants as high a stock price as possible and so can make an effort to placate the investors.  In this way, at least some investors will still feel that they have input into the direction of the company, even if they can’t change its direction by voting.

Now, with this voting vs non-voting shares, I do think this is neo-feudalism and must be stopped.  The WWE shares, for instance, stipulate that only the descendants of Vince McMahon can ever hold the super-voting shares in the company, any shares sold by them get converted into lower-voting or non-shares.  This allows people to inherit what are basically titles of nobility that no one else could ever have.  Only the descendants of ennobled investors can ever steer the direction of the company, even if they own far fewer shares the the other investors.  Capitalism is supposed to be plutocratic and this sort of hereditary nobility will do more to harm competition than any possible good it could do.  It’s no accident that the poorest countries during the industrial revolution of the 19th century were those that held on tightest to nobility and titles, money can’t compete with inherited rights.

A free market absolutist might claim that you can just start your own business and replace Google or WWE but we all know that’s not how the world works.  Large companies can have an outsized influence to maintain their market share even if there is some modicum of competition so that they don’t count as “monopolies.”  In the end, ennobled families will hold unwarranted power over cornerstones of the world economy, and those cornerstones will be hard to replace due to their sheer size and ability to buy or outlast the competition.  In the end, we’re all worse off.

The president of El Salvador is playing a dangerous game

El Salvador became internet famous about a year ago first when President Bukele declared that they would be the world’s first country with Bitcoin as a legal tender and second when their president began having his government buy Bitcoin as a “sovereign wealth fund.”  But flirtations with the Bitcoin ponzi are not even El Salvador’s biggest problem.  El Salvador owes billions of dollars in sovereign debt, and due to a large government deficit and little hope of improving economic conditions, the debt is currently at junk status.  The status of debt is basically how people express the risk of the debt not being paid back in full, and for El Salvador that risk is very high.  The money markets that have lent money to El Salvador believe it to be somewhat likely that El Salvador will default on its debt, leaving them with either nothing or less than the full amount that they lent, and because of that the debt is considered to be junk status.

What is a default?  A default is basically where a country declares it won’t pay back its debt.  It may be a partial default (we won’t pay back specific bonds) or a “haircut” (we’ll pay back only a certain percentage of what we owe) or a total default (we won’t pay back anything).  But a default leaves the lenders with less than the face value of the debt they lent to the country, and it in turn makes other lenders way less likely to lend money to that country.  Think about it, if you lend a buddy 100$ and he never pays you back, will you lend him another 100$ next time?

Now even junk debt isn’t worthless.  It may be *likely* that El Salvador defaults but it is not *certain*.  So if you hold an IOU from El Salvador, you can still try to make money off of it.  Let’s say you own El Salvador government debt worth 100$.  You think it unlikely that you’ll get back the full 100$ but someone else will buy the debt from you for 20$.  You’re taking a loss by selling the debt instead of waiting for El Salvador to pay up, but the 20$ they will give you is more than the 0$ you think El Salvador will give you, so you go ahead and sell it.  This sort of debt market happens all the time as institutions sell and buy debt based on their expectations of how likely the debt is to be paid back.  As economic conditions improve, the likelihood of being paid back increases and the price of the debt can rise, while worsening economic conditions would make it fall.

The problem is that President Bukele saw this debt market, and he hatched a scheme.  The debt markets think that El Salvador is unlikely to pay back its debt, and so 100$ of debt can be bought for 20$.  Well, thought the president, what if El Salvador just buys back the debt itself?  Now we can wipe away 100$ of debt for just 20$, genius!  Except not really, the debt is trading cheaply on the expectation that it won’t be paid back in full.  Buying it at this discount is an admittance that El Salvador won’t pay it back in full, they won’t pay back 100$ for 100$ worth of debt, they’ll pay back 20$.  In some ways that is a de facto default, and in the future when El Salvador wants to take out a loan (and remember they need loans to cover their deficit), banks will be very leery of giving a loan to a country that basically entered a partial default.  Secondly, President Bukele announced this scheme on twitter, and with this public announcement the price of El Salvador’s debt went way way up.  Obviously a lot of people holding El Salvador’s debt expected to get nothing, so with the public announcement of a buyback they now expect to get something and will raise their prices accordingly.  If the president thought he could buy back all the debt on the cheap, he’s very likely to be mistaken.

I don’t know who advises the president of El Salvador, but it seems like he does financial policy without much understanding of the effects.  By the way, this entire article is written using dollar denomination because El Salvador’s debt is denominated in dollars and dollars are an official currency (alongside Bitcoin). It’s probably one of the reasons El Salvador doesn’t have many economic levers to pull, they don’t control their own money supply.

I don’t think people understand stocks or what gives stocks value, and I think that’s why some people fall headlong into Bitcoin

Let me get one thing clear: Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin “exchanges” are rugpulls waiting to happen.  There is no value in Bitcoin as an asset; anything it can do, everything else can do better.  But it’s clear that Bitcoin has a hold on people and I’ve seen many try to defend Bitcoin by comparing it to stocks.  Once you accept that Bitcoin is terrible and has no use cases, the only thing left is to claim that everything else in the world is even worse.  I’ve seen the argument made that the stock market is a legalized ponzi scheme taking money from individuals and giving it to corporations, but that argument clearly comes from a place of ignorance. Stocks are a legitimate investment vehicle, unlike Bitcoin, and I’d like to explain why.

First, why does a stock have value at all?  Two big reasons cited are ownership and dividends.  When you own a stock, you have real *ownership* of a small percentage of the company with all the property rights that come with that.  In a very real sense the stockholders can plutocratically vote (plutocracy in this case means 1 share = 1 vote) on the direction of the company. The stockholders have a sort of representative plutocracy in which they vote for the Board of Directors, who then act as the stockholders’ representatives guiding the direction of the company through their chosen CEO.  In 2021 for example, ExxonMobil stockholders led by a group called “Engine No 1” fought to make ExxonMobil commit to new environmental standards and a sustainable energy future.  There have also been cases in which stockholders such as private equity will put up a proposal to replace the board of directors and management staff with someone else in order to turn around the company and bring it back into profitability.  All these things are possible only if you can get the stockholders to agree, and this is the value that owning a share of stock has.

Another reason shares of stock have value is dividends, and here ownership comes into play as well.  If a plutocratic majority of the stockholders want it, they can demand that the company give them more and more of the company’s money in the form of dividends.  The value of the stock therefore is the value of all future dividends, divided by the uncertainty the company will stay in business, multiplied by the fact that money now is better than money later.  Say I hold a corporate stock that gives a yearly 1$ in dividend. I think the dividend is stable, so I expect to receive 1$ per year every year.  So the price of the stock is infinity because I expect to receive infinity dollars?  Well no because there is market uncertainty, I could be wrong about the company for instance, and it goes bankrupt next year. Or the market could change in ways I can’t predict and the company goes bankrupt, there’s no certainty about how long this company will stay in business.  Also, money now is always worth more than money later (even if inflation is zero, I’ll talk about that some time), so the dollars I expect to get 10 or 20 years from now are worth less than and less then the dollar I will get this year.  And so despite seeming infinite, the stock value can converge to a finite amount because there’s no guarantee I get all those future dividends. And of course different people can value a stock more or less based on their own personal appetite for risk.

So the value of a stock is based on real value.  A company has value just as much as say a factory does.  People want to buy the things that come out of it, so owning it gives you something that makes money and therefore has value.  Likewise a company gives money back to its stockholders in the form of dividends.  Now there are many reasons a company would want to give dividends, and likewise reasons stockholders would be OK with not having dividends, but going back to shares being ownership, remember that the shareholders can always demand the company give them dividends if there is a plutocratic majority in favor of it.  So dividends are demanded by the stockholders, given by the company, and the value of all future dividends plus the value of owning a part of the company itself is what gives a stock value for a stockholder.

Bitcoin does not have this value.  There is no dividend, there is no underlying thing of value that you “own” when you own a Bitcoin.  All Bitcoin has is the greater fool theory, the idea that somehow you’ll find someone to buy your Bitcoin for more than what you bought it for.  Greater fool theory isn’t unique to Bitcoin, and at least some percentage of stock market daytraders are only buying in order to sell to a greater fool, but as I said stocks have more than greater fool theory underpinning their value.  Bitcoin only has greater fools, and that’s what makes it a ponzi scheme.

Random thoughts about Dyson Sphere Program

So Dyson Sphere Program (DSP for short) is a video game I’ve put way too much time into, and I decided to write down some random thoughts I had on it

I now know why Factorio was helped by having biters: they give you something to do and work on.  I spend a lot of time in DSP just waiting for the next research to finish. I had nothing to lose but time, and no idea of what to do next. Biters in Factorio at least gave you a goal and a thing to work on whenever you were stuck. “I don’t know what to do, well the biters to the west are giving me trouble, I’ll reinforce the defenses or destroy the nests, maybe both.”

It feels like there’s too much research and also it’s a mistake to let you queue it all immediately.  I end up researching a lot of things that I don’t know what they do or why they help. I just queue up everything I can currently research and I end up wondering what the hell any of it did because I wasn’t really thinking about my decisions. The research queue is a QOL feature, but its absence does at least force the player to kind of go back to the tech tree and glance over the techs every few minutes instead of every few hours.

Also I think the research tree could use some UI help.  There are certain techs that require other techs… but those techs don’t directly precede them.  If I MUST research Tech A before Tech B, then Tech A should be linked to Tech B and immediately precede it.  OR AT LEAST if I click on Tech B because I want to research it, then Tech A should get queued automatically before Tech B.  As it stands I found myself wanting to research certain techs and having to hunt around the tech tree to find the required pre-reqs (logistics/interplanetary logistics were where I had the most trouble)

Other times I research a tech only to find that although I can craft New Item B, that item relies on Other Item A which I do NOT have the tech for.  So again I have to hunt through the tech tree to find Other Item A so I can finally craft New Item B like I wanted to.  Again, if B requires A then A should immediately precede B and I shouldn’t be allowed to research B until I have A.

I feel like this game doesn’t really ramp up in scope and scale as much as Factorio did, and because of this I found myself not really needing or caring to expand all that much.  After making an initial spaghetti base I moved on the starting planet to two new spots to set up research lines, and that basically carried me through half or more of the tech tree.  My starting resources never/barely ran out and I didn’t need to go to new planets for more iron or copper, just for the titanium and silicon that didn’t spawn on my starting planet.  Having certain resources only spawn on specific planets is certainly one way to incentivize moving off-world, but I’d also like it more if higher levels of science required massively increased amounts of resources, forcing you to colonize more and more planets to meet the resource requirements much like how Factorio forces you to expand further and further outwards to meet the higher requirements for Blue/Purple/Yellow science.

Blueprints were the opposite of intuitive.  I understood Factorio blueprints pretty quickly, but I could not possibly figure out how to create a blueprint here without going online.

I really like the multiple levels for transport belts, really makes the spaghetti come alive and does at least mitigate my disappointment in not having double sided belts like Factorio. Double sided belts were where you could create a T-intersection with belts with say Iron Gears from the left and Green Circuits from the right, and the result would be a belt with Gears on its left half and Circuits on its right half. DSP doesn’t have that, but at least with multiple layers of belts all on top of each other it isn’t *too* much trouble to get everything where I want it, possibly even easier.

Having liquids exist as little cubes on belts took some getting used to, but since pipes in Factorio were always a little opaque and had strange fail conditions, I really like this system

Why does every single planet have coal?  Is it just to give a player something to mine for energy when they first land on a planet, to make sure they can always get the energy to get back home?  Because coal being dead plant matter on earth makes it seem like ALL these planets were once life-bearing.

First Past the Post vs Proportional Representation

This one’s going to be controversial so I’ll post it while my blog is still small

One thing I’ve read a lot of is the differences between First Past the Post (FPTP) voting and Proportional Representation (PR) voting. Among most places that debate this PR is seen as infinitely better than FPTP with zero downsides. I’m lukewarm towards both, but for the sake of contrarianism I’d like to discuss one of the few benefits of FPTP.

First of all what are these? FPTP is the voting system in America and most of Britain. Each election has some number of candidates, whichever candidate gets more votes than the others wins. Importantly, simple FPTP does not require a candidate to get the *majority* of all votes cast, they only have to get more than any other individual candidate (what’s called a plurality). In the 1992 election, Bill Clinton did not get a majority in almost any state. Take Ohio, for instance where he only won 40% of the vote, but this was enough to win because George HW Bush got 38% and Ross Perot 20%.

In PR however, this is different. A very abridged version of the German system is that in 2021 the SPD of Germany got about 25% of all the votes, and therefore got 25% of all the seats in Parliament. How very proportional.

Now, naturally PR doesn’t make much sense when electing a single entity. In the 1992 election we couldn’t have a result where Bill Clinton got 40% of the presidency, George HW Bush got 38% and Ross Perot got 20%, that just doesn’t make sense for a singular position. But this is also why people think we should be parliamentary instead of presidential so whatevs. Instead I’d like to point towards the one benefit of FPTP that I think is underappreciated and deserves mention, and that’s the ability to Vote the Bastards Out.

Vote the Bastards Out is something I would define as when a single candidate is so terrible that they themselves are the object of the voters’ disdain, more-so than their party. In this case while the voters might not object to a substitute candidate from the same party, they would very much object to this particular candidate. In this case the voters can express their disagreement by voting against the candidate this election, but in the next election they can still show their preference for the candidate’s party by voting for a replacement candidate. This is important I feel because in PR systems I’ve seen, the candidates who go to parliament are controlled by the party themselves. Don’t like this particular candidate? Tough, they’re top of the list and will get in so long as the national party meets its threshold.  This allows for a system where party politics can insulate high ranking members from voters’ disdain.

If party politics can insulate members from the voters in this way, then the voters’ choices can become constrained.  They may prefer to vote for a certain party due to sharing values, but not want to reward the Bastard who is a high ranking member of that party and will be first on the list to get a seat in parliament.  If time after time the Bastard remains at the top of the list, then time after time the voters face this choice between their values and their personal disdain.  With FPTP this choice hopefully only comes up once, once the Bastard is voted out they resign in disgrace.  With PR, as long as the Bastard is a high ranking member who will retain their seat, then this choice keeps coming up again and again, there is no way for voters to punish only the Bastard without also punishing the party as a whole.

That’s overall my feeling, I don’t want party politics to be able to insulate any candidate from the voters.  I think every candidate should be personally responsible to the voters as much as possible rather than being able to ride in on a party wave.  Now of course in FPTP in America there is strong party ideology, many people will vote for a party regardless of candidate.  But I think recent elections have shown that there is still an amount of candidate preference.  The best example I can think of is the 2016 election in which Donald Trump received less votes than Hillary Clinton (Trump  63 million, Clinton 66 million), meanwhile GOP House members received more votes than Democratic house members (GOP: 63 million, Democrats 62 million).  Donald Trump was clearly seen as the Bastard in that election and the amount of voters who voted Hillary but did not vote for a Democratic congressman seems to prove that.  It was only because of ANOTHER vulgarity of American elections (the Electoral College) that Trump squeaked by, he should not have won based on the popular vote.  However if the American electorate had gotten a true FPTP result they would have had President Hillary and a GOP house of representatives.  But if America had a parliamentary PR system, in which the executive is chosen by the legislature, then we would have had a GOP majority in the House and they could have chosen Trump as their Prime minister even though he was toxic to the electorate.

Now we got Trump anyway, but that was the fault of the Electoral college.  I would much rather have a national popular vote based on FPTP, and I don’t think PR is the antidote to this that advocates think it is.

Post 8

Quick one today as I’m tired and what not, but I’m hoping to have a site design up soon. I say “design” and not “redesign” because this site is so far using the default WordPress blog design which is apparently white text on black background dark mode. Not sure why that is but whatever. In the future I’m hoping to put up little updates of the other things I try to get done in a week, be they scientific or artistic, and hopefully those updates can go in logical places so I can find them more easily in the future.

Otherwise I’m just going to put down what I have been thinking of in my head and hope to write about in the future:

  • how some areas of real life are trying to be replaced with zoom and it isn’t always working
  • how seriously are people taking the monkeypox epidemic?
  • how would or could one make a game to teach proteomics, or really any science?
  • proportional representation vs first past the post voting

I hope to get those ideas out of my head and onto paper (or the internet in this case) soon.

Post 7

I’d like to start with a chat about stories.

Say I told you a story and it started out like this: “there once was a great man called America.  He had 13 sons and together they fought against tyranny.”  Obviously this is an anthropomorphic mythology of the American Revolution, right?  The nation of America and its 13 colonies/states become actual people in a dramatic tale.  Now here’s a different story: “there was a great man called America, and with his 50 children he settled the length and breadth of this land.”  Well this is an anthropomorphic mythology of a more *modern* America.  There’s 50 states instead of 13, and they don’t need to fight the British anymore.  But how about this one: “America and his 24 children quarreled frequently among themselves.”  What is “24” in relation to?  Well in 1821 Missouri became the 24th state, and it wasn’t until 1836 that Arkansas became the 25th.  Us modern folk don’t really think about America as having 24 states, but for 15 years in the 19th century that was the case.

If you lived in 1830 and were going to write an anthropomorphic mythology of the United States, it might make sense for you to give America 24 children.  You would probably characterize America and the states in an 1830s way.  New York and Pennsylvania, the richest and by far the largest states, might be America’s two eldest sons, with large and wealthy families.  An unpopulated state like Illinois would be one of America’s youngest children, who lives far away on the very edges of the frontier.  This kind of arrangement seems strange to a modern, but makes perfect sense when you consider that that was the reality of the 1830 world.

Now this story is kind of pointless but it illustrates how many stories in the bible appear to work.  Too often I see a simplistic dichotomy of how people see the bible: either it is literal truth (though some may acquiesce to saying it is embellished) or it is a book full of lies with zero academic or historical value.  I don’t think the bible is literally true, and I do know that many of its narratives are historically false, but in saying that there is a lot that can be learned historically by the stories written in the bible *even the stories that are false*.  

The story of Jacob and his son Joseph is the best example of this.  The story itself is impossible and archeologically unfounded, however it gives us important historical clues not towards any “real” Jacob and Joseph, but into the worldview of the story’s writers.  To refresh your memory, Jacob (aka Israel) is a shepherd with 12 sons: Judah, Levi, Benjamin, Joseph, etc.  Joseph is his favorite/best son who can do all manner of awesome things to save himself and his family.  An observant reader can page ahead to later parts of the Old Testament and see that the names of Jacob’s children are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel.  So “Levi” is the ancestor of the tribe of Levites, “Judah” is the ancestor of the tribe of Judah and so on.

You can see the connections with the America story from above.  A father (America/Israel) and his sons (13 states, 12 tribes) can be used as mythological antecedents for the political realities of the day.  And it seems that the Jacob story was in fact used to “explain” some of the historical realities of the day.  On Jacob’s deathbed, he praises Judah over all the other brothers, hinting at how the tribe of Judah would gain supremacy during the monarchic period.  It seems clear that the author(s) of the Jacob/Joseph story seemed to be using it to explain or justify the author’s “modern” time period.  The 12 tribes of Israel should all be united because they were originally the 12 sons of Jacob.  And the wisdom of Joseph and Judah are used to justify the ruling families of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, who claimed descendence from these two.

Now I use this example mostly because I think it’s neat but also because it’s something I look out for when reading works set in an author’s past.  How the author thinks of the past is usually colored by their own present in ways that may not be obvious.  I’d love to hear if anyone else has examples of this.

Post 6

So all the previous posts were written during a single long plane ride. What am I going to write about now?

I’m always somewhat interested in how many elements of ancient languages can be seen retained by modern ones. The ancient Near East god Mot was the god of Death, and his name is strikingly similar to the modern Arabic word موت (mowt) meaning death. The words Jesus said on the cross (eli eli lama sabachthani) are conjugated much in the way that modern Arabic is as well. If “el” means god then “eli” means my god, and any modern Arabic speaker would understand if even if they would use a different noun for god. I learned to say lematha for “why” but lama seems recognizable as لما which would also mean why, and sabachthani is conjugated just as a modern word would be, except with a “tha” instead of a “ta”.

It’s somewhat striking to be able to find little bits and pieces of old languages that are still legible in this way, and it shows us just how much languages stay the same even if they change. Perhaps it’s also interesting to me because as a native English speaker I feel like we’re used to thinking about our language as being very very “new.” The “English” of Beowulf seems almost unrecognizable to a modern and bored schoolchildren still struggle with Shakespeare. Yet occasionally some ancient bits of Latin, German or French can be seen to contain a word or two which is recognizable due to its English descendant.

It’s an idea I’ve toyed with but don’t have any data for: is it measurable how fast languages changed in the past and are changing today? Has English changed particularly quickly in the last millennium, or are we English speakers just filled with exceptionalism? And if it did change faster than other languages, has that change slowed due to global English? Or has it sped up? I would hazard a guess that all languages have slowed their rate of change since the invention of movable type and later the radio. Moveable type fossilized many spellings and letter shapes that had before been more fluid. And radio itself probably smoothed out the differences between accents as everyone heard many of the same songs, the same broadcasts, the same speeches no matter where they lived. Likewise the ability to record our speech gives us a link to the past that other generations don’t have, and those influences probably slow the changing of our language even more.

I’d like to know how the rate of change of languages is calculated, and how that rate has changed, and what changes it. When the Greeks conquered the Near East they brought with them a lingua franca that would later be known as “Koine.” Did an influx of Near Eastern speakers cause this language to change faster than if it had stayed in Greece? Or did its status as a language for everyone cause it to change more slowly, since everyone had to understand each other?

If anyone knows where I can learn more about this, hit me up.