As an aside, idealistic free market is impossible to achieve without regulation. At the very least, contracts need to be enforced. Free market also demands price forming to happen through bids on the market, needing protection from extra-market negotiations. As an elastic system, it can also be broken by a concerted application of force and needs protection from such actions.

Whatever is being sold as free market sounds like a myth at best.

PS: Coop corporations should really become the norm. Trickle up systems create concentrations of power by design, and concentration of power is how you stretch elastic system beyond its deformation limits.

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Federation has nothing to do with that capability. git clone exists since the beginning of git.

Don’t compare someone’s highlight reel to your behind the scenes.

I once convinced someone that they are actually doing a great job by sharing my struggles and showing that they are not an impostor. They now outshine me and will go to even greater heights.

And while that one episode of dealing with burnout and impostor syndrome is a drop in the ocean of their persistence, it’s a great illustration to how misleading comparison to others is.

PS: Also, if you have ADHD, you’re nearsighted in time. That doesn’t only mean “you can’t plan well”, it means “your life looks like a hazy blob, where others see a complex scenery”. And that can be devastating when doing a comparison. Be kind to yourself, be kind to others.

Wealth itself is a stronger predictor for future wealth than individual performance.

That quote of mine doesn’t talk about success, nor wealth itself for that matter. You’re ignoring everything in the message to argue against a statement that was never made in the first place.

Please reflect on the fact that until you joined the discussion, we didn’t talk about equating success to luck.

Afterwards, you will likely notice that your jackpot argument reinforces mine.

Millionaires often worked for their money. Billionaires often worked for their first millions too. Problem is, difference between a billion and a million is about a billion.

On the other side of the argument, the amount of people that work harder and smarter than any given billionaire and have nothing is simply staggering. If it wasn’t down to luck, they’d all be billionaires.

So yeah, it is dumb luck. Randomness is not uniform, and someone ends up being close to the time and place of a local spike.

They are left to the fascism, that they equate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, in a very special way - both are ultra right, but tankies are on the left of a spectrum orthogonal to the one the rest of us usually employ.

Oh, I’m not an academic, just an ADHD poster child. Historic weapons keep appearing on my radar for the past few years and I repeatedly find myself spending time on researching what I’ll never practice.

I try to find and share sources for that reason - they allow others to skip incorrect assumptions I made along the way.

By compete I mean to compete in utility and general use, not in a duel. Fencing sword is of no use when you get whacked at the back of your head. It’s also relatively useless on a battlefield, from which I presume it occupied mostly the same space the clubs did - streets and roads.

I won’t argue on weight distribution influence. Sharp object balanced near the handle doesn’t need much of a swing to render my arms unusable. A mace simply cannot do that, its utility lies elsewhere.

PS: I would love to see a skilled fight using a thrusting sword and a mace. Thrusting swords don’t have a cutting edge, which makes it possible to grab and grapple them aside. I imagine the moment your opponent grabs your sword and swings their club presents quite a pickle.

For example, https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1589

It being from 16th century, it’s likely the heavier variant for cavalrymen (which the description kinda confirms). Even then it weighs only 1.6kg.

Some sword examples:

• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1600. - 1.76kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.686 - 1.6kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.58 - 1.62kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.59 - rapier, 1.48kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1919.69 - 1.06kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.698 - 1.28kg
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1916.1099 - a very interesting case of 600g of weight
• https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1974.57 - 360g

Note the years and descriptions on the lighter swords. They are more of an everyday tool for civilians at that point. A regular club competed with those, probably very successfully.

Maces tended to be lighter and shorter than equivalent swords.

Maces aren’t as good against unarmored opponents, because unarmored opponents bleed and get incapacitated from a few well placed cuts. Swords tend to balance their weight closer to the handle to offer precision to make those cuts.

Maces specialize in delivering nearly the entire energy behind a strike. They were balanced to the tip of the weapon for that reason. Which is great against cut resistant armor due to energy transfer. Note that this places maces utility well before invention of plate armor.

If it’s heavy and slow, it’s not a weapon. Slow weapons kill their weilders. Rare armor rendered the user so slow as to let you swing in a game-like “lumberjack dealing with a stubborn log” fashion. There are plenty demonstrations around that show how fast and deadly an armored swordsman is.

The statement about spears indoors is game logic. The variability in spears and swords designs is such that most swords and spears would be equally dogshit indoors, but those that wouldn’t would all work quite ok. In a narrow, defensibly built passageway, thrusting attacks are nearly the only attacks available to combatants. A short spear then can offer a good deal of utility that sword wouldn’t, and vise versa. Short maces are nowhere near being useless there either.

Word “respect” means two different things. One of them can only be earned, another can only be given.

What’s more, the part that can only be given is best described by trust. As in, the only way you can truly know if you can trust someone is to trust and find out.

In this context, the respect that is given - a regard for the others - is a baseline trust in a reciprocal valuation. The respect that is earned is the collection of outcomes that feed into others’ trust risk assessment.

I’m not afraid of retirement, I’m afraid of needing to work on the day of my funeral.

The idea of centrally planned economy ignores the lessons of the past. Bronze Age empires and recent examples all display universal inability to adjust to changes.

It’s the same magical thinking as the blind belief in market forces exhibits.
Priests of “invisible hand of market” ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia, believing that markets will just magically fix everything in time for it to matter.
Preachers of central planning ignore information exchange speed limits and market inertia (and yes, there is a market, as long as there is goods and services exchange, however indirect) by believing they will have all the relevant information and the capacity to process it in time for it to matter.

Neither is true. Neither school of thought even attempted to show itself to be true.

Well, at least in Ukraine, it’s both at the same time. Gotta laugh to have strength to grief.