• 0 Posts
  • 441 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 8th, 2026

help-circle



  • Hoping it’s true, generally when I see posts about how strong and successful something is, it hits like a warning sign that it’s struggling / at risk and someone is trying to project growth for attraction / retention.

    I assume I’m not the only one with this kind of mental filter. Maybe there’s a way to go about it that would get the impression across without ringing that alarm?

    Maybe a show don’t tell kind of tact? Like “check out all this new content being generated by the influx of users”… or a backhanded thing like “here’s how to protect your insrance against recent traffic surges”?

    Idk I’m no expert. Hope it’s helpful but otherwise just ignore me~











  • I used to work at a university whose education department sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into a study to find ideal lecture length to maximize retention.

    Memory’s a little fuzzy… it was short. Like a half hour?

    Anyway the punchline I definitely do remember is that they got the results of the study then changed absolutely nothing


  • Yeah, I’m not sure it really holds up. I initially wanted to say “slave labor”, but that gets tricky compared to chattel slavery, which mostly was not what built the wonders.

    I’m surprised to learn just now that the conscription rates compared to population are much lower than I would have thought, 1.5-2.5% during pyramids area, just double modern US military service.

    But the mortality rates performing the labor are 100x modern US military service, which helps my point about it being slavey.

    *Maybe the important change isn’t the workforce itself, but the authority structure? No longer a single guy saying “put them all on __ and finish by ___, i don’t care about losses.”? More people in between, making it less slavey?


  • I’d think the reason we stopped engaging in national scale single focus construction projects is that nations that relied on national scale conscripted labor didn’t prosper as well as ones that didn’t.

    *Note: I don’t pretend to be educated enough to actually back this up, nor do I have any underlying political point. Just thinking with my thumbs.