or...mountains are petrified giants that lay down and fell asleep. My dad used to tell me this all the time.

That would so awesome. Like, Sandra the downstairs neighbor is actually a sentient cloud of gas that learned how to project a holographic body and you've been fooled all along.

I suspect they suffered more than we know.

Grok certainly hasn't suffered.

Maybe it's easy to argue that all people suffer -- certainly hard to prove otherwise -- yet that's not really what I mean. There's a kind of artist who is clearly caught by misery. Jeff Buckley, tortured by their own success and failure at living. Maybe art only comes from bad decisions...

yes, that makes more sense. I wasn't happy with how I phrased it. I almost wanted to say: do you need to pursue art until you are suffering for it to become good?

I've never researched this, but I wonder if people were very conscious of participating in something (an industrial revolution, a technological shift, a new era) or if it all felt so diffuse and so bottom-up that there wasn't really an awareness of an industrial revolution until long after. I'm sure books have been written on the topic, but I'm curious how the inventors and tinkerers and business-people of 17th and 18th centuries felt about their place in history: did they feel like they were ushering in a new era?

the reformation day date has always struck me as interesting. let's hope bitcoin doesn't lead to quite so many wars.

I see the analogy, but I disagree with the implication: if our political overlords were effective enough to plan, engineer, and execute something like this, they wouldn't have the problems this solution solves.

this is a good observation.

1000 sats per dollar does not sound anywhere near as exciting, sadly.