Capitalism isn’t the “best system we’ve got”, though… it isn’t even the system we are all using right now.

We’ve never operated in anything like a “purely” capitalist economy, and the socialist policies most western countries have put in place are wildly popular and few people would want to live without them.

Countries that intelligently choose when and where and what things should be operated on a capitalist basis, have better outcomes.

Healthcare? Not something anyone should make money off of. Basic housing, food, water, power… these should be immune to market forces.

At the same time, capitalism drives fantastic technological and social innovation within its swimlane. We just have to pre-define what things people should be able to make money doing.

Ironically, it’s more the equivalent of “tech debt”. The older the deity is, the more the worship of that deity has changed over time, and so the more convoluted it gets … because the religion is very different from itself over time.

E.g., the 8th century Yahweh wasn’t a monotheistic god, he was just the specific god of a particular tribe. They didn’t think of him as all knowing or all powerful, they just wanted a cool story to show how their tribal god was so tough he beat up the gods of the local superpower, sort of a “my dad can beat up your dad” thing. The concept of monotheism didn’t show up in Jewish religion for another 300 or so years

The tablet is written in proto cuneiform, the earliest format of real writing – its basically got numbers, nouns and a limited list of verbs, but no grammatical elements… so we don’t know that it was past tense, it’s just a guess – but a reasonable one:

• We know Kushim signed about a dozen other tablets listing various transactions, which were always either receiving, or disbursing grain. Proto debits and credits, if you will.

• The distribution of grain has a recipient and a purpose (e.g., to four different people to make beer), and usually does not have a time frame.

• The receipts have a time frame, and sometimes a source (sort of a “tax receipt”).

The thought is that basically, when the grain came in it’d be tallied, then tablets would be added noting recipients and purpose until it had been disbursed.

It’s also worth noting that clay tablets are challenging to date, and there’s an (as far as I know, ongoing) debate about whether “kushim” was an individual, or an office (e.g., “grain wrangler”).

Fun fact… From the Roman era through the early modern era, the “four humors” theory of medicine led to an extraordinary focus on the quality, consistency and uh, frequency of feces in assessing people’s medical health – at least the people wealthy enough to have a doctor obsess over their poop.

Now, here’s where it gets funny. Doctors were not generally nobility, or highly trusted … What if they deliberately treated the king poorly? Best to have an impartial observer, someone you really trusted, who could describe your poop to multiple doctors (so as to get a second opinion) and be trusted not to discuss your poop willy nilly (can’t have spurious rumors about the king’s health).

Hence the introduction of a new title, the Groom of the Stool, whose job it was to… Well, to look at the king’s poop, and be present while the aforementioned poop was pooped to verify the uh, chain of custody.

For hundreds of years, it was one of the most powerful positions at court, and formed the seed of what would later become the “privy counsel”. The Victorians gradually phased it out (because they were less enthusiastic about poop than their predecessors).

Anyway I guess this picture made me think of three people sitting around watching each other poop, so … Now you know about that, I guess