A bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Yes, 50% child mortality skews life expectancy statistics heavily, but any 40 year life expectancy estimate is clearly filtering out at least some portion of childhood deaths. By our best estimates: of the 48% of people who survived age 10, slightly less than half were dead by 45. Of those who clear 45, less than half reach 65.

Those early deaths aren’t driven by “inferior physiology”, but disease and malnourishment (as the previous commenter noted). It was possible to live into your 80s, but you had to be very, very lucky to pull it off.

Feudalism bad: yes and no. It meant everyone had a job and housing. Homelessness didn’t exist until the end of feudalism.

There were absolutely homeless and destitute people in feudal societies. Quite a lot of them, really, although the individuals in question likely didn’t live very long. We have many references to beggars from this period, as well as some insight into attempts to curtail them.

Someone who finds themselves displaced from where they used to live can’t just wander onto some lord’s land and start farming. That land is already full of people who are producing just barely enough to feed themselves (after said local lord’s taxes are accounted for). A typical peasant family has more labor available than is required to till their rather small allocation of farmable land, which itself is often insufficient to feed them. Any surplus labor is spent working land of one of the local “big men” to cover the gap. Supporting an additional person off the street, even one capable of putting in a good shift, is no easy task in this period.

It’s easy to romanticize the past from a great distance when looking at the problems of our present, and produce some wildly incorrect conclusions as a result. Feudalism (to the extent that this term refers to any specific system at all, scholars don’t use it very much these days) was a deeply unfair system with a host of structural problems, and had far fewer safety nets for the unlucky members of society than any developed country has today.

I’ve been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.

I don’t remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I’ve had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

Trying to enforce anything new right now, just before Trump goes into office, accomplishes nothing and guarantees that Trump will just reverse it. Publicly deciding not to enforce leaves the incoming administration with a less obvious choice PR-wise, and thus the possibility that they might choose to “own the libs” by actually enforcing the ban.

They are largely powerless at this stage, and preparing for an idiot to take over their job. Why not?

How did you do this?

The real question is the hell did people downvote me? Looks like Lemmy turned into Reddit in a month’s time…

Next time lead with the why instead of a one word “no”. This is a discussion forum, nobody knows who you are and certainly nobody is taking your word as truth if you don’t provide evidence.