2023-03-21

• I’ve continued reading about the history of civilization. One thing that stands out is how modern/Western/American culture places a much higher value on a human life than people did in ancient times. Lots of people speculate on the reasons for this. The most compelling reason seems to be economics-based (compared with some sort of advancement in morals). The simple idea is that when people figured out that conquered peoples could be effectively put to work as slaves, the practice of slaughtering the losers of a given battle subsided. That’s all pretty fine and unsurprising really. The surprising piece is just how little people valued human life in the past. Sort of hard to get your head around it. One of those things that stands out to me as hard to grasp what was going on there. The most likely answer is “nothing” was going on there, which is pretty consistently the strangest answer in these cases. Anyways, worth noting there are exceptions, in terms of moral clarity seemingly being the driving factor behind valuing human life more highly. Cyrus and Alexander the Great seemed to take something of a moral stance against slaughtering their enemies, though it’s a bit muddied by the fact that conquered peoples were expected to pay tributes and all that (aka there was a clear economic incentive). But their level of mercy extended beyond what was common from an economic dollars-and-cents perspective at that time. Of course, legend has it, that this approach was also helpful militarily as it lessened the resistance that Cyrus/Alexander faced from opposing forces. I think that’s a pretty good lesson, actually. When you extend mercy, you actually pretty regularly make things easier on yourself, and this translates whether you are conquering Eurasia or dealing with people at home or work.
  journal
  
• PadDaddy features
  • Commute times
    • Identify coordinates of each listing
      
    • approximate travel times from running partial gmaps api calls
      
    • TODO
      • UI
        • section for specifying commute time in minutes to destination that is also specified
          
      • Finding new listings faster
        • want to have a thing that checks for new listings
          • how to handle listings that go off market then come back?
            • keep checking listings if they went off market within 7 days?
              
            • actually only need to keep checking the “in contract” units…
              
      • Emails
        • button in UI to generate email to the listing
          • nice to have because it takes me one step closer to managing process for people
            
      • Rate listings among search results
        • How would this work?
          • A setting?
            
          • Something we calculate on the fly?
            
          • A background process?
            • Do a search
              • What if the search returns all the results…? Then it’s gonna take a while to return the deal results?
                • Could crash the server…it’s not super highly powered…
                  
            • It adds the search query to a
              
      • Explain what’s good about a listing

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