Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one.
The big issue AIUI is die-cut cardboard. The vast majority of modern board games come with several sheets of it to punch out small pieces (think coins or victory point chips).
Producing these (and other game components) requires specialized machinery which isn't made in the US. So even if someone did want to set up a board game manufacturing company in the US, they would now be hit by tariffs as they bought the machines they need.
Stegmaier says that possibly games where all the components are cards will be less affected, as there are companies in the US printing playing cards.
Die cut is one way to do it, but there are other approaches. I worked in a Christmas card factory for a bit and there are a lot of ways to make patterned bits of flat paper. The point about machinery import costs is spot on though.
Rowing had the sliding rigger boat which was banned in international competition within a year of first being used.
(In a normal racing rowing boat, the athlete sits on a sliding seat, while their shoes and the rigger with the oarlock are fixed to the boat. In the 1980s, boats were developed that had the shoes and rigger as a unit that slid, while the seat was fixed, which was more efficient as it meant that the boat hull and the athlete's mass moved together.)
On the other hand, first carbon-fibre oar shafts and later asymmetrical "hatchet" oar blades were adopted near-universally within a few years of their invention.
Here's a museum catalogue entry [0] of a very similar object which the museum calls a fire mark.
The Licensed Victuallers' Association was a mutual benefit society for pub landlords. As well as operating institutions like schools and almshouses, it ran an insurance company.
Monarchy does not prevent enslavement. In fact, serfdom is a relatively common feature of monarchy. That’s what those two things have to do with each other.
The UK, under a monarch, abolished slavery and set the Royal Navy to blockade slave ships.
Meanwhile, the USofA pre civil war under a President with no offical monarch (other than the Little King for a term arrangement) had extensive slave plantations.
Good that you agree slavery was abolished by a country with a monarch ... you skipped over the second point; the country most associated with industrial scale slavery in the world had no monarch.
It's a loose correlation you're making here, very much a "let's build this skyscraper with wet noodles instead of steel" approach.
Slavery was “abolished” in the UK while that same nation continued to traffic and profit from enslavement for quite a long time it’s “abolition”. Is your point that monarchy is good, or that slavery is associated with all forms of government?
"guest workers" as a term completely excludes serfs. Serfs are attached to the land, guest workers on the other hand come from a completely different place. North Korea is not a monarchy, and what's happening there is forced labour, or slavery.
The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy". People are so completely unable to provide evidence for that claim of it being common these days (500 years in the past being quite irrelevant here given numerous monarchies exist these days) that the closest you can get is by pointing to one single case, on the other side of the world from the monarchies we're talking about, that isn't serfdom and isn't a monarchy. Hardly a "relatively common feature".
Serfs were forced to work for little to no wages, and often can't leave the country because their employers confiscate their passports. That's about as close to modern serfdom as you can get.
> The original point I was refuting was that "serfdom is a relatively common feature under monarchy".
It is. Some kind of serfdom was common throughout Europe until around 19-th century. Russia abolished it in 1861, in Austria in 1848, hardly "500 years". As usual, Wikipedia has a nice overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
Perhaps absolute would be a better wording. After all there are also very few absolute democracies, absolute free markets, etc, etc.
Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned it just isn't prevented in practice either. At which point I wonder about other localized abusive working and living conditions in many supposedly more developed and civilized countries.
> with hereditary power transfer
Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy? It seems to me that the defining characteristic is a single authority figure. Hereditary power transfer is just a natural consequence of basic self interest under those circumstances.
> Of note about Saudi Arabian guest workers is that if I understand correctly the mistreatment isn't officially condoned
Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
> Getting slightly tangential, but is that even necessarily a feature of a monarchy?
Yes. It's _the_ main characteristic of monarchy. Without it, you have run-of-the-mill autocracy (e.g. Putin in Russia or Saddam Hussein in Iraq). Hereditary power transfer means that the monarchy is an institution, with its own support structures (feudals, court, etc.).
The saying: "The king is dead, long live the king!" is not hypocrisy. It's a sign that the monarchy is an institution and can survive an individual monarch's death.
For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know. There's going to be a power struggle with unpredictable results. There is no line of succession for the true power.
Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
Admittedly it's possible that might run afoul of a dictionary definition or three. I'm not sure. I suppose it's all largely pointless speculation anyway since someone with a long enough term is going to be incentivized to modify the system to officially become hereditary if it isn't already.
> Of course it is. The laws (as they are) are set to allow that.
Officially though?
Contrast with your other example, North Korea, where many of the abuses are indeed officially recognized.
There's plenty that the laws (or at least enforcement) in the western world fail to stop. In many cases you can argue that it's intentional (and I might even agree with you). But that doesn't make it official in that it isn't what's written down or what the electorate explicitly agreed to.
> Sure but, in theory at least, who says you need the official mechanism to be hereditary? An institution could define that however it wanted, and if it works then it works.
The thing is, regular autocracy has to destroy the institutions of power transfer. If there's a presumptive successor, then the autocrat can never feel secure in their power. So hereditary transfer is the only model that is at least tolerable for autocrats.
But building the institutions of power transfer requires people who are invested in them. So you need feudal lords who derive their power and wealth from their relation with the monarch. These feudal lords _themselves_ are interested in power transfer to make sure their heirs can be secure.
That's why, historically, elected kings turned into hereditary kings with only one exception, Vatican (for obvious reasons).
> For example, if Putin dies tomorrow, who is going to gain the power? We don't know.
Mikhail Mishustin. The Prime Minister of Russia takes over in the event of the President being indisposed and acts as temporary President until the President recovers or a new one is elected.
Putin is holding his power because he set himself up as the final arbiter in conflicts between powerful "clans". This is largely unofficial power, that he holds personally (not due to institutions).
He is preventing anyone else from gaining similar levels of influence. For example, Mishustin's power was cut down by the changes Putin pushed into the Constitution in 2020.
Side note, this situation is 100% typical for autocracies. And once the autocrat dies, the country very often descends into chaos, simply because there are no institutions that are capable of resolving conflicts between groups without violence. Example: Libya.
It's almost as though the global political landscape has varied significantly over these thousands of years and various societal features (including monarchy, serfdom, slavery, etc) aren't inherently linked to one another.
My original point was that a monarchy permits both the best and worst possible outcomes because a single individual has maximal power to enact a unified vision. The observation could obviously apply in degrees to any dictatorship though, regardless of the official classification.
Yeah, that’s the ol’ philosopher-king argument. I get it, but I don’t really buy into it. I.e. if the next monarch is a despot, their rule is a part of the previous monarch’s actions… so even a truly good king will inevitably harm the people under them.
You don't actually seem like you're disagreeing with me though? I spoke only to the form of government as it pertains to end results, not to how we should attribute "points" to a given ruler or politician. Credit assignment is similarly difficult when it comes to voters and elected leaders.
The end result is higher variance over a long period of time as a dictatorship switches between good and bad leadership. Meanwhile democracies consistently fail to execute on large scale visions. There's a reason corporate structure generally resembles a dictatorship, and that same reason is what eventually leads many of them to fail.
>the privilege of being sent to the country during a dangerous time.
Children of all social classes were evacuated- the slum child evacuated to a prosperous country farmhouse is practically a trope, while some children of wealthy families stayed in London. The only thing that decided whether children went or not was their parents' choice.
Though the Pevensies are relatively privileged in that they have a (EDIT: family friend not uncle) in the countryside who has room for them rather than being sent to a stranger's house.
(EDIT: actually, I can't remember- is there an indication that they knew the Professor before the war?)
You are right in principle, but the mansion does not seem to be owned by an uncle, and there is no indication they were related at all. He is to referred throughout the book as "the professor".
The Pevensies are definitely middle class kids. The sort of kids an academic like Lewis would have known in real life, and probably reflecting the real Lucy's family's circumstances.
Posting from the perspective of an American East Coast skier:
An interesting question is whether what is happening is loss or consolidation? In other words, while there are fewer ski resorts in the US, is the total size of the remaining resorts larger or smaller?
A quick look at skimap.org [0] shows both a lot of closed resorts, and archived maps from the open resorts that show that a few decades ago they were much smaller, both in terms of lifts and trails.
Unfortunately, a reliable measurement of ski area capacity is hard to come by. Even if we only look at the US (so ignore the fact that European resorts measure their terrain in km of piste while North American ones use skiable acres), the figures they quote can be inflated. The ideal figure to use is comfortable carrying capacity [1] but this is a trade secret. Possibly one could use total lift uphill capacity (or an estimate based on the lift type)?
There are a few factors driving the death of small local ski resorts. I think this is a bad thing and endangers the future of the sport by raising the barrier in terms of cost and travel for new skiers to try it, at the same time as mega passes make skiing cheaper than it has ever been for people who ski a lot. But it's not just climate change (the article touches on this).
One issue is the necessity and cost of snowmaking. Climate change has something to do with this (resorts that could open on all-natural snow now can't) but the real issue is that once one resort installed snowmaking, its rivals had to do so or go out of business. The Christmas vacation week is the biggest money maker for ski resorts, but skiing on the East Coast on natural snow at Christmas has never been reliable south of about Killington. The first season Okemo operated (without snowmaking), they didn't have enough snow to open to the general public until February.
Another issue is insurance. The court case of Sunday v. Stratton in the 1970s dramatically raised resort's insurance premiums and forced them to spend more money on trail maintenance, replacing the old narrow CCC-style trails with today's wide "boulevards".
(A novice skier tripped over a bush at the edge of a beginner trail, hit his head on a rock and became paralyzed. He sued the resort and won).
Finally, there's better roads and more reliable cars. This means that skiers might be willing to travel further to a better mountain rather than ski at their small local hill. The closure of Braddock Heights ski area on the outskirts of Frederick, Maryland, coincides almost exactly with US-15 being upgraded to a four lane highway, making it much quicker for skiers from Frederick to drive to the larger Liberty resort in Pennsylvania.
Taken together, there are a lot of reasons why smaller ski areas have closed. Some are climate related, others not.
Consolidation would kill it for me. I know that Wisconsin isn't exactly a ski mecca, but I live about 35 minutes away from a dinky little ski hill. I loved to just hop in my car after work, and ski for a couple of hours, then go home to my own food, and my own bed.
On the other hand, my family took an obligatory ski vacation in Colorado, and while the experience was stunning in every respect, it required planning, travel, vacation time, lodging, and so forth. And I'm not a great skier.
Unfortunately, the warmer winters are killing the nearby slopes.
All of that might be true, but I feel like the experience of skiing has gotten really bad in the last couple years. The passes have become more expensive, the hills are a lot more crowded, you can find no parking even if you are there at opening time, and so on. It is becoming less of something to look forward to, and more like dealing with lines at Disneyland.
the pass structures now overwhelmingly favor return trippers vs. day passes. So it's very possible that there are fewer people going significantly more often.
i haven't skiied in a while and I went on a trip with regular skiiers to Whistler, and while I knew that skiing had gone expensive and Whistler is a top-tier resort, the lift tickets were $350 due to dynamic pricing for lifts that close at 3pm. If you ski at the same collection of resorts a few times a year the passes make more sense, but day tripping is eye-wateringly expensive now. The $20-50 lift ticket is increasingly rare.
There is also the issue of the massive migration to the Sunbelt. Once you have to take a plane to ski you shrink the market significantly.
Where I am in Washington has seen massive population growth and the ski resorts have not kept up, but I have not heard anything about new ski areas opening in the state.
That's another problem, particularly out West (but also in Vermont). Most ski resorts operate at least partly on public land such as national forests. The relevant land management agencies, particularly the Forest Service, have been extremely slow/reluctant to grant the permits for new ski resorts to operate, or for existing ones to expand.
Could state law mitigate this? In essence, someone can certify themselves as an expert and thus waive liability for the resort? (I assume this would also void one's life insurance policy.)
Many states[0] have explored this. IIRC, the New Mexico legislature once, back in the 1980s, helpfully defined alpine skiing as a "hyper-dangerous" activity, trying to place all liability on the skier, but a reference eludes my google-fu.
[0] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/pa-supreme-court/1528129.h...
While lift ticket prices have maybe doubled in the last 20 years, I am sure costs
For the ski areas have more than doubled, like
You said insurance, but also parts, labour,
They were already able to perceive polarized light [0], like many other arthropods, though AFAIK it's not clear what they normally use this perception for.
Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one.
[0]https://starkeycomics.com/2024/05/10/eight-british-and-irish...
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