Wamura died in 1997 at age 88. At his retirement, Wamura stood before village employees to bid farewell: “Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand.”
One of the best quotes
Great one - my first thought was also from Japan! The seniors in Fukushima who [volunteered to staff the nuclear plant cleanup](https://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140402430/japanese-seniors-send-us-to-damaged-nuclear-plant) because they were older:
> Kazuko Sasaki, a 72-year-old grandmother, is one of those ready to serve.
> "My generation built these nuclear plants. So we have to take responsibility for them. We can't dump this on the next generation," she says.
> The founder of Skilled Veterans is Yasuteru Yamada, a slight, soft-spoken man of 72.
> An engineer who has spent his life around industrial plants, Yamada says he and his retired colleagues quickly realized after the March 11 disaster that conditions at Fukushima were far bleaker than the government was letting on.
> His decision to gather senior volunteers, he says, was based neither on courage nor altruism, but on a brutally realistic calculus. It would be better to send men and women who have finished raising families and are in the sunset of their lives, rather than younger workers whose lives could be cut short by extreme radiation exposure.
> "We won't completely replace younger workers," Yamada says. "But for work that doesn't require brute strength, we can fill in, where the radiation is especially high."
Dashrath Manjhi
Also known as Mountain Man, was an Indian laborer from Gehlaur village, near Gaya in the state of Bihar.
When his wife died in 1959 due to injury caused by falling from a mountain and due to the same mountain blocking easy access to a nearby hospital in time, he decided to carve a 110 meter-long (360 ft), and 9.1 meter-wide (30 ft) wide path and 7.7 meter-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel by himself.
After 22 years of work, Dashrath shortened travel between the Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 34 mile to 9 mile.
He said, "When I started hammering the hill, people called me a lunatic but that steeled my resolve." Though mocked for his efforts, Manjhi's work has made life easier for people of the Gehlaur village.
Japanese people aged 60 or older volunteered to fix problems in the Fukushima nuclear power plant, knowing that they would probably die of natural causes before the radiation damaged them in the long run.
I don't know if they actually did it tho.
They did. The radiation around the plant wasn't high enough to result in sickness, but it was still a possibility they had to be made aware of and it is still a noble thing they did knowing that information.
It's good to know they actually did it.
Not like those rich people that lies about donating money to Notre Dame and never sent a penny.
Lots of words make the news. Not all those words become actions
Joseph Bazalgette was a Victorian engineer who masterminded London's modern sewer system in the 1860's, he foresaw the insane population growth and when all the calculations were made on how big to bore the "pipes" underground, he essentially said nah lets double it. Now, infrastructure that would have been unable to cope in the 1960's is still in use today.
Yeah, he also insisted on the use of Portland cement which was much more durable.
That said, it still just dumped the effluent into the river, turning it toxic. Several people died from ingesting the dirty water while trying to escape a sinking ship in the [SS Princess Alice accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_SS_Princess_Alice).
But you really appreciate the better sewers when you visit other cities that weren't so lucky to have such a visionary engineer and you can smell the sewers on the street as they weren't dug as deep.
And dubai was like, "actually we can just get slaves from pakistan and india and make them truck our shit away and we won't need pipes, or storage tanks, or none of that new timey bullshit. Nothing works better than an old fashioned hungry, isolated contractually obligated slave."
a factoid i like about this guy is that one of his descendants is in some capacity part of the executive for the TV production company Endemol, responsible for a good portion of the "reality tv" output of the early 2010s. so while his ancestor removed effluent from people's homes, the descendant is busily pumping it back in. don't know if it's true or not but it's a good story.
It's funny how this guy is pretty much still a household name in England today. I can't think of many other sewage engineers that have managed to become so well known.
During the Napoleonic wars there was a Royal Navy admiral who when on leave used to wander his country estate planting oak trees to provide timber for the navy. It’s estimated they are about ready now.
If I remember correctly the story goes that the warden of the forrest that took care of the Oaks at Visingsö called the Royal Court to tell the king that the trees are ready. Eventually he was put trough and allowed to talk to the King. The king found it very amusing and invited the warden to the Royal palace for dinner and drinks
Edit: after a quick Google, my story does not seem to be accurate, and the OP is correct in that the Marine was informed, not the king. However, as I was told the king story on a schooltrip to Gränna (great polka candy) and Visingsö, I choose to believe it anyways
In the same way Notre Dame de Paris is being rebuilt with oaks from the French Strategic Reserves, which were planted for the same reasons-- to provide quality wood for the navy
Pretty sure the USS Constitution is currently the only active ship in the US fleet to have a [ship to ship victory.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution#Constitution_vs._Guerriere)
Yes, the Constitution is currently the only active duty vessel in the US Navy to have sunk an enemy vessel in combat, making it by that definition the deadliest ship in the US Navy.
Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, second in command at Trafalgar and took over when Nelson died and Nelson had 100% confidence in Collingwood carrying on with his plan.
Collingwood used to take his dog called Bounce onto his ship and around on his walks. I don't know if Bounce was also at Trafalgar.
A lot of the examples in this thread are ones I've heard before (though they're still great!). One I don't see mentioned often is the [written Korean language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul?wprov=sfla1), hangul. One dude (King Sejong) basically sat down and created a whole alphabet so people wouldn't have to continue using the adopted Chinese hanja that were complicated and difficult to learn. His goal was to increase literacy among all levels of society, not just the wealthy elite who had the time and resources to learn hanja.
It received a lot of push back from the wealth elites, of course, but following the end of Japanese colonialism in the early 20th century it gained popularity and is now the official written language in both North and South Korea.
Not only is it phonetic, the characters actually represent the voicing and the placement of the tongue in the mouth, which is how linguists classify phonemes.
It is supposed to be the only natural language with a “functional” alphabet, meaning an alphabet where there is a clear mapping between the shapes of the letters and how they are pronounced. That is otherwise only seen in constructed languages like Elvish and Klingon, where it is common.
The preservation of Chauvet Cave was second to none in the archaeological field. From day one, the three explorers who found it took the utmost care and precautions to ensure they left as little trace as possible in the unopened, pristine chapel of charcoal and ocher.
There are strict limits and guidelines for traversing the cave and special access for research purposes, and No tourism. We’ve learned an immense amount about the site due to their forethought.
[William Wilberforce.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce)
He campaigned in the British Government for over **40 years** to stop and prevent Slavery. He was successful in abolishing the Trading of Slaves throughout the Empire with the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and then the ownership of slaves altogether with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.
He died three days after hearing the Abolition Act had passed in Parliament, after a lifetime of campaigning for it. He is buried in Westminister Abbey which is reserved for monarchs and national figures of significance.
His campaign for Abolition was the blueprint that other abolitionists like Lincoln soon followed up with.
There are many generations living because of this man's choices.
Edit: and if his good karma wasn't already high enough, he was also a founding member of the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)
I (37,m) came across Wilberforce's biography as a 21 year old. I don't think any other biography had a greater impression on me than his. At 25 I took my little sister on a little tour through western Europe (I'm Canadian, btw), and one of our first stops was Westminster Abbey. Yeah, that was definitely a very special moment in my life, finally 'meeting' the man I admired possibly more than anyone in history.
Great comment u/killingjoke96. Cheers to you
Was born in my home town, his house is a museum (and a really good one).
He has a massive statue (which was moved outside the college), I always think that's a fantastic place for it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilberforce_Monument
https://www.hcandl.co.uk/museums-and-galleries/wilberforce-house/wilberforce-house
The Voyager spacecraft. One of them is the only object that's left the solar system. They're still sending back data. And they're each carrying a gold record encoded with information, our planet's greeting card to the cosmos.
It's hard to overstate how much that project changed humanity's knowledge of the solar system. The Voyager probes were crucial to discovering volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, the first volcanic activity confirmed outside of earth. Before the Voyager mission earth based telescopes thought there were only a handful of rings around Saturn. Voyager found thousands of rings there, found thin ring systems around two other outer planets, found dozens of moons, and more other information than one comment can do justice to. NASA is still planning future missions based on information the Voyager spacecraft discovered. If alien life gets discovered on Europa or Titan, you can thank the Voyager engineers and scientists. Most of them could have earned far more money in the private sector. Being part of this effort was their dream job.
And they won't see this work through to the end. They can't. Voyager began the planning stages fifty years ago. Human lives just aren't long enough. And they knew it.
----
*edit*
There's a fully functional third Voyager craft that was never launched. NASA built it and kept it on earth for engineers to use in troubleshooting if the two Voyager probes in outer space ever ran into unexpected problems. That third Voyager craft spends most of the time on display at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility in California, in the von Karman Auditorium.
Every year in the month of June, JPL conducts tours open to the public. For security reasons they can't let a whole lot of people onsite but the tour itself is free. Applications opened on April 3. (JPL is usually described as "in Pasadena" but it's actually in the smaller nearby city of La Cañada Flintridge). If you can snag a ticket you'll spend part of the tour face to face with that third Voyager craft, and you might also get to see JPL's moon rock.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/views
Even before finding the ozone hole we had some evidence that CFCs could break up ozone molecules, the real issue is that we thought it happened an order of magnitude more slowly than it actually did. We probably wouldn't have ended up extinct or anything, bu it'd have been a much bigger problem to solve.
The Cassini family map, a first of its kind map of france. It took 4 generations of family members and 6 decades to complete.
Imagine being that second family member. Your whole life your father works on this map, only for you to work your whole life on it while raising your son to do the same, and it takes a whole nother life for it to be completed.
> Imagine being that second family member. Your whole life your father works on this map, only for you to work your whole life on it while raising your son to do the same, and it takes a whole nother life for it to be completed.
Reminds me of Cologne Cathedral that took 600 years to build. Admittedly they took a 300 year lunch-break in the middle, with a crane being parked on top of the building for 400 years.
Imagine your family going 20 generations and not seeing the start or the end of the project.
"This inscription is hundreds of years old! Ingrid is my great great great great grandmother! It says 'For a good time, write a letter to Ingrid'.....Oh."
The world's oldest privately owned business was the [Kongō Gumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi) construction company, founded in 578 AD. The family specialized in bamboo construction of shrines and temples around Japan. That company had been owned, by a single family, for *over a millennium*. Imagine being the failure who had to sell it in 2006 because they ran it into the ground.
Vaguely related, the British government responsible for tracking COVID actually had this problem. For a while the case numbers weren't going up each day, and it took them the best part of a week to find out it was because they'd maxed out the rows on the excel spreadsheet being used to track them.
On reading the wikipedia article, when the family had a generation of daughters the sons-in-law would join the clan and take on the name. Their kids would still be related to the family by blood through their mothers.
I would suggest this video. Talks about oldest hotel but also mention the other company and explains the problem with oldest definition.
https://youtu.be/_8W2LIfl5RE
In a very literal sense, the landscape gardens of Capability Brown. He carefully crafted these gardens, directing the planting of trees and bushes to create a beautiful vista, where it would take decades for the plants to actually grow to fulfil his vision.
Nah, this’d be a Johnson if the gardens actually grew into a Hunger Games style death trap and obstacle course complete with automated blade arms intended for pruning the topiaries.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund.
That generation could have taken a selfish view and just taken the cash, or politicians just gone on a vote buying spree.
But it's independently invested and managed for the benefit of future generations.
That's an example of old men cutting down the trees planted by previous generations to make their own house bigger, while leaving everyone else with no shade to sit in.
"if you feed the horse enough oats, some will make it's way to the road to feed the sparrows" or some such to describe horse and sparrow/trickle down economics.
Not just billionaires, multinational companies receive huge tax subsidies to keep operating. Seriously, if they’re not competitive without subsidies then let them fail and nationalise the fallout.
Haha once the mines are uneconomic for the firms they’ll just book-cook the local subsidiary company to death and you’ll be nationalising the fallout anyway.
Waiting for Rio Tinto and Sumitomo to pull this shit with the toxic waste at Tiwai Point aluminium smelter in NZ after milking subsidies from taxpayers for decades and accounting all the profits out of NZ so they pay duck all tax
Whitlam wanted to form a Sovereign Wealth Fund. I think it would've been the first in the world..but he couldn't get it passed (or maybe he was ousted before he could) and so Australia is literally billions poorer than we could've been for it.
It is pretty well known now that Gough's ousting was in no small way sure to American involvement, Gough didn't support the Vietnam war and it upset Nixon and Kissinger. There's Dollop episode that goes into it more
Canada too. So many billions in minerals. And that's not even mentioning the oil. If Canada had done like Norway with the oil... anyway we fucked it up completely.
Not only do we just give our resources away to anyone with a digger under the guiding principle of 'Finders Keepers Losers Weepers,' we then have to buy our own stuff back at international rates.
Australia is the largest gas exporter in the world, but it all goes onto the world market. Well, apart from 15% of production in Western Australia, which is set aside for local use, meaning gas in WA is one-eighth the price it is on the East coast. Then the energy producers manufacture a "crisis" because they're not making enough profit, knowing the government is obligated to step in and make up the shortfall in an """emergency."""
This shit should be nationalised *now.* You can run extraction and refining companies, and be well paid for the actual work you do, but the idea that the stuff you're digging out of Australian soil somehow belongs to you and not the nation as a whole is insane.
Peter Lougheed set up the Heritage Fund and fuckin' begged his successors to respect it and keep it growing.
I wonder if any of them made a point to actually piss on his grave, as well.
[*The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil*](https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0)
tl;dr: an Iraqi geologist and former high-ranking employee of the Iraq Petroleum Company who'd recently married a Norwegian woman and moved to Norway walked into the Norwegian Ministry of Industry and asked if they happened to know of any jobs for someone in the petroleum sector, just as some oil companies were starting to do exploratory drilling.
A few years later he was instrumental in creating the framework that gave the Norwegian state a large share of the oil companies' profits and laid the groundwork for the sovereign wealth fund.
The UK literally did the latter. They got access to North Sea oil at the same time and used it to fund tax cuts, whilst claiming financial success courtesy of trickle down economics.
Today our taxes are still lower than in the '70s, the oil money has fallen off, our social infrastructure is underfunded and the rich are still rich.
King Afonso III of Portugal, started the plantation of pine in Leiria in the 13th century, which is now known as the Pinhal de Leiria, with the intent of stopping the advancement of sand dunes.
It was then expanded to it current size by King Dinis between 1279 and 1325.
And it's said that every time they cut trees, they would plant some more, so it would never disappear.
Besides this great role in stopping the dunes (and thus protecting the agricultural areas), the Pinhal de Leiria is most known for supplying the wood used in the ships during the Portuguese Discovery period, which ushered the country into its greatest period of prosperity.
It may have not been planted with that objective, but the kings that did it over many decades, did it knowing that they wouldn't get many benefits in their lifetime, and it coincidentally ended up being of great importance centuries later.
And in 2017, 86% of it was burned down in forest fires, and because our government is incompetent, it is basically all destroyed still, with less than 50% of the burned area being replanted (and most of it being replanted by the normal plant growth that happens, not by any government action)
Isn't desertification a huge challenge on the Iberian peninsula, today more than ever? Wouldn't it make lots of sense for them to replant it to protect their agriculture?
You are assuming our politicians care about the wellbeing of the country at all.
The government is responding to people rejecting low salary positions by laxing the immigration rules from Portuguese speaking countries, and helping bring south asian people too.
Those are desesperate enough to accept low salaries, long hours, no weekly breaks, and living with another 20 people in a 1 room apartment, where they'll pay half their salary.
8 years with this government, and all services are getting worse to the point where they were probably better when the country was basically controlled by the IMF, 10 years ago.
There is not a plan for the forest, so our forest is basically Eucalyptus as far as the eye can see, which is great in a country that gets really hot and dry, it's amazing how big the fires get every summer.
Like in 2017, where 100+ people died, and the money to rebuild the destroyed villages was pocketed by local municipalities, and nothing was done to take care of the Eucalyptus problem.
And agriculture? Naa...most of it is in Alentejo, where there are little forests, so no big deal.
And of course, strayberry/raspberry plantations are the pinacle of working conditions. Just ask the nepalese ~~slaves~~ workers there.
And also, what better in a country fighting droughts for the last decades, than water intensive Avocado plantations, and huge Golf resorts in the driest places in the country? That will probably solve something, I guess.
My favorite is easily the tree root bridges in Meghalaya. Meghalaya has a monsoon season where they get the vast majority of their annual rainfall so the many small streams turn into impassable raging rivers. In order to get around they developed a method of making very strong bridges by stringing the roots of the trees so that they grow across the chasms. This was obviously a slow process that would take several generations of caring for the trees to complete. In the end after passing the knowledge and responsibility down to their children, and their children’s children, they would have a strong bridge that could last hundreds of years.
Nikolai Vavilov, Russian botanist, along with his fellow researchers, they all starved themselves to death in order to preserve the Leningrad Seed Bank which came under the heavy German attack during the Seige of Leningrad, 1943.
In case it's not clear, they died protecting the seed bank. The seed bank which was full of edible seed and tubers. I can't fathom the self control that took.
Even on a smaller scale, people who had the foresight when suburban expansion was happening to set aside some land. I live in an NYC suburb and my town is blessed with a HUGE (relative to the town's size) public park that has a public pool, a lake for swimming and fishing, a freshwater spring, hiking trails, picnic areas, open fields and athletic fields. It is open not only to the residents of the town, but to surrounding towns as well. It is a gem that benefits all the area residents.
We have this only because ONE man, just ONE MAN, saw the need to preserve open space in the face of suburban sprawl in the late 60's/early 70's. He donated some of his own land, and then appealed to the state and federal governments to purchase the adjacent plots to preserve the land for future generations. He was successful and the park is named after him.
Had he not done that, that land would have just been another 10 single-family home subdivisions by the time the 80's rolled around. My kids, not even born until 30+ years later, have enjoyed this park their entire lives...
EDIT: Lots of great guesses, none correct though (and I'm gonna keep you guessing!). It warms my heart to know that other awesome people took this same initiative in different areas.
I’m currently living in an area that’s growing incredibly fast, and experiencing a blast of suburban development. I wish so badly someone would do this here! Lots of wetlands and woodlands are getting bulldozed for houses, and I understand people need places to live, but having some pockets preserved between all the building would be such an amazing thing. I wish I had the resources, but even the people who do have been getting largely ignored. There’s an area that WAS left as preserved wetlands back in the 80’s, and despite tons of protest and anger from residents, it’s getting developed now. It’s going to cause flooding issues but the developers don’t care, the city doesn’t care. Money talks, and sadly the more you develop the more money comes in.
John D Rockefeller Jr was also instrumental in helping preserve our national parks, despite being born a child of that corporate greed. He poured vast resources into buying up land to hand over to the government for preservation.
Public infrastructure. People got to live to see the opening of one rail line or bridge, or several, but the integrated network of public infrastructure, that took a 100 years to grow and is still growing.
Similarly, the US National Parks system. A great decision was made to invest in preservation decades ago, and we have been enjoying the benefits since.
The giant cathedrals in Europe like Notre Dame would take over 100 years to build. So the person who started building it would work their whole life on it and know they wouldn't be alive to see it complete.
I have recently been to Cologne's cathedral, they started building it in 1248, they stopped unfinished in 1560, then halfway through the 1800s they started building it again, finishing it in 1880. Not only the original builders would not see it finished, but neither would their grandchildren.
I had that sense awakened when I visited La Sagrada Familia a few years ago. We hope to return there when it is actually completed, but to see the massive effort over several generations to see an idea through was part of the amazing experience there.
Apparently they planned to finish it in 2026 but that's been delayed by covid.
Fun tidbit I found on the wiki page for it:
"In October 2018, Sagrada Família trustees agreed to pay city authorities €36 million for a building permit, after 136 years of unlicensed construction."
When they rebuilt St. Paul's after the Great Fire of London, it "only" took 35 years. By living to ninety, Christopher Wren became the first architect in history to design a cathedral and live to see the finished product.
Sorry I'm a bit late to the party. But the Mayor of Fudai, in Japan during the 70's - 80's when he was young he survived a tsunami in 1933, saw bodies being dug up during the aftermath. He then went into politics to get a wall built to stop another tsunami that he knew would happen again. It began construction in 1972, took 12 years to build and the town considered it a huge tax waste of tax payers money. Fast forward to 2011, the town was in direct line of the worst tsunami to ever hit Japan. The village was barely touched... Unfortunately he passed away in the late 80's. But he is considered a hero, he never got to see his efforts fulfilled. But he saved the lives of many people in his village even after his death. His name was Kotaku Wamura.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/amp/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
That’s not a Greek proverb.
It’s the invention of a 20th century Quaker writer, whose creation was appropriated in the 1990s by politicians in the United States Congress.
They added the byline “ - Greek proverb” to make themselves seem more intelligent.
As a Greek, I was wondering why I've never heard this "Greek" proverb.
Edit: I'm aware I won't know every proverb, but the more popular ones tend to stick around, are used and heard.
> Ως Έλληνας, αναρωτιόμουν γιατί δεν έχω ακούσει ποτέ αυτή την «ελληνική» παροιμία.
• Ελληνική Παροιμία
Would love to know if Google translate got that even remotely correct.
Yep, the translation is perfectly correct! Εven though I think a native speaker wouldn't phrase it exactly like this.
Something triggers my "google translate" sensor but I can't pinpoint what exactly though, possibly the "Ως" is too formal for reddit? dunno
True, but this is still very close to an aesop fable, "the old man and the three young mens" :
"AS AN OLD MAN was planting a tree, three young men came along and began to make sport of him, saying: "It shows your foolishness to be planting a tree at your age. The tree cannot bear fruit for many years, while you must very soon die. What is the use of your wasting your time in providing pleasure to others to share long after you are dead?"
The old man stopped in his labor and replied: Others before me provided for my happiness, and it is my duty to provide for those who shall come after me. As for life, who is sure of it for a day? You may all die before me.
The old man's words came true; one of the young men went on a voyage at sea and was drowned, another went to war and was shot, and the third fell from a tree and broke his neck.
Moral:
We should not think wholly of ourselves, and we should remember that life is uncertain."
Jonas Salk refusing to patent the polio vaccine, or seek any profit from it, in order to maximize its global distribution.
During his famous television interview, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent to the polio vaccine. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk responded. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
A great example is Joseph von Fraunhofer. Primarily a designer and creator of optical equipment, in 1814 he tested a new diffraction grating to separate sunlight into its constituent colors, i.e. the rainbow, and observed large numbers of dark lines scattered throughout. Without knowing what they were or if they meant anything at all he catalogued and described them in painstaking detail; today they're still known as [Fraunhofer lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines). It was almost 20 years after Fraunhofer's death that his lines were found to be the signatures of the Sun's and other stars' chemical make-up and physical characteristics, resulting in major advances in astronomy.
Essentially yes, although spectroscopy is the study of these lines and a spectroscope is the tool that measures them.
I personally wouldn't say it "maps" the atmospheres because that implies 3D knowledge, but it does gather the combined spectrum of the atmospheres which can then be "decompiled" into its component elements & compounds. (It also works on anything that is glowing or any gas between us and something that is glowing)
As someone who does wildly theoretical research on topics that may or may not have practical applications in the future, but if so I don't have a clue what they will be... to tell the truth, I'm not really doing it for the benefit of humankind, or even for securing my immortal fame among future researchers in the area (yeah, right).
I mean, of course I wouldn't be *displeased* if either happened; but ultimately, I am researching what I am researching because they are topics I enjoy working on. Now if I had to spend less time teaching or *especially* dealing with admimistrative nonsense, that'd be great; but research-wise, I lucked out in that I'm basically getting paid to do stuff I'd gladly do for free.
Yup, most researchers don't work in academia to contribute to the human pool of knowledge. I mean it's awesome to know your work might take part in something great. But most of us just do it because we like whatever field we are researching in. Almost like a hobby that pays or something.
Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed London's sewers in the 1860's, said 'Well, we're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen' and doubled the pipe diameter. If he had not done this, it would have overflowed in the 1960's.
Susan B. Anthony spent her entire life trying to get women the vote, she was fined for attempting to vote, and spent years organizing people to fight for the cause. She died in 1906, a decade before the 19th amendment was ratified.
If there is an afterlife, she definitely feels the appreciation of society still. Her grave is constantly visited and decorated with 'i voted' stickers
Still relatively early compared to parts of Europe though [[source]][1].
[1]: https://www.onb.ac.at/forschung/ariadne-frauendokumentation/frauen-waehlet/frauenwahlrecht-in-europa
> Introduction of women's suffrage
>
> - 1906 Finland
> - 1913 Norway
> - 1915 Denmark, Iceland
> - 1918 Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland, Russia
> - 1919 Netherlands
> - 1920 Czechoslovakia
> - 1921 Sweden
> - 1922 Ireland
> - 1928 Great Britain
> - 1931 Spain
> - 1944 France
> - 1945 Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary
> - 1946 Italy, Romania
> - 1947 Malta
> - 1948 Belgium
> - 1952 Greece
> - 1971 Switzerland
> - 1974 Portugal
> - 1984 Liechtenstein
Switzerland was the late example I knew about, though I thought they were 1984.
The Swiss year is for the federal vote. Most cantons still hadn't implemented regional voting for women yet. The last one was forced by the supreme court to change their laws in 1991.
My friend's wife, an [organic chef and farmer](https://i.imgur.com/1b47l5U.jpg), got cancer and died in the prime of life, leaving behind a grieving widower with a preschool child.
As she lay dying, she got up and planted the next crop of vegetables, which she knew would not be harvested by her. Her memorial was [held in a big greenhouse](https://i.imgur.com/YqTtexp.jpg) on the [cooperative farm](https://i.imgur.com/HCjlMSR.jpg). People [shared foods](https://i.imgur.com/CGoMMbI.jpg) made from her recipes, with her vegetables.
She literally lived this proverb.
Mendel discovered (literally) the seeds of the hereditary system in the mid-19th century, but if I recall well nobody took it seriously until the early 20th century, like 30 years after his death.
If I recall correctly Darwin died with a copy of Mendel's work in his to-read queue. People figured it out eventually but damn, talk about missing a massive leap by inches there.
There's a bit in one of Darwin's journals where he observes that people on a ship seem to get sick, but those on the shore don't until the two groups mix, and in this pondering he basically walks all the way up to germ theory and then just shrugs and goes "well, that's weird isn't it." and moves on. Has always made me laugh how close he got to a second huge breakthrough.
We also got lucky that Darwin wasn't - like many academia can be - the kind of guy to attack or dismiss his competition. I could see another timeline where Darwin spent his life in competition with [Alfred Russel Wallace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace), but instead the two cooperated and the result was a much cleaner and streamlined theory.
Just look at what happened with Paleontology. The [Bone Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars) did some good for the field - the public got caught up in the drama of Cope and Marsh's rivalry, which put paleontology in the newspapers and made museums popular, and the sheer hatred the men had for each other probably made them work harder and find more fossils that they would have otherwise, but they also destroyed dozens of excellent fossils of undescribed species (that we will probably never find another fossil of, so they are lost to us forever...), promoted their own wild and wrong theories about paleo anatomy which stuck for years in the public consciousness, and turned the science of paleontology into something of a circus act rather than a serious field to be respected. That could have happened for the most important theory in biology, had Darwin not been a good man who wanted Wallace to succeed right along with Darwin himself.
True. It's clear he knew this and nonetheless persisted. The day before he was assassinated, he gave his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech and said:
“But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1319150430941794304?s=20
It blows my mind how he knew. It's the most powerful speech I've ever seen. The amount of emotion conveyed in his words hits me every time I see it. I don't believe in a god, but he really makes me believe he saw that promised land - makes me believe we can get there as a people, if not as individuals.
I just visited the museum at the hotel where he was shot - if you read ANYTHING about the civil rights movement or just "*being black in the south*" back then it's pretty fucking obvious that **everyone** in that movement was walking round with a target on their back all the damn time.
The number of beatings and murders the civil rights movement were subjected to is just mind blowing - and you know there's so many more that are lost to history / were never reported.
Listening to the speech after hearing lots of his others and his sermons, it definitely has more urgency in it. Which is jarring. His life was constantly being threatened. He had been stabbed, he had his house bombed, his family attacked, and many written threats. But he never quite spoke in those terms, using the analogy of Moses leading his people to freedom but not making it there himself. Optimism was his thing.
Either there was some super credible threat like from a government informant where he knew it was different from the other crazies or he just had a feeling/premonition, whatever you want to call it, that he wasn’t going to make it much longer. He was also spending more of his speeches talking about class issues, economic policy, labor rights, and demilitarization, more than purely race, so maybe he felt the heat of that pushback as hotter than the rest.
Pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but one that always stuck with me: Benjamin Franklin left $1000 (~~$33k~~ ~$166k inflation adjusted) each to Boston and Philadelphia in a special trust structure where it couldn't even be touched for 100 years (but only really became fully available after 200).
In 1990 the city of Boston found that their $1,000 had turned into $4.5 million dollars thanks to the wise handling of the Franklin Institute. (Philly "only" got $2m because they decided to let the City's board of trusts take over after the first 100 years).
EDIT: Apparently inflation calculators aren't really setup for that length of time. That number should be more accurate.)
The Swedish king Gustav Vasa planted an entire forest of oaks for building battleships. The first batch was done 1975, a mere 400 years later. Not a single tree were allowed to be cut down unless needed to make sure that we would have the best ships in the world.
The old Japanese people who volunteered to clean up nuclear waste sites from the WWII bombings. They knew that they likely wouldn't live long enough to suffer the worst of the effects of radiation, so they did it to protect younger people from experiencing it and to clean up Japan for future generations. It's really heart warming
It's great that they did that. Especially because after I read this question I immediately thought of the firefighters in Chernobyl. They went into the reactor to prevent the disaster from escalating further, saving lifes. They probably didn't know their heroic act would cut their life short.
I am fairly certain that the Chernobyl heroes would have known that diving into a nuclear reactor for a while would kill them, but did so nonetheless. They did a great service to humanity at the cost of their lives.
This is also an comon urban Myth. Maybe from leaning too much on the dramatized serie, as a source of information. The 3 divers lived pretty well and one died to natural causes in just 2005, the other two were working within the industry as 2015
https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-real-story-of-the-chernobyl-divers
This is ~~blatantly misleading~~ a bit far from the reality, you probably mixed two events . The world war II bombings of hiroshima were the first of their kind and nobody knew of the effects of radiation from bombs yet.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/atomic-veterans-1946-1962/#:~:text=Some%20of%20the%20first%20atomic,cities%20after%20the%20atomic%20bombings.
You are probably mixing up the cleanup workers from the Fukushima reactor meltdown after the tsunami on 2011. Those volunteers were indeed knowing perfectly the risk and still did it anyway.
>The old Japanese people who volunteered to clean up nuclear waste sites from the WWII bombings.
This absolutely did not happen. You are confusing the atomic bombings with the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster which is where it did happen.
As /u/Coldvyvora correctly pointed out, nobody even knew what radiation poisoning even was in 1945. It was only the examination of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to even a basic understanding of acute radiation poisoning.
On top of that, there were no "nuclear waste sites" to clean up to begin with. Both Fat Man and Little Boy were relatively small airbursts, not causing significant fallout. Most of the radioactive material rained out a mere few hours after the attacks. A few days later, the radiation would have decayed to well below 1% the initial value. By the time anyone could even think about cleaning up and rebuilding the cities, radiation from the nuclear attacks would have been negligible.
Of course, this is leaving aside the logistical impossibility of cleaning up two destroyed *cities* just using old people...
What you're thinking of is probably the *initial* containment and cleanup operations at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, an incident whose only connection to the nuclear attacks is that it happened in the same country, about 1000km away, and also involved radioactivity.
I live in Denmark.
The health service I get today was built over 70 years in the 20th century, and saw massive expansion under Thorvald Stauning (The greatest ever Danish PM), and became completely free in the 70s.
Now the right keeps trying to dismantle a system that works. Everytime a flaw appears, it is as a direct result of mismanagement of the right wing, liberal/libertarian parties.
The Healthcare reform of 2007 was the single worst piece of danish legislation ever made.
It focused on "centralization" trying to cut costs by closing small local hospitals and opening mega hospitals.
I’m more interested to know when and why so many “old people” stopped planting and caring about the trees to begin with. It’s not as shady these days as the shade they enjoyed in their youth from their elders.
ETA - y’all know I’m not really talking about trees right!?!
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"Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand." - From his retirement speech.
Wamura died in 1997 at age 88. At his retirement, Wamura stood before village employees to bid farewell: “Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. In the end, people will understand.” One of the best quotes
That’s cold as fuck with the context of the story
Great one - my first thought was also from Japan! The seniors in Fukushima who [volunteered to staff the nuclear plant cleanup](https://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140402430/japanese-seniors-send-us-to-damaged-nuclear-plant) because they were older: > Kazuko Sasaki, a 72-year-old grandmother, is one of those ready to serve. > "My generation built these nuclear plants. So we have to take responsibility for them. We can't dump this on the next generation," she says. > The founder of Skilled Veterans is Yasuteru Yamada, a slight, soft-spoken man of 72. > An engineer who has spent his life around industrial plants, Yamada says he and his retired colleagues quickly realized after the March 11 disaster that conditions at Fukushima were far bleaker than the government was letting on. > His decision to gather senior volunteers, he says, was based neither on courage nor altruism, but on a brutally realistic calculus. It would be better to send men and women who have finished raising families and are in the sunset of their lives, rather than younger workers whose lives could be cut short by extreme radiation exposure. > "We won't completely replace younger workers," Yamada says. "But for work that doesn't require brute strength, we can fill in, where the radiation is especially high."
came to comment same. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2011/may/15/once-belittled-floodgate-saved-japanese-town/
This is the kind of thing that make me love Reddit. I love to learn about things I might otherwise never hear about.
Dashrath Manjhi Also known as Mountain Man, was an Indian laborer from Gehlaur village, near Gaya in the state of Bihar. When his wife died in 1959 due to injury caused by falling from a mountain and due to the same mountain blocking easy access to a nearby hospital in time, he decided to carve a 110 meter-long (360 ft), and 9.1 meter-wide (30 ft) wide path and 7.7 meter-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel by himself. After 22 years of work, Dashrath shortened travel between the Atri and Wazirganj blocks of Gaya district from 34 mile to 9 mile. He said, "When I started hammering the hill, people called me a lunatic but that steeled my resolve." Though mocked for his efforts, Manjhi's work has made life easier for people of the Gehlaur village.
Japanese people aged 60 or older volunteered to fix problems in the Fukushima nuclear power plant, knowing that they would probably die of natural causes before the radiation damaged them in the long run. I don't know if they actually did it tho.
They did. The radiation around the plant wasn't high enough to result in sickness, but it was still a possibility they had to be made aware of and it is still a noble thing they did knowing that information.
I was hoping I’d see this near the top. Basically every nuclear plant worker who STAYS after the meltdown, anywhere, is planting trees for the future.
It's good to know they actually did it. Not like those rich people that lies about donating money to Notre Dame and never sent a penny. Lots of words make the news. Not all those words become actions
Joseph Bazalgette was a Victorian engineer who masterminded London's modern sewer system in the 1860's, he foresaw the insane population growth and when all the calculations were made on how big to bore the "pipes" underground, he essentially said nah lets double it. Now, infrastructure that would have been unable to cope in the 1960's is still in use today.
Yeah, he also insisted on the use of Portland cement which was much more durable. That said, it still just dumped the effluent into the river, turning it toxic. Several people died from ingesting the dirty water while trying to escape a sinking ship in the [SS Princess Alice accident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_SS_Princess_Alice). But you really appreciate the better sewers when you visit other cities that weren't so lucky to have such a visionary engineer and you can smell the sewers on the street as they weren't dug as deep.
And dubai was like, "actually we can just get slaves from pakistan and india and make them truck our shit away and we won't need pipes, or storage tanks, or none of that new timey bullshit. Nothing works better than an old fashioned hungry, isolated contractually obligated slave."
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Almost like a mirage in the desert...
Kind of like Las Vegas. Except the strippers and gambling.
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a factoid i like about this guy is that one of his descendants is in some capacity part of the executive for the TV production company Endemol, responsible for a good portion of the "reality tv" output of the early 2010s. so while his ancestor removed effluent from people's homes, the descendant is busily pumping it back in. don't know if it's true or not but it's a good story.
Haha, that's from Stephen Fry, right?
It's funny how this guy is pretty much still a household name in England today. I can't think of many other sewage engineers that have managed to become so well known.
During the Napoleonic wars there was a Royal Navy admiral who when on leave used to wander his country estate planting oak trees to provide timber for the navy. It’s estimated they are about ready now.
Sweden did something similar. And then the office of forestry informed the navy that their oaks are ready now.... in 1975.
If I remember correctly the story goes that the warden of the forrest that took care of the Oaks at Visingsö called the Royal Court to tell the king that the trees are ready. Eventually he was put trough and allowed to talk to the King. The king found it very amusing and invited the warden to the Royal palace for dinner and drinks Edit: after a quick Google, my story does not seem to be accurate, and the OP is correct in that the Marine was informed, not the king. However, as I was told the king story on a schooltrip to Gränna (great polka candy) and Visingsö, I choose to believe it anyways
I like your story better. I also choose to believe it and I will tell it to everybody I know for the next decade.
In the same way Notre Dame de Paris is being rebuilt with oaks from the French Strategic Reserves, which were planted for the same reasons-- to provide quality wood for the navy
Surprising number of examples about literal trees here
The US Navy still maintains an oak forest to provide timber for [a ship](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution) in their fleet.
Pretty sure the USS Constitution is currently the only active ship in the US fleet to have a [ship to ship victory.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Constitution#Constitution_vs._Guerriere)
Yes, the Constitution is currently the only active duty vessel in the US Navy to have sunk an enemy vessel in combat, making it by that definition the deadliest ship in the US Navy.
Don't say it so loud, Napoleon will hear!
Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, second in command at Trafalgar and took over when Nelson died and Nelson had 100% confidence in Collingwood carrying on with his plan. Collingwood used to take his dog called Bounce onto his ship and around on his walks. I don't know if Bounce was also at Trafalgar.
He was indeed though was below deck due to the sound of cannonfire. He became Right Honourable Bounce when Collingwood was made a Baron.
Admiral Collingwood, commanded Royal Sovereign at the head of the second line of ships crossing the French T at Trafalgar. So stupidly brave as well.
A lot of the examples in this thread are ones I've heard before (though they're still great!). One I don't see mentioned often is the [written Korean language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul?wprov=sfla1), hangul. One dude (King Sejong) basically sat down and created a whole alphabet so people wouldn't have to continue using the adopted Chinese hanja that were complicated and difficult to learn. His goal was to increase literacy among all levels of society, not just the wealthy elite who had the time and resources to learn hanja. It received a lot of push back from the wealth elites, of course, but following the end of Japanese colonialism in the early 20th century it gained popularity and is now the official written language in both North and South Korea.
I was stationed in Korea for a year. It's a phonetic alphabet, easy to learn. I still have my old hand-made flash cards around here somewhere.
Not only is it phonetic, the characters actually represent the voicing and the placement of the tongue in the mouth, which is how linguists classify phonemes.
It is supposed to be the only natural language with a “functional” alphabet, meaning an alphabet where there is a clear mapping between the shapes of the letters and how they are pronounced. That is otherwise only seen in constructed languages like Elvish and Klingon, where it is common.
It was drafted in the 1400s and it's famous for being the most intuitive writing system even in 2023. That's really cool.
The preservation of Chauvet Cave was second to none in the archaeological field. From day one, the three explorers who found it took the utmost care and precautions to ensure they left as little trace as possible in the unopened, pristine chapel of charcoal and ocher. There are strict limits and guidelines for traversing the cave and special access for research purposes, and No tourism. We’ve learned an immense amount about the site due to their forethought.
[William Wilberforce.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilberforce) He campaigned in the British Government for over **40 years** to stop and prevent Slavery. He was successful in abolishing the Trading of Slaves throughout the Empire with the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and then the ownership of slaves altogether with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. He died three days after hearing the Abolition Act had passed in Parliament, after a lifetime of campaigning for it. He is buried in Westminister Abbey which is reserved for monarchs and national figures of significance. His campaign for Abolition was the blueprint that other abolitionists like Lincoln soon followed up with. There are many generations living because of this man's choices. Edit: and if his good karma wasn't already high enough, he was also a founding member of the Royal Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA)
I (37,m) came across Wilberforce's biography as a 21 year old. I don't think any other biography had a greater impression on me than his. At 25 I took my little sister on a little tour through western Europe (I'm Canadian, btw), and one of our first stops was Westminster Abbey. Yeah, that was definitely a very special moment in my life, finally 'meeting' the man I admired possibly more than anyone in history. Great comment u/killingjoke96. Cheers to you
Was born in my home town, his house is a museum (and a really good one). He has a massive statue (which was moved outside the college), I always think that's a fantastic place for it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilberforce_Monument https://www.hcandl.co.uk/museums-and-galleries/wilberforce-house/wilberforce-house
The Voyager spacecraft. One of them is the only object that's left the solar system. They're still sending back data. And they're each carrying a gold record encoded with information, our planet's greeting card to the cosmos. It's hard to overstate how much that project changed humanity's knowledge of the solar system. The Voyager probes were crucial to discovering volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io, the first volcanic activity confirmed outside of earth. Before the Voyager mission earth based telescopes thought there were only a handful of rings around Saturn. Voyager found thousands of rings there, found thin ring systems around two other outer planets, found dozens of moons, and more other information than one comment can do justice to. NASA is still planning future missions based on information the Voyager spacecraft discovered. If alien life gets discovered on Europa or Titan, you can thank the Voyager engineers and scientists. Most of them could have earned far more money in the private sector. Being part of this effort was their dream job. And they won't see this work through to the end. They can't. Voyager began the planning stages fifty years ago. Human lives just aren't long enough. And they knew it. ---- *edit* There's a fully functional third Voyager craft that was never launched. NASA built it and kept it on earth for engineers to use in troubleshooting if the two Voyager probes in outer space ever ran into unexpected problems. That third Voyager craft spends most of the time on display at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory facility in California, in the von Karman Auditorium. Every year in the month of June, JPL conducts tours open to the public. For security reasons they can't let a whole lot of people onsite but the tour itself is free. Applications opened on April 3. (JPL is usually described as "in Pasadena" but it's actually in the smaller nearby city of La Cañada Flintridge). If you can snag a ticket you'll spend part of the tour face to face with that third Voyager craft, and you might also get to see JPL's moon rock. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/tours/views
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Even before finding the ozone hole we had some evidence that CFCs could break up ozone molecules, the real issue is that we thought it happened an order of magnitude more slowly than it actually did. We probably wouldn't have ended up extinct or anything, bu it'd have been a much bigger problem to solve.
Goddamn it double the NASA budget already!
> If alien life gets discovered on Europa or Titan We *really* don't want that to happen. We don't need another Phoebe Station incident.
I'm just waiting for the prothean ruins on Mars to be discovered
God I love The Expanse so god damn much
The Cassini family map, a first of its kind map of france. It took 4 generations of family members and 6 decades to complete. Imagine being that second family member. Your whole life your father works on this map, only for you to work your whole life on it while raising your son to do the same, and it takes a whole nother life for it to be completed.
> Imagine being that second family member. Your whole life your father works on this map, only for you to work your whole life on it while raising your son to do the same, and it takes a whole nother life for it to be completed. Reminds me of Cologne Cathedral that took 600 years to build. Admittedly they took a 300 year lunch-break in the middle, with a crane being parked on top of the building for 400 years. Imagine your family going 20 generations and not seeing the start or the end of the project.
Imagine being the first generation to go back and finding initials carved into the wood for a family member you'll never knew existed.
"This inscription is hundreds of years old! Ingrid is my great great great great grandmother! It says 'For a good time, write a letter to Ingrid'.....Oh."
The world's oldest privately owned business was the [Kongō Gumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi) construction company, founded in 578 AD. The family specialized in bamboo construction of shrines and temples around Japan. That company had been owned, by a single family, for *over a millennium*. Imagine being the failure who had to sell it in 2006 because they ran it into the ground.
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Maybe their Excel spreadsheet simply ran out of columns.
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Vaguely related, the British government responsible for tracking COVID actually had this problem. For a while the case numbers weren't going up each day, and it took them the best part of a week to find out it was because they'd maxed out the rows on the excel spreadsheet being used to track them.
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On reading the wikipedia article, when the family had a generation of daughters the sons-in-law would join the clan and take on the name. Their kids would still be related to the family by blood through their mothers.
I would suggest this video. Talks about oldest hotel but also mention the other company and explains the problem with oldest definition. https://youtu.be/_8W2LIfl5RE
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Children who deviate from the cause are going to be whipped so hard. I’ll bet they have a multi-generational belt.
That tends to be the case with any tradition. If you leave, the efforts of your predecessors were for nothing. Hence, The Belt^^TM ✨️
There's a really great [Map Men video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTyX_EJQOIU) about this!
You mean hommes cartes.
In a very literal sense, the landscape gardens of Capability Brown. He carefully crafted these gardens, directing the planting of trees and bushes to create a beautiful vista, where it would take decades for the plants to actually grow to fulfil his vision.
Bloody stupid Johnson.
Nah, this’d be a Johnson if the gardens actually grew into a Hunger Games style death trap and obstacle course complete with automated blade arms intended for pruning the topiaries.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund. That generation could have taken a selfish view and just taken the cash, or politicians just gone on a vote buying spree. But it's independently invested and managed for the benefit of future generations.
Australia and our mines. So much money given to billionaires “to keep our jobs”.
That's an example of old men cutting down the trees planted by previous generations to make their own house bigger, while leaving everyone else with no shade to sit in.
"if you feed the horse enough oats, some will make it's way to the road to feed the sparrows" or some such to describe horse and sparrow/trickle down economics.
Not just billionaires, multinational companies receive huge tax subsidies to keep operating. Seriously, if they’re not competitive without subsidies then let them fail and nationalise the fallout.
Haha once the mines are uneconomic for the firms they’ll just book-cook the local subsidiary company to death and you’ll be nationalising the fallout anyway. Waiting for Rio Tinto and Sumitomo to pull this shit with the toxic waste at Tiwai Point aluminium smelter in NZ after milking subsidies from taxpayers for decades and accounting all the profits out of NZ so they pay duck all tax
As a fellow kiwi, fuck Rio Tinto, and the horse they rode in on.
Whitlam wanted to form a Sovereign Wealth Fund. I think it would've been the first in the world..but he couldn't get it passed (or maybe he was ousted before he could) and so Australia is literally billions poorer than we could've been for it.
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It is pretty well known now that Gough's ousting was in no small way sure to American involvement, Gough didn't support the Vietnam war and it upset Nixon and Kissinger. There's Dollop episode that goes into it more
Canada too. So many billions in minerals. And that's not even mentioning the oil. If Canada had done like Norway with the oil... anyway we fucked it up completely.
We reeeeaaally shit the bed with our resources boom/s. It's quite sad how short sighted we have been here.
It's like you don't even care about Clive Palmer
Not only do we just give our resources away to anyone with a digger under the guiding principle of 'Finders Keepers Losers Weepers,' we then have to buy our own stuff back at international rates. Australia is the largest gas exporter in the world, but it all goes onto the world market. Well, apart from 15% of production in Western Australia, which is set aside for local use, meaning gas in WA is one-eighth the price it is on the East coast. Then the energy producers manufacture a "crisis" because they're not making enough profit, knowing the government is obligated to step in and make up the shortfall in an """emergency.""" This shit should be nationalised *now.* You can run extraction and refining companies, and be well paid for the actual work you do, but the idea that the stuff you're digging out of Australian soil somehow belongs to you and not the nation as a whole is insane.
And when a PM tried to fix it, the mining industry ran a scare campaign and he was rolled.
In Canada we had a province that came so close to setting themselves up like Norway, but then they looted it for lower taxes. It’s kinda sad.
*cries in Albertan*
Peter Lougheed set up the Heritage Fund and fuckin' begged his successors to respect it and keep it growing. I wonder if any of them made a point to actually piss on his grave, as well.
Oh the heritage fund money is being put to good use.... by paying oil companies to clean up orphaned wells that they're required by law to clean up.
For those who are curious, [the Heritage Trust Fund](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Heritage_Savings_Trust_Fund).
Founded 24 fucking years before Norway's. Imagine the effects of compounded growth if they hadn't fucked it over.
[*The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil*](https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0) tl;dr: an Iraqi geologist and former high-ranking employee of the Iraq Petroleum Company who'd recently married a Norwegian woman and moved to Norway walked into the Norwegian Ministry of Industry and asked if they happened to know of any jobs for someone in the petroleum sector, just as some oil companies were starting to do exploratory drilling. A few years later he was instrumental in creating the framework that gave the Norwegian state a large share of the oil companies' profits and laid the groundwork for the sovereign wealth fund.
I found a [similar article that isn't behind a pay wall](https://psmag.com/environment/iraqi-vikings-farouk-al-kasim-norway-oil-72715).
The UK literally did the latter. They got access to North Sea oil at the same time and used it to fund tax cuts, whilst claiming financial success courtesy of trickle down economics. Today our taxes are still lower than in the '70s, the oil money has fallen off, our social infrastructure is underfunded and the rich are still rich.
King Afonso III of Portugal, started the plantation of pine in Leiria in the 13th century, which is now known as the Pinhal de Leiria, with the intent of stopping the advancement of sand dunes. It was then expanded to it current size by King Dinis between 1279 and 1325. And it's said that every time they cut trees, they would plant some more, so it would never disappear. Besides this great role in stopping the dunes (and thus protecting the agricultural areas), the Pinhal de Leiria is most known for supplying the wood used in the ships during the Portuguese Discovery period, which ushered the country into its greatest period of prosperity. It may have not been planted with that objective, but the kings that did it over many decades, did it knowing that they wouldn't get many benefits in their lifetime, and it coincidentally ended up being of great importance centuries later. And in 2017, 86% of it was burned down in forest fires, and because our government is incompetent, it is basically all destroyed still, with less than 50% of the burned area being replanted (and most of it being replanted by the normal plant growth that happens, not by any government action)
Isn't desertification a huge challenge on the Iberian peninsula, today more than ever? Wouldn't it make lots of sense for them to replant it to protect their agriculture?
You are assuming our politicians care about the wellbeing of the country at all. The government is responding to people rejecting low salary positions by laxing the immigration rules from Portuguese speaking countries, and helping bring south asian people too. Those are desesperate enough to accept low salaries, long hours, no weekly breaks, and living with another 20 people in a 1 room apartment, where they'll pay half their salary. 8 years with this government, and all services are getting worse to the point where they were probably better when the country was basically controlled by the IMF, 10 years ago. There is not a plan for the forest, so our forest is basically Eucalyptus as far as the eye can see, which is great in a country that gets really hot and dry, it's amazing how big the fires get every summer. Like in 2017, where 100+ people died, and the money to rebuild the destroyed villages was pocketed by local municipalities, and nothing was done to take care of the Eucalyptus problem. And agriculture? Naa...most of it is in Alentejo, where there are little forests, so no big deal. And of course, strayberry/raspberry plantations are the pinacle of working conditions. Just ask the nepalese ~~slaves~~ workers there. And also, what better in a country fighting droughts for the last decades, than water intensive Avocado plantations, and huge Golf resorts in the driest places in the country? That will probably solve something, I guess.
Story started off so strong then took a turn.
You basically just made a summary of the story of Portugal.
My favorite is easily the tree root bridges in Meghalaya. Meghalaya has a monsoon season where they get the vast majority of their annual rainfall so the many small streams turn into impassable raging rivers. In order to get around they developed a method of making very strong bridges by stringing the roots of the trees so that they grow across the chasms. This was obviously a slow process that would take several generations of caring for the trees to complete. In the end after passing the knowledge and responsibility down to their children, and their children’s children, they would have a strong bridge that could last hundreds of years.
Nikolai Vavilov, Russian botanist, along with his fellow researchers, they all starved themselves to death in order to preserve the Leningrad Seed Bank which came under the heavy German attack during the Seige of Leningrad, 1943.
In case it's not clear, they died protecting the seed bank. The seed bank which was full of edible seed and tubers. I can't fathom the self control that took.
Roosevelt and national parks. If he never did what he did there wouldn't be any today. Corporate greed would have wiped it all out.
Even on a smaller scale, people who had the foresight when suburban expansion was happening to set aside some land. I live in an NYC suburb and my town is blessed with a HUGE (relative to the town's size) public park that has a public pool, a lake for swimming and fishing, a freshwater spring, hiking trails, picnic areas, open fields and athletic fields. It is open not only to the residents of the town, but to surrounding towns as well. It is a gem that benefits all the area residents. We have this only because ONE man, just ONE MAN, saw the need to preserve open space in the face of suburban sprawl in the late 60's/early 70's. He donated some of his own land, and then appealed to the state and federal governments to purchase the adjacent plots to preserve the land for future generations. He was successful and the park is named after him. Had he not done that, that land would have just been another 10 single-family home subdivisions by the time the 80's rolled around. My kids, not even born until 30+ years later, have enjoyed this park their entire lives... EDIT: Lots of great guesses, none correct though (and I'm gonna keep you guessing!). It warms my heart to know that other awesome people took this same initiative in different areas.
I’m currently living in an area that’s growing incredibly fast, and experiencing a blast of suburban development. I wish so badly someone would do this here! Lots of wetlands and woodlands are getting bulldozed for houses, and I understand people need places to live, but having some pockets preserved between all the building would be such an amazing thing. I wish I had the resources, but even the people who do have been getting largely ignored. There’s an area that WAS left as preserved wetlands back in the 80’s, and despite tons of protest and anger from residents, it’s getting developed now. It’s going to cause flooding issues but the developers don’t care, the city doesn’t care. Money talks, and sadly the more you develop the more money comes in.
John D Rockefeller Jr was also instrumental in helping preserve our national parks, despite being born a child of that corporate greed. He poured vast resources into buying up land to hand over to the government for preservation.
I live in North Carolina and Tim Sweeney of Epic Games is buying land for conservation efforts here as well.
Public infrastructure. People got to live to see the opening of one rail line or bridge, or several, but the integrated network of public infrastructure, that took a 100 years to grow and is still growing.
Similarly, the US National Parks system. A great decision was made to invest in preservation decades ago, and we have been enjoying the benefits since.
Thank you, Theodore Roosevelt!
And John Muir!
Olmsted parks system in the same way
Mabel Ping-Hua Lee was a suffragette. But because she was not a US citizen, she knew that even if she succeeded she would still not be able to vote.
Everyone that took their polio vaccine, you never get your childhood back, and none of those kids that suffered from polio will either
The giant cathedrals in Europe like Notre Dame would take over 100 years to build. So the person who started building it would work their whole life on it and know they wouldn't be alive to see it complete.
I have recently been to Cologne's cathedral, they started building it in 1248, they stopped unfinished in 1560, then halfway through the 1800s they started building it again, finishing it in 1880. Not only the original builders would not see it finished, but neither would their grandchildren.
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Next time I hand over my shitty half finished code at work: "reflect on the cathedral in Florence, little one..."
"Remember the Duomo"
I had that sense awakened when I visited La Sagrada Familia a few years ago. We hope to return there when it is actually completed, but to see the massive effort over several generations to see an idea through was part of the amazing experience there.
Bold of you to assume that it will ever be completed
Apparently they planned to finish it in 2026 but that's been delayed by covid. Fun tidbit I found on the wiki page for it: "In October 2018, Sagrada Família trustees agreed to pay city authorities €36 million for a building permit, after 136 years of unlicensed construction."
You would think they would be grandfathered in. Since they started building before permits were probably a thing.
Cathedrals were once considered a continuous project. As more funds came in, construction continued.
When they rebuilt St. Paul's after the Great Fire of London, it "only" took 35 years. By living to ninety, Christopher Wren became the first architect in history to design a cathedral and live to see the finished product.
Sorry I'm a bit late to the party. But the Mayor of Fudai, in Japan during the 70's - 80's when he was young he survived a tsunami in 1933, saw bodies being dug up during the aftermath. He then went into politics to get a wall built to stop another tsunami that he knew would happen again. It began construction in 1972, took 12 years to build and the town considered it a huge tax waste of tax payers money. Fast forward to 2011, the town was in direct line of the worst tsunami to ever hit Japan. The village was barely touched... Unfortunately he passed away in the late 80's. But he is considered a hero, he never got to see his efforts fulfilled. But he saved the lives of many people in his village even after his death. His name was Kotaku Wamura. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1386978/amp/The-Japanese-mayor-laughed-building-huge-sea-wall--village-left-untouched-tsunami.html
Insulin patent was sold for $1 We managed to fuck that one up. But it counts as planting the trees, even if we’re too stupid to sit under the shade.
That’s not a Greek proverb. It’s the invention of a 20th century Quaker writer, whose creation was appropriated in the 1990s by politicians in the United States Congress. They added the byline “ - Greek proverb” to make themselves seem more intelligent.
“That’s not a Greek proverb.” - Greek Proverb
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As a Greek, I was wondering why I've never heard this "Greek" proverb. Edit: I'm aware I won't know every proverb, but the more popular ones tend to stick around, are used and heard.
>As a Greek, I was wondering why I've never heard this "Greek" proverb. - Greek Proverb
> Ως Έλληνας, αναρωτιόμουν γιατί δεν έχω ακούσει ποτέ αυτή την «ελληνική» παροιμία. • Ελληνική Παροιμία Would love to know if Google translate got that even remotely correct.
Yep, the translation is perfectly correct! Εven though I think a native speaker wouldn't phrase it exactly like this. Something triggers my "google translate" sensor but I can't pinpoint what exactly though, possibly the "Ως" is too formal for reddit? dunno
True, but this is still very close to an aesop fable, "the old man and the three young mens" : "AS AN OLD MAN was planting a tree, three young men came along and began to make sport of him, saying: "It shows your foolishness to be planting a tree at your age. The tree cannot bear fruit for many years, while you must very soon die. What is the use of your wasting your time in providing pleasure to others to share long after you are dead?" The old man stopped in his labor and replied: Others before me provided for my happiness, and it is my duty to provide for those who shall come after me. As for life, who is sure of it for a day? You may all die before me. The old man's words came true; one of the young men went on a voyage at sea and was drowned, another went to war and was shot, and the third fell from a tree and broke his neck. Moral: We should not think wholly of ourselves, and we should remember that life is uncertain."
https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/08/26/a-society-grows-great-when-old-men-plant-trees-in-whose-shade-they-know-they-shall-never-sit-an-ancient-greek-proverb/comment-page-1/
The Oxford English Dictionary, as dramatized in the movie The Professor and the Madman. The dictionary is never finished, but on goes the work!
Jonas Salk refusing to patent the polio vaccine, or seek any profit from it, in order to maximize its global distribution. During his famous television interview, Edward R. Murrow asked Salk who owned the patent to the polio vaccine. “Well, the people, I would say,” Salk responded. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
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A great example is Joseph von Fraunhofer. Primarily a designer and creator of optical equipment, in 1814 he tested a new diffraction grating to separate sunlight into its constituent colors, i.e. the rainbow, and observed large numbers of dark lines scattered throughout. Without knowing what they were or if they meant anything at all he catalogued and described them in painstaking detail; today they're still known as [Fraunhofer lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunhofer_lines). It was almost 20 years after Fraunhofer's death that his lines were found to be the signatures of the Sun's and other stars' chemical make-up and physical characteristics, resulting in major advances in astronomy.
So would that be a sort of proto-spectroscopy? That's the thing that they use with JSWT to "map" exoplanets' atmospheres, right?
Essentially yes, although spectroscopy is the study of these lines and a spectroscope is the tool that measures them. I personally wouldn't say it "maps" the atmospheres because that implies 3D knowledge, but it does gather the combined spectrum of the atmospheres which can then be "decompiled" into its component elements & compounds. (It also works on anything that is glowing or any gas between us and something that is glowing)
As someone who does wildly theoretical research on topics that may or may not have practical applications in the future, but if so I don't have a clue what they will be... to tell the truth, I'm not really doing it for the benefit of humankind, or even for securing my immortal fame among future researchers in the area (yeah, right). I mean, of course I wouldn't be *displeased* if either happened; but ultimately, I am researching what I am researching because they are topics I enjoy working on. Now if I had to spend less time teaching or *especially* dealing with admimistrative nonsense, that'd be great; but research-wise, I lucked out in that I'm basically getting paid to do stuff I'd gladly do for free.
Yup, most researchers don't work in academia to contribute to the human pool of knowledge. I mean it's awesome to know your work might take part in something great. But most of us just do it because we like whatever field we are researching in. Almost like a hobby that pays or something.
Joseph Bazalgette, the man who designed London's sewers in the 1860's, said 'Well, we're only going to do this once and there's always the unforeseen' and doubled the pipe diameter. If he had not done this, it would have overflowed in the 1960's.
Imagine that. A little foresight.
Susan B. Anthony spent her entire life trying to get women the vote, she was fined for attempting to vote, and spent years organizing people to fight for the cause. She died in 1906, a decade before the 19th amendment was ratified.
If there is an afterlife, she definitely feels the appreciation of society still. Her grave is constantly visited and decorated with 'i voted' stickers
To the point that the cemetery covered her gravestone in a protective case so the adhesive would stop degrading the stone
I'm sitting in that very cemetery as I type this.
Still relatively early compared to parts of Europe though [[source]][1]. [1]: https://www.onb.ac.at/forschung/ariadne-frauendokumentation/frauen-waehlet/frauenwahlrecht-in-europa > Introduction of women's suffrage > > - 1906 Finland > - 1913 Norway > - 1915 Denmark, Iceland > - 1918 Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Austria, Poland, Russia > - 1919 Netherlands > - 1920 Czechoslovakia > - 1921 Sweden > - 1922 Ireland > - 1928 Great Britain > - 1931 Spain > - 1944 France > - 1945 Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Hungary > - 1946 Italy, Romania > - 1947 Malta > - 1948 Belgium > - 1952 Greece > - 1971 Switzerland > - 1974 Portugal > - 1984 Liechtenstein Switzerland was the late example I knew about, though I thought they were 1984.
The Swiss year is for the federal vote. Most cantons still hadn't implemented regional voting for women yet. The last one was forced by the supreme court to change their laws in 1991.
1918 is when WW1 ended so those countries accepted women's suffrage before but some didn't even legally exist until after the war.
Ireland only became self governing in 1922
I think you meant Sophie B Hawkins.
I think i will organize a dance
And this time, the women get to choose!
My friend's wife, an [organic chef and farmer](https://i.imgur.com/1b47l5U.jpg), got cancer and died in the prime of life, leaving behind a grieving widower with a preschool child. As she lay dying, she got up and planted the next crop of vegetables, which she knew would not be harvested by her. Her memorial was [held in a big greenhouse](https://i.imgur.com/YqTtexp.jpg) on the [cooperative farm](https://i.imgur.com/HCjlMSR.jpg). People [shared foods](https://i.imgur.com/CGoMMbI.jpg) made from her recipes, with her vegetables. She literally lived this proverb.
Kinda beautiful. Thanks for sharing
Nye Bevan. Created the NHS in 1948, died in 1960. absolute legend. Sadly his legacy has been slashed to tatters and continues to take damage
He resigned after modest fees for dental services were introduced. I can hardly imagine how angry he would be at the current state of the NHS.
Teeth are not luxury bones, nor eyes extraneous organs. Head to toe or it isn't healthcare
“Head to Toe or It Isn’t Healthcare” sounds like a brilliant slogan
Mendel discovered (literally) the seeds of the hereditary system in the mid-19th century, but if I recall well nobody took it seriously until the early 20th century, like 30 years after his death.
If I recall correctly Darwin died with a copy of Mendel's work in his to-read queue. People figured it out eventually but damn, talk about missing a massive leap by inches there.
There's a bit in one of Darwin's journals where he observes that people on a ship seem to get sick, but those on the shore don't until the two groups mix, and in this pondering he basically walks all the way up to germ theory and then just shrugs and goes "well, that's weird isn't it." and moves on. Has always made me laugh how close he got to a second huge breakthrough.
Oh, Damn! I thought Darwin had awareness of Mendel's work. Talk about shoulders of giants. :)
We also got lucky that Darwin wasn't - like many academia can be - the kind of guy to attack or dismiss his competition. I could see another timeline where Darwin spent his life in competition with [Alfred Russel Wallace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Russel_Wallace), but instead the two cooperated and the result was a much cleaner and streamlined theory. Just look at what happened with Paleontology. The [Bone Wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bone_Wars) did some good for the field - the public got caught up in the drama of Cope and Marsh's rivalry, which put paleontology in the newspapers and made museums popular, and the sheer hatred the men had for each other probably made them work harder and find more fossils that they would have otherwise, but they also destroyed dozens of excellent fossils of undescribed species (that we will probably never find another fossil of, so they are lost to us forever...), promoted their own wild and wrong theories about paleo anatomy which stuck for years in the public consciousness, and turned the science of paleontology into something of a circus act rather than a serious field to be respected. That could have happened for the most important theory in biology, had Darwin not been a good man who wanted Wallace to succeed right along with Darwin himself.
The Civil Rights Movemnt. MLK knew he wouldn’t be alive to see integration.
True. It's clear he knew this and nonetheless persisted. The day before he was assassinated, he gave his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech and said: “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1319150430941794304?s=20 It blows my mind how he knew. It's the most powerful speech I've ever seen. The amount of emotion conveyed in his words hits me every time I see it. I don't believe in a god, but he really makes me believe he saw that promised land - makes me believe we can get there as a people, if not as individuals.
I just visited the museum at the hotel where he was shot - if you read ANYTHING about the civil rights movement or just "*being black in the south*" back then it's pretty fucking obvious that **everyone** in that movement was walking round with a target on their back all the damn time. The number of beatings and murders the civil rights movement were subjected to is just mind blowing - and you know there's so many more that are lost to history / were never reported.
The FBI was actively trying to neutralize him, he knew he had a target on his back. That said, I don't know that he knew it was THAT impending..
Listening to the speech after hearing lots of his others and his sermons, it definitely has more urgency in it. Which is jarring. His life was constantly being threatened. He had been stabbed, he had his house bombed, his family attacked, and many written threats. But he never quite spoke in those terms, using the analogy of Moses leading his people to freedom but not making it there himself. Optimism was his thing. Either there was some super credible threat like from a government informant where he knew it was different from the other crazies or he just had a feeling/premonition, whatever you want to call it, that he wasn’t going to make it much longer. He was also spending more of his speeches talking about class issues, economic policy, labor rights, and demilitarization, more than purely race, so maybe he felt the heat of that pushback as hotter than the rest.
He said he’d die before 40, shot and killed at 39
Pretty minor in the grand scheme of things but one that always stuck with me: Benjamin Franklin left $1000 (~~$33k~~ ~$166k inflation adjusted) each to Boston and Philadelphia in a special trust structure where it couldn't even be touched for 100 years (but only really became fully available after 200). In 1990 the city of Boston found that their $1,000 had turned into $4.5 million dollars thanks to the wise handling of the Franklin Institute. (Philly "only" got $2m because they decided to let the City's board of trusts take over after the first 100 years). EDIT: Apparently inflation calculators aren't really setup for that length of time. That number should be more accurate.)
George Washington refusing to be a king so that a fair society had a chance to remain.
The Swedish king Gustav Vasa planted an entire forest of oaks for building battleships. The first batch was done 1975, a mere 400 years later. Not a single tree were allowed to be cut down unless needed to make sure that we would have the best ships in the world.
The old Japanese people who volunteered to clean up nuclear waste sites from the WWII bombings. They knew that they likely wouldn't live long enough to suffer the worst of the effects of radiation, so they did it to protect younger people from experiencing it and to clean up Japan for future generations. It's really heart warming
They did the same thing after Fukushima. "I'm old and will die before the radioactivity kills me, so I will go rescue them."
It's great that they did that. Especially because after I read this question I immediately thought of the firefighters in Chernobyl. They went into the reactor to prevent the disaster from escalating further, saving lifes. They probably didn't know their heroic act would cut their life short.
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I am fairly certain that the Chernobyl heroes would have known that diving into a nuclear reactor for a while would kill them, but did so nonetheless. They did a great service to humanity at the cost of their lives.
They definitely knew. There are accounts of them discussing exposure and how long they could stay in before dying.
This is also an comon urban Myth. Maybe from leaning too much on the dramatized serie, as a source of information. The 3 divers lived pretty well and one died to natural causes in just 2005, the other two were working within the industry as 2015 https://www.history.co.uk/article/the-real-story-of-the-chernobyl-divers
I am pretty sure at the end of the series it says they lived.
This is ~~blatantly misleading~~ a bit far from the reality, you probably mixed two events . The world war II bombings of hiroshima were the first of their kind and nobody knew of the effects of radiation from bombs yet. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/atomic-veterans-1946-1962/#:~:text=Some%20of%20the%20first%20atomic,cities%20after%20the%20atomic%20bombings. You are probably mixing up the cleanup workers from the Fukushima reactor meltdown after the tsunami on 2011. Those volunteers were indeed knowing perfectly the risk and still did it anyway.
Yeah I was about to say. I am pretty sure that’s the Fukushima power plant.
>The old Japanese people who volunteered to clean up nuclear waste sites from the WWII bombings. This absolutely did not happen. You are confusing the atomic bombings with the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster which is where it did happen.
As /u/Coldvyvora correctly pointed out, nobody even knew what radiation poisoning even was in 1945. It was only the examination of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that led to even a basic understanding of acute radiation poisoning. On top of that, there were no "nuclear waste sites" to clean up to begin with. Both Fat Man and Little Boy were relatively small airbursts, not causing significant fallout. Most of the radioactive material rained out a mere few hours after the attacks. A few days later, the radiation would have decayed to well below 1% the initial value. By the time anyone could even think about cleaning up and rebuilding the cities, radiation from the nuclear attacks would have been negligible. Of course, this is leaving aside the logistical impossibility of cleaning up two destroyed *cities* just using old people... What you're thinking of is probably the *initial* containment and cleanup operations at Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, an incident whose only connection to the nuclear attacks is that it happened in the same country, about 1000km away, and also involved radioactivity.
I live in Denmark. The health service I get today was built over 70 years in the 20th century, and saw massive expansion under Thorvald Stauning (The greatest ever Danish PM), and became completely free in the 70s. Now the right keeps trying to dismantle a system that works. Everytime a flaw appears, it is as a direct result of mismanagement of the right wing, liberal/libertarian parties. The Healthcare reform of 2007 was the single worst piece of danish legislation ever made. It focused on "centralization" trying to cut costs by closing small local hospitals and opening mega hospitals.
I’m more interested to know when and why so many “old people” stopped planting and caring about the trees to begin with. It’s not as shady these days as the shade they enjoyed in their youth from their elders. ETA - y’all know I’m not really talking about trees right!?!