Reflection:Back to the Past for Dollars
"Wouldn't it be great to go back to 1995 and buy dollars for five rubles each? I'd be rich!" shouted one shopkeeper to another in a grocery store when we walked in. Their conversation was a classic "if only" scenario, but let's assume this is possible: there's a time (and space) machine that can send you back to 1995 and return you safely.
Full of joy, you take out loans, borrow from relatives, friends, enemies, scrape together your last savings, and now you have 100 million rubles in your hands. With that, you can buy 20 million dollars and sell them today for 1.5 billion rubles. Not bad, right?
You hop into the machine, land in the summer of 1995 in central Moscow, look around, and begin to realize that a dollar costs not 5 rubles, but 5000 rubles (actually, about 4500), and not the kind you have in your suitcase, but entirely different ones. Your hundred million could become a hundred billion here, but there's nowhere to exchange them.
Читать далееIn pain you shall bring forth children
A few days ago, I was pondering on this fragment from Genesis when God expelled people from paradise
To the woman He said: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow you shall bring forth children...
Gen. 3:16
I wonder, were there any other options before this? Was a woman's body arranged differently before the expulsion? Were the passages wider, and was it planned that the child would just jump out from there?
Or did God add nerve endings after the expulsion to make it more painful? Nausea, a heavier stomach, swollen legs and other sorrows.
How could it have been different physiologically if the human body structure didn't change?
The Dilemma of Attitude Towards Couriers
Deliveri Club, Yandex.Food, Yandex.Lavka, Samokat couriers and other foot-bike workers find it objectively difficult to work in winter (at least in Moscow). There are many orders, and it's freezing outside. You watch as they navigate through ice, mud or snowdrifts on their bikes, sliding their wheels, and your heart bleeds at the realization that they are doing this all day for a pittance.
And you don't understand whether to pity them, praise them, envy them, or remain indifferent. I have a problem with the latter, so I need to decide.
On one hand, it's a pity because you automatically compare it with your own social position. You want to liberate them from the slavery of the square backpack. But if you free them all, no one will bring me home a KFC chicken or groceries from the store, I'll have to go myself.
That is, on the other hand, couriers are great because they help me save time and spend it on my work or other cool things. Therefore, it's worth pitying them just as much as an employer pities an employee for their work: not at all.
On the third hand, they are constantly moving and burning calories, while I have to go to a special place and pay money for similar activities. Couriers do this in (relatively) fresh air and get paid, while I sit in a chair all day and don't see the light of day. So, you could even envy them.
It's a tough situation. I still feel sorry for them, can't help it.
Time and Space Machine
Perhaps you haven't thought about it, but a time machine should move a person not only in time but also in space, taking into account the position of the Earth.
Because if you go back a couple of months to the same point in the universe, you will simply die, suspended in space.
And if the universe itself is not stationary and is moving within another space that we do not know about, then you can die in about 100% of travel cases, no matter what you've calculated.
Have a nice day!