Its heavily contested if these were chariots. If anything, I would suggest that the consensus scholarly opinion is that these were ox drawn carts, not chariots.
- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period
- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe
- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.
The specific US version was an attempt to bootstrap acceptance of the $1 coin-- if you could get a box of 500 shipped to your door, you'd spend them and eventually they'd displace $1 notes. When they went straight back to the bank, no circulation occurred, and they were burning merchant fees and shipping costs for nothing.
Some other countries used "selling coins at face value" as an explicit financial hack based on seignorage (the value of a coin in excess of its buillion content).
Canada used to sell commemorative $20 (and then on to $50, 100, and possibly $200) coins with modest silver content based on this model.
If someone pays $20 for $10 worth of silver, the government profits $10-- as long as the coin disappears into a collector's binder and never enters circulation.
So it worked fine as long as collectors bought them. When people bought them to generate card points, and immediately took them to the bank to exchange for more conventional currency, the plan fell apart, and Canada abandoned the programme.
It's a shame these programmes were sabotaged and died. The idea of "instead of stuffing a banknote or gift card in an envelope, I can give you a pretty collectible and feel confident that if one day you need the money bad enough, you can still spend it" was a nice idea while it lasted.
I believe in some cases there was no premium at all, not even shipping, so widespread manufactured spending was losing the Mint much more money than they were prepared for when they started the program.
I don't follow. Why would Manufactured Spend specifically cost the Mint money? It's not great for the credit card company, sure, but why the Mint? If the Mint was previously eating the interchange fees & shipping, ok, but that's not a manufactured spend specific issue.
I agree it's not specific to MS. But MS was probably inducing much more demand and thereby making them eat more fees than they planned to. (I don't have any inside information though.) Adding a premium would make it a little less attractive to MSers.
> credit card companies aggressively shut down manufactured spending when they notice it.
I'm familiar with the concept of manufactured spend, and why credit card companies would try to clamp down on it. What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies. The usual way to eliminate manufactured spend would be to add a credit card specific transaction fee that cancels out the spend points. By the Mint increasing the base price for everybody, this affects even people who might be paying with a debit card, or an ACH transaction (not sure if they're options, just positing).
> What I don't get is why the US Mint would care one way or the other for the concerns of credit card companies.
Hard to say what their reasoning is. It could be pressure from the credit card companies. Or it could be that someone at the mint decided they don't like the idea of people gaming the system.
At the end of the day, it's not a positive-value economic activity. And if enough folks started buying coins for face value just to churn credit card points, there would be financial losses for the mint/and-or the credit card company.
That seems ... odd. I can pay my apartment rent with a debit card with a fixed transaction fee (eg, $999.99 and up to $1,999.99 the service fee is $4.95), while covering it with a credit card has a different fee structure of a flat 2.95%. This is with Rent Cafe in NYC, and from what I can tell, it's a very widespread platform across the country. The 2.95% fee specific to credit cards will wipe out the points earned for a credit card under almost all circumstances.
Platforms like RentCafe are highly configurable to support local laws, because the nature of landlord/tenant law is that it is highly variable by state.
Going though that same effort is a waste of time and implementation budget for something like selling novelty bills.
Fair enough - in which case the Mint just needs to pad the sale price a bit to cover interchange fees, and make a little extra on top, and shipping can be extra. 10% on top of the face value should be more than enough, and would have the side effect of sapping any would be manufactured spend. Yet the prices on the Mint are way above that - it looks like more than 50%. Sure, if the novelty or collector market values it at that premium, great. What I struggle to understand is that this is primarily to combat manufactured spend. I still don't see why manufactured spend is a problem for the Mint to solve, rather than the credit card companies.
> We cannot use any tax dollars to fund our numismatic operations.
> The United States Mint’s numismatic programs are self-sustaining and operate at no cost to the taxpayer. Any excess funds are returned to the Treasury General Fund to reduce the annual budget deficit of the federal government.
There are a couple of ways to rule out modern contamination.
Ancient DNA has certain characteristic damage that changes the sequence slightly, and you can use that to filter out any DNA that doesn't have that signature. Plus, you can maintain DNA profiles of all people involved in handling to ensure it's not modern contamination from the field workers or lab techs.
The majority of healthy people develop a latent infection, and won't manifest symptoms in their lifetimes. The bacteria are encapsulated into nodules by the immune system, which weaken if the immune system weakens. The bacteria escape and active symptomatic infection occurs.
Yeah but the US has very low levels of latent TB in the population at only 4%. Compared that to places like Brazil where 40% of the population has latent TB. It’s not the climate because in Russia 80% of the population has latent TB.
In order to get latent TB, you need exposure to someone with active TB. If someone with active TB meets the healthcare system, you get a rapid response from health departments. In May 2024, the Long Beach, CA declared a public health emergency [1] based on a cluster of 14 cases. This kind of reaction is typical and makes it difficult to spread to others, and keeps the levels of latent TB low.
Yes, and it's a self-perpetuating cycle. If so few people have latent TB, fewer people develop active TB that will go on to infect others. As other comments have mentioned, poverty and its resultant poor health is the biggest correlation for developing active TB. I wonder if most of the Russian latent infections happened during the Soviet/Post Soviet collapse era, with newer latent infections falling off as quality of life improved over time?
80% sounds like a BS number. It's cited on Wikipedia, but references are either "opinions" or do not contain such information at all.
A proper study [1] shows mean infection rate of ~20% in the worst regions (Far East and North) with the highest rate up to 47%. The situation should be better in the western regions. For comparison, in the US studies show ~4% infection rate [2], so situation in Russia is relatively bad, but improves steadily since 90s and it's far from being catastrophic as the 80% number paints it.
Russia actually spent quite a lot of resources on TB, especially during the late Soviet and the early Russian history.
All children and professionals working with children are receiving yearly TB testing ("Mantoux test"). Prisons used to be a major vector, but that was reduced by doing TB prevention (antibiotics).
Russia did this to themselves. Objectively, for what it once was Russia has horrific metrics around healthcare, alcohol consumption, HIV, drug use, food prices, human rights or any kind of sustainability initiative.
> The timeline looks scary, it looks like it took about a decade to introduce a regulation that would help protect the vultures
To be fair, the cause was conclusively identified as diclofenac only as late as 2004-2005. Even in papers published as late as 2003, various other, more likely culprits were being investigated, including pesticides, pathogens, or food scarcity. India moved to ban veterinary use of diclofenac by early 2005, slowed down by pushback from the Ministry of Agriculture for lack of an effective alternative vulture safe drug, which were only really demonstrated in studies in early 2006. Later that year diclofenac was banned.
To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.
Disagree - Seurat had first mover advantage with single cell but sucked with larger datasets that Scanpy could handle till the big change in Seurat 5. The preference for either Seurat/Scanpy is incredibly lab specific. That said, Seurat is better documented for sure, but the ecosystem for both is incredibly rich and flourishing.
yeah, I also disagree with this. It's true Seurat is still heavily used for scRNA/scATAC but I see most new models increasingly being written/tooled for python and based on anndata. Geneformer, scGPT, scVI etc. I wish there was better operability between the scverse stuff and Seurat, but Seurat went their own way from SCE/bioconductor so that's probably not going to happen.
As someone who lives & works in the Bronx, I haven't encountered any harassment in the Bronx lines. Pretty much every negative experience I've had on any subway line has been in Manhattan.
- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period
- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe
- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.