But bro

You could get yourself a yeast infection with 3000 year old yeast

That’s the joke

It was partially staged. The main benefit of staging is dropping dry mass during the burn, and the Atlas I dropped engines

The Panama Canal, obviously

It’s a joke, it’s not meant to be serious philosophical commentary.

That said, I find your comment a bit funny because Socrates’ dialectical method was largely a result of his objection to sophistry. Note that he rarely makes a statement himself, merely challenges those who use oratory techniques to support their claims to know the truth

Seed back then would have just been unprocessed grain. I don’t know about prices in the early 1900s, but the current price of unprocessed wheat is around $230 per metric ton. That’s around $0.10/lb and would put 20 lbs at around $2 given wholesale bulk pricing.

Not even in the ballpark of the $5/lb you cite for grass seed.

You don’t need a sense of numbers, in the abstract mathematical way humans use, to count.

Maybe a human child can’t count to 1000 but they could be taught to put a BB inside a jar every step they take. Then they can take a BB back out of the jar at every step on the way back. When the jar is empty, they’re near home. Even if they can’t count at all, they can keep track of thousands of steps this way given enough attention span and stamina.

Then, just imagine, instead of a BB’s in a jar it’s some chemical signal in the brain.

The original title is “‘sunbeam alpine’ racing”

A bit was cut off

Tasers and shooting lightning from your fingertips aren’t even close to the same thing

But the point remains that, yes, society can do a thing but the power of wizards in most fantasy stories largely comes from personal, internal, strength rather than the ability to leverage a vast web of engineers, laborers and infrastructure in the outside world

If someone dropped you in a remote area you wouldn’t just whip up a quick dishwasher to get a job done. The parallel between technology and magic as seen in most fantasy stories is weak at best

Depends on how good the magic was. If it let you fireball a room full of goblins with a wave of your hand, read minds, lightning people with your fingertips like emperor palpatine, and conjure familiars to do your house work?

All without any manufacturing facilities and minimal capital outlay

I dare say physics would be more popular then