Or just earned.

That doesn’t answer the question.
I don’t think they’re silly, no.
Why do you?

Absurd? You think the other names are absurd? Why?

So citing this as ‘proof’ that independence would fail is circular, it's using a figure that only exists because Scotland lacks fiscal sovereignty to argue against Scotland gaining fiscal sovereignty.

Scotland's deficit within the UK isn't Scotland's deficit in any meaningful sense right now anyway, because Scotland doesn't issue currency or set its own fiscal policy. It's a devolved accounting construct within a currency union it doesn't control.

That would rule out an awful lot of the classics though.

You can hire reel to reels.

That’s a bit of a stretch for me. Certainly capitalism was created to socialise risk and privatise gains. The rules were always controlled by those with most. Without a public sector there can be no private sector.

Yup. This was two years ago.

bsky.app/profile/waso...

What an absurd petition.

Some more than others.

To credit capitalism with modern wealth is like crediting a landlord with the harvest. The soil was prepared, the crop was planted, the rain fell… and yes he owned the field but that's just property law. It doesn't address who built the combine harvester… or sowed the seed.

Capitalism gets to take the credit because it was the dominant social arrangement when the curve went vertical. But correlation isn't mechanism. The machine was already running. Capitalism emerged from wealth created by altruism and curiosity.

Once you have deep specialisation and compounding scientific knowledge, wealth growth is close to inevitable. The productivity gains follow from the knowledge gains. You don't need capitalism to explain it. You need literacy, surplus, social stability and time.

Not greed.

The steam engine didn't emerge only from a profit motive. It was a creative act.

It emerged from natural philosophers, instrument makers, mining engineers and metallurgists whose specialisations had been deepening for generations.

The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution… is what happens when enough specialists exist in enough proximity, with enough surplus, to dream rather than just survive.

Social cooperation made that possible. Capitalism just inherited it.

Specialisation doesn't just make individuals more productive. It makes new disciplines possible. And disciplines, talking to each other across permeable boundaries, produce science. Not capitalism.

Creativity thrives when hands and minds are freed from subsistence living.

Here's what actually explains the explosion in human wealth: specialisation deepens over time. Specialists talk to other specialists. Knowledge compounds. A clockmaker's precision feeds a physicist's instrument. A physician's anatomy feeds a surgeon's technique…