From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?
I've heard some speculate that this introduced European diseases, and unlike many Native American tribes, the Mayans lived in dense cities. Such disease would spread like wildfire.
(Certainly, some disease made it the other way too! Tuberculosis and syphilis are examples)
I've heard numbers like 95% died, and it was decades between first contact and serious conquest.
That leaves a lot of time for people to grow up with no one to teach them trades, or even how to read.
If we lost 95% of our population, so many active skills would be lost.
> Didn't the Spanish show up briefly, then come back in force later?
The end of the Incan empire is a really striking example of this dynamic. The Spanish landed on the South American mainland in ~1524, European diseases started spreading, and in 1527 the Incan emperor died from one of the diseases without an heir. This triggered a really brutal civil war of succession that weakened the empire. The Spanish started the conquest proper of the Incan empire in ~1532 and were successful in part because how weak the empire was after the civil war.
So essentially, by arriving early and (inadvertently) initiating the disease epidemics, the Spanish put in place conditions that made the conquest possible a few years later.
Estimates vary wildly on what percentage of the natives died from european diseases. There's just too little information on pre-Columbian populations.
For comparison, estimates of the deaths from the Black Plague in Europe are 30% to 60%. It's a huge error bar, despite having a lot of written records that survived.
Look up the american bison. The US government's official policy was to eliminate bison to eliminate Indians/First Peoples. Mountains of skulls. In under a decade, the bison population was pushed down from 30-60M to approximately 500 individuals.
Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever. Then colonization and disease and westward expansion. Look up the Trail of Tears, the genocide and/or ethnic cleansing.
Your education may align with propaganda. Even today, first people nations are actively having their history taken. Pete Hegseth, sec of def/war, has pushed to close the door on the massacre of wounded knee, enshrining the medals earned for slaughtering woman and children. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/27/us/hegseth-wounded-knee.h....
Look up how the US government stole native kids and sent them catholic schools to have the Indian taught out of them. A system that was purpose built to stop their way of life. Or forced, non-consented sterilization of native woman that was happening in the 60s and 70s.
If you somehow didn't know the US government's history of conflict and abuse of Native Americans, you should question your formal education. And you should do some light research.
you seem used to issuing commands. best of luck with that approach.
your cherry picked data points may be correct, but they are also misleading absent broader historical context. these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period), so your subsequent points about x/y/z impact although valid don't carry weight. imo data driven arguments trump emotional appeals. Trail of tears and similar are powerful and empathy inducing for sure, but don't change the facts around which my comment was based.
your presentation skews things to a false dichotomy of one group against another which is inaccurate and unproductive.
current politicians (left or right) in the US don't change history (and no I didn't bother reading your nytimes link...).
> Did tribes fight and war and capture slaves? Yes. They did that for forever.
sounds like you're confused what point you are arguing.
> these groups had largely diminished already (as is well documented by historians of the period
this is an obvious contradiction. how could colonial historians know that "these groups had diminished" before colonialism when they weren't there? troll better
I'm not sure what the GP is referencing specifically (the colonization of the Americas took hundreds of years on two continents after all) but we've got enough archaeological evidence to know that many indigenous cultures were in decline by the time the Spaniards first visited, and many entered a second decline after first contact but before they were conquered or fully economically exploited.
For example I've been studying the Mississippi river cultures [1] which left behind lots of mound villages formed into chiefdoms and paramount chiefdoms. Those cultures suffered a decline around the mid-15th century likely due to environmental changes which we can see in the distribution of villages and mounds changing. We can also see how warfare evolved based on defenses and the distribution of arable land to houses (i.e. are they clustered villages for defense or spread around their fields for efficiency?) Historians then compare them to the accounts of the Narvaez and de Soto expeditions which provides a baseline for post-contact (mid 16th), where we can also see a large decline and social restructuring before the English and French came in to finish the job (the Spaniards more or less gave up on that area as economically uninteresting except for the occasional slave raid).
I’m talking about a specific civilization’s rise and fall and what that looked like relative to the history of colonization.
You can come up with all the juvenile “fun facts” you want but what’s the point if you’re not actually going to say anything to add to the conversation?
> We don't know that there's anything like our rich inner world in the mind of a ...
I posit that we should start with a default "this animal experiences the world the same as I do" until proven differently. Doctors used to think human babies could not feel pain. The assumption has always been "this animal is a rock and doesn't experience anything like me, God's divine creation." It was stupid when applied to babies. It is stupid when applied to animals.
Did you know that jumping spiders can spot prey, move out of line of sight, approach said pray outside that specific prey's ability to detect, and then attack? How could anything do that without a model of the world? MRIs on mice have shown that they plan and experience actions ahead of doing them. Just like when you plan to throw a ball or lift something heavy where you think through it first. Polar bears will spot walrus, go for a long ass swim (again, out of sight) and approach from behind the colony to attack. A spider and the apex bear have models of the world and their prey.
Show that the animal doesn't have a rich inner world before defaulting to "it doesn't."
> I posit that we should start with a default "this animal experiences the world the same as I do" until proven differently.
As I don't know, I take the defensive position both ways for different questions.*
Just in case they have an inner world: We should be kind to animals, not eat them, not castrate them (unless their reproductive method appears to be non-consensual), not allow them to be selectively bred for human interest without regard to their own, etc.
I'd say ditto for AI, but in their case, even under the assumption that they have an inner world (which isn't at all certain!), it's not clear what "be kind" even looks like: are LLMs complex enough to have created an inner model of emotion where getting the tokens for "thanks!" has a feeling that is good? Or are all tokens equal, and the only pleasure-analog or pain-analog they ever experienced were training experiences to shift the model weights?
(I'm still going to say "please" to the LLMs even if it has no emotion: they're trained on human responses, and humans give better responses when the counterparty is polite).
> How could anything do that without a model of the world?
Is "a model of the world" (external) necessarily "a rich inner world" (internal, qualia)? If it can be proven so, then AI must be likewise.
* The case where I say that the defensive position is to say "no" is currently still hypothetical: if someone is dying and wishes to preserve their continuity of consciousness, is it sufficient to scan their brain** and simulate it?
>assumed teachers have the same protections in deep blue Washington state
California is just as "blue" as Washington.
>move to a state where the job prospects are better. That sounds like "let them eat cake", except that moving to another state as an American citizen is a lot easier than what of people went through fleeing the Sicilian Mafia or the Irish Potato Famine, let alone WW2 European front or the fall of Saigon.
There is no such state. Nearly every state is in budget crisis and cutting school funds, and a certain vocal segment of them are actively attacking the entire concept of education, banning books, prosecuting teachers who provide support to their students or talk about how the world works, and more.
Illinois and Massachusetts are definitely not slashing public school spending. Deep-red Florida is also increasing its educational budget, and so is deep-red Texas.
It's not like I have family or friends with kids going to public school or anything in those states, what do I know?
Florida and Texas are spending because they make life for educators utter hell and there are plenty of other good reasons no teacher wants to go there. Illinois may be a single counterexample, but this is akin to saying "if you watch Craigslist for a few weeks you can get an amazing deal on one car" - the plan does not scale, and if a non-trivial number of the people in the market for [a used car / a better education job] tried to go for that target it would instantly dry up as there aren't enough to go around by many orders of magnitude.
Counter point: spooky code at a distance is bad. Splitting your code to live partially in source control and partly in the database means keeping multiple layers in sync. This is coupling, and coupling multiple things, especially if that means teams, together means increased overhead.
I have seen business rules as stored procedures lock a business into their current model across with a dozen teams, effectively making system improvements impossible. And because they needed some olap atop oltp in some cases, their very beefy postgres solution crawled down to a max of 2k queries per second. I worked with them for over a year trying to pull apart domain boundaries and unlock teams from one another. Shared, stored procedures was a major pole in the tent of things making scaling the technical org incredibly hard.
+100 to you both. This is the classic tradeoff: powerful, centralized DB logic vs. clean but often anemic app code.
I'm building Typegres to give you both. It lets you (a) write complex business logic in TypeScript using a type-safe mapping of Postgres's 3000+ functions and (b) compiles it all down to a single SQL query.
I call it lego pieces. We want to enable teams to compose useful units together; to enable builders (generally internal teams) to build things with a clear mental model. "Primitives" are the same: base unit of abstraction for the domain.
It's a joke. An older version of the joke, from Usenet, is that RTFM stands for "Read The Manual".
The gag is that the newbie asking the question will wonder why the F wasn't included in the expansion, and rapidly figure it out. Or they ask, and you make fun of them for it. The joke is either kinda cerebral or really juvenile... and the tension between the two is part of the joke.
https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/77060/mayan-def...
From newish imaging. We can see the impressions of vast jungle swaths cut down and way made for planting food and houses. This looks to have disrupted the water cycle enough to cause cinotes (underground water systems and only source of drinking water) to deplete. We see sacrificial remnants below the modern water line. Their water disappeared and so did their civilization. By the time the Spanish arrived, the local people had no knowledge of how to build nor maintain their now ancient cities, the jungles regrew, water came back, and sacrificial artifacts were covered by replenished water levels.
They are an example of man made effects on local weather leading to the downfall of an advanced civilization.
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