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July 8

Companies other than Apple that are considered by some to be cult-like

Are there any companies other than Apple that have a reputation for being cult-like? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Uncle dan is home (talk • contribs) 02:05, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Multi-level marketing... -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:10, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Cult-like for customers or employees?
Sleigh (talk) 07:30, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Define "cult". For example, does a joint like Hobby Lobby qualify? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:05, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Well... for a definition, let's start with: "do sources call the company a cult"? Blueboar (talk) 09:39, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the OP could present a valid source that claims Apple is a "cult". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:39, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The OP is under no obligation to do so, but I will. https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-is-obviously-a-cult-and-samsung-isnt-says-cultural-historian/ Mingmingla (talk) 20:28, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The opinion from that one writer sounds like Samsung is expressing professional jealousy. It's well to keep in mind that the term "computer geek" also implies a "cult". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:59, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Harley-Davidson? 72.38.213.159 (talk) 12:56, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

How about Saturn?[1][2][3] --Guy Macon (talk) 13:05, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ah... that last one (Saturn) is more responsive to the question... instead of giving his personal opinion, Guy points us to sources to show that someone else thinks the company is like a cult. Let's see more of that. Blueboar (talk) 13:14, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Blueboar is right, and those of us who offer opinions without sources make the reference desks lower quality than they could be. Reddit, on the other hand. loves that sort of answer. BTW, if you haven't watched the YouTube video that I linked to between the legitimate sources, you are missing out. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:22, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Starting with the OP's own unsourced premise. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:48, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Where does it say that OPs are limited to sources in constructing their questions? Nowhere. They're allowed to be as wrong-headed and sourceless as possible. It's OUR job to find sources that answer their questions, and that sometimes means correcting the implicit or explicit assumptions in their questions. How many more aspects of how the Ref Desks work have you still not figured out yet, after all these years? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:02, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Where does it say the responders have to do the OP's work for him? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:53, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much everyone who has given this any serious thought agrees with JackofOz and disagrees with Baseball Bugs on how we should respond when someone posts a question on the ref desks. The problem is that Baseball Bugs is immune to both social pressure and to logical arguments about what is best for Wikipedia. The most effective response is to simply refuse to reply to him in the hope that he will eventually grow tired of shouting into and empty hall. --Guy Macon (talk) 03:41, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

No reference desk librarian is a slave to a questioner's unsupported premise. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:28, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Reread what I wrote, particularly "It's OUR job to find sources that answer their questions, and that sometimes means correcting the implicit or explicit assumptions in their questions". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:05, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

How do you deal with a premise that's thoroughly bogus on its face? The Roman Catholic Church has been called a "cult". That don't make it so. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:22, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

(How do I deal with a fellow refdesker who seems unwilling to accept what I have now said twice?) Well, it has indeed sometimes been called a cult. If the OP's question is seeking verification of the fact that it has been called a cult, we could quickly find sources attesting to that. If the OP's question is whether or not it actually is a cult, we would need to provide a source for the mainstream consensus, and maybe for good measure find sources that argue that it is, and for balance, others that argue that it is not. Then we let the OP come to their own conclusion. It is not for us as individual refdesk respondents to add our own personal opinions into the mix. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:47, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Samsung calling Apple a "cult" amounts to griping that Apple is better at marketing than they are. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:10, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Electronic Data Systems had a bit of cult of personality based on it's founder, Ross Perot. Had he become US President, it might have gotten worse, but since he didn't, and retired from the company, that era ended, and now EDS has been absorbed into other companies. StuRat (talk) 19:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Microsoft: [4] — 2606:A000:4C0C:E200:AC70:E52:BE83:E545 (talk) 21:20, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See also: Arnott, Dave (2000). Corporate cults : the insidious lure of the all-consuming organization. New York: AMACOM. ISBN 0814404936.

Mary Kay? Clarityfiend (talk) 22:56, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

A lot depends on what's meant by "cult". And to say that something is a cult IFF a reliable source calls it a cult is a cop-out, because it's obvious that persons writing for "reliable sources" (and getting their output through the copyediting process) can have different understandings of "cult". The OED gives this definition (as well as others): a collective obsession with or intense admiration for a particular person, thing, or idea. I'd suggest that, for starters, this applies to every "maker" (brand name) of every "luxury good". These aren't just the brands for which people of other genders or social strata than your own pay ludicrous prices, they're also what you and your mates waste your money on (or would, if you had money). They're even what I [blush] waste my money on, so far as this is collective (and it often is). -- Hoary (talk) 07:36, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

All that cult means in this context is that a company maintains an illusion that their product is special, relative to the product of a competitor. A company has to avoid false advertising, but that leaves plenty of room for a sales pitch that can be short on substance. Disneyland is an eminently wholesome enterprise. If not, it could be considered cult-like. Bus stop (talk) 03:41, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Tesla is a cult gets plenty of ghits. Similarly Facebook is a cult and so on. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 10:57, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Can a renter decline to have electricity in the apartment?

Is the renter required to accept everything that the apartment manager offers? If the renter doesn't want electricity or Internet service but wants easy access to clean water and a functional stove, then can the renter negotiate with the manager? Or is it all subjective? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 03:51, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The owner of the apartment can install or not install whatever they please, as long as the apartment meets certain minimum standards. Those standards are likely to include an electricity supply.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 06:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note that in many markets, water and electricity are metered, so you only pay what you use for. Internet is often not provided by the landlord, but by a third party, and probably via an independent contract. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:32, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In many US markets, electricity is often also maintained as a separate contract, and one can in principle choose not to have any electricity service. Dragons flight (talk) 06:57, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I've honestly never heard of an electric meter not owned by an electric company, though of course in principle they could exist. And because electricity is charged per use, allowing tenants unlimited electricity could be a very costly mistake for a landlord. The only situations I can picture it coming up is where a tenant is short term (like at a hotel) so the risk is averaged, or where they rent a room as a "boarder", which I've only heard of in fiction or in informal family type arrangements. A landlord doesn't want to sign a year lease and then find out his tenant is growing a house full of hydroponic ... tomatoes. Wnt (talk) 11:58, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You say very costly mistake, I say common practice. My parents and/or I used to live in a series of high-rise apartments none of which had metered utilities (electricity or water). Each building had about 200 apartments and it was simpler if the landlord didn't have to bother about everyone's individual usage. To be fair, that was some decades back and quite possibly in a different country. Oh, and obviously for these apartments the answer to the original question was no. --76.71.5.114 (talk) 22:34, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Informally renting a room in strangers' apartments is extremely, extremely, extremely common in New York City. Even illegal ones in basements with no window or fire escape. The population density is very high and rooms start at $5 or 6 hundred (ghetto, no bathroom). I doubt many have electric meters. They would have to ask for more money if their electric bill's too high (or kick you out or ask for some of your weed or call the cops or tell you to stop growing weed). Many (most?) people don't want to see their landlord every time they pee or cook though and pay double to live alone. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:29, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

If the heating and/or cooling systems require electricity, the landlord might require it, in order to keep the building in good shape. Internet is normally optional. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I have seen a contract which states "the landlord shall provide a supply of electricity and/or gas". In rented accommodation there used to be meters which accepted shillings. If you didn't feed the meter you would be plunged into darkness. Every so often the landlord would come along, open the meter and take out the shillings. This would be a very dangerous arrangement with a gas meter. Landlords could set the quantity of electricity provided for a shilling, thus providing scope for overcharging. 92.19.185.111 (talk) 12:50, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the UK a property without an electricity supply and a water supply would be deemed unfit for habitation (unless in some very isolated location, with alternatives available), and it would be illegal to let it to tenants. Wymspen (talk) 15:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

So every historical building ever has electricity even if you rent it by the week to 18th century life cosplayers? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:24, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's not illegal to rent out a UK property that's unfit for human habitation. A law to make it so was defeated recently [5], by a vote of landlords.

Nor is it a requirement for a habitable house to include a mains electricity supply (many still don't, from being too remote) or water supply. Access to water might be argued as a need, but this can be a single private borehole, a well and pump, or even barrels of water brought in by vehicles. Sanitation can certainly be by earth composting toilet or cesspit.

As to whether a tenant wants a service, that's a matter for discussion with the landlord. Who might agree to instate or remove it - but probably not if it's going to cost money or inconvenience to have it removed. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:52, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I just have to say, it's a bit misleading to say that it's legal to rent out property unfit for human habitation. It's currently a matter for local authorities to assess whether or not a property is in a fit condition using the Housing Health and Safety Rating System - the rejected law would have changed the rules in order to standardize them nationwide. Full Fact has a good summary. (Also, whether or not an MP was a landlord seems to have played no role in whether or not they voted for or against: all Tory MPs who voted voted against and all Labour/LD/SNP MPs voted for, regardless of whether or not they were landlords. Had it been a straight vote of landlord MPs, it would actually have probably passed - 72 landlord MPs voted against, out of the 196 landlord MPs in Commons all together) Smurrayinchester 08:43, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As Baseball Bugs notes, it's highly dependent on the manager in question, but it also depends on how the building's constructed; in grad school I considered renting a place with water included in the rent, for example, while other apartments offered coverage of all the utilities except Internet. I now rent an apartment with gas, electricity, water, and Internet: I decided to get Internet, the rental contract absolutely required me to get electricity (the contract would have been voided had I not), and ownership pays for gas and water. Presumably they just have a single meter for each one that covers the whole building, and ownership figures the average costs into what they decide to charge for rent; I expect they'd be unable to give me a figure on how much of either one I consume. Maybe they'd be able to notice if I started consuming massive amounts of one or the other (e.g. I set up some sort of mini-hydroelectric plant in the bathtub to save myself money on electricity), but I don't expect that they'd be able to be precise. Nyttend (talk) 00:58, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In a market in which there is reasonable demand for rental apartments the owner is unlikely to accept a lower rent in exchange for not providing electricity or Internet because the owner would prefer to rent at a higher fee and provide electricity and Internet. Each enhancement theoretically is an opportunity for the owner to make more money, as long as there is a general demand for these amenities in the population. In this question, electricity and Internet are widely demanded services. Very few people are looking for the opportunity to save on rent in exchange for doing without electricity and Internet. Bus stop (talk) 02:02, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Heh, I'm reminded — In 1985–6 a TV cable appeared in our apartment. We shrugged. Months went by. The cable company called to say that our service was on the brink of being cut off for nonpayment. I could have objected that we hadn't seen a bill, but instead I mentioned that we had no TV. —Tamfang (talk) 07:33, 13 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What proportion of the population must be low-risk to support insurance?

I'm thinking about health insurance and the rise of obesity and metabolic diseases. If obesity and metabolic diseases take over, then at what point will the whole society be doomed because most people are sick and require healthcare? Although health insurance is one example, I'm concerned with insurance in general. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 05:12, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

At no point is society doomed, but it may be forced to limit medical services for people who are "at fault" for their medical conditions, and this may mean they die sooner than they would have (with taxpayer-supported medical services). As far as health insurance goes, the insurers would just need to charge higher rates for the obese, smokers, alcoholics, drug addicts, etc., quite possibly making health insurance unaffordable for those people. However, if these are legislated as pre-existing conditions which they can't discriminate against, then everyone's health insurance rates may become unaffordable. But, many people in the US have no insurance now, and even more went without before Obamacare (and may again soon, if Republicans get their way). Yes, they die sooner, but society doesn't collapse. StuRat (talk) 05:15, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Note that Cuba provides a comparable level of health care outcomes than the US, but with, IIRC, 5% of per-patient-cost. Health care has two properties. On an individual level, the pareto principle apples. You can provide good healthcare quite cheaply. Going the last few percent is what makes it expensive. On a societal level, having broad, low barrier access to health care, especially including free or even mandatory access to precautionary measures such as vaccination and regular screenings, can reduce the need for later expensive interventions. That is one reason why co-payments, by keeping people away from doctors for perceived minor ailments, may actually increase overall cost. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:33, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Their doctors and auxillary labor (nurses, janitors..) also work for less than American doctors. Even their best baseball players get paid very little and baseball is very popular in Cuba. An ounce of prevention is still definitely worth a pound of cure though. Imagine how much more it is to treat something like colon cancer if you don't start till it hurts a lot. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:57, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The pareto principle says 80/20. 20% of the richest, in the original example, owns 80% of the wealth. In science, the most predicable theories are least expensive to prove. How does this principle address healthcare? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 12:08, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@StuRat: Deciding who is "at fault" is an exercise in bullying. A rich teenager gets a fast car for his 16th birthday and winds up in the hospital with a severed spine - will the health insurance company say he is "at fault"? Certainly not. In concept, every injury is "at fault" - even the parents of a child with Tay-Sachs could be told that they "should have gotten genetically tested and decided not to mate". But in practice, bullying means "let's go pick on the fat kid". There is no real logic to it, but eventually the same solution seems likely to come up as at the schoolyard: the fat kid comes into class with a bunch of guns and casts a Vote to clean house that changes overall policy on a widespread basis.

Now as for metabolic diseases, well, most Americans are "overweight or obese" already: [6] Obviously, like any medical problem, this can get more prevalent or more severe to an unlimited degree; however, it is clear that the overall level of medical care required is not extraordinary. Though the American health system is legendarily inefficient, residents actually see physicians only 4 times per year versus 12 times for Japanese residents. Most drugs for diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and such are cheap generics. And when everyone in a society has a problem -- if reducing costs rather than fueling racketeers were a priority -- they could be herded through automated glucose, BP and cholesterol tests at the local supermarket and given prescriptions by minimum wage laborers. So I don't view any of the U.S. health care problem as something that could be fixed by rationing -- it's all about the cadre of marketers, lawyers, regulators, and paper pushers who make their living by standing between the person with an often mild medical issue and the obvious and well known remedies that might help to alleviate some of its effects. Wnt (talk) 11:52, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Certainly the inefficient US health care system needs fixing, and we don't need doctors to all become millionaires, but every nation may eventually arrive at the same problem, that providing every possible medical treatment to every possible patient, at taxpayer expense, isn't possible. So, some form of rationing must be applied. The most obvious form of rationing taxpayer dollars is that the rich can pay for their own medical care. Then we have expensive procedures that aren't very effective, like a heart transplant on an elderly patient with other terminal medical problems. StuRat (talk) 18:04, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Re: 'Deciding who is "at fault" is an exercise in bullying' ... that would make the courts all bullies. StuRat (talk) 19:22, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@StuRat: Indeed. One might merely consider the typical American jail full of black folks to see this is true, and true in the worst way. But you have to decide -- are people entitled to medical care, or are they entitled to be treated like criminals because they have a health problem, to face a biased judgment on whether they got the health problem for the "right" reasons or the wrong? And why is it popular to pick on some folks, like a fat guy who likes to eat a lot, but not on others, like a gay guy who sleeps around too much and catches an incurable disease? I mean, if you proposed a big per capita tax for being gay because of higher HIV rates, even if you worked it out as some luxury license fee per relationship/liason, how do you think people would react? Well, that's how they ought to react when you propose taxes on obese people for eating. Wnt (talk) 10:35, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It wouldn't just make biased judges and juries bullies. It would make ALL judges and juries bullies. StuRat (talk) 05:26, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed so. Show me a single judge who will not impose escalating penalties on someone who doesn't comply with his demands on even the most trivial of issues, or for expressing himself in an outspoken manner with some contempt for the etiquette of the court. We should not forget that bullying is in fact the law of the land. The question is, do you condone that bullying toward people for being obese, and if so ... how far? Suppose you impose your "sin tax", you cut $1000 off the incomes of folks many of whom are poor, and ... nothing happens, same with any other diet. Then what do you do? Do you apologetically say oh, I'm sorry, I realize now that isn't a working idea? I doubt it. Instead you rely on it as a revenue source, and make it $2000. Then $4000. Then you find out people are growing black market potatoes and making black market vegetable oil and mixing moonshine cola from black market sugar beets, and you send out the guys with guns. See Death of Eric Garner, or how cops really want to help keep you safe by demanding you wear a seat belt. Today obese folks are the target of bigots, but there are two saving graces in this case: a) overweight folks are the majority, and b) bullies are made out of meat. Wnt (talk) 13:16, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The 80/20 rule was mentioned above. That is the specific topic here. It is supported by extensive research and described well here. There are many proposed solutions to the problem. Two common solutions are 1) force everyone to pay into a pool that is used to cover medical expenses. That is basically what insurance is. 2) Ration health care so the sickest die before they cost too much. There are many forms of rationing from simply not covering certain procedures to having out-of-pocket expenses to weed out the poor. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 12:19, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In Hungarian politics, what is a "Nemzeti konzultáció"?

Nemzeti konzultáció seems to translate to national consultation, but I am unsure what this means in English. Is it a referendum or something else? There appears to be an article in Hungarian, but nothing corresponding in English. Can someone explain what it is, how it works, etc? Thanks.2601:642:C301:119A:15EE:EB3A:DFD8:4CDC (talk) 08:53, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Nemzeti konzultáció means National (i.e. nationwide) consultation. The expression was used in the 2005 "State of the Union" speech and referred to questionnaires posted to about 1.6 million people asking their views on political events and public issues. Here are reports in English. From October 2015 the newly formed Prime Minister's Cabinet Office took over the national consultations. The consultations are not a referendum, they are more like opinion research about subjects such as basic law, economics, immigration, terrorism, and the wording of the questions has been criticized as manipulative[7]. Blooteuth (talk) 13:06, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

When Europe industrialized and peasants moved to the cities, what happened to the gentry?

When Europe industrialized and peasants moved to the cities to find work in the factories, what happened to the gentry and nobility that depended on peasants for labor? Did they have to start working for a living? 50.4.236.254 (talk) 18:00, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Not all agricultural workers ("peasant" has a pejorative sense these days) moved to cities, so many landowners continued with a smaller workforce. Dbfirs 18:07, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. But also the gentry did suffer a loss of income and assets. Some did become part of the workforce, while others rented out parts of their estate, charged for tours, etc., to make a living. StuRat (talk) 19:21, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Dbfirs -- The term "agricultural worker" is most often synonymous with "landless laborer", but peasants in many areas were not pure landless laborers... AnonMoos (talk) 22:27, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The landless labourers were the ones that the gentry relied upon to get the work done. The yeomen, who owned their own land, tended to stay in the countryside and continue farming (though there were exceptions, of course). Dbfirs 14:27, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Agriculture started to mechanise around the same period, so it became possible to farm estates with a smaller workforce anyway. Most estates continued in much the same way until the First World War - that was the real moment of change. After that the estates did start to decline much more. Wymspen (talk) 22:01, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

50.4.236.254 -- You might be interested in Barrington Moore Jr.'s classic book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World... AnonMoos (talk) 22:27, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ooooh, that sounds interesting. I love social history books. :) SSS (talk) 22:57, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

See also British Agricultural Revolution. Not only mechanisation, but improved farming practices such as inclosure and crop rotation led to increased productivity with fewer labourers. The "loss of income and assets" mentioned by User:StuRat above (assuming that he is referring to the UK), was brought about not by industrialisation but by the Great Depression of British Agriculture which was "caused by the dramatic fall in grain prices following the opening up of the American prairies to cultivation in the 1870s and the advent of cheap transportation with the rise of steamships". Alansplodge (talk) 00:11, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

One thing the factories needed was coal. Some land-owners were fortunate enough to dig a little deeper and find that newly important source of wealth. Of course, it wasn't them personally doing the digging. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 16:36, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

To cut a long story short, the nineteenth century happened. The more forward-thinking members of the upper classes (and upper-middle classes) used their wealth to invest in new high-tech ideas (canals, railways, factories) and imperial projects (mining in South Africa, sheep farming in Australia, rubber tapping in the Belgian Congo, and so on), creating a new moneyed class that wasn't as tied to the land and could therefore move to the cities or to the colonies, while those who didn't or whose investments failed either fell into destitution or clung on until WWI. European countries that industrialised became imperial powers run in large part by and for the new investing class (you can, in part, blame the Prussian "Junker" agricultural nobles who maintained a lot of political and military power, and their dislike for the wealthy traders in cities like Hamburg, for the fact that Germany industrialised late and didn't develop the same kind of overseas empires that the UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Portugal etc did) Smurrayinchester 08:30, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, but the reason that domestic UK agriculture became unprofitable was that mechanisation allowed a flood of cheap food imports from North America. Other European countries fared less badly because they protected themselves with trade barriers, but this was contrary to the free trade ethos espoused by the British political class. Germany's late start may also be down to the fact that it wasn't actually a country until 1871. Alansplodge (talk) 09:09, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Britain did protect itself with the Corn Laws till mid century. However the thing that really made the difference was cheap shipping after 1880 - so basically as you say mechanization. Dmcq (talk) 11:11, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and the machinery to convert the prairies into productive land; much of it horse-powered at that stage, but machinery nonetheless; for example the Hussey Reaper, invented by Obed Hussey earlier in the century. Alansplodge (talk) 11:55, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In the U.K., The gentry ("landed gentry") owned the land. They are the ones that profited by increased agricultural efficiency, so they invested in enclosure. This meant they needed fewer laborers on their land. The population of landed gentry remained (roughly) constant while the number of laborers declined. -Arch dude (talk) 22:08, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Also, in the UK, "what happened" was the People's Budget; the descendants of city-bound peasants, having gradually acquired the franchise, voted for a party that basically destroyed the centuries-old constitution of government in order to tax the gentry and nobility severely. Nyttend (talk) 00:48, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

In Poland many nobles also left the contryside for cities and either became entrepeneurs or got into highly skilled jobs like doctors, lawyers, professors, artists, etc., eventually becoming a new social class known as the intelligentsia. — Kpalion^(talk) 14:19, 11 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sam Ruby

I was looking for books for learning Ruby (programming language) when I came across one by Sam Ruby. Is this a case of Nominative determinism or was his birth name different? Scala Cats (talk) 23:07, 8 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

From Sam Ruby#Ruby: "Sam Ruby has done development in the Ruby programming language, leading to some confusion between the person's name and the language. However, there is no formal connection—they both just coincidentally have the same name." However, this is uncited. Rojomoke (talk) 05:18, 9 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yukihiro Matsumoto named Ruby (the language). There is no reason to assume he had any contact with Sam Ruby. Sam Ruby's primary work with Ruby is the Ruby2js tool, which was developed a good 10 years after the development of Ruby. 209.149.113.5 (talk) 11:59, 10 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]