Surely that would be “bipedal”*? “Bimodal” would suggest alternating between two modes, as it might be, sheep/lamb or even Schrödinger’s sheep.
*Not “bicycle” - that would be silly.
Until you observe him, he’s on the fence.
Excellent - I chortled, sniggered, but not guffawed - would have woken my wife.
It doesn’t surprise me that polyphasic sleep would be the norm in much of Europe because a lot of Europe is at a pretty high latitude, and in the winter it gets dark quite early. In a world where candles are expensive for most people, all they allow you to do is be awake at home (you can’t really go outside or do business), and most people are illiterate so you can’t read books, then it makes sense to just go to sleep. But you can’t sleep for 14 hours so you end up spending some time awake in that period.
OTOH, the traditional siesta in the more tropic latitudes has been explained as the need to avoid exertion during the hottest part of the day. Whereas, factories don’t like frequent stars and stops, and some processes, like smelting iron, probably don’t do well with frequent stops.
But working with smelted iron all day must be an even more horrible job in sub-tropic or even tropic climates than in the temperate zones.
There does seem to be a sharp contrast between work-ethic cultures which were best adapted to industrialism and more traditional cultures where the goal was to work as little and rest as much as survival would permit. Historically westerners saw this as indolence and explained it via racism, but what does make the difference?
As I mentioned earlier, this is a lesson that the IR taught to the minions… show up on time, work hard enough, or you don’t get paid - and you don’t have a farm any more, so this is your only choice. Regulation by the clock, doing your assigned task, and constant supervision is something taught in the school system so we can be good little workers.
I suspect a century of progess and creeping capitalism as lessened the tendency to work at one’s own pace that was the hallmark of pre-IR and less developed countries nowadays.
Given that the description of Count Dracula is taken almost verbatim from a recently published police pamphlet describing criminal types (born criminals, who were actually thought to look a certain way), it’s probably about our anxiety over having evil in our midst and not recognizing it.
Also given that Dracula sort of gets a pass, even after people are slightly suspicious, both because of his class, and that he’s a foreigner who is thought of as sophisticated, the book is probably to an extent about both kinds of fears.
Bearing in mind as well that England was actually seeing quite a lot of immigration of poor people from eastern Europe, and actually projecting a lot of fear onto them (Jack the Ripper is Jewish-- no, wait, he’s Russian-- no, wait, both Polish and Jewish).
I agree. Our lack of memory and imagination regarding alternatives is something else we lost with the IR, or, more properly, the dominance of capitalism. It is a truism that people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But there are ideas and suggestions and examples out there. Heck, 8% of Italy’s GDP is produced by coops, most of which emerged out of necessity, not wild-eyed idealism. It may be that people will increasingly be forced to find new ways and so create alternatives and experiments and linkages on the peripheries of capitalism and the state. Instead of TINA (There Is No Alternative) perhaps TIA MARIA will evolve: There Is an Alternative, Many Alternatives, Really Interesting Alternatives. Which is not to say it will be easy.
After all, Rome wasn’t burnt in a day, as an old Wobbly told me 50 years ago.
I also wonder if the IR has accelerated the concept of living alone…
Not just general mobility, from the farm to the city, and then all over the country, so we are no longer in the village of our ancestors surrounded by relatives. But the amount of domestic work required to keep a house required at least hired servants, if not a family, before the advent of labour-saving house appliances. Urbanization (accelerated with the IR) allowed one to purchase services - for example, baked bread as a substitute for making dough and baking it from scratch, paying a laundry service, preparing meals. Employment rather than agriculture yielded the cash flow that even lower class workers could afford to buy services once done by a member of the family. (Although, yes, there was a beginning of this in any earlier urban environment where tradesmen worked for cash).
I don’t recall if this has been referenced before (forgive me 
) but wasn’t standardizing one of the basic building blocks of IR, either products (every item comes out the same, no idiosyncrasies) or employees ( ie no unique skill set required)
For a lot of thing, yes, but the standard brick is much older.
The gold standard of industrial machining is interchangeability: If something is made of an assembly of widgets, the goal is that any randomly chosen widget will fit into place and the whole work properly. This is achieved by tolerances: every part can be made to exact dimensions to a certain limit of accuracy, and the design will work if all of its parts are within the specified tolerances.
is n’t the whole concept of a factory that it is basically converted skilled into unskilled work? … so you could use Any-Body? …and any “body” was easily replacable?
to make long lasting chair se before IR, took a skilled worker … breaking down (hey!) the construction of a chair into 20 small steps that can be learned in minutes, is what factories were all about.
Think Charly Chaplin “modern times” trope in the factory, fastening just one screw. The “money” was no longer dependent of the “skill” of a few (who would only work as hard as they wanted in the put-out world), but could do anything in sufficiently small steps at their discretion, urgency or speed. Shifts also became a thing and follow the same logic.
That’s part of it. But even the jobs that required skill became “at the office” or “at the plant” jobs, not something seen and handed down from father to son done in the shop in front of, or under the family home. Welder, pipefitter, electrician, or engineer, accountant, etc. - or the guy whose job it was to build and fix the automatic looms. These were no longer jobs the child saw the parent doing, looked up to, and eventually do. Plus, the parent was still working that job when the child was adult and jobs weren’t “shared”. So… no guarantee there was a job opening for them.
So maybe those industries don’t flourish in hot climates as much as in temperate ones, irrespective of the culture?
Not in the first 100 years or so, tbh. While there was some of this, early factories were more agglomerations of artisans than they were what you described. It took Henry Ford and the development of what was then called “Fordism” which was both the development of the movable assembly line combined with the minute division of labor using semi-skilled labor which you described (and Chaplin highlighted).
Of course the assembly line existed before Ford, but what he (and Knudson, et al) brought to the factory means of production was the breaking down of the manufacturing process into simpler, discrete steps which meant that the capitalist no longer needed to hire skilled artisans to make, for example, a bumper. Instead he could hire five guys* who would then do their tasks to produce bumpers, thereby increasing the number of bumpers produced per day.
In Fod’s case, the use of this principle allowed the production time of a Model T to be decreased from 1 car every 13 days to 1 car every 90 minutes.
Cite: Fordism | Definition, History, & Facts | Britannica Money
*this is an example, I have no idea how many people it took to make a bumper in 1914.
IIRC, Ford got inspiration for this new form or work-organization from Chicago’s meat-processing plants. Of course, the up-and-coming car industry was a way nicer example to promote/push this re-organization than those guy who waded ancle-deep in animal blood, hence Fordism …
ps: similar benchmarks were achived for the construction of airplanes during WW2 in the US … and had the added benefit, that the steps were so simplified, so even (then) unskilled workers like gasp …. womenfolk could build airplanes!!!
I recall a documentary that mentioned the Royal Navy’s use of assembly lines. In the heyday of the British naval dominance, the number of ships and the demand for something simple used in large quatnities - pulleys - meant they needed vast numbers of them. The Navy organized workshops where each person did a single job. One cut wood blanks, others turned them to pulley wheels, another group did nothing but prepare each of the metal parts, and another group assembled the final product.
Ford just broke the system down further for a far more complex product. However he got the idea, it worked wonders for him.