Sublime

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The capacity to mass-produce books was incredibly subversive to medieval institutions, just as microtechnology will prove subversive to the modern nation-state. Printing rapidly undermined the Church’s monopoly on the word of God, even as it created a new market for heresy.

The value of this early money, whether gold, silver, cowry shells or barley, was essentially the same as the value of the quantity of the stuff from which it was made. Economists call this "commodity money". Paper money, by contrast, tends to be worth far more than the paper it is printed on. One of the key technological challenges was to

A perfect example is lottery winners. Research has shown again and again that regardless of the size of their winnings, most lottery winners eventually return to their original financial state, the amount they can comfortably handle.