It's Spanish only AFAIK, but worth watching for the commissioned 3d renders of the different devices and techniques.
TL;DR We need more engineer archeologists to avoid misinterpreting archeological evidence
Isaac is a civil engineer for the Spanish government, and an amateur historian that focuses on Roman technology and civil engineering, particularly roads and hydraulics.
There are a number of tropes and myths about Roman technology that stem from the fact that archeologists are very unlikely to have an engineering background and thus lack the knowledge to correctly interpret some of what they uncover.
As Isaac explains and shows in his videos, Romans supplied their cities with fresh water from springs only, never from rivers, rain or any other still water. They possessed the topographical and geodesic knowledge required to map terrain precisely and route both roads and aqueducts for hundreds of miles with the necessary and adequate slope.
Furthermore, they understood pressure and routinely siphoned water across significant elevation differences and their pipe engineering was able to handle several atmospheres.
They always captured the entire stream and dumped the excess flow directly into the sewers which were kept clean with running water. There is evidence of several of these distribution points in different cities.
With all of this in mind, I'm skeptical of the dating precision of the sites. I find it suspicious that there is absolutely no difference between health in the Imperial heyday and health in late-empire times when maintenance was deficient and water supply irregular and thus no permanent running water in the sewers, thus rats, thus diseases.
I would guess the samples are actually of the same times or at least from places with deficient sanitation for whatever reason.
Some other article tropes he specifically addresses are:
- lack of toilet privacy: they likely built stalls in wood like we do now; they just did not last
- the shared sponges: these were likely for dislodging stuck material and cleaning the toilet, not the body; again, just like we do nowadays
>Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes.
>Sometimes I use my bike when I go to see some of my friends
Because to earn dividends you must be a owner i.e. actually hold company stock.
To profit from buybacks you only need the option of buying the stock at a lower price than the buyback price.
The CEOs and other CXXs of these firms often have large amounts of options included in their comp packages.
This is why buybacks happen at market highs instead of market lows as sound management principles and common sense would suggest.
Increasing shareholder value by increasing equity value is just a pretext. The real purpose of buybacks is a swindle to funnel company money directly into the pockets of the C-Suite through what in the books appears a routine management operation.
These executives decide on the buybacks and exercise their share options just before, thus pocketing millions in company money and actually hurting shareholders.
Shareholders get the blame despite having little to no power and seeing their investments ruined and looted. Also, in many firms, a lot of shareholders are also employees.
Some companies pay out “retained dividends” on unvested RSUs.
Like buybacks vs regular dividends, the main differences have to do with their taxability.
From what I can tell, the main complaint in the Atlantic article is that CEOs time buyback announcements to coincide with their stock sales. The first example they give is the Home Depot announcing a buy back (apparently in the Feb ‘18 earnings call), and then selling stock after the insider lock up window opened. In all likelihood, that sale was scheduled well ahead of time (execs have to do this to avoid insider trading charges).
So, the controversy seems to reduce to Home Depot having a strong quarter and buying back stock, making money for shareholders, including the CEO.
Note that if they’d issued dividends, and they pay retained dividends on unvested RSUs, the net effect would be exactly the same (except taxes).
The controversy is not insider trading. It is executives exercising their share options during buybacks the price of which they themselves decide.
They decide when to buyback and choose to do it at market highs. This is not sound management and is not in the interest of the shareholders.
I learned about it in a recent edition of "The Intelligent Investor".
Most executives are shareholders only during the brief moment it takes exercising their options. They are not shareholders in the investor or even trader sense.
The claim that this amounts to distributing dividends is also not true. Options which is most of what the executives are holding don't earn dividends.
If environmental disasters are enough pretext for questioning sovereignty, shall we compile a list, together with the territory to be subtracted? I suggest with start with North America. I'll go first:
- Deepwater Horizon platform; Gulf of Mexico, 2010.
This is downvoted, but it is a fair point, that is being used as politics weapon. The Amazon forest was savaged before, but the previous administration was seen as "good".
And more than that, those supposed good funds from Germany and Norway that were basically a form of bribe for the previous administration look to the other side on the mining atrocities these countries did in the forest.
I count the parent, and a couple more replying with something-must-be-done answers at the suggestion that the territory be forcefully or otherwise removed from Brazilian sovereignty.
There are other comments in other sub-threads.
Also, this pretext isn't a new idea, and there's heavyweight international support for it.
“Contrary to what Brazilians think, the Amazon is not their property, it belongs to all of us,” Al Gore, then a senator, said in 1989.
The Latin-American Bishops Conference denounced this back in 2007:
The growing assault on the environment may serve as a pretext for proposals to internationalize the Amazon, which only serve the economic interests of transnational corporations. Pan-Amazon society is multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious. The dispute over the occupation of the land is intensifying more and more. The traditional communities of the region want their lands to be recognized and legalized.
https://www.youtube.com/@IsaacMorenoGallo/videos
Isaac is a civil engineer that worked for the Spanish road service and amateur historian.
He routinely refers to GIS techniques in his videos and work to uncover the routes of both Roman roads and aqueducts in Spain.
He is involved with a state-sponsored website for the Roman road layout in the province Castilla-León:
https://www.viasromanas.net
He consulted on and presented a documentary series on Roman engineering for the Spanish public TV, RTE:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRMFqXMPhK3OtGKkveDC9...
You can check his website for all his scholarly work (papers, etc):
https://www.traianvs.net/vias-romanas/