Skip to main content

Why is history interesting, and how does it help us today?

History is very interesting because it does help us today. So many events in history have relevance to current events. History repeats itself over and over again. The names and places may change, but the basic events are very similar. If you can see the similarities between past and present events, you should see how relevant history is. It is our job to learn from the past so we don’t keep repeating the same mistakes now and in the future.


A fairly recent example of this can be seen with the Great Recession of 2008-2010. There are some parallels between the events of the Great Recession to the events of the Great Depression of the 1930s. One of the events leading to the Great Depression was risky investment practices. In the 1920s, banks made loans to many people who were already in debt or who didn’t have an income level that could support the loans they were receiving. People were also investing in companies without doing much research on these companies. In the Great Recession of 2008-2010, banks again made risky loans. This time, it was to people who wanted to buy a home. Some of these people didn’t have the income level to support the loan they were receiving. When these people couldn’t pay back their loan, banks suffered big losses. This helped send the economy into a downward spiral. If we had learned some lessons from the events leading to the Great Depression, the banks wouldn’t have made some of these risky loans.


There are many parallels between the past and the present. If we learn from the past, we can make better decisions now and in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

A man has a garden measuring 84 meters by 56 meters. He divides it into the minimum number of square plots. What is the length of the square plots?

We wish to divide this man's garden into the minimum number of square plots possible. A square has all four sides with the same length.Our garden is a rectangle, so the answer is clearly not 1 square plot. If we choose the wrong length for our squares, we may end up with missing holes or we may not be able to fit our squares inside the garden. So we have 84 meters in one direction and 56 meters in the other direction. When we start dividing the garden in square plots, we are "filling" those lengths in their respective directions. At each direction, there must be an integer number of squares (otherwise, we get holes or we leave the garden), so that all the square plots fill up the garden nicely. Thus, our job here is to find the greatest common divisor of 84 and 56. For this, we prime factor both of them: `56 = 2*2*2*7` `84 = 2*2*3*7` We can see that the prime factors and multiplicities in common are `2*2*7 = 28` . This is the desired length of the square plots. If you wi...
Post a Comment
Read more