How did the Maya survive?

But maybe all that means is they will master some other technology that we did not. It seems like previous civilizations have mastered technology that we cannot figure out.

Countries invite IMF assistance. If they wanted to be left alone, all they have to do is do nothing. If IMF loans didn't have strings attached, they wouldn't be able to borrow money, as it's those strings which build bond investor confidence. The entire point of IMF assistance is to avoid being cutoff from international borrowing for being horrible credit risks (again).

The root cause of national debt problems is primarily government corruption, but also mismanagement, often at the behest of populist politics that excuse economic policy failures by, e.g., scapegoating outside forces. The US isn't immune to this problem, either, it just happens that the US had, albeit intermittently, long enough runs of solid financial management (e.g. Hamilton during the Founding) that it could grow an economic base that could withstand intermittent periods of mismanagement without the entire economy collapsing (yet).

Even when a country is dealt a really crappy hand at the outset, it's not irreversible. Haiti is the poster child for crushing debt unfairly imposed by foreign powers, yet the Dominican Republic had the same history, but managed to overcome it. In some instances, interventions blamed for keeping Haiti oppressed were precisely what helped the Dominican Republic flourish. Likewise, nobody hears about the IMF success stories, just the failures; and it's not because the former don't exist or are rare.

The Spanish inquisition for the most pairt maintained the medieval view that witchcraft could not exist from a theological perspective and continued prosecuting belief in it as a heresy.

I'm not defending the church, though. They declared witchcraft to be an irrational superstition to delegitimize pagan beliefs a few centuries earlier yet had no qualms about embracing the same beliefs to gain a competitive edge when competing against protestants.

References about the platinum technology in South America before the arrival of the Europeans:

"Ancient Platinum Technology in South America, its use by the indians in pre-hispanic times", by David A. Scott and Warwick Bray, Institute of Archaeology, University of London, 1980.

"Metallurgy of Gold and Platinum among the Pre-Columbian Indians", Nature, 1936.

About the knowledge of the natural osmium-iridium alloy in the ancient Mediterranean world, there are several archaeology articles with chemical analyses of Egyptian gold artifacts, most of which contain as inclusions small nuggets of osmium-iridium alloy, whose cause is the fact that the gold was collected from river deposits, where the gold nuggets and the Os-Ir nuggets accumulate together, so when the gold was melted it incorporated the Os-Ir nuggets. (For instance: "The analysis of platinum-group element inclusions in gold antiquities", N.D. Meeksa, M.S. Titea, a British Museum Research Laboratory, London WC1B 3DG, England)

These archaeological finds match perfectly the description of adamant from Plato (in "Timaeus" and in "The Statesman"), where adamant is described as the "knot of gold", which is found together with gold, but it cannot be shaped like gold, because it is too hard and impossible to melt. The same description of adamant is provided by Pliny the Elder in his tenth book, which adds besides it the description of the Indian adamants, which are completely different from the classical adamant, being octahedral crystals, not metal nuggets, which matches what are now called diamonds.

The earliest reference to "adamant" is at Hesiod, who describes how Gaia has made a sickle blade from "grey adamant", for the castration of Uranus, which makes no sense as a reference to modern diamonds, which are neither grey nor suitable to be forged into a blade, but it makes perfect sense as a reference to the grey Os-Ir alloy, the hardest metal known to Hesiod, which humans were too weak to forge, but surely a huge goddess like Gaia should be able to forge. Other references to Os-Ir adamant are in Aeschylus (Prometheus is bound with chains made of adamant; another use that makes perfect sense for a metal, but which would be impossible for fragile diamond crystals, which cannot be forged into chain links) and in Theophrastus.

There are a few other articles about the history of platinum and platinum-group metals that have relevant information about all these things, but I do not remember now the titles or authors.

The fact that by searching the Internet you can find a lot of incomplete or even completely incorrect information about many things proves that one should never trust the answers given by an LLM for any really important question, because an LLM will provide the information most likely to be found in its training sources, while truth cannot be based on democracy. On the contrary, much too frequently the majority opinion is more likely to be incorrect, than the minority opinion.

Some jewelry may have been traded until North America, but they would have been certainly rare by the Mayan.

Because the South-Americans did not have iron or iron alloys, but they had rather abundant gold and silver and platinum, the usage of precious metals was not confined to decoration and currency. For instance the use of nails made of gold-copper-silver alloy was frequent and also various tools were made from such a gold-copper-silver alloy (named "tumbaga" by the Spaniards).

Pure gold, silver or copper are extremely soft, but their alloys can have a decent strength, even if not comparable to steel.

The discovery of platinum in South America had a significant impact on the entire human civilization.

Initially the Spaniards have despised the metal because, unlike for the gold and silver that they took back to Europe, nobody would give anything in exchange for the unknown platinum, and they also did not know how to work the metal into useful things. Hence the Spanish name of the metal, "platina", as a diminutive of "plata", i.e. silver, as at that time it was much less valuable than silver.

Nevertheless, platinum samples have been taken back to Europe, and eventually, in the middle of the 18th century they have arisen the curiosity of the chemists, who began to study its properties.

After it was established that platinum is an ideal material for vessels used in chemical research, due to its resistance to chemical reagents and high temperatures, platinum has played an exceedingly important role in chemistry around the end of the 18th century and during the 19th century, i.e. during the time when the majority of the chemical elements have been discovered, frequently during analyses performed in platinum vessels.

Other early important use of platinum was for the standards of mass and of length of the metric system, which ensured an accuracy and reproducibility of the measurements much better than anything before that.

What nobody wants to admit is what used to be common knowledge in the 90's: cultures are relative, not the same.

i went to check on the doc. i watched (https://youtu.be/laW_Yf6N4kU?si=vi3KY9prfdqfNybC&t=1176) and i have to make a correction: they point out that the majority of the 80 million people living on America were killed on the first 100 years of colonization. they do talk impartially as it being one of the biggest holocaust known to the humanity. i don't agree on excluding death numbers from disease. it wasn't something like the Black Death (25 million) where effected countries weren't in war, nor they were also being blown out of existence by superior (war) technology

and 80 million aren't even the highest estimations historians suggest [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indi... ¶ some historians point up to 100 million people killed

https://www.sp-amazon.org/publications

don't link me with that guy

The Aztecs are noteworthy because of having an empire to conquer.

I am not suggesting that their civilizations did not have artistic or cultural merit, but I think even in a fictional alternate history where the Spanish decided to peacefully trade with Montezuma, I bet a couple hundred years later these people would've had mechanical looms and walked around in tailored suits just the same as their European counterparts.

Not to speak of an what an empire gaing such powerful technologies and ideas about running society would've done to its neighbors.

By which measure were they less advanced? Tenochtitlan had a population of north of 200k when the Spanish arrived - bigger than most European cities at that time, bar a couple. When you read the chronicles of the conquistadores you realise how advanced they were in many ways compared with Europeans.

Th Maya were contemporary to and very similar to Greece in many ways - definitely more advanced in some aspects of mathematics and astronomy, and had an extremely complex architecture.

The gap wasn’t so big, and in some cases American cities were even more advanced - probably the complex sanitation system of most mesoamerican cities contributed to the biggest asymmetry of all - European cities were a Petri dish of filth and disease.

In a couple hundred years these populations in many ways were quite indistinguishable from their conquerors, as they adopted their customs and ways of running society.

Many of these conqured peoples while becoming Westernized culturally, didn't escape the yoke of their conquerors until much later.

This process was repeated in Latin America.

I know there are a lot of politically motivated people are interested in simple stories of the virtuous locals versus the evil West, but the same story played out pretty much everywhere over different continents and timeframes.

I'm not sure if Romes conquest of the Gauls was any less brutal than the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

If by 'running' you mean 'colonizing', then yes.

The 2014 Ukraine invasion worked because the nation was splintered and demoralized, and the Russians could just roll in and take what tey wanted. The 2022 didn't because the Ukrainians were unified and willing to fight, despite a much higher degree of military readiness on the Russian side.

But going back, over time, the native population became serfs, picked up the language, culture, religion of their conquerors, they even intermarried to a significant degree. Latin America is full of people with both European and native ancestry to some degree.

Yes they were serfs, but so were most European peasants at that time.

And only a couple hundred years later, as the Spanish empire collapsed, these people, culturally Westernized at this point, threw off the yoke and formed their independent countries, with Mexico starting it's own empire.

I just cannot imagine a credible scenario in which even if Western colonial powers didn't manage to conquer the territory of Mexico, they wouldn't have been Westernized to a significant degree, by the Aztec rulers themselves starting a Meiji style modernization.