How the Pyramids were built, finally answered

How were the pyramids built?  People have been wrestling with this for a long time, but the reason we can't figure it out is not because of the people who built it but because of the people who are trying to figure it out, us.

The pyramids were built by smart people who had no constraints when it came to human capital, monetary capital, time or safety.  When you put all of those aside it's fairly simple.  You move giant stones however you can, even if it takes a year, even if it kills a thousand people.

Imagine showing a professor at Cambridge in 1850 a printed version of Wikipedia.  Just for reference, if you did print Wikipedia it would be just shy of seventeen hundred bound books.  He would solve the problem by probably starting a college, getting a couple thousand students, each who was a specialist in any number of fields and asking them to start doing research and writing papers.  It would cost an arm and a leg and would take years.  We did it with just a little time, from twenty million people, effectively for free.

Maybe you have unlimited man hours, or maybe you aren't allowed to kill a thousand workers (hopefully, but as recently as the Hoover Dam, rail system and Golden Gate Bridge we did not count human lives as too much of a cost for completion).

When trying to fix a problem, make sure to ask who is fixing the problem not just what problem is being fixed.  How do you fix problems?  Now, what problem needs to be fixed?

a billion dollars and somebody else's life

What if Bill or Warren walked into your job, or your business if you are an entrepreneur, and offered you a billion dollars to quit.  I think everybody I know would take that billion.  What if they also said they were going to close the company down after you left?  I don't know many people where that would change their answer.

The CEO of almost every major corporation is hoping this will happen to them.  The owner of almost every single small company would call that day the best day of their life.

The chances of that happening if you are a small to midsize business is smaller than winning the lottery.

If you work for a large corporation (as I do) than somebody else is willing to sacrifice you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Many people are hoping it will happen to them and it almost assuredly won't.  A few people are hoping it will happen to them and you will lose your job, and at some point it almost certainly will.

Better never than late

There is the classic story in the Bible of the Israelites sending 12 spies into the promise land to scope it out and see if it is all that it was hyped up to be.

They come back and say that it is all that it hyped up to be and more.  There is one issue, there are already people living there and they are giants.  Not only giants but the grandchildren of giants!  And to boot, the giants looked at the 12 spies like they were grasshoppers.  Two of the spies say let's go kill the giants and take their land, but the other ten get the people worked up.  Everyone decides God is sending them off to their deaths so they decline the invitation and spend the next forty years in the desert as punishment.

That's the story.  But it's not the story.  The end of the story is left out.  After everybody complains and threatens, Moses talks to God, God condemns them to forty years in the desert, AND THEY DECIDE THEY WERE WRONG.  Better late then never right...  Apparently not, they tell Moses and God they are sorry and head into the promise land to fight the giants, and are unanimously killed like grasshoppers.

Pride and unbelief are spectacularly bad partners.  Their unbelief caused them not to follow Gods promise immediately, then their pride decided they might as well accept God's promise rather than 40 years of wandering.  Nope.  Deals off the table.

I've never been taught that some of God's promises have an expiration date on them,  and if consumed after that date are actually bad for you.  But that seems to be what my Bible is telling me.

Following God is a dangerous proposition, it is only when you concede that not following him is worse that you really hunker in.