3. A Good Ruler

I think the most effective way for a ruler to maintain order is he can't be too nice, but he also can't be too strict, he has to fall somewhere in the middle. I think the ruler must have the respect of the people and the peoples' trust. For example, Barack Obama is very close to his fellow Americans, he goes out and plays basketball with the troops and even goes out and walks his dog, like a regular person. Obama really shows that he is one of the people and this helps Americans trust him. A good ruler also needs to be strong, he needs to show other countries that if they mess with his country, there will be war. And lastly a good ruler needs to know how to keep control, he needs to know how to make decisions for the army. He also needs to control the crimes going on in his county and make consequences for people who break the rules.

2. Jared Diamond's Thesis

I agree with Jared Diamond's thesis that powerful civilizations are formed by geographical luck. For a civilization to be strong and prosper they must have good crops and good agricultural land. This makes them more powerful because that way the civilization can spread and share their ideas with other places. If you want to be a strong civilization you also have to have a good location, you can't be locked from the rest of society, like on an island because then no one can get their new ideas and information to you. Being in a good location with multiple other civilizations near by make it easy to conquer them, if your civilization is strong. I think Jared Diamond is right with his thesis that in order for a civilization to prosper it needs geographical luck.

1. Advantages and Disadvantages of Farming

I don't think the advantages of agriculture and farming over weigh the disadvantages. In my opinion farming is a better way to get food than hunting and gathering. Farming is a reliable way to know that you will get food, while hunting and gathering is very unreliable, for example one day you might get lucky and find a lot of vegetation and meat, but other days there may be none. For farming you don't have to look for food, you just have to go and pick the food. The only disadvantages that I can think of that farming has is it is very expensive to start and hard to maintain, but even with that I think it is much better than going out and hunting and gathering. Now that people have technology such as tractors and plows to run their farms it makes them much easier to run and now we have no need for hunting and gathering.