The central premise of Time on the Cross—that slavery was economically profitable and unlikely “wither away”, and this had some positive effect on the treatment of the slaves, seems quite plausible to me. (That said, I believe this is only true after the invention of the cotton gin).
The first half of the thesis is most assuredly true. It could be that if not for the invention of the cotton gin, slavery would not have been profitable in the cotton-growing regions of the US South, but slavery was extremely profitable and economically dynamic elsewhere, so I wouldn’t be inclined to lay too much emphasis on the gin (except as a matter, possibly, of where slavery came to be located, as it did die out “naturally” in the areas where it was unprofitable.) However, it is also true that northern and/or metropolitan political leaders generally believed (however incorrectly) that free labor would generally be more efficient than slave, which to be fair it was in the industrial production processes that the abolishing regions had a comparative advantage in.
I am extremely skeptical of the second part of the thesis, because most everything I’ve seen indicates that slaves were worse off than black sharecroppers were worse off than southern whites were worse off than northern whites. But I haven’t actually read Time on the Cross too closely.
Some possibilities: it jets out in one direction, little droplets radiate outwards from all over, there are a bunch of miniature streams going in all directions, there are sorts of sheets of water radiating outward that split into droplets, it does any of these things at a rapid or very slow rate, the water doesn’t leave at all
Reasoning: when I wring out a towel it usually all leaves in one big thing, then drips from all over. Does it all leave through one “faucet” because that’s where the pressure is or because it’s the lowest point? I’ve never paid too close attention to it, but I think it typically leaves from the bottom, which would imply that gravity’s doing the work of choosing that one exit point. With the dripping off it’s unclear whether the drops would just cling to the towel in the absence of gravity. It may be that the whole thing depends on the extra oomph of gravity; if when I wring out my towel it all leaves from the lowest spot (although again, I’m not sure of that,) then presumably the pressure prior to its getting there isn’t enough to make it exit. All of this leans towards less water exiting than otherwise, and maybe not from all the same place, and (of course) slower than before. So my guess would be something like little droplets slowly radiating out from all over but not as much water leaving as before, unless it gets wrung really tight.
Meta reasoning: you were much more likely to post this if it was cool and/or surprising. The most intuitively cool and/or surprising things (that are still plausible according to the above thinking) would be if it all left as a sort of sheet or bubble of if none (or at least very little) left, or maybe if the sheet or bubble arrived but only after a lot of wringing. On the second thought, towels are pretty irregular surfaces, so I wouldn’t expect a smooth sheet to radiate out from it. So my official guess is that very little will leave from it until it has been wrung very tightly, and then a bunch will surprisingly burst out.
~WATCHING THE VIDEO~
Hey, that was cool! I guess I was sort of right—water mostly didn’t exit the towel, but I didn’t predict (correctly, in my head, or explicitly, in the post above) what it would look like as it was not exiting the towel, and I was more dramatically incorrect about it all bursting out. The features I hadn’t thought about were the clumpiness of the water and the way water looks like when it’s about to fall from a towel but is still clinging—visibly on the surface, not hiding within the folds. I also think that if I had correctly predicted what it would look like I wouldn’t have predicted the burst from the meta-reasoning, because the towel being shrunk in within the water was already cool-looking. When I predicted that something cool would happen, I suspect I should have thought through my reasoning earlier and seen at what points there was an opportunity for something cool to occur—which is a point that might be more broadly applicable. To remember the surface tension stuff I should have tried to remember mechanical features of water in general, like why droplets form in the first place and so on, rather than jumping into directly imagining how wringing out a towel looks like and reasoning from there. Broader lesson there, obviously not a new one, but perhaps one I should be better about keeping in mind: appeals to first principles are relatively more important when dealing with novel situations.