Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 September 17

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September 17

Beauchamp and the Pompey Stone

Was the William M. Beauchamp who identified the Pompey Stone this William M. Beauchamp? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 02:55, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

DuncanHill: it would seem to be so! I’ll check a bit closer and give you a more definitive answer when I’m on my laptop tomorrow, but great catch— the information I’d expect to be there lines up with my knowledge of beauchamp. I’m somewhat embarrassed to have missed this. Great catch as usual! Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 03:01, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@Eddie891: I have a habit of googling unlinked people/places/things in interesting articles, which makes me look like I know a lot more than I actually do :) DuncanHill (talk) 03:11, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

@DuncanHill this refers to the reverend Beauchamp as one and the same and in his book it seems like they're the same guy. Seems reasonable to assume they're the same guy. And yes, I very much do the same thing... Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 13:56, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

The article in which the sleuth William M. Beauchamp reported the Pompey stone as a hoax, published in The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal, can be read here. The Reverend William Martin Beauchamp researched inscriptions in Onondaga County cemeteries, including Pompey.^[1][2] There can be little doubt that sleuth and Reverend are one and the same person.  --Lambiam 08:15, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Colchester church identification

Can anyone identify this engraving by Wenceslas Hollar which is labelled "Colchester Church". There are an awful lot of churches in Colchester, but I think it may be St. Botolph's Priory, in which case I could add it to the article. Alansplodge (talk) 13:04, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

St_John's_Abbey,_Colchester#The_abbey_church seems like a good guess, see the picture here. This has more, including Hollar's etching. --Wrongfilter (talk) 13:43, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Excellent work, many thanks. The second link says that Hollar copied an earlier drawing, as the church had been demolished a century earlier. I have now added it to the St John's article and also the correct category to the Commons page. Alansplodge (talk) 14:03, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Resolved

Listing people of Polish-Jewish backgrounds

This is a big problem. This can refer to people from Poland, but which Poland. The independent Poland after WWI? The old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which existed from middle ages until the third partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century? This Commonwealth included a vast territory with many different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. It included what is now part of the Baltic States, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, Muscovy, Rumania, and Slovakia and Moldova. It included Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews of many different kinds, Muslims, and others. It included these languages: Lithuanian, German, Polish, Latvian, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarussian, Turkish, Armenian, Magyar and Latin. If you really mean all of this your list would never end of Polish Jews. -- 2600:1700:59A0:6A80:9440:7385:1B2:7218

Wikipedia has guidance on this. According to WP:ETHNICITY, "The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases, this will be the country, region, or territory, where the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident; or, if the person is notable mainly for past events, where the person was a citizen, national, or permanent resident when the person became notable." (bold mine). If a person was a resident of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time they were alive, we call it exactly that, and we don't use the names of places that did not exist at the time like "Belarus". The opening paragraph of an article does not normally discuss religion or ethnicity, unless such religion or ethnicity is tied inextricably to the reason the person is notable (i.e. if they were a notable Jewish theologian), then it would make sense to mention that in the lead. If they had some other job unrelated to their ethnicity or religion, then we probably aren't going to mention it in the lead, though it likely would get a passing mention in the expanded biography later in the article. I hope that all helps. --Jayron32 15:25, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

We routinely mention ethnicity in the lead also when it is not tied strongly to the reason for their notability: "Thomas Hobbes ... was an English philosopher"; "René Descartes ... was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist"; "Immanuel Kant" ... was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers".  --Lambiam 07:40, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

Those aren't mentions of ethnicity; they're mentions of "the country, region, or territory, where the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident". Deor (talk) 16:04, 19 September 2021 (UTC)

What Deor said. Thomas Hobbes was a resident of the Kingdom of England. Immanuel Kant was a resident of Germany, a widely recognized region even if there was no state called Germany at that time. --Jayron32 15:20, 20 September 2021 (UTC)

A bank's intangible assets

I wrongly assumed that banks are simple to analyze. Look at LYG, although US banks have similar if smaller problems. Its price-to-book is 0.6, but according to WSJ, its tangible book value is 0.52c/sh., while trading at $2.53. A look at the balance sheet shows goodwill to be small relative to Other Assets that includes intangibles.

Why do almost all the banks I've look at carry significant intangible assets? Why'd acquirers pay for them? Imagine Reason (talk) 20:57, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Well, for one, banks have both trademark value (i.e. their brand name carries intangible value) as well as goodwill that the acquire when during mergers and acquisitions. In the U.S., the accumulation of goodwill value has become significant due to widespread consolidation in the banking industry over the past several decades, since the two major acts of banking deregulation, the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999. --Jayron32 16:59, 17 September 2021 (UTC)

Thank you. That explains a lot. It seems to me as well that European banks tend to be unprofitable but trading far below tangible book, while British banks have even more intangible assets than US banks. Imagine Reason (talk) 15:05, 18 September 2021 (UTC)

It doesn't surprise me that goodwill is a small part of a bank's balance sheet. A bank's good name and reputation used to be of tremendous value to its owners/BoD, and they would go to lengths to avoid the big bad Reputational Risk. I am intimately familiar with one bank that still makes many unprofitable decisions to maintain favor of public opinion. For most banks this is no longer the case: they care little that their name is as good as the names of Comcast and gulags. Blame short-term greed and fuckbuddy CEOs. Temerarius (talk) 05:57, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

It wouldn't surprise me to find small amounts of intangible assets in any company, but some of them are not so small. NYCB, which I know has been buying banks for years, has a tangible book of $8.43/sh. according to WSJ, trades at $12.50, and has a price-to-book of 0.92 according to Yahoo Finance (0.77 according to WSJ). Btw, that shows Jayron's answer was quite on point. Imagine Reason (talk) 19:16, 22 September 2021 (UTC)