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Y'all should read Latro in the Mist, Gene Wolfe's sick nasty novel about a Latin mercenary who receives a head wound at the Battle of Plataea that makes him forget his life every morning. It takes place primarily in Greece (at least at first), and since Latro is both amnesiac and not a native Greek speaker, all the place names get rendered literally in the journal he writes for himself: the Peloponnese becomes 'Red Face Island', Sparta 'Rope', Mesopotamia 'Riverland', etc. It's good poo poo, especially for classics nerds.
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Dec 5, 2017 07:23
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Arglebargle III posted:Hey give me some counter examples for "gold has always had trade value for 10,000 years" I think if you read Pizarro's account of his war on the Incas he reports they considered gold valuable for decoration but didn't use it as money or anything like that
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Dec 5, 2017 07:51
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I mean everything has trade value to someon, even literal poo poo
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Dec 5, 2017 08:17
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Arglebargle III posted:Hey give me some counter examples for "gold has always had trade value for 10,000 years" Where? I mean, if you showed an Australian aborigine circa 1200CE some gold he'd say "what" and probably be little interested in trading for it.
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Dec 5, 2017 08:19
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I think there could be some interest/value in translating Greek mythology that way. "Forethought, the titan who stole fire from the gods". "All-Gifts's box". "Invisible, the ruler of the dead".
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Dec 5, 2017 08:37
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fantastic in plastic posted:"Invisible, the ruler of the dead". And his dog, Spot.
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Dec 5, 2017 08:40
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Many of the Greek gods' names are probably pre-Greek though, so that complicates things as the real etymology is almost impossible to know. Unless you want to go with the folk etymologies of the time, which would probably be fine if you want to capture what people in Antiquity thought it meant. For example, Demeter could mean "earth mother" if the *da part of her name (de only in Attic and Ionic) is a pre-Greek word meaning earth. In that case Poseidon could mean "Lord/husband of earth" if the first element is potis as in despot, and the second some variation on *da. But it's only speculation. Grevling fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Dec 5, 2017 |
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Dec 5, 2017 10:05
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The Lone Badger posted:Where? Gold is a fairly pretty color and shiny too. You could probably generally expect to get something for it from a guy with resources to blow. In your example that something might be his backup loincloth and half of his handful of tasty grubs but hey.
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Dec 5, 2017 11:37
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cheetah7071 posted:I think if you read Pizarro's account of his war on the Incas he reports they considered gold valuable for decoration but didn't use it as money or anything like that This is common to all American cultures I'm aware of. Specifically in Mesoamerica the terms literally translate to poo poo of the sun god/poo poo of the moon god and it was valued for religious purposes, but there was no concept of it as having anything like monetary value. I don't believe any of the American civilizations had money per se but jade shows up frequently in Mesoamerica as a barter good.
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Dec 5, 2017 12:44
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Arglebargle III posted:Hey give me some counter examples for "gold has always had trade value for 10,000 years" 
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Dec 5, 2017 12:59
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the whole backing money with silver was always meant to be an inflationary measure to appeal to some constituencies like its still metal fiat
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Dec 5, 2017 13:25
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Phobophilia posted:the whole backing money with silver was always meant to be an inflationary measure to appeal to some constituencies Sounds like someone is in the fat cats' pockets!! 
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Dec 5, 2017 14:33
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In ancient times, I'm pretty sure that silver was more popular as a measurement of value, because gold is just so much more rare, especially before modern mining. The biggest ancient gold mines were in Egypt, so they had kind of a monopoly on gold for a few thousand years.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:10
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Hell, in ancient times cows were the poo poo for units of account for a long while. They're a source of food and labor, and if you invest care into managing them, you'll get more cows over time. I think coinage only overtakes them when there's big huge empires start backing the new currency, and it's after that when everyone starts having a universal respect for rare metals. Of course, the weird thing about units of account is that people often do their accounting in those terms even when they physically don't have them, they just evaluate their ownings and transactions in those terms.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:36
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Grand Fromage posted:This is common to all American cultures I'm aware of. Specifically in Mesoamerica the terms literally translate to poo poo of the sun god/poo poo of the moon god and it was valued for religious purposes, but there was no concept of it as having anything like monetary value. I don't believe any of the American civilizations had money per se but jade shows up frequently in Mesoamerica as a barter good. Cacao beans were used as a handy means of exchange by the Mexica, but I don't know if the rest of Mesoamerica used them in the same way. It's probably the closest thing to "money" they had; valuable, small enough to carry, and, as a bonus, delicious.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:55
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SlothfulCobra posted:Hell, in ancient times cows were the poo poo for units of account for a long while. They're a source of food and labor, and if you invest care into managing them, you'll get more cows over time. for more detail, see the noted work of historical scholarship King of Dragon Pass [Dunham, Stafford, Laws 99]
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Dec 5, 2017 17:57
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glynnenstein posted:Sounds like someone is in the fat cats' pockets!! drat, Schoolhouse Rock went dark
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Dec 5, 2017 18:02
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If you want an argument against basing your trade on the inherent and immutable value of gold then the old story about Mansa Musa crashing the Mediterranean economy by going on holiday is a laff.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:06
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OwlFancier posted:If you want an argument against basing your trade on the inherent and immutable value of gold then the old story about Mansa Musa crashing the Mediterranean economy by going on holiday is a laff. That's just a cautionary tale about monetary supply and inflation. Hypothetically if the US Gov't had decided to go hog loving wild during the height of the Breton Woods system and print dollars like Weimar Germany they could have done something similar to a lot of other economies (well, right up until everyone GTFO of Breton Woods and either pegged to another standard or let their currencies float, which probably would have been done pretty quickly). Since the question of whether gold has an inherent value or not almost always comes up in conjunction with the kinds of people who insist on keeping part of their savings in gold in case of the apocalypse or whatever, I think that's the real thing that needs to be addressed. If society collapses to the point where currency issued by the current government becomes worthless, but there is still a functioning economy beyond basic barter, then yes gold (as well as other precious metals and gems) will hold some value as a means of exchange. BUT, if the crisis isn't "just" a second American civil war or whatever and a true back-to-the-stone-age apocalyptic collapse of society, then it's loving worthless. You need a certain level of economic complexity for any store of value to work, be it gold or shells or whatever, and absent that you're going to fall back to barter in some form.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:43
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feedmegin posted:drat, Schoolhouse Rock went dark I'm just a bill Just a battered old bill And I'm bleeding out on Capitol Hill
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Dec 5, 2017 21:45
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BUY GOLD GOLD GOLD CALL THIS NUMBER RIGHT NOW
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Dec 5, 2017 21:51
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No buy my fake internet gold.
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Dec 5, 2017 21:56
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Cyrano4747 posted:That's just a cautionary tale about monetary supply and inflation. Hypothetically if the US Gov't had decided to go hog loving wild during the height of the Breton Woods system and print dollars like Weimar Germany they could have done something similar to a lot of other economies (well, right up until everyone GTFO of Breton Woods and either pegged to another standard or let their currencies float, which probably would have been done pretty quickly). True but as you say, the kind of people who are generally interested in the value of gold seem to assign it magical properties to hold steady value and set sensible monetary policy 
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Dec 5, 2017 22:06
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There's also a severe difference between individual countries crashing their own monetary supply by overproducing currency and the entire monetary system going awry because it's based on the rarity of a mineral that some guy just walked into town with a truckload of. The difference between external and internal forces screwing with the monetary supply. I think there was a similar thing with the Spanish empire at its height where it was receiving shiploads of specie from the Americas, but it's harder to track because at the same time Spain was blowing all its money on fighting wars up and down Europe. The fact of the matter is that gold is a commodity like any other, even if in theory the supply is stable, buyers and sellers get different ideas into their heads which pulls the cost around. Like take for example the fluctuations of gold's price over the last century. You'd be a fool to buy into gold in 1980, but a genius go buy it in 1970 or 2001. One of the chief problems with backing your currency with gold is that theoretically if the government isn't absolutely up to date on gold prices, that opens the door to arbitrage where people could trade in their currency for gold and then immediately flogging the gold for a higher price on the open market. There's even a lot of people out there today with big stockpiles of pennies ready to melt them down for their metal once the US government stops supporting them and it's legal.
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Dec 5, 2017 22:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:
No, when you're on the gold standard directly, or on a nominal gold standard (like say the US dollar from the 30s to 70s when technically we were on it but it wasn't freely convertible anymore), gold is not a commodity like any other. Like a troy ounce of gold was legally worth $35 from the mid 30s to the early 70s gold peg removal. The gold price never changed, it was always $35 even as $35 became worth quite a lot less. Gold values would only fluctuate in a major way in countries that were falling apart with untrusted currency, and countries that had deliberately chosen to devalue or upvalue their currency in comparison to gold.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:10
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CommonShore posted:No buy my fake internet gold. no gently caress this guy, he has globalist gold, my stuff is made for real patriots
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Dec 6, 2017 02:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:Hell, in ancient times cows were the poo poo for units of account for a long while. They're a source of food and labor, and if you invest care into managing them, you'll get more cows over time. I think coinage only overtakes them when there's big huge empires start backing the new currency, and it's after that when everyone starts having a universal respect for rare metals. Yeah I've read early modern sources where the worth of land, goods and even other livestock like sheep is measured in how many cows you'd pay for it. Like "Jón Jónsson claimed his neighbour Jón Bjarnason stole butter and fermented shark worth a quarter of a cow from his storeroom using black magic." And so on and so forth. Cows were a pretty big deal for a very long time. Still are though not as mainstream.
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Dec 6, 2017 03:54
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It's also a lot harder to steal a hundred cows than a hundred cows' worth of gold.
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Dec 6, 2017 05:27
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Safety Biscuits posted:It's also a lot harder to steal a hundred cows than a hundred cows' worth of gold. If anything, it's easier because the cows move themselves.
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Dec 6, 2017 06:24
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On the other hand my gold can’t get sick and die.
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Dec 6, 2017 06:26
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You can't eat your gold when there's a famine though
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Dec 6, 2017 06:34
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There's actually a big problem with people in South Sudan having had their entire physical wealth as cows, but as part of the war, most of the cows were rounded up and confiscated by the warring sides and now the refugees have nothing.fishmech posted:No, when you're on the gold standard directly, or on a nominal gold standard (like say the US dollar from the 30s to 70s when technically we were on it but it wasn't freely convertible anymore), gold is not a commodity like any other. Like a troy ounce of gold was legally worth $35 from the mid 30s to the early 70s gold peg removal. The gold price never changed, it was always $35 even as $35 became worth quite a lot less. Gold values would only fluctuate in a major way in countries that were falling apart with untrusted currency, and countries that had deliberately chosen to devalue or upvalue their currency in comparison to gold. What, so is that federally enforced? Private gold buyers/sellers aren't allowed to charge what they want? Either way there will be shifting public demand for gold, the same as any commodity, and even shifting supply on occasion.
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Dec 6, 2017 06:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:
For a while private ownership of gold was actually illegal
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Dec 6, 2017 06:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:There's also a severe difference between individual countries crashing their own monetary supply by overproducing currency and the entire monetary system going awry because it's based on the rarity of a mineral that some guy just walked into town with a truckload of. The difference between external and internal forces screwing with the monetary supply. I think there was a similar thing with the Spanish empire at its height where it was receiving shiploads of specie from the Americas, but it's harder to track because at the same time Spain was blowing all its money on fighting wars up and down Europe. the spanish mines in the new world caused an acceleration in inflation across europe precisely because they were blowing it absolutely as fast as possible in many different places simultaneously which arguably contributed significantly to the transition from the feudal economic model into the early modern economy
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Dec 6, 2017 09:22
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in general you want to match your money supply to the economic output of your land anyway, too little money and goods dont get circulated around so more gold was good for the spanish in the short term, but good for the rest of europe in the long term
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Dec 6, 2017 09:25
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The Lone Badger posted:I mean, if you showed an Australian aborigine circa 1200CE some gold he'd say "what" and probably be little interested in trading for it. On that note, here's an excerpt from Clare Wright's The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka that talks about the indigenous Wathaurung people's experience during the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s. quote:Gold was among the minerals extracted by Aboriginal people, as Captain Cadell, explorer of the Murray River, noted when in 1857 he registered a claim for the reward offered by the South Australian Government to discover a goldfield in that colony. Cadell made his claim conjointly with a black woman, or lubra, known as Betsy, who has resided at Cape Willoughby...for 30 years. It appears that the latter recently informed the captain on being shown some nuggets from Ballarat, that she had seen plenty of 'dat yellow fellow tone'; and that when her son was a 'piccaninny' she, in company with another lubra, had beat out these stones, in her own words 'made 'em long. The book unfortunately doesn't have much more on the issue, as her focus is more on women's experiences on the goldfields, and specifically their role in a small rebellion that occurred at the time, but I found it a very interesting aside.
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Dec 6, 2017 13:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:What, so is that federally enforced? Private gold buyers/sellers aren't allowed to charge what they want? Yeah? That's what being on the gold standard meant, that the price of gold was fixed in place to thereby mean that X amount of your currency would be worth Y mass of gold. And while you could charge different prices if you wanted, any serious dealings would be at the official price because there was always a bunch of other people who would only deal at that price. And before FDR ended private ownership of gold temporarily and almost entirely ended convertibility of gold to dollars, you could have brought the "gold certificate" type currency to certain banks to receive appropriately sized amounts of gold, or brought pure gold to the same banks to receive currency. (but again this was only during times the US was on the gold standard, which was hardly all the time). These decisions were also enforced internationally by the fact that major countries would be buying and selling gold on the international markets at their own currency rates. E.g. when the US decided to go to the $35 per Troy ounce price, immediately gold markets in other countries had huge volumes in their dollar-denominated trade at the $35 price and thus exerting massive amounts of influence that kept international trading at that price. Similarly, through about 15 years that a Troy ounce was $35, it would also be £12.50 or so because the UK was following a deliberate policy to keep the pound closely aligned in exchange with the dollar (as most countries were at the time) which would reflect itself through gold pricing. Again though shifting demand for gold meant nothing for the "price" or really for the currency. It behaved quite different from normal commodities. It is, really, similar to how a "price for gold" would have been in ancient times. Since theoretically all your gold coins were the same amount of gold stamped on them, the currency value was the gold value and a fluctuation in price should only occur if you suspected counterfeit/tampered coin that wasn't pure gold or had had metal clipped off etc. Now over time most ancient societies did debase their currency so the price of gold did change from what the currency said, but that's a different issue really. fishmech fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 15:55
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Jazerus posted:the spanish mines in the new world caused an acceleration in inflation across europe precisely because they were blowing it absolutely as fast as possible in many different places simultaneously Not just Europe as China saw most of the silver come its way which devastated their economy via rapid inflation as well. It’s cited as a contributing factor in the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.
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Dec 6, 2017 17:16
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Gluten Freeman posted:On that note, here's an excerpt from Clare Wright's The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka that talks about the indigenous Wathaurung people's experience during the Victorian gold rush in the 1850s. This is interesting to me. The term "piccaninny" was a Deep South term for a child who wasn't picking any cotton yet. Roughly 3 and younger. Wonder how it made the jump to Australia.
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Dec 6, 2017 17:32
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LingcodKilla posted:This is interesting to me. The term "piccaninny" was a Deep South term for a child who wasn't picking any cotton yet. Roughly 3 and younger. According to wikipedia and a few other sources that seem modestly credible, it's a slave creole word first found in the West Indies in the 17th century to generally refer to the young children of black people, and just generally little things before that. General agreement seems to be that the root is one of the various romance languages found prominent in the slave trade of the time, maybe portugese. From there it spread to the American colonies and into the southern white vernacular over the next few centuries. Given that history it's not all that surprising that Englishmen familiar with slaves in the caribbean would start applying it to Australian aborigines with similar skin tones. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 17:42
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