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Now that we live in a world without toilet paper, you can all get started on your Roman craft projects.
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Mar 12, 2020 22:19
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Libluini posted:I second this the king was called Germajesty
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Mar 12, 2020 22:22
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bleurgh, i just thought of those things last night and grossed myself out
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Mar 12, 2020 22:22
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Squalid posted:bleurgh, i just thought of those things last night and grossed myself out Take a poo poo then jump in the shower wash yo nasty butts with a washcloth.
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Mar 12, 2020 22:43
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Grand Fromage posted:Now that we live in a world without toilet paper, you can all get started on your Roman craft projects. No thanks, i'm fine. There's poison Ivy in the field nearby my house. I'll use that instead.
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Mar 12, 2020 23:29
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What if scenario: Toilet Paper becomes such a prized commodity that those hoarding it today acquire a form of power over others and hundreds of years down the line their descendants are lords or something similar.
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Mar 12, 2020 23:34
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Shitlords?
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Mar 13, 2020 00:45
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Squalid posted:bleurgh, i just thought of those things last night and grossed myself out If you really want to gross yourself out, read Matthew 27:48 with this in mind.
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Mar 13, 2020 02:27
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Zopotantor posted:If you really want to gross yourself out, read Matthew 27:48 with this in mind. You know, I never put that together. Was it meant as an insult, then?
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Mar 13, 2020 03:15
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I mean, you can use sponges on sticks for a lot of things.
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Mar 13, 2020 03:35
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Ynglaur posted:You know, I never put that together. Was it meant as an insult, then? The vinegar alone yes.... but who carriers a 2nd non-butt sponge stick around?
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Mar 13, 2020 03:38
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LingcodKilla posted:The vinegar alone yes.... but who carriers a 2nd non-butt sponge stick around? The vinegar wouldn't have been an insult. It's posca; vinegar mixed with water and flavored with herbs. Soldiers drank it on campaign.
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Mar 13, 2020 03:42
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Zopotantor posted:If you really want to gross yourself out, read Matthew 27:48 with this in mind. can you quote it for me . . . think i left my bible in my car unrelated, but the fall of Rome, good? One guy who wrote a book says yes The absence of the Roman Empire fueled Western civilization, Stanford scholar says quote:Why the Roman Empire fell is often discussed in history classes and textbooks. But new research by Stanford historian Walter Scheidel considers an angle that has received little scholarly attention: Why did it – or something similar to it – never emerge again? Gotta say I'm skeptical. At least I'm skeptical its even possible to support an argument like this with sound evidence. I think I've probably posted a lot of stuff in this thread which borders on geographic and economic determinism but this is pushing it even for me. Still its not like all of these ideas are new, I'm sure everybody itt already has an opinion on Jared Diamond's writing on the effects of European political disunity on development. Squalid fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 04:04
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Squalid posted:can you quote it for me . . . think i left my bible in my car "Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink."
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Mar 13, 2020 04:14
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Epicurius posted:The vinegar wouldn't have been an insult. It's posca; vinegar mixed with water and flavored with herbs. Soldiers drank it on campaign. Matthew 27:34 They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted thereof, he would not drink. Psalm 69:21 They poisoned my food with gall and gave me vinegar to quench my thirst. Luke 23:36 The soldiers also mocked Him and came up to offer Him sour wine I’ve eaten military food. It’s insulting giving it to someone who doesn’t have to eat it. Crab Dad fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 04:30
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Epicurius posted:The vinegar wouldn't have been an insult. It's posca; vinegar mixed with water and flavored with herbs. Soldiers drank it on campaign. On the other hand, why would the soldiers waste their good posca on a condemned prisoner? Give him some rear end-vinegar and let him think it's posca. Joke's on him, right?
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Mar 13, 2020 04:46
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i would definitely not want to drink anything with gall in it, it would make everything taste real astringent what with gall (as in oak galls I assume?) being all full of tannin. of course I think i've heard of posca before too and it doesn't sound half bad. So i'm just going to have to wait until you guys come to a consensus on this one.
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Mar 13, 2020 04:47
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Posca had honey and ground coriander (if you could get them) as well I think. The important part was sour wine, plus other flavourings as available. You mixed the vinegar, honey, spices etc into a concentrated syrup you could carry with you and then mix with whatever water you could get on-site to make it palatable. This last part is me speculating, but the sugar and electrolyte content would make posca the ancient roman equivalent of a sports drink. Not at all a bad thing to have on campaign. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 04:53
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Squalid posted:can you quote it for me . . . think i left my bible in my car I'm curious to read it will check the library and see if they got a copy. It does seem like a stretch like you said, but I am curious to see why he says that. My own issue is that Rome wasn't really a European based Empire, but a Mediterranean based Empire. That Empire didn't really fall until you get to the Arab Invasions long after 476, who they themselves build a Mediterranean Empire for a couple centuries. Even through the 1700's to 1800's you have the Ottomans control like half of the Mediterranean basin. The Ottomans were still ruling over a huge chunk of the Roman Empire from its capital calling themselves the Kaiser-i-Rumi till it lost WWI. Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Mar 13, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 05:09
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Dalael posted:What if scenario: mad max fury roll
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Mar 13, 2020 08:23
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Squalid posted:can you quote it for me . . . think i left my bible in my car The argument isn't new by any means, and that interview doesn't tell us what angle the author is actually taking with it. In economic terms, it goes back *at least* to Marx and Engels that the Roman slave latifundia were inefficient compared to the feudal system that emerged afterwards and would go on to create the preconditions for industrialism. Whether this was "good" or "bad" is of course becoming an increasingly charged question when the system that emerged is destroying the planet, but hey
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Mar 13, 2020 11:47
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Dalael posted:What if scenario: Wold be more like temporary currency that has an immediate use and an expiration date.
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Mar 13, 2020 12:09
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The Lone Badger posted:Posca had honey and ground coriander (if you could get them) as well I think. The important part was sour wine, plus other flavourings as available. Someone else who experimented with posca recipes speculates that adding honey and spices to sweeten it wouldn't have been very common, as both of these were relatively costly products and anyone who could afford them could afford fresh wine. Posca was the drink of commoners and soldiers. I would actually speculate that giving Jesus the posca was an act of kindness, as the soldier was likely giving up some of his ration to him.
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Mar 13, 2020 13:09
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I’ve had switchel which is basically flavored vinegar water. Would recommend to anyone dying on a cross
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Mar 13, 2020 13:16
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What if it’s just literally vinegar for cleaning. The other passages make it pretty clear that it wasn’t pleasant.
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Mar 13, 2020 13:18
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Ras Het posted:The argument isn't new by any means, and that interview doesn't tell us what angle the author is actually taking with it. In economic terms, it goes back *at least* to Marx and Engels that the Roman slave latifundia were inefficient compared to the feudal system that emerged afterwards and would go on to create the preconditions for industrialism. Whether this was "good" or "bad" is of course becoming an increasingly charged question when the system that emerged is destroying the planet, but hey I'm curious but.. how would we know whether latifundia's were inefficient or not?
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Mar 13, 2020 13:42
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Dalael posted:I'm curious but.. how would we know whether latifundia's were inefficient or not? I am not an expert in the slightest, but I think the rough idea is that there was less economic and technological innovation than in the Middle Ages, implying that the economic system was in some way essentially stagnant. For one Roman cities had basically no independence, which precluded the development of an urban bourgeoisie, the economic motor of the later Middle Ages
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Mar 13, 2020 14:01
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Dalael posted:I'm curious but.. how would we know whether latifundia's were inefficient or not? Really the thing to look at would be how they differentiate Roman latifundia from Medieval serf estates, since they were extremely similar. The biggest thing that comes to mind for me is that the church gobbled up a lot of that land and made it less efficient, a situation that took hundreds of years to reverse.
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Mar 13, 2020 14:06
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Kaal posted:Really the thing to look at would be how they differentiate Roman latifundia from Medieval serf estates, since they were extremely similar. The biggest thing that comes to mind for me is that the church gobbled up a lot of that land and made it less efficient, a situation that took hundreds of years to reverse. Wouldn't having one landowner rather than several make it more efficient due to scale rather than less efficient? Also, the church reclaimed huge amounts of wilderness and developed them into useful land through abbeys so they're a necessary part of having a large rural population that can feed a growing urban population.
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Mar 13, 2020 18:53
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There are some interesting metrics to look at. One is that the populations of Western Europe and Italy were essentially the same in 1AD and 1000AD, but in the Roman era only modest growth was seen afterwards, while in the Middle Ages a massive population boom happened. You can of course explain the fact in many ways, and it's not entirely obvious if population booms speak of the health of society, but it does raise questions
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Mar 13, 2020 22:41
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Ithle01 posted:Wouldn't having one landowner rather than several make it more efficient due to scale rather than less efficient? Also, the church reclaimed huge amounts of wilderness and developed them into useful land through abbeys so they're a necessary part of having a large rural population that can feed a growing urban population. Essentially one of the big issues in Byzantine History in the 800's - 900's was big landowners, now there is debate over how much power the big landholding families had versus how much land was held by the church. The issue with church held lands is they were generally tax exempt. So as the Monasteries etc . grew larger through donations etc. They created big swathes of untaxable farmland. In some cases it seems like wealthy families would set up monasteries and have say a younger son run it and it was ostensibly a religious institution but still controlled by them. So while these religious institutions could be incredibly productive and wealthy, the money was not flowing to the state. For big landowners they are harder to tax kind of like the 1% today. either they simply can afford to bribe the tax collector, buy the rights to be the tax collector and just gauge everyone else to cover their shortfall. Finally if you have like 5 ranches around Anatolia, just shuffle your herds around to the next theme whenever the Imperial Tax collector comes by and plead poverty and a bad year. So we know from the modern day there are big efficiencies in scale, so large landowners may have created more wealth, they made it more difficult for the relatively primitive state to collect.
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Mar 13, 2020 22:46
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Jack2142 posted:Essentially one of the big issues in Byzantine History in the 800's - 900's was big landowners, now there is debate over how much power the big landholding families had versus how much land was held by the church. Ah, okay, yeah I get what you mean now. From the point of forming a nation state the church would be a rival for authority.
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Mar 13, 2020 22:52
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Ras Het posted:The argument isn't new by any means, and that interview doesn't tell us what angle the author is actually taking with it. In economic terms, it goes back *at least* to Marx and Engels that the Roman slave latifundia were inefficient compared to the feudal system that emerged afterwards and would go on to create the preconditions for industrialism. Whether this was "good" or "bad" is of course becoming an increasingly charged question when the system that emerged is destroying the planet, but hey There are a lot of interesting angles you could take. I'm reminded of something cheetah7071 posted a bit ago about water mills in the Roman era. That is while the Romans had the technology to build sophisticated mills, they mostly just didn't. In contrast to the Medieval when watermills were built literally everywhere you could fit them, in Roman times they were really only built in a few big cities at the terminus of aqueducts. One reason cheetah7071 gave for this is the economics of the Roman empire made it more profitable to just buy slaves to do the same work. Still I feel uncomfortable trying to extrapolate too much from observations like this, because a Roman empire that lasted in the west another 500 years would obviously look very different. Slavery was already declining in the Roman era after all, who's to say that an eight century Roman Gaul wouldn't also invest in watermills? I'm not sure these are questions it is possible to answer. Ithle01 posted:Wouldn't having one landowner rather than several make it more efficient due to scale rather than less efficient? Also, the church reclaimed huge amounts of wilderness and developed them into useful land through abbeys so they're a necessary part of having a large rural population that can feed a growing urban population. I often see this assumption that increasing the scale of a farm makes an operation more efficient, but I really don't think real life supports this notion. There might be an ideal size that maximizes efficiency, but bigger = better definitely isn't a truism. How big the ideal farm is is going to depend on a lot of factors including what crops it grows and capitalization, and in the pre-modern era farming will be a lot less capital intensive than it is today. For an example of this complexity if you look at the farmstead pattern in Central America, there's a consistent pattern of small scale coffee farmers in the highlands who own maybe ~10 hectares, while in the flat lowlands you had great big plantations or ranches with vast tracts of land to raise cattle, sugar cane, and rice. In this case the pattern is theorized to be a product of the most 'efficient' size of a farm based on labor needs to be dependent on the crop, with large coffee plantations actually losing efficiency as they grow beyond the ability of one family to work it by themselves.
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Mar 14, 2020 00:29
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Squalid posted:For an example of this complexity if you look at the farmstead pattern in Central America, there's a consistent pattern of small scale coffee farmers in the highlands who own maybe ~10 hectares, while in the flat lowlands you had great big plantations or ranches with vast tracts of land to raise cattle, sugar cane, and rice. In this case the pattern is theorized to be a product of the most 'efficient' size of a farm based on labor needs to be dependent on the crop, with large coffee plantations actually losing efficiency as they grow beyond the ability of one family to work it by themselves. I was actually thinking about this myself from another perspective and I really just assumed that economy of scale was a thing because I've heard it used as an axiom in the past. In my original line of thought I guessed it makes sense that farmhands only have enough incentive to work as just as hard as they have to in order to not starve or get sacked because they don't share in the profits of the farm and therefore consolidation shouldn't increase output (as you noted, once you get past the area where one family can work the farm output doesn't scale as well). Whereas, if the farmers who are willing to cooperate with each other rather than compete and share rather than hoard tools and resources from each other would produce more despite owning individual plots. Then again, I wasn't sure if my half-baked ideas are a good guideline to follow so I just went with the line 'economy of scale is good'.
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Mar 14, 2020 04:32
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I feel like while there are economies of scale out there, they can't be taken as a given. You'd have to dig up a study about whether big landowners were actually engaging in more efficient practices. It's not like there were many ways to centralize labor like you can do with industrial technology. I guess maybe wealthy landowners could afford a horse to plow their fields after the right collar was invented. There's other times when poorer farmers can't afford to diversify their crops, but I don't know how much of an issue that was. I guess more efficient crop rotation strategies are also more affordable for larger landowners, but I don't know the history of when what crop rotation strategy was invented. Of course, there's also no real reason farmers couldn't coordinate without being consolidated under one lord, and nothing preventing a big lord from being an idiot and mismanaging everything (and scale makes mismanagement hurt worse when it's bigger). I'd hesitate assuming economies of scale just because there's non-economic motivations for territories get consolidated or scattered.
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Mar 14, 2020 05:30
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There are economies of scale, and there are also diseconomies of scale. It depends on the activity.
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Mar 14, 2020 05:32
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The problem would be calculating the efficiency too. Yields? Income to the farmer after taxes? Yields in total or per unit of labor?
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Mar 14, 2020 05:33
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I've read things about slaves generally being less motivated workers since they're not likely to see any rewards from their work, as opposed to free small scale farmers who can diligently go over every inch of their territory looking for weeds and stuff. That's only really an issue if you live in a time when human capital is expensive though. If you can buy enough labor to compensate for the decrease in efficiency, it's fine.
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Mar 14, 2020 05:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel like while there are economies of scale out there, they can't be taken as a given. You'd have to dig up a study about whether big landowners were actually engaging in more efficient practices. It's not like there were many ways to centralize labor like you can do with industrial technology. I guess maybe wealthy landowners could afford a horse to plow their fields after the right collar was invented. There's other times when poorer farmers can't afford to diversify their crops, but I don't know how much of an issue that was. I guess more efficient crop rotation strategies are also more affordable for larger landowners, but I don't know the history of when what crop rotation strategy was invented. one thing i heard in a documentary about the medieval was that after the horse collar and moldboard plow were invented, plowsman became a professional trade. I think that gets to the heart of why its hard to make statements about the effect of technology on what is or isn't efficient. Maybe sometimes you have to get big to afford the expensive new tech, but alternatively maybe it will allow the same amount of labor to go farther on a small scales.
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Mar 14, 2020 06:26
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Oderint dum fututant.
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Mar 15, 2020 11:06
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