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Alhazred posted:3. Letting a monarch decide how to spend the money is a bad idea. Among other problems, Chuck the Chin dove headlong into debt to afford the bribes necessary to win the election for Holy Roman Emperor. In 1546 65% of Spanish income went just to servicing the debt. ulmont fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 19:45
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And when Spain went bankrupt their solution was to sell off a lot of revenue generating assets, for example granting tax-exempt status to anyone who was willing to pay cash, and then their finances got even worse because it's not like they could stop fighting four different wars so revenue decreased but expenses were still the same. Peter Wilson's book The Thirty Year War spends about fifty pages talking about Spanish finances and the New World precious metals weren't even close to the issue with their economy and only made up something like 10-20% of their income at the best of times. Most of their income came from taxes collected in Castile and Naples. Also, Italian bankers absolutely took the crown for a ride financially and probably made things worse. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 20:48
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Taxes are big income when you start getting into population bases of millions. When ISIS was trying to be a state, for example, most of their income just came from taxing Mosul and other cities they ruled, more than just oil income.
Nothingtoseehere fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 22:09
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Taxes are big income when you start getting into population bases of millions. When ISIS was trying to be a state, for example, most of their income just came from taxing Mosul and other cities they ruled, more than just oil income for example. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html
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Jan 26, 2021 22:31
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Theres another article, that I unfortunately dont have on hand, that talked about ISIS' attempt at creating a currency for their state (as well as passports iirc). From what I can remember they were apparently either gold backed or actual gold coins.
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Jan 27, 2021 00:54
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the gold dinar thing is more of a case of religious jurisprudence fixating on hundreds of years in the past like im sure you can find some fatwa within the last 50 years saying that fiat currency is okay to use but that just aint isis style
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Jan 27, 2021 02:36
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ISIS allowed Foosball but only ir the tiny plastic players were decapitated because otherwise you're playing with graven images.
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Jan 27, 2021 02:51
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Alhazred posted:Wasn't iron more valuable? They didn't know how to smelt iron so it was just astonishingly rare. But gold was still valuable, because it was baller.
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Jan 27, 2021 04:16
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Alhazred posted:I also seems to remember that gold was more or less worthless In Ancient Egypt because they had so much of it. Its more accurate to say that gold was less valuable in Ancient Egypt then it generally has been in other places, especially in comparison to other items which have usually been considered more valuable then gold. Gold was still plenty valuable in Egypt, especially because they could export it to places where gold was far less common. Gold was Egypt's largest export during the bronze age, and it was the primary way they bought foreign products that couldn't be acquired in Egypt. For example, Egyptian wood is basically useless for building anything, so Egypt bought lots of cedar wood from modern day Lebanon, often with gold. A letter from the King of Babylon to the Pharaoh Amenhotep in the 14th century illustrates how valuable gold was for Egyptian foreign trade. quote:Why do you send me only two minas of gold? Now, my work on the god’s house is extensive and I am seriously engaged in carrying it out. Send me much gold. And as for you, whatever you desire from my country, write to me and let them bring it to you. The Babylonian king was willing to offer the Pharaoh anything he wanted in return for gold, because Egypt had such a chokehold on the supply. If you wanted to acquire large amounts of gold, you had to buy from Egypt, because no one else could supply very much.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:04
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There are a lot of other examples of other 14th century BC kings asking for/begging for gold from Egypt in the same archive of diplomatic letters. (The other kings used "brother" to refer to the Pharaoh if they ruled an independent kingdom and "father" if they were a vassal of Egypt).quote:EA 3 quote:EA 4 quote:EA 7 quote:EA 10 quote:EA 16 quote:EA 19 quote:EA 24 quote:EA 44
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Jan 27, 2021 05:43
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Just wanted to say, this related tweet is extremely my poo poo: https://mobile.twitter.com/Moudhy/status/1352949087767818240
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Jan 27, 2021 07:12
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Pic of people having sex and drinking: "They may have had magical or religious significance." Future anthropologists will have a tough time discerning between pornhub and the Vatican.
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Jan 27, 2021 16:34
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Cessna posted:Future anthropologists will have a tough time discerning between pornhub and the Vatican. "The bond between stepsister and stepbrother (and sometimes stepsister, stepbrother and stepsister) was considered sacred in the 21st century."
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Jan 27, 2021 16:46
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Alhazred posted:"The bond between stepsister and stepbrother (and sometimes stepsister, stepbrother and stepsister) was considered sacred in the 21st century." "The Pornhub Collapse refers to the destruction of the greatest of the 21st century sacred repositories at the hands of the mysterious "Semen Peoples"".
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Jan 28, 2021 00:00
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Y'all joke but imo there is a major loving issue right now in archaeology where the people who do the vast vast majority of data collection do not give a single poo poo about historic (~Late 1800s Onward) sites or artifacts. It's definitely going to lead to some major gaps of knowledge in the future. I got a full time postion recently and like 40% of that was because I like/am willing to deal with historics. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 00:11
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Alhazred posted:The problem wasn't so much that it caused inflation as it was that it caused the king to take up loans until he was hopelessly in debt. Recently I've learned Spain hosed itself over not with gold, but with silver. So much silver it arrested economic development in Spain itself, as it made imports loving cheap, but let prices in Spain itself spiral out of control to the point where everything had to be imported. The internal market crashed, basically. While other nations developed internally, Spain's development just stopped for a good, long while. Add all the wars and poo poo, and the situation was loving awful. (Apparently the silver output of the Americas was at one point so gigantic, the Spanish Empire outpaced most of the world's producers at the time combined.) Source: The Revolutions podcast, chapter 5 (Revolution in South America, Simón Bolivar the Liberator, etc.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 07:27 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 06:33
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Libluini posted:(Apparently the silver output of the Americas was at one point so gigantic, the Spanish Empire outpaced most of the world's producers at the time combined.) Easily. The Cerro Rico mine alone produced like 3/4 of the world's silver for centuries.
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Jan 28, 2021 06:40
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Cessna posted:Pic of people having sex and drinking: "They may have had magical or religious significance." I've never seen drinking in a pornhub clip.
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Jan 28, 2021 07:06
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Telsa Cola posted:Y'all joke but imo there is a major loving issue right now in archaeology where the people who do the vast vast majority of data collection do not give a single poo poo about historic (~Late 1800s Booo taking work from future mystery documentary makers. "Could the industrial age have been started by aliens?"
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Jan 28, 2021 09:47
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I was born into modern society and even I have no idea how we are able to build skyscrapers. Aliens? Yeah, sure, I could be convinced. e: actually I'm curious how long 20 and 21st century skyscrapers are expected to stand if something catastrophic happened to us.
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Jan 28, 2021 13:25
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Grand Fromage posted:Easily. The Cerro Rico mine alone produced like 3/4 of the world's silver for centuries. I can't believe Spain stole all that silver from the Atlanteans 
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Jan 28, 2021 15:21
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I was born into modern society and even I have no idea how we are able to build skyscrapers. Aliens? Yeah, sure, I could be convinced. Within a 100 years, most would fail due to no structural maintenance. Some even earlier.
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Jan 28, 2021 15:22
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Telsa Cola posted:Y'all joke but imo there is a major loving issue right now in archaeology where the people who do the vast vast majority of data collection do not give a single poo poo about historic (~Late 1800s isn't that really just a continuation of the norm though? people took bricks and stones off of the coliseum to build houses. people only seem to start caring when its 200+ years old
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Jan 28, 2021 16:27
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Crossposting this here because it is technically about pre-1453 "history" and because it may be of interest: https://twitter.com/alloy_dr/status/1354632507401117699?s=20
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Jan 28, 2021 17:21
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Dalael posted:Within a 100 years, most would fail due to no structural maintenance. Some even earlier. Yeah the structural strength comes from steel, which is not known for lasting in the weather. That said, in a collapse scenario, there's a good chance that the skyscrapers would be systematically demolished to scavenge the steel. We've already mined all the easy-to-extract iron ore on the planet, so it's quite possible that a hypothetical lower-tech society's best bet for getting iron would be from the remains of modern society.
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Jan 28, 2021 17:54
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yeah the structural strength comes from steel, which is not known for lasting in the weather. Also note that this is generally by design. Modern cities change regularly, and the builders assume that in 100 years, someone else will want some other building on the site. They aren't interested in paying for a building designed to last 1000 years if it will get torn down in 120 years regardless.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:03
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Yeah the structural strength comes from steel, which is not known for lasting in the weather. That's how it worked in the past. People started to loot the pyramids and the Colosseum for stones the moment the people in charge stopped caring about them.
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Jan 28, 2021 18:04
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WoodrowSkillson posted:isn't that really just a continuation of the norm though? people took bricks and stones off of the coliseum to build houses. people only seem to start caring when its 200+ years old People taking bricks off poo poo to build houses (also something the Maya did!) is more of an issue of site reuse and salvaging. The legal and academic definition for what constitutes an artifact varies from place to place but in the US, at least where I worked, it's generally defined as physical remains of human activity that are 40-50 years old. This is when protections can kick in and where we start needing to take a look to see if there is any value in adding these protections. The issue with waiting 200 years for people to "naturally" give a poo poo is that those sites are going to degrade naturally or people are going to destroy them for development or general convenience because they have no protections. While this is environment dependent, a log cabin or homestead is reaaally gonna struggle to last 200 years if no one gives a poo poo about it. There is also the issue that records do not last as long as we like to think they do. They got outright lost, deleted, misfiled or whatever. We have issues currently locating patents or getting information about products from long standing companies, either because they lost or got rid of that information. Edit: Sorry if this is worded oddly, I have a migraine. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jan 28, 2021 |
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Jan 28, 2021 18:09
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There was an interesting video recently about that kind of question about valuing historical value of various artifacts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xD1K121mbQ I think there's always a lot of cool stuff you can learn from old stuff, but there's also the constant need in the present to push things that are no longer useful to the side because it takes up space. I have a base instinct to preserve, but future archaeologists will also have better and fancier tools for trying to figure out the past.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:There was an interesting video recently about that kind of question about valuing historical value of various artifacts. Yeah you need to make space for future human use of the land, you just gotta be good and thorough about documenting the poo poo that's there before you give them the okay to bulldoze it all. In my experience one of the biggest impacts has been the introduction and common usage of GPS devices for mapping and site location, though loads of the early stuff that was done with it can be inaccurate or badly done.
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Jan 28, 2021 19:18
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:They didn't know how to smelt iron so it was just astonishingly rare. But gold was still valuable, because it was baller. Ya, my understanding is that the list of all the places they got iron from is as follows: A. iron meteorites they found in the desert - end of list -
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Jan 29, 2021 11:44
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and then you have situations in Melbourne where even if there are historic protections developers will just send demolition teams in the middle of the night to destroy a heritage listed pub and wear the costs of the fine so they can throw up another apartment block and make mad cash.
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Jan 29, 2021 23:02
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Big Willy Style posted:and then you have situations in Melbourne where even if there are historic protections developers will just send demolition teams in the middle of the night to destroy a heritage listed pub and wear the costs of the fine so they can throw up another apartment block and make mad cash. At least schliemann didn't try to build luxury lofts over troy
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Jan 29, 2021 23:12
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Come stay at the Schliemann Marriott. It's dynamite!
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Jan 29, 2021 23:16
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FAUXTON posted:At least schliemann didn't try to build luxury lofts over troy That's actually why he insisted on moving around so much before he died, he was scouting out to see whether Troy or Pompeii would make a better site for his new luxury hotel and knew he needed to move fast before anyone realized the "archeologists" were actually just local construction workers.
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Jan 30, 2021 00:44
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How does one buy ancient coins/doodads online? Is this a bad thing to do for some reason? This thread seemed like the best place to ask -- from googling it seems like you can get a coin which was around when crazy historical events were happening for way less than I thought.
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Jan 30, 2021 00:48
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tildes posted:How does one buy ancient coins/doodads online? Is this a bad thing to do for some reason? This thread seemed like the best place to ask -- from googling it seems like you can get a coin which was around when crazy historical events were happening for way less than I thought. I do know there is a goon who sells coins, apparently it is all above board but I can't actually confirm that! I would assume if they weren't other goons would have driven him out https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3884740&pagenumber=19&perpage=40
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Jan 30, 2021 00:53
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tildes posted:How does one buy ancient coins/doodads online? Is this a bad thing to do for some reason? This thread seemed like the best place to ask -- from googling it seems like you can get a coin which was around when crazy historical events were happening for way less than I thought. It's not a bad thing to do as long as it's from a reputable dealer with a provenance. Coins are extremely valuable for archaeological dating, and looting of sites for coins destroys the sites. You don't want to buy from looters. However, once the coins have been properly excavated and catalogued they're basically useless as far as archaeology is concerned, so they're often sold. At that point it's perfectly fine to buy them, I have a bunch myself. I don't have a source for reputable dealers since I haven't bought any coins in a long time, but if you google around you should be able to find some. It'll probably be more expensive than Random Ebay Guy but it's worth going the extra mile to not give looters money. And legit coins are still pretty cheap. Ones in great condition aren't super common, but there's an ungodly number of just general ancient coins so they're not worth much.
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Jan 30, 2021 00:54
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I remembered the thread talking about this a while back, but in the time it took me to scroll back to march, Grand Fromage managed to repeat himself. Ah well, the old conversation started here. Apparently there's also people of various repute on etsy making jewelery of old coins and other artifacts for much higher prices. Kevin DuBrow posted:I was surprised recently by how cheaply you can acquire ancient coins. You can buy a coin struck right after the death of Constantine and bearing his visage for $30. A lot more people talk about coincidences than coins. Darn paper/plastic currency.
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Jan 30, 2021 03:15
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Big Willy Style posted:I do know there is a goon who sells coins, apparently it is all above board but I can't actually confirm that! I would assume if they weren't other goons would have driven him out I can vouch for him I’ve been buying coins for the last 4 years exclusively from him. He specializes in low value common coins mostly of bronze. He does all the research and providence. Typically he gets them from group auction. He will offer up the random expensive silver coin but I don’t think I’ve seen anything go for more than a hundred bucks. Most things I buy are usually from the 5-20 range.
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Jan 30, 2021 14:51
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