The Lone Badger posted:

How frequently did tax contracts change hands? Did you want to pillage as much as you could hecause next year is someone else's problem, or would it be you again next year so you want to leave them enough to prosper and keep paying tax?

Zombie Dachshund posted:

Wait what? I know nothing about how the French collect taxes but surely in TYOOL 2022 they don’t use publicans. Or is this some sort of double ?

quote:

social security association (ASSO), private organizations endowed with a mission of public service (even though they behave to a large extent like public administrations). Their budget is made up of all mandatory social security funds (general scheme, unemployment insurance schemes, complementary retirement funds and welfare benefit funds, funds for the liberal professions and agricultural funds, special employee schemes) and the agencies financed by such funds (social works, public and private sector hospitals contributing to public hospital services and financed from an aggregate operating grant). They are mostly financed by social contributions, collected for the sole purpose of social welfare.
Taxes in France are made up of taxes in the narrow meaning of the word, plus social security contributions. Most of the taxes are collected by the government and the local collectivities, while the social deductions are collected by the Social Security. There is a distinction to be made between taxes (impôts), which applies to production, importations, wealth and incomes, and social contributions (cotisations sociales), which are part of the total wage paid by an employer when he remunerates an employee. Taxes and contributions together are called in French prélèvements obligatoires (compulsory deductions).

Zombie Dachshund posted:

Wait what? I know nothing about how the French collect taxes but surely in TYOOL 2022 they don’t use publicans. Or is this some sort of double ?

wikipedia posted:

Sabinus came from Reate in the Sabine region of Italy, the son of Titus Flavius Petro and his wife, Tertulla. He served as a customs official and then as a banker in the province of Asia, where he was honoured with statues dedicated "To an Honest Tax-gatherer", and later as a banker at Aventicum among the Helvetii in Gaul, where he died.

The Lone Badger posted:

How frequently did tax contracts change hands? Did you want to pillage as much as you could hecause next year is someone else's problem, or would it be you again next year so you want to leave them enough to prosper and keep paying tax?

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Governors were in charge of taxation and governors were appointed at the whim of the emperor, usually from anywhere from 1 year to 5 years. It's a short enough amount of time that generally their goal was to get as wealthy as possible without causing a revolt. Not sure how things worked with the local guys actually collecting the taxes, but presumably the governor chose his people in a similar manner. A couple of provinces (at least Egypt, maybe another one or two but I don't remember) were so wealthy that senators weren't allowed to govern them due to how rich you could get. They didn't think it could be trusted in the hands of someone who could hold the higher offices in Rome, so it was usually a member of the equites who governed that province.

FFT posted:

That's a French 75 with some substitutions (gin -> vodka, lemon -> lime). Not sure how that relates either.

sullat posted:

Jamwad Hilder posted:

Governors were in charge of taxation and governors were appointed at the whim of the emperor, usually from anywhere from 1 year to 5 years. It's a short enough amount of time that generally their goal was to get as wealthy as possible without causing a revolt. Not sure how things worked with the local guys actually collecting the taxes, but presumably the governor chose his people in a similar manner. A couple of provinces (at least Egypt, maybe another one or two but I don't remember) were so wealthy that senators weren't allowed to govern them due to how rich you could get. They didn't think it could be trusted in the hands of someone who could hold the higher offices in Rome, so it was usually a member of the equites who governed that province.

Tulip posted:

So, in China this is something we know with a fair deal of granularity, with enough detail that we can talk about changes between dynasties. Northern Song is the most famous for this because that's when the world-changing New Policies came into force, which is very memorable to students because the policies they replaced had such obvious massive problems. Usually though the comparison with Rome is to Han, where I'm a bit less familiar or at least a bit less fine tuned - the actual executive authority for sub government was delegated to a governor via the emperor, and they would go to the province and eventually the bureaucracy would link up with country officers, who were more or less similar to like a big man in a low-formality society. Which is to say the country officers were people widely recognized as respectable in their local community, and that had the necessary local connections and sway to put the executive's strategy into action. Well acquitted country officers could find themselves ascending up into the civil service and even into ministerial positions.

I know the situation in the Song dynasty a lot better because it's something you end up needing to learn in order to understand the New Policies, which is one of the most important events in Chinese imperial history, and at least for that era I know the process for how tax collectors and scribes and tea servers and event planners. Supply officer was a particularly infamous assignment, being so burdensome that people would deliberately impoverish themselves (or commit infanticide) in order to be technically ineligible for the position. This meant that in particularly established areas, there would be occasional families that would basically become the local master of the supply officer position, and they'd get paid by other eligible families to take their spot and that was kind of their little industry (for the last two paragraphs my main soruce is Liu, Reform in Sung China).

Anyway I guess that's what I'm wondering - do we know anything like that level of detail for Roman governance or is it basically opaque below a certain level?

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

The Ottomans used siege artillery to break through the walls of Constantinople. The French 75 is a cocktail named after a famous artillery gun type. That's the connection.

Edgar Allen Ho posted:

Someone should open a greek restaurant across the street and get in a petty snipe menu war.

Elissimpark posted:

I wonder if the Romans ever raised statues sarcastically.

Firstscion posted:

That sounds like one of those things were people say "I've been studying Chinese tax systems for 50 years and I can confidently say I know nothing."

Whorelord posted:

They'd be outnumbered. There's like three other Turkish resturants on that street alone.

sullat posted:

That guy's son and grandsons went on to be emperors so it was probably a way to curry some Flavian favor.

moonmazed posted:

, or flavor

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

I want to go to this street.

Tulip posted:

If somebody managed to study Chinese tax systems for 50 minutes without learning anything I'd be genuinely impressed.

sullat posted:

That guy's son and grandsons went on to be emperors so it was probably a way to curry some Flavian favor.

Tunicate posted:

"I have spent several hours going through these primary sources, and have learned that I can't read Chinese."

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

This is also everyone who's ever just begun studying nineteenth century handwriting in any language.

Siivola posted:

You can't just say that and not post your favourite awful handwriting.

FMguru posted:

I remember someone asking an esteemed professor of American History why so many dissertations were written about increasingly obscure subjects in the 20th century while all sorts of interesting questions from the 19th/18th/17th century were going wholly unaddressed.

That professor gave a one-word answer: "Typewriters."

Tunicate posted:

"I have spent several hours going through these primary sources, and have learned that I can't read Chinese."

Gaius Marius posted:

Just make poo poo up. Worked for hundreds of egyptologists pre rosseta stone

Tulip posted:

I don't know if it's my favorite but I did see it yesterday:


note in particular "occupation"

Siivola posted:

What the gently caress is a ’boypalus"

Edit: "Corpgolem"?

AAAAA! Real Muenster posted:

You can actually read any of that? If my life depended on reading what is written on that paper, I would die.

FMguru posted:

I remember someone asking an esteemed professor of American History why so many dissertations were written about increasingly obscure subjects in the 20th century while all sorts of interesting questions from the 19th/18th/17th century were going wholly unaddressed.

That professor gave a one-word answer: "Typewriters."

SlothfulCobra posted:

They tried to teach us cursive in school, and I only barely managed to write it because I had dexterity issues as a kid, and to this day it's really hard for me to read it. When my grandmother sends a letter, it takes me like 5 minutes to figure out half a page of writing.

But the king of archaic barely-legible writing systems is shorthand. A system of simplifying and speeding up the writing process that isn't even really meant to be that legible to other people, it's more for people writing notes for themselves, and it is designed for the mechanical advantage of just writing really fast. Some people get in excess of 200 wpm on shorthand.



The system has also been adapted to different scripts, even Japanese, but I can't really say how well they work.





Something kinda spooky is Yiddish shorthand, a significantly less-legible system of a language that is dying out.



https://ingeveb.org/blog/making-sense-of-squiggles-teaching-and-learning-yiddish-stenography

Cessna posted:

There's also Sutterlin, an old German handwriting: