Crowsbeak posted:

Woodrow Wilson's wonderful idea for a Armenian state. I'm sure the Kurds and Turks in that planned nation would have been fine.

tetsman posted:

I have the impression that map is either inaccurate or simply doesn't have data from the Southern Hemisphere. Checking netindex.com, you can see that Singapore, Chile, Mexico and Brazil are all over the 1000 KBps speeds.

Ammat The Ankh posted:

But there's never been a female Premier of the People's Republic of China.

Phlegmish posted:

Annual meat consumption per capita:



The usual suspects are in red.

Phlegmish posted:

I'm almost certain that some Portuguese is spoken in border areas of Paraguay. From the Wikipedia article on Brasiguayos:


Historically, the Portuguese/Brazilians have always expanded at the expense of neighboring Spanish-speaking territories, so the conclusion that Spanish 'bleeds into' Brazil is as misleading as saying that Spanish is expanding into North America based on its presence in the Southwest.

Brazil started out in 1534 with this theoretical division into captaincies, even more ridiculous-looking than the colonial United States' elongated territories:

Phlegmish posted:

I'm also doing well as them in my current Ironman game of EUIV. Highest trade income in the world

PrinceRandom posted:

I think if you convert a save from CK2 that has Sunset Invasions active, the Incas and the Aztecs are buffed up to about European levels.

I think that happens even if you don't get invaded in your CK2 game.

SWITCH HITLER posted:

I might be confusing him with someone else, but he has a tendency to take it... weird places. Heretic isn't a word you hear used earnestly every day.

sweek0 posted:

Based on murders per capita for cities with over 100k inhabitants.

Source here: http://www.seguridadjusticiaypaz.org.mx/ranking-de-ciudades-2017

Numerical Anxiety posted:

Countries demarcated as not having invaded Poland: Andorra, San Marino, Monaco.

Countries which blend into the red areas and which have thus presumably invaded Poland: Vatican City, Liechtenstein.

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

Incredible shrinking Luxembourg:

Gen. Ripper posted:

CONFIRMED: MBS of Saudi Arabia is an rear end man

Lycus posted:

Is "Near Abroad" just Soviet Union minus Baltics?

System Metternich posted:

Warning: below follows a loooong post that concerns itself with the diet of early modern inhabitants of Vienna, which is something I know about and which seems to come up in discussion every now and again. Vienna was recognised as being extraordinary in this regard already by the people living back then, but I think that it nevertheless could serve to show that "early modern god botherers" probably were rarer than one might think.


Kitchen scene in Vienna, 1787

18th century Vienna was super catholic with e.g. 31 monasteries with more than 1,400 religious living there in 1723 when the entire city had 150-200,000 people etc., daily processions, thousands of Masses read every day etc., that sort of thing. They weren't "god botherers" who only ate bland food to showcase their holiness, though - quite the contrary actually. Early modern descriptions of the city repeatedly talk about how much food the Viennese consume, and how extraordinary it was in terms of variety and quality. The baroque preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara called his contemporaries "idolatrous servants of their own belly", and Johann Basilius Küchelbecker, an author from what is today Thuringia, writes about the city that


Which in 1789 is quoted and confirmed by Friedrich Nicolai, a Berlin-based travelogue writer:


Nicolai claims that the Viennese ate up to 25% more beef than the people of Berlin or London, not counting the vast amount of game and poultry they supposedly consumed as well. Nicolai's claims are hard to confirm in detail, and he overlooked the simple fact that the enormous amount of oxen reared in nearby Hungary naturally made beef much more affordable than it was elsewhere, but we nevertheless know that early modern Viennese did indeed eat and drink a lot, and this high consumption wasn't just restricted to beef or the financially solvent upper classes, either.

By the middle of the 18th century, the average Viennese consumed about 154 pounds of meat, poultry and fish; by 1784 this number had grown to 190. While the consumption of wine did slowly decrease during the 18th century, the rising beer consumption made up for that. While in 1730 about 225 litres of wine and beer were consumed per capita and year, this number had risen to 267 fifty years later. Even the inhabitants of the municipal poorhouse were supplied with 130-165 litres of wine a year during the early 17th century! Fish was especially during Lent and other fasting days (until the calendar reforms enforced in the latter hald of the 18th century, those fasting days may have amounted to more than a full third of the year, even though early modern people proved quite inventive in finding loopholes or getting themselves official dispensations. Late 18th-century Vienna probably saw a fish consumption of up to five pounds per capita and year.

The high consumption of course meant that an enormous amount of foodstuffs had to be transported to the city every day. Johann Pezzl writes during the 1780s that:



The so-called "New Market" in Vienna, 1724

The great variety of food that potentially formed part of a meal in early modern Vienna can also be reconstructed by examining extant menus of inns. This covers at least those in the population who could afford going to such localities. Their number probably wasn’t that small, though, seeing as meals with “four bowls” (i.e. four courses) could be ordered at the low price of six kreutzers as late as 1780s Vienna. Forty years earlier, a six-course meal ran for only ten kreutzers. A mason journeyman could even afford to eat out several times a week, seeing as their average daily wage was at about 24-27 kreutzers during summer. A seven-kreutzer meal that was offered in 1745 consisted of a soup, beef with radish and cucumbers, a serving of vegetables and cured or roasted meat. During fasting days, fish and pastries replaced the meat courses. The 24-kreutzer meal added sauces, sausages, pastries, an additional course of game or crabs and a course of veal, lamb, pork or roasted poultry, each accompanied by a salad.

As luxury goods slowly became more widespread even outside of the Imperial court, many businesses sprung up that dealt with processing and sale of sugar, coffee, tobacco and similar products. The first known Viennese sugar-maker appears in a 1519 document; he and his colleagues at first supplied mostly the court. As shown by the average sugar consumption, sweets and sweetened drinks became increasingly popular by the last quarter of the 18th century. In 1770, about 4.4 pounds of sugar were consumed per capita and per year; by 1783, this number had risen to an astounding eleven pounds! Along with sugar came the consumption of coffee, tea and ice cream, all of which was mostly offered in coffee houses.

The first Viennese coffee makers came from Armenia. In 1685, a certain John Diodato received the permission to “prepare coffee, tea and Scherbet (=sorbet)”. In 1736 there were already 37 coffee houses, and by 1790 this number had risen to 70.

The most important food however was bread, and there was an enormous amount of bakeries and small market stalls or stores that sold it, as well as bread roll and occasionally more expensive goods like pretzels, sweet pastries and an early form of the croissant as well. The so-called Bratlbräter were highly popular; they operated at small market stalls throughout the city where they sold cured or roasted meat and sausages. They and the bakeries were basically the early modern Viennese version of street food.


A street vendor offering Italian salami, c.1775

The Viennese bought their food either at bakeries, street market stalls, specialised or general storefronts or at the many various farmer's markets, most of which were held weekly or even twice a week. In addition to all that there was a ton of mostly unlicensed street vendors who basically sold stuff out of their backpack. Even though they were unlicensed, the government tended to go easy on them because they formed an important part of the everyday supply with food and other assorted goods. Most of them seem to have been women, and it can't have been too unpopular a job either, because we have sources telling us that young people actually preferred this line of work over a job in the weaving mills (which also might tell you something about the quality of life and pay you might expect to get by working there).


A street vendor selling pretzels, c.1775

I already mentioned that people got quite creative for Lent. Everybody knows about beavers being counted as fish, but it's fascinating to see how much the Viennese back then got out of cooking with fish. They had a lot to choose from; a 1548 poem lists 52 different kinds of fish you could get at the city's largest fish market. Fish that hadn't been sold the day they got caught had to get their fins removed so that everybody could easily recognise them, and the fish vendors were legally obliged to stand all the time and not wear coats or caps, so that they would speed up the sale of their easily spoilable goods.

The Viennese cuisine during fasting times was pretty inventive; there were sausages made from fish and fake beef broth made from fish heads. A 1787 Viennese cookbook mentions chocolate soup (roux, milk, cinnamon, chocolate, butter) as a food for lent and gives a fasting day recipe consisting out of different fish, crabs and crab eggs, pistachioes, almonds, lemon peel, ginger, pepper, cloves, laurel, rosemary, thyme, vinegar, wine and saffron - it's not like people had to starve during the many, many fasting days! In addition to fish, people also ate increased amounts of crabs, oysters, mussels, snails and frogs and of course stuff like beaver and otter which also counted as fish.


A "snail woman" offering her wares, c. 1775

Re: the available herbs and spices back then, maybe it would be interesting to look at what the aforementioned cookbook lists as possible ingredients for each month of the year:

December, January, February: dried fruits, cabbage, turnips, beetroors, celery, radish, potatoes and other easily storable vegetables. It's important to note that, while they were known from the 16th century on, potatoes only became a fixed part of the everyday diet from the late 18th century onwards. Available greens were watercress and winter salads. The winter saw a ton of meat, however: beef, mutton, pork, venison, rabbit and poultry, but also herring, buckling, carp, tench, eel, salmon and otter for fasting times.

March: In addition to what we have during the winter the cookbook now mentions a ton of various salads and herbs that became available by then.

April: Pork, rabbit, poultry and lamb were easily available, even though venison grew more rare. The cookbook mentions eel, whiting and sturgeon and reminds the reader that the supply of vegetables and greens grew even more diverse, with lettuce, radish and cucumbers, but also aniseed and artichokes which became widely popular from the early 18th century onwards.

During the summer months there was of course a ton of fruit both from Austria and other countries: strawberries, cherries, apricots, pears, grapes, apples, lemons, melons and pears. During July there was more fish than meat available at the markets, whereas August saw a lot of veal and sucklings on offer.

September: Venison and other game makes a reappearance on the menu, also lots of birds like snipes, thrushes, fieldfares, grouses and larks. There was still lots of fish on sale.

November: Fish becomes more hard to get. Most Viennese knew to only buy cured or smoked meat and sausages, because fresh meat tended to not be very good from now on.

Again: Vienna wasn't representative for the early modern era, and even back then people knew this too. Otoh I don't believe that they were too much out of the ordinary, and that depending on local supply, time of the year and cultural/religious mores there was quite a lot to buy and consume for people back then. In Vienna a surprising amount of sugar was consumed every year, and I don't think that this wasn't the case elsewhere. Exotic spices were expensive and relatively rare, but local cuisine offered a ton of herbs and sauces as condiments that people loved to use to "spice up" their meals, and at least in Vienna a sizeable part of the city could afford to eat out several times a week and consume what we would consider today quite an extravagant meal, although the average portion size was probably quite a bit smaller than it is today.

FreudianSlippers posted:

Do they eat sausages and drink beer?
Central Europe

Do they eat turnips/potatoes and drink vodka? Eastern Europe

Do they eat fish (often rotten) and drink akavit/brennivin?
Northern Europe

Do they eat good food and drink wine? Southern Europe

kikkelivelho posted:

Behold

steinrokkan posted:

Those countries are not able to compete with western Europe no matter what. The policies you decribed would do nothing but maybe put a bandage on the brain drain. This is the cost of globalization, the death of entire countries, if not continents.

actionjackson posted:

Institute of Internet Diagrams lmao

Jerry Cotton posted: