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Alhazred posted:The first recorded strike happened in the 12th century BC. Craftsmen who were working on tombs in the Valley of Kings were not given rations and decided to stop working. I've seen this mentioned twice now and nobody has brought up just what the rations were. Specifically, they were onions and mascara. Mascara you say? Yes, for the still-common practice of painting the area around one's eyes black to cut down on glare. "You cheapskates want us on-site without our makeup on? Out, brothers!"
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Nov 9, 2015 19:13
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cash crab posted:Canada initially didn't let First Nations people into WWI because, to quote Sam Hughes, "Germans may fail to extend to them the privileges of civilized warfare". Like, the idea was that sure, British people would LOVE to serve with you guys, both those nasty Germans. Some guys still got in during the beginning, though. This was actually an issue, though. At the outset of the war Imperial Germany regarded any member of a "non-combatant" nation in uniform as a mercenary and shot them immediately on capture (as happened to quite a few Americans who crossed the Atlantic to join up). They did the same with captured black soldiers from the French colonial regiments. Germany wouldn't extend anyone suspiciously nonwhite the privileges of civilised warfare.
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Nov 17, 2015 19:18
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My favourites from that era are the curse tablets hurled into holy places, like the Roman springs at Bath. Bitter tirades at exes, angry cursing of petty thieves, crap business partners, worthless brothers-in-laws, whomever gave them an STD...they're all so delightfully human.
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Nov 28, 2015 15:06
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Alhazred posted:If you wanted to buy a slave in Oceania in the 16th century it would cost you 200-300 kauri shells. In the 17th century the market crashed and a slave was now worth 20 000 kauri shells. Amusingly, the market crashed because of an influx of coinage. The process of cleaning out the shells and drying them for use as currency took quite a lot of time and labour, thereby maintaining an artificial shortage and keeping the value high. Then traders turned up and began buying local goods with their own shells, dumping far more shells into the system than it had ever had to sustain. This triggered hyperinflation.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:21
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Bertrand Hustle posted:People used to just piss where they sat in church? Really long sermons.
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Aug 24, 2019 09:16
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Krankenstyle posted:It's kindof amazing that they even managed to figure out if they were in the black or not... There wasn't really a concept of "black" or "red" outside specific merchant accounts, which needed profit/loss statements in abstract coinage so it could be used for credit, especially credit for destinations at the other end of a sea voyage. If the land produced enough to live on then it was productive, and the landlord and the local steward's tax collector would want a percentage of the yield. English law doesn't even have the concept of embezzlement until the reign of Henry VIII (not even the famously tight-fisted Henry VII, who overhauled the tax system and forced a lot of wealthy nobles to cough up). If your employees skimmed a bit off the top, then it was considered your own silly fault for not supervising them properly. It was a pre-cash economy.
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Nov 15, 2019 21:46
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BalloonFish posted:When the ship was being fitted out in Belfast and the Marconi team were installing, checking and testing the equipment, the nighttime conditions were exceptionally good and Titanic was able to communicate with Port Said at the north end of the Suez Canal and a station on Tenerife, both well over 2000 miles away. And then the Titanic's radio operator is ordered to clear a backlog of messages from first class passengers, most notably a stack of bets and live horse-race commentary. This means when a neighbouring ship, the SS Californian, sends an alert that the Titanic is in the middle of an ice field and they are stopping all engines for the night for safety, he responds (with his big shiny transmitter) with "SHUT UP SHUT UP I AM WORKING CAPE RACE." ("Cape Race" in this case referring to the receiving station). This stunning display of professionalism causes the Californian's radio operator to roll his eyes and go to bed, for which he was later slated by the Court of Inquiry. For not ten minutes later, Titanic hit the iceberg, and despite being close enough to render assistance and even see signal rockets being sent up, the Californian sailed on blissfully in ignorance of the Titanic's distress signals.
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Nov 18, 2019 14:09
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Werong Bustope posted:Is that the same Maskelyne as the guy who made Alexandria Harbour vanish, or is this just a family of insanely precocious magicians? Same guy. Very good at what he did (stage magic), but an insufferable arsehole. His memoirs pretty much claim he single-handedly won WW2 and are several hundred pages of pure 
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Nov 19, 2019 20:43
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Alhazred posted:A fun thing Asterix and Obelix does. This is how Vercingetorix surrendered in the first panel of the series: According to Uderzo, when Rene Goscinny had the first idea for what would become Asterix, this was the key joke. French school history lessons spent an inordinate amount of time on the nobility and pastoral idyll of "our ancestors the Gauls" and De Bello Gallico, so they took the great historical image of Vercingetorix surrendering and took the piss out of it.
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Dec 3, 2019 12:37
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Samovar posted:I always liked the name of the Brazilian stray cat adopted by an office for social help; Advogato. That's Doctor Leon Advogato to you. (That little security badge! )
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Dec 13, 2019 10:52
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A truly excellent post/avatar combo there.
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Jan 28, 2020 20:14
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nonathlon posted:Allegedly, when the first platypus was captured, killed and sent back to the museum in England, the response was something along the lines of "haha guys, you got us good, for a while we thought it was real". I can corroborate this, and add the pleasing extra detail that they added "...look, you can even see the stitching around the beak." It wasn't until live specimens were brought back to England that serious biologists believed in such a drat silly thing.
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Feb 21, 2020 21:46
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Sulla Faex posted:* it could also be to reduce overhead on metalworking etc, i dont know enough about metals or roman manufacturing to say, but it seems unlikely. there's also no mention of him wanting to change it for any reason other than to reduce/zero out the rate of return of pila Roman metalworking and blacksmithing was decent but their smelting was terrible (later communities quite profitably mined Roman ore tailings for recoverable metal). It's possible the pilum's bendable neck was a happy accident. Roman legions had forges as part of their supply train so I imagine they made their own pila, or drew from stockpiles at depots. Re: pulling it out of your shield, bear in mind as you're doing this that the rest of the Roman front line is charging you. The javelins were a last-second disruption weapon, intended to break up enemy lines and counter-charges.
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Mar 23, 2020 11:45
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hawowanlawow posted:I'm reminded of Louis the whatever's finance minister, duh-something. He built this chateau. The bishop who built Hampton Court Palace in England was quicker on the uptake. When he saw Henry VIII eyeing it up, he gave it to the king as a gift. It was quite common for kings or rulers to knock off people with houses fancier than them. All the way back to Republican Rome, when Sulla's cronies quietly added the names of citizens with snazzy houses to the proscription lists. Cicero talks about it in one of his speeches, saying it was so well-known that citizens would talk about "X being killed by his new garden portico. and Y being murdered by his bathhouse."
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Apr 24, 2020 17:31
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The story about sewing machines suddenly becoming incredibly valuable because their needles were rumoured to contain red mercury is wonderful. If you put that in a Tom Clancy novel people would reject it as too silly.
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Jul 14, 2020 11:02
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verbal enema posted:wonder how big War Wolf is and why the gently caress it wasn't in Age of Kings If you mean AOE2, it was added as a special unique technology for the English faction as part of the HD re-release.
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Oct 31, 2020 21:10
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Moldless Bread posted:I wonder what happens if you deny a challenge because you don't consider your opponent a gentleman and your social group backs you up. Sure, they're going to be gravely insulted, but what are they going to do? Challenge you to a duel? Well this is a thing. If you have a system of duelling that only applies to the upper classes, then the upper classes can exclude anyone else from their social enforcement mechanism. You can't sue me, that's a duelling matter...oh and you're too scummy to duel me, sorry, piss off. This is why states (as opposed to militaries) frowned on the practice as mechanisms of civil law were set up. Duelling undermined the courts. People still enjoyed the practice because it showed how badass you were. There was a club in 1890s Paris that held mock duels with pistols firing wax bullets.
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Nov 28, 2020 12:17
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Ichabod Sexbeast posted:Wasn't a good chunk of being a second going "Leave it bro he's not worth it bro he's not worth it?" Also true. It was quite common for both gentlemen to say "all right, you've made your point", fire into the air or deliberately aim to miss, and consider the matter settled. You'd proved you were prepared to die over the point, but that it wasn't worth killing over. Both parties were only supposed to fire once, and pistols in the 18th century were horribly inaccurate and prone to misfires, so even if you wanted to fire a killing shot you could well end up missing each other "honestly". The most famous example of this is of course Alexander Hamilton deloping (firing into the air or ground) in his duel with Aaron Burr. Assuming that's what he was actually doing - the story started after the duel as a way of his supporters vilifying Burr by saying his opponent hadn't wanted to kill him and Burr had essentially shot an unarmed man. The last nasty twist in all this is that seconds were also supposed to enforce the agreed-upon rules of the duel with lethal force. If your man cheated by firing early, or shot the other fellow in the back, then you as his second were supposed to kill him where he stood.
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Nov 28, 2020 12:25
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Red Bones posted:Is there a lot of research on when and why these social codes changed in Europe? The 19th century was not a very long time ago, comparatively, and it's a pretty big shift if (as described) it permeated every layer of society in some way. Was it everyone eating dirt in WWI? Or the big shifts in culture post-WWII? WW1, basically. A lot of the 19th century lifestyle required large bodies of servants just for basic upkeep and maintenance; WW1 called up millions of men, taught many of them technical and organisational skills, and slaughtered most of the next generation of the upper class. Texts written at the time lament how hard it is now to get "proper servants", how difficult it is to fill crappy jobs, and so on. The answer was simply that nobody had liked being junior boot polisher, and now they had sellable job skills and a degree of life experience.
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Dec 5, 2020 13:24
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Nessus posted:I assume that the aristos were unwilling or unable to offer general pay raises, so they downsized staff, even if they still kept some. During WW1 (and again in WW2, but moreso the first time around) the various governments actually imposed limits on how many staff and groundskeepers the nobility could employ, with the rest called up for the military. They would even send inspectors round to conduct time-and-motion studies and essentially press-gang "unneeded" estate labour. There's an anecdote Stephen Fry told on QI about the Duke of somewhere or other being told he can "release" one of his pastry chefs and quipping "Can't a fellow have a biscuit?", which...did not say what he thought it did. And of course, the military taught them a trade and self-respect, whilst giving them a brutal demonstration that the class system didn't mean poo poo against incoming machinegun fire. Expecting those people to just walk back into their jobs after the war (assuming their jobs still existed) fundamentally misunderstood what those people had been through. It's easy to forget just how degrading and humiliating domestic service could be, with long hours of physical labour and poor wages (although it did have decent job security). Many soldiers in both wars are quite adamant in their diaries that gently caress Their Old Job, They're Not Going Back. Loxbourne has a new favorite as of 15:25 on Dec 13, 2020 |
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Dec 13, 2020 15:22
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pentyne posted:Not sure if Downton Abbey is accurate but the post-war seasons have a continuing trend of less and less staff with the Earl mentioning in ~1925 that even with their staff size half what it was the wage bill was 3x what they paid pre-war. The cost and burden of maintaining noble estates is frequently mentioned and multiple times friends/relatives of the Family are shown to be selling off everything since they can't afford it anymore. Downton Abbey is a well-researched romanticisation. The showrunner is infamous in the UK for being something of a suckup to the upper classes, so he presents a very polished and toned-down depiction. It's pretty clear from accounts of those who were alive at the time that Downton Abbey is very much the theme park version.
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Dec 13, 2020 17:54
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If you ever want to see old American men have a huge internet slapfight, find a model railroading forum or FB community and ask about graffiti. The screaming will be heard for miles around.
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Dec 30, 2020 13:18
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ChubbyChecker posted:haha amazing I have seen internet arguments over whether LEDs or incandescent bulbs are better. The all-time trophy still goes to the scale model hobbyists still fighting over the hull colours of Star Trek TOS ships. The original show knew the colours would shift under studio lighting and using 60s cameras, so the models are quite a different shade to how they appeared on screen and there are extra details that couldn't be seen in the broadcast. This could be a fascinating study of why colour palettes are actually serious considerations in the real world...but no, they have slapfights instead. My theory is that these hobbies are about recreating beloved childhood memories or fantasies of the past, and anyone "doing it wrong" is contradicting your memory and therefore attacking your sense of self directly. That and (in the model railway world definitely) a hefty dose of racism.
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Dec 31, 2020 01:56
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BrigadierSensible posted:Since y'all are talking about model train enthusiasts. What would happen to one of those fellows when their grand-daughter comes over and wants to play with their grandfather in his special basement, so brings along her toy Thomas the Tank Engine toy and starts toot-tooting it around his meticulously created model? To be clear, there are plenty of people in the hobby who do have a sense of humour and would happily play trains with their granddaughter. I went to a show once where a guy had rigged up a train using a giant battery-operated hamster wheel, and ran it randomly through the display to mess with everyone. There's a wonderful company called Rapido Trains whose UK offices are near the old BBC studios where they used to film 70s Dr Who episodes, and they looted it for props and film videos where they visit people's layouts dressed as Cybermen. They build Easter eggs into their model's electronics that play Star Trek sound effects. Their catalogue refers anyone with complaints to their Customer Service Dalek. It's just that every single one of them has an awkward "well, there was that time ol' Jim from the club invited me round to look at his exact-scale replica of the Neuremberg rally..." story. Hornby apparently posted huge profits this year as the lockdown made everyone stay home and get their train sets out of storage, so maybe we'll get a resurgence.
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Jan 2, 2021 01:41
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Carthag Tuek posted:But also I mixed up my divisors and didnt think lol. 8 øre would be 10-15 minutes skilled labour (25-30 øre per hour). See, I didn't see a problem with bread costing a day's labour for the peasantry as an example of how grim things were in Ye Olden Days...but then I live in the country that came up with the Corn Laws, so it was an interesting demonstration of how quirks of national history can warp one's perspective.
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Feb 13, 2021 00:14
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Carthag Tuek posted:Please tell me more about the Corn Laws. I know that the English are bastards, but I only have a vague idea of how it was legally justified. The Corn Laws started in the 1810s as a system of trade tariffs designed to maintain the price of "corn" above the level where it would be economical for local production in the British Isles. The definition of "corn" was pretty loose - it covered all cereal crops,, meaning wheat, oats, and barley (maize was still a New World thing back then). Being an island nation, Britain has always been a little paranoid about domestic versus imported food. Previous centuries had actually seen mass financial speculation on the grain supply causing ugly shortages, in ways that would be familiar to Goldman Sachs these days, and the Elizabethans had actually set up price controls to try and halt this. In the 18th century some rather better systems were put in place that merely regulated exports and set price caps...but now we were in the brave new world of free trade and classical capital-L Liberalism. The end of the Napoleonic Wars caused the price of grain to drop and re-opened sea traffic for cheap grain imports, and rural landowners pressured Parliament to fix prices to keep their profit margins high. And so price controls and an import ban went into effect. If the price of grain went below 80 shillings per 8 bushels (wikipedia cites this as roughly £1,727 per metric ton in modern £pounds), all imports would be banned and the prices would be fixed - at levels far above what the average urban worker could afford, let alone rural ones. Then just to add insult to injury, 1816 saw the eruption of a supervolcano in Indonesia (I thought this was Krakatoa but no, a different one). Dust spewed into the atmosphere causing global cooling and "the year without a summer". Crops failed, food supplies crashed...and the price of grain was still pegged to that horrible fixed price. Food riots broke out. Consider a period of several decades, amidst growing middle class power and wealth and urban industrialisation, where the price of bread is literally fixed above what most of the population can afford. The Corn Laws were hated. You may have heard that the Duke of Wellington was appointed Prime Minister but wasn't very good at it? The corn laws were what got him, essentially. His supporters were all wealthy pre-Reform Act landlords, meaning the populace going hungry couldn't even vote. He did push for some reform but was caught between his own party, who wanted blood and crackdowns, and the people at large, who wanted the laws repealed and some bread please. In the 1820s the ceiling was lowered by half...which was still far above the market price. Prices didn't catch up until 1828. Landlords blamed food manufacturers for the price fixing; food manufacturers claimed they were innocent and blamed landlords. The growing English middle class began to organise and opposition to the Corn Laws essentially created the Victorian era's great middle-class reform movements, and kickstarted a lot of trade unionism too. The Corn Laws finally died in the 1840s when the Irish Potato Famine hit (which, occasional idiot IRA retellings aside, actually hit Britain pretty hard too). The spectacle of mass starvation while food stocks still existed (and were openly traded at prices far above what the public could afford) was finally too much. Popular unrest and fear of revolution scared Parliament into action. Even then, the Prime Minister at the time (Peel) was brought down by his own party after repeal for daring to harm their cosy positions as food barons. So yeah, that's the Corn Laws. A set of vicious food price controls that almost strangled the Industrial Revolution (assuming it didn't trigger a British Revolution and added the UK to the list of nations taking part in 1848). A favourite of British school history essays to this day.
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Feb 13, 2021 01:48
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