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It also took a very long time for tax evasion to be a thing or for sensical tax codes to even exist. People, being people, would notice that you paid grain taxes only on specific things. Like you'd pay a certain chunk of your grain only when it was baked into bread. The solution? Turn it into things that are not bread but still provide calories like, say, beer. Beer got taxed? Lol we mostly eat gruel now gently caress you. They tax all the wheat grains? It's barley o'clock, fuckers.
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Nov 15, 2019 22:21
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mostlygray posted:Even in the 80's, small Post Offices would still accept mail as "name, town, state" There can sometimes be too much ambiguity and people move around a lot more these days. That worked when you did have tiny towns where everybody knew everybody anyway. You can still do that in places without street addresses. Apparently in remote enough places a person's address can be "Josh Murphy, In the Woods by the Waterfall, Town, State Zip Code." Emergency services are also one of the reasons that happened; where I'm originally from they kept having problems with EMS not knowing where the gently caress to go as there were unlabeled streets (the locals knew the names and nobody out of town had much of a habit of going there) that had a few houses that might not even have numbers. Or signs. Or any indication there was even a house there if you went out far enough and enough trees were blocking the view. Eventually the state said "OK, enough is enough" and foot the bill for a particular style of numbered sign that everybody had to put somewhere obvious so 911 would know where the hell they were going. I think a few people outright refused but for the most part people went "yeah that's a good idea, actually." Now every dwelling has a number label on it.
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Nov 28, 2019 23:40
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Atticus_1354 posted:Out here we call those signs your "911 address" because they have no connection to the mail. Usually the local emergency people will know county roads and ranch names and get dispatched that way without them even mentioning the physical address. There are places I'm from where they don't actually deliver the mail to you. You get a post office box and have to go pick it up. While technically there were places that had street addresses some of them nobody knew or had forgotten. I mean some never had a street address in the first place; some people seriously lived on paths in the middle of nowhere. But yeah we didn't call them 911 addresses but mostly the signs got put up and often forgotten about. All EMS cares about is that the signs exist and are visible.
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Nov 29, 2019 15:27
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Not going to lie, I always wondered why the word for "throwing somebody through a window" was "defenestrate." Now I know!
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Dec 1, 2019 18:14
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Incidentally, that's why English is such a loving mess. It's a Germanic language that also has influence from the Celtic and Nordic languages but also from Latin. Basically everybody was conquering the Isles repeatedly throughout history. Then it was left to its own devices when the English nobility decided to speak French because lol gently caress that dirty peasant speak. A few centuries later this weird mish mash of languages then decided that it wanted to be a Romance language like all the cool kid languages the other empires used so they tried to smush that square peg into the round hole. Despite the madness that led to the wreck that it is now it's still fundamentally a Germanic language and follows those rules. A lot of the "rules" you were taught in grammar classes were actually the rules of Latin which does some things differently than the Germanic languages do.
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Dec 1, 2019 18:47
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canis minor posted:Apparently 70% of Polish are loan words, but I guess that can be said about any language Language as a whole is actually a really weird thing full of stuff that doesn't make sense because people in general are weird and don't make sense.
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Dec 5, 2019 16:45
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Straight White Shark posted:Where are you finding Czech soap in Rome? I know a guy.
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Dec 8, 2019 04:19
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I think my favorite thing about the German language is that they often just don't bother coming up with new words if they don't have to. You see this in places like their word for "pet." It's just "Haustier" which literally is "house animal." That's it. It's an animal you keep in your house. No need to over complicate it. Don't come up with a new noun, just grab a few off the shelf and staple them together. Done.
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Dec 9, 2019 23:55
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I didn't know adults drank straight milk Depends on ancestry, far as I can tell. The various cultures that spent a lot of time in places good for herding started keeping lactose tolerance into adulthood. Other cultures lose lactose tolerance like you're supposed to. It's an adaptation. Various Germanic peoples eat piles and piles of cheese. There are herding cultures in other places like the Maasai, Mongols, and various other Asian cultures whose names escape me right now. I think lactose tolerance is most common among European people. Most of Europe went whole hog on keeping herds of dairy cows around as a whole while on other continents it was something specific to only a few peoples. I for one don't drink a ton of milk but do sometimes. I can positively murder a cheese supply, though. I eat so god drat much cheese.
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Feb 20, 2020 01:15
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CoolCab posted:i also feel it might be a nurture rather than nature thing - some people are going to become lactose intolerant regardless but many people can maintain a tolerance with continued ingestion. it's entirely cultural if you would have that exposure. Yeah my understanding is that it's a combination of nature and nurture. The way it's supposed to work is that you lose tolerance for lactose as you grow up. Babies obviously can really only do milk (in natural surroundings anyway; people are clever and we invent neat things like formula) but are supposed to wean off of that after a few years. However, if you're in a place where milk is plentiful because you have a ton of cows it would make sense if the body was just like "well if that's what we have here..." while the people who did become lactose intolerant probably didn't do well. They either moved to a place where there were other staples, didn't go there in the first place, or just died. Some people slowly become lactose intolerant while others can just chug a gallon of milk every few days and not give a poo poo. There's absolutely a genetic component to it as the ability to process milk is genetic in and of itself but the biological coding for most living things that do the milk thing is to put a time limit on it. Either way it's neat how adaptable humanity is. Of course humans aren't the only thing to take milk from other species. No other mammal does it but there are apparently birds that go after milk into adulthood which is weird because birds don't do the milk thing.
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Feb 20, 2020 02:31
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Straight White Shark posted:actually pretty accurate, rural dialects in eastern North America preserve pre-1776 English much more authentically than anything being spoken in the British Isles today. we continued speaking proper English while the perfidious Brits descended into weird gibberish. On the other end of the spectrum you get English spoken in areas where the population is a mish mash of random cultures all smooshed together that, when they were deciding which languages to borrow from, answered "yes" and created a crazy dialect. I think those are neat but my opinion is probably biased by the fact that I speak one. It's great to lay it on thick for people who are from out of state. There are a lot of people that disagree with me but I think that Pittsburghese in particular is fantastic. Yinz're in Stiller country. Freakin' jagoffs. Betchyinz dun e'n know what a hoagie is.
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Feb 21, 2020 22:56
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Cythereal posted:You'll pretty much never see this in media, but the Roman legions carried javelins for precisely the same tactic - and legion javelins were specifically built with long, thin 'necks' behind the tip so the javelin would bend after hitting an enemy or a shield, preventing it from being readily pulled out. The neck part was also made of lead specifically so it was soft. That's what made them so bendy; the other side of that was that bending after landing, even if they didn't hit anything, made it impossible to throw them back. One of the reasons the legion ruined basically everybody else was because a lot of thought went into how they operated and how their gear worked.
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Mar 23, 2020 01:17
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CharlestheHammer posted:The Guard in Rome never really became the ruling class. They had influence but never really took the last step for whatever reason They had a lot of leverage in the Empire given that emperors who displeased them had a tendency to...uh...not survive long. You had to keep the Praetorians happy if you wanted to remain breathing. It seems that state of affairs suited them just fine. Granted the military is also part of what bankrupted the Roman Empire when it started to fall apart; they wanted more and more money which caused obvious problems. The fall was a complicated issue with a lot of causes but that was a huge contributor. One of the reasons elite military units tend to take over and get a lot of political power is because, well, what are you going to do? Kick them out? Then you have an elite fighting force you'll probably have to fight and no elite fighting force of your own. This is why lifetime, career soldiers actually become a huge problem when you have them in large enough numbers but with no way out of the military and no pensions. Better to be an elite military unit in charge of things than an elite military unit with no paycheck. In the case of the Janissaries this is why they were comprised entirely of kidnapped boys (Christians, typically) that were trained hard and then forbidden from marrying or learning trades. Once you were a Janissary you were a Janissary for life. This lasted a while but as all things do it eroded over time until they weren't the elite fighting force they used to be. Originally though being a Janissary was a pretty sweet gig in a lot of ways. While they were legally slaves they were actually paid a salary and well taken care of; far better than a common peasant or soldier would expect. They got a ton of status as well as influence. The snag was that they became too big and too powerful over time. While originally they were a modernized fighting force that was a poo poo storm to deal with they became complacent and tended to throw a revolt if you tried to change them in any way, even if that meant modernizing their tactics. This is part of why the Ottoman Empire had problems late in its existence; their formerly elite fighting force was behind technologically, not as elite as they used to be compared to other countries, and tended to throw rebellions for any excuse they could find. Kind of hard to fight off invaders when your "best" soldiers are a bunch of disloyal pricks who might just decide to fight you instead of the other team.
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Mar 24, 2020 03:46
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While it's useful to have people who don't have local loyalties people tend to refuse to give up their original loyalties, especially once the paychecks stop coming. This was a massive problem for the Roman Empire when it started falling apart; it turned out the foreigners that got recruited into the legion could get a better deal out of joining the incoming raiders and pillaging the land they were supposed to be defending so guess what they did. This was especially true if they paychecks started coming late. There was also the issue that taxes got so high on a lot of the areas outside of Rome that people just plain abandoned their towns as it was impossible for them to pay their taxes and simultaneously not starve to death. That led to fewer Roman soldiers and more foreign recruits who may or may not just switch sides to the invaders because, well, those are my guys anyway. This also led to a situation where the people started just telling the invaders that they were in charge now because lol gently caress Rome in a lot of areas. Life didn't meaningfully change for much of the peasantry at that point regardless of if it was a Roman or a Goth in charge so they just went with whoever had the lower taxes, which would frequently be the invaders.
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Mar 24, 2020 21:40
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Ghost Leviathan posted:IIRC this kind of bit them in the butt in the long run, but there's a reason Byzantine is a byword for overcomplicated to the point of nonfunctional. Not sure how much of that was propaganda, but then again, we've certainly seen plenty of modern equivalents. Rome was extremely organized and the Byzantines followed suit. They were just...uh...more Byzantine about it.
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Mar 26, 2020 20:27
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