191–200 of 232 posts
> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
Modern business suit prices in other words or thereabouts.
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Why not build a printing press? All you really need to do is carve some wood. As expensive as tunics were, books were much more so. Copying the bible would have taken several months (if not years) of labour. And the ability and control to spread such knowledge faster than others would not only be very lucrative but a source of great power.
The printing press is the easy part - parchment was expensive and hard or impossible to get.
My understanding is that while parchment (vellum in particular) was used in early printing press printings, such as the Gutenberg Bible, the use of paper was more common because it was so much cheaper, if less durable.
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No, you couldn't. It wasn't until Wilkinson had perfected his boring machine and Watt had a model of a steam engine that could not be be realized because he couldn't get a precise enough bore, that Wilkinson took it upon himself to bore the first steam engine cylinder that worked. In order to get this, there are a lot of steps involved, including the ability to sand cast and bore iron of sufficient quality to take a…
Watt's steam engines were vacuum engines, with power on the condensation stroke. High-pressure expansion engines didn't emerge until after Watt's patents expired in 1800. (I believe they may have been introduced a few years earlier in the United States where Watt's patents had no authority.) There was no danger of a Watt engine exploding.
I learned something new today, thanks for pointing that out.
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The printing press is the easy part - parchment was expensive and hard or impossible to get.
Did the Romans not have paper of any sort? It seems odd that they only used animal skins for writing on. My understanding is that while parchment (vellum in particular) was used in early printing press printings, such as the Gutenberg Bible, the use of paper was more common because it was so much cheaper, if less durable.
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> goes so quickly that it's possible for the person calculating to cheat an onlooker Indeed, the biggest advantage of paper arithmetic is that it leaves a written record: each step in the algorithm can be checked for mistakes afterward. It is otherwise significantly slower and not inherently more accurate than a counting board. The other advantage that paper arithmetic has is that it can be easily reproduced in print…
Chalk (or charcoal) and slate (or other rewritable surfaces) were common before paper was cheap. Greek and Roman students typically used wax-coated boards and scratched them with styli. The surface could be heated or rubbed to restore its unmarked form.
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"Not terribly high," I mean 99.5% of Americans will never spend even the lower end of that range on a single garment. It seems pretty high to me. Also you have to get pretty high up into the luxury market before you'll find a suit that costs $7,000. Armanis are synonymous with luxury suits in the public consciousness and they top out at $4,000, according to their website. The cost of those luxury items don't come fro…
> The cost of those luxury items don't come from the cost of making them. That's not entirely true, especially when it comes to haute couture. For example, clothes made by a French fashion house may take tens/hundreds of hours to make, at Western European salaries. Yes, agreed, the markup puts the cost into the stratosphere, but the point is that clothes made like this would need to cost thousands of dollars at minim…
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Chalk (or charcoal) and slate (or other rewritable surfaces) were common before paper was cheap. Greek and Roman students typically used wax-coated boards and scratched them with styli. The surface could be heated or rubbed to restore its unmarked form.
Yes that is true, but if you don’t have a permanent written record of the computation, that takes away a lot of the advantage of written arithmetic. You may as well just use your counting board.
My point was that there were cheap alternatives to parchment and paper for quick work.
> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
> That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective. Cloth was so valuable that the words for both the robber and the extremely valuable robes they stole and plundered share a common origin: https://www.etymonline.com/word/robe#etymonline_v_15128
> So a linen weaver would need to work for (500 / 2×40 to 500 / 2×20) 6 to 12 days to earn the price of the simplest linen tunic So translating to modern wages (in US/Western Europe) somewhere between $500 and $1500 for the simplest tunic, or between $7000 and $21000 for the finest quality. That certainly puts the practice of robbers to take people's clothes into perspective.
An average worker in Ancient Rome is not really comparable to a worker in a modern country (e.g he likely would had spent >50% of his income on food, so equivalent wage would probably below the minimum wage in US). The prices in Diocletian's degree don't really make much sense, e.g. for 40 Denarii you could buy ~5 pounds of beef or only 8 pounds of rye/barley. So likely the price for tunics is quite a bit higher than…
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What were the poor people wearing? How did women earn these - were linen garments a form of payment to effective prostitution? YES: Source; Kimono.
> What were the poor people wearing? Dollar analysis like 'how much did X cost in a pre-industrial economy' is incredibly unsuitable for answering these kinds of questions. The answer is - most people weren't wage workers. Most people didn't have money. Most people were subsistence peasants, and they paid taxes, rent, and for many services in goods. What money they had would usually go towards buying things they coul…
There was a post on HN `2013 or so, about a wiki for instructions on how to rebuild civilization through plans to start with primitive farming equipment up through more modern equipment...
We need this.