I am copying a previous comment of mine[-2] below. But first let me estimate the cost of food for one day in Diocletian's empire. I do not feel like solving a linear programming problem with ancient food so I substituted Roman ingredients from 301 A.D. for similar Polish ingredients from 2016 A.D.
400 g of rye bread = 400 g of rye flour = 0.95 liters[-1] = 7 d.c.
100 g of wheat flour = 0.2 liters[-1] = 2.5 d.c.
250 g of beans = 0.33 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
100 g of beef = 0.3 librae = 2.5 d.c
100 g of dessert grapes = 0.5 d.c
80 g of olive oil (second quality) = 0.09 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
1/2 litre of Egyptian beer = 4 d.c
Total: 24.5 denarii communes for raw ingredients. Add 20% for condiments and cooking, and get roughly 30 denarii communes for 1 trofa.
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Here goes the previous comment[-2]:
A Polish numismatist, Zbigniew Żabiński, came up with trofa (from Greek trophe 'alimentation'), a universal measure of the value of money. One trofa is defined as an average person's daily ration of food typical for the given place and time. Altogether, it has 3000 kcal: 1800 kcal in 450 g of carbohydrates, 900 kcal in 100 g of fat, and 300 kcal in 75 g of protein.
For instance, in late 1970s' Poland, one trofa consisted of 400 g of rye bread, 100 g of wheat flour, 250 g of potatoes, 100 g of beef, 100 g of sugar, 80 g of butter, and 1/2 litre of milk. Assuming that its content has not changed, you take the cost of the food (8.70 PLN in 2016), add 20% for condiments and preparation, and get 10.50 PLN as the 2016 price of a trofa in Poland.[0]
In Octavian's times, one denarius could buy you 2 trofas (with content appropriate for ancient Mediterranean lands),[0] Judas's 30 pieces of silver were worth 60 trofas,[1] etc.
Unfortunately, Żabiński published in Polish behind the Iron Curtain so the trofa is virtually unknown outside Poland. The Big Mac index is its pale reflection.
And here is an emoji from 1913 [0], accompanied with a footnote: "The author felt the need to enrich the Polish spelling with a new symbol, which he dares name wink. This symbol, whose absence was till now sorely felt, particularly in lyric poetry, should soon become as indispensable as the colon, dash, exclamation mark, etc."
Given the words of the poem, the similarity of the emoji to a female sexual organ is not accidental IMHO.
Oh, and another example from Ukraine, this time in 2020: threatened by the International Monetary Fund with being denied loans in the midst of the pandemic, the Ukrainian parliament allowed the sale of the largest asset they are left with, the agricultural land, to foreign entities [0]. Who thinks this will end well for Ukraine, raise your hand.
One quasi-actionable lesson of history the governments can try to remember is: do not sacrifice your strategic goals for a short-term gain, or "avoid hotfixes in production".
Example 1: Septimius Severus raised the legionary's yearly pay from 300 to 400 denarii while decreasing the amount of silver in a denarius by a half. The upset Roman economy would never fully recover.
Example 2: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Ukraine on 9 February 1918. Ukraine obliged to deliver grain to Austria-Hungary to relieve the food shortage. In exchange, Ukraine was given lands that Polish people considered their own. When the news went public, the Poles, hitherto the most loyal nation to the Habsburgs, changed the orientation to anti-Austrian. In due time, their Regency Council declared independence. (And Ukraine never delivered the grain; Austria-Hungary had to be sent 500 truckloads of grain and flour from Germany.)
Everyone and their dog have a pet theory on the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Let me copy a previous comment of mine.[0]
My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone diagrams.[1] For history, the main branches of the fishbone could be: Military, Economy, Society, Politics, and Nature. So a tentative diagram explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire would have:
* Military: weakened army (increasing dependence on mercenaries), fights with the Germanic tribes (in turn, caused by the expansion of the Huns).
* Economy: inflation (debasement of currency), decline in the influx of slaves (end of expansion), lost taxation from some provinces (Germanic invasions), decline in maritime trade (Vandalic pirates), decline of agriculture (excessive taxes), drain of money (trade deficit with the Eastern Empire).
* Society: decline of civic virtue (expansion of Christianity), loss of ties with Rome in the provinces.
* Politics: political instability, overly powerful Praetorian Guard.
* Nature: population decline (Antonine Plague, Plague of Cyprian), soil erosion (deforestation, excessive grazing, soil salinization).
Improving the diagram and making similar diagrams explaining other events and processes is left as an exercise to the reader.
In 2000, Claude Monet's Beach in Pourville was stolen from the National Museum in Poznań, Poland. The police suspected a steal-to-order gang.
Six years later, an unemployed bricklayer was fingerprinted for not paying alimony to his ex-wife. His fingerprints matched those left in the museum, and the police found the painting behind a wardrobe in his apartment. He told the court that he fell in love with the painting when visiting the museum and wanted to have it all to himself[0].
Yeah, I got to know Benedyktowicz at the end of a long and winding experience that led me to read on the beginnings of the Krakow Chess Club (he was a founder). Depending on your outlook, it happened either by chance or by destiny.
Ludomir Benedyktowicz (1844–1926) got his both hands chopped off at the age of 18 while fighting in a Polish uprising against Russia. This did not deter him from becoming a painter. You can see his low-tech prosthesis and a few of his paintings on Wikipedia[0].
Fun fact: The US declaration of war against Austria-Hungary, for a change, was justified by the sinking of the US ship Marguerite by a submarine whose officer "spoke Austrian"[0]. As the saying goes in my part of Europe, "winners are not judged".
Saint Paul: "The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat" (2 Thess 3:10). Note the subtle difference in Lenin's version: "He who does not work shall not eat" [0].
Well, I suppose Napier presaged the concept of a single source of truth. Aren't other log-trig tables a waste of paper if you can look up log(cos x) under log(sin(90°−x)) and quickly calculate log(tan x) as log(sin x)−log(cos x)?
> Napier’s main motivation was to find an easier way to do multiplication and division.
> Next, mathematicians decided to combine these tables. If you wanted to multiply trigonometric functions, you could find the values in a trigonometric table and then convert them to logarithms.
Actually, Napier's 1614 Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio contains tables of −10⁷ ln(sin x/10⁷) [0]. Non-trigonometric log tables appeared later.
While I upvoted your native insight regarding present-day language and I agree that the name is stupid, I can nitpickingly Ctrl+F "дроворуб", explained already in the 19th century as an obsolete or Siberian word, in the "ДРОВА" entry of Dahl's dictionary: http://slovardalja.net/word.php?wordid=7571
In 1995, Polish Scientific Publishers PWN, a long-time publisher of dictionaries, sued Kurpisz, a new publishing house, for plagiarizing their large dictionary of Polish. The case was closed in favor of PWN in 2005, hitting the Supreme Court along the way.
Among the evidence against Kurpisz was their entry on the nonce word "amikus" (meaning "friend"), which they illustrated with the quotation "spijał się ze swoimi amikusami" (he was getting drunk with his friends) but could not tell the court where they had gotten the quotation from. Nowadays, with libraries digitizing every flimsy old book, they would find the source easily.
My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone diagrams[0]. For history, the main branches of the fishbone could be: Military, Economy, Society, Politics, and Nature. So a tentative diagram explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire would have:
* Military: weakened army (increasing dependence on mercenaries), fights with the Germanic tribes (in turn, caused by the expansion of the Huns).
* Economy: inflation (debasement of currency), decline in the influx of slaves (end of expansion), lost taxation from some provinces (Germanic invasions), decline in maritime trade (Vandalic pirates), decline of agriculture (excessive taxes), drain of money (trade deficit with the Eastern Empire).
* Society: decline of civic virtue (expansion of Christianity), loss of ties with Rome in the provinces.
* Politics: political instability, overly powerful Praetorian Guard.
* Nature: population decline (Antonine Plague, Plague of Cyprian), soil erosion (deforestation, excessive grazing, soil salinization).
Improving the diagram and making similar diagrams explaining other events and processes is left as an exercise to the reader.
400 g of rye bread = 400 g of rye flour = 0.95 liters[-1] = 7 d.c.
100 g of wheat flour = 0.2 liters[-1] = 2.5 d.c.
250 g of beans = 0.33 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
100 g of beef = 0.3 librae = 2.5 d.c
100 g of dessert grapes = 0.5 d.c
80 g of olive oil (second quality) = 0.09 liters[-1] = 4 d.c
1/2 litre of Egyptian beer = 4 d.c
Total: 24.5 denarii communes for raw ingredients. Add 20% for condiments and cooking, and get roughly 30 denarii communes for 1 trofa.
-----------------------------------
Here goes the previous comment[-2]:
A Polish numismatist, Zbigniew Żabiński, came up with trofa (from Greek trophe 'alimentation'), a universal measure of the value of money. One trofa is defined as an average person's daily ration of food typical for the given place and time. Altogether, it has 3000 kcal: 1800 kcal in 450 g of carbohydrates, 900 kcal in 100 g of fat, and 300 kcal in 75 g of protein.
For instance, in late 1970s' Poland, one trofa consisted of 400 g of rye bread, 100 g of wheat flour, 250 g of potatoes, 100 g of beef, 100 g of sugar, 80 g of butter, and 1/2 litre of milk. Assuming that its content has not changed, you take the cost of the food (8.70 PLN in 2016), add 20% for condiments and preparation, and get 10.50 PLN as the 2016 price of a trofa in Poland.[0]
In Octavian's times, one denarius could buy you 2 trofas (with content appropriate for ancient Mediterranean lands),[0] Judas's 30 pieces of silver were worth 60 trofas,[1] etc.
Unfortunately, Żabiński published in Polish behind the Iron Curtain so the trofa is virtually unknown outside Poland. The Big Mac index is its pale reflection.
More information in Polish:
[-2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22777042
[-1] https://coolconversion.com/
[0] A table of trofa's price from Octavian's Rome to contemporary Poland: http://blognumizmatyczny.pl/2016/03/14/trofa-miernik-wartosc...
[1] Thirty pieces of silver: https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media//files/Collectanea_Theologica/...
[2] The purchasing power in medieval Balkans: https://repozytorium.amu.edu.pl/bitstream/10593/8080/1/11_Zb...
[3] Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=Żabiński+trofa