Hapankaali
@Hapankaali@lemmy.world
- Comment on What's "email"? 2 hours ago:
The amount (usually much less - unless there was some marauding army nearby) aside, it was more complicated than that. Taxation was delegated across a hierarchy of various stages; at each stage a mixture of negotiation, deception and coercion would be used to determine the taxation amount. The lowest-level tax collectors typically worked akin to a mob protection racket, and their own livelihood depended on extracting a surplus above what their employer (typically some noble) demanded.
Certainly substantially less transparent and simple than clicking through an online form in a few minutes.
- Comment on What's "email"? 3 hours ago:
Pretty sure filing taxes (taking all of 5 minutes) is a heck of a lot simpler for me than for any medieval peasant or minor nobility.
- Comment on Is £70 becoming harder to justify? The rise of cheaper blockbuster games 4 hours ago:
$100 today is about $40 in 1990. In those days games were made by a handful of people or even a single individual in one of two years of development. Chris Sawyer started work on the 1994 classic Transport Tycoon in 1992 and wrote the entire codebase in x86 Assembly. The price isn’t really that crazy considering the comparatively massive undertaking that is GTA6 development.
Having said that, it’s rare nowadays for any AAA game to release anywhere near its best state, so it tends to be worth it to wait even if money isn’t the concern.
- Comment on Video Games Need to Be Cheaper to Buy 1 week ago:
AAA games are significantly cheaper in real terms than they were in the 90s.
30 CAD in 1993 is about 58 CAD today, and those weren’t even the most expensive games in the flyer you saw then.
Especially console titles were expensive by modern standards, the main titles like Mario games retailed for something like 150 USD in 2026 dollars.
- Comment on Retro StarCraft prizes 1 week ago:
The thought “I shouldn’t mine Bitcoin because it is an immoral activity that destroys the environment and facilitates crime while not producing anything of value” never crossed your mind?
- Comment on Just a few 1 week ago:
It isn’t accurate anyway, the Bible certainly supports living together with people while not married in certain situations, for example with (sex) slaves.
- Comment on halal paintball 1 week ago:
No, that’s just an ad-hoc rationalization. Before refrigeration, people didn’t just leave fresh meat lying around. Either it was consumed immediately after cooking it, or it was smoked, cured or dried right away after butchering (people used much more salt than they do nowadays for e.g. modern hams to make sure the meat lasted a long time). The climate doesn’t really matter - in temperate climates fresh meat goes bad rapidly as well.
- Comment on halal paintball 1 week ago:
The origin of Abrahamic dietary laws is not certain. There is no obvious benefit in terms of hygiene, also not in ancient times (they long predate “medieval” times). Keep in mind that poultry carries a significant risk of salmonella poisoning.
It has been suggested that the origin might have simply been that pigs are viewed as unclean due to their own diet including carrion. Another speculated reason is that rulers might have wanted to promote poultry due to it being a more economical way of raising livestock.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 weeks ago:
Drug use, and especially problematic drug use, has low price elasticity and the US is a relatively high-income country. The cost of living is almost certainly a negligible factor in the decline of alcohol consumption.
Although most of the gains have gone to top earners, US real median household income has trended slightly upwards over time and is not “way [down].”
Moreover, high-income European countries where even fewer people are budget-constrained when it comes to drug use have also seen dramatic declines in alcohol consumption.
- Comment on Ubisoft Randomly Gives Far Cry 3 A 60FPS Current-Gen Upgrade 4 weeks ago:
The definition of insanity: continuing to run your game company horribly and expecting different results.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 5 weeks ago:
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
- Comment on Do you have to deal with this during your morning commute? 5 weeks ago:
I have never commuted by car, but I plan to get a car when I retire so I can drive around in the mornings.