It was a lot easier to get a job back in the day

Comments

• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  You can still go to the military, to invade some countries under the pretext of national security.

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• GraniteM@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  [H]owever much all this soothes my vanity, and however much I appreciate being vice-president of Mensa, an organization which bases admission to its membership on IQ, I must, in all honesty, maintain that it means nothing.

  What, after all, does such an intelligence test measure but those skills that are associated with intelligence by the individuals designing the test? And those individuals are subject to the cultural pressures and prejudices that force a subjective definition of intelligence.

  […]

  The whole thing is a self-perpetuating device. Men in intellectual control of a dominating section of society define themselves as intelligent, then design tests that are a series of clever little doors that can let through only minds like their own, thus giving them more evidence of “intelligence” and more examples of “intelligent people” and therefore more reason to devise additional tests of the same kind. More circular reasoning!

  –Isaac Asimov, “Thinking About Thinking,” 1975

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• chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  To be fair, I know plenty of people with multiple degrees and a high IQ who don’t have a driver’s license!

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  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    How is a drivers licence related to intelligence or education?

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    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s not, but it is a qualification for being a pizza delivery driver!

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• plutopos@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Did you know Roman citizenship was transferred by the mother? And the main way to obtain it otherwise was serving in the military?

  This is because men went at war, so they were likely to marry foreign women, so their children had no citizenship, so they had to go to war too.

  The cycle repeats, boom infinite soldiers hack

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  • PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    This is because men went at war, so they were likely to marry foreign women, so their children had no citizenship, so they had to go to war too.

    Not quite. Roman legionaries usually married citizen women (or freedwomen), while auxiliaries had citizenship granted to themselves and their wife and children upon completion of service.

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  • isles@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Image

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• ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  The current military would also love to recklessly throw you at some foreigners…

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  • RamenJunkie@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Yeah, there is a conspiracy argument to be made that the shit job market is intentional to drive young people to join the military because basically everyone has realized that dying for corporate interests is stupid as fuck and that is all the military has become.

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• luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  On the history of this:

  In the Republic, Roman soldiers had to provide their own equipment. They were counted and drafted by wealth classes, then expected to bring or buy their own weapons and armour in line with the regulations.

  On one hand, this allowed the state to push expenses (and the overhead for collecting taxes to fund them) on the citizens instead. On the other, that meant that citizens were motivated primarily by duty to their city, as well as social expectations (nobody wants to look bad in front of their peers, particularly if you might depend on their assistance at some point), rather than a pure expectation of profit.

  They did get a decent salary, so it’s not like that was a net loss, but having to shoulder the initial cost (and armour wasn’t exactly cheap, particularly if you wanted to rely on it for survival) meant not every family could afford to send their kids to war for money. For families that had previously served, the arms of the fathers could obviously be passed to the children if they were still in good shape, which would reduce the burden - if they could afford to shoulder it once, it would be lighter down the line.

  There is also an intermediate option, where poorer or younger soldiers could serve not as legionaries, but as lighter velites, whose equipment would be much cheaper. They’d move out in front of the main body to screen the army and harass the enemy with javelins, then retreat before the main engagement happened. The loot from that service might enable them to buy heavier equipment and subsequently serve as heavy infantry.

  The evidence isn’t entirely clear, but it seems that this shifted at some point, possibly along the shift from a draft army to professional volunteer soldiers, which was formalised primarily by Augustus. By the end of the first century CE, it appears as if state-operated arms production was the main source of soldiers’ equipment. This would enable poorer classes to voluntarily serve for money (and maybe a shot at some land of their own, at least until Roman expansion started to falter), as the meme describes, which places it somewhere in the Imperial era. As memes go, this one is fairly accurate.

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  • PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Largely accurate, just a couple of nitpicks!

    1. The change to state-issued equipment is suggested to have occurred as early as the Second Punic War, with velites, hastati, principes, and triarii being sorted by experience rather than wealth, as in Ye Olde Days.

    2. The change to volunteer, professional legions occurred about ~100 years before Augustus. Gaius Marius is often credited with the change, but it’s generally accepted nowadays that the change happened organically throughout the whole 2nd century BCE, and Marius probably only formalized it, if he was involved at all in changing formal regulations. Augustus just standardized the term length (previously, terms of 5-10 years were common; Augustus set it to ~20 years, adjusting it upwards a few times) and instituted the retirement bonus.

    3. The equipment was issued by the state, but centralized state manufacturing would not occur until the Late Empire (and would prove to be disastrous). The equipment was bought from private contractors (and retiring soldiers who didn’t want to keep their gear, which was most of them). Some specialized pieces would have been created by the specialist blacksmiths (who traveled with the legion and fought in combat as well) in each legion, but much of it was externally acquired. There’s a whole array of fascinating tidbits we’ve gleaned about the arms trade and military-market integration in recent decades of research on the Roman Empire!

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    • luciferofastora@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Huh, this doesn’t entirely line up with my reading of ACOUP’s posts on the dilectus and the "Marian Reforms" (that weren’t a thing).

      The Pedant mentions that Polybius describes the second and third steps of the dilectus as assembling explicitly without weapons, then being sent home again to muster again with full equipment. The assumption is that the equipment would be procured or fetched by the soldiers-to-be in the interim.

      Scipio does build a “public armaments production center in Carthago Nova in 210, but this may be a one off” (Marian Reforms), and in the view of the Pedant, recruitment of volunteers was an occasional occurrence to sidestep the Senate if they refused to let a commander levy armies the “proper” way but didn’t turn into a regular way to raise troops until the Imperial era.

      Maybe I’m reading those articles wrong or missing some complexities. You do list details I’m missing, so I assume I don’t know the whole picture.

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  • tio_bira@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Cool, that’s explain the amount of myths and stories involving the heirloom arms and armor on ancient roman media

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    • PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      In the days of the militia-legions, even, it was expected that fathers would be the ones who trained their sons in the art of war, and gear was so expensive (and being equipped for duty core to the identity of a Roman citizen) that it was rarely sold off. “This is my father’s blade, as it was his father’s…”

      … of course, given the necessity of repairs and maintenance, there may be some “Ship of Theseus” thought that needs to be applied over a long enough period of time, but the basic idea applies!

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• iatenine@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Food service vs military

  Apples and olives, my legionaire

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• orbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Beg to differ. I remember trying get a job I was qualified for, but being told I was over qualified for. I asked why that would be a problem, they said, “because you’ll just quit when you get bored or find something better.”

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• Skullgrid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  to be fair you can still go work in the army

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  • PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I’ve been told the food sucks now, though 😔

    And they tell you you’ll never get rich! 😭

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    • MyVeryRealName@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s not like the food was great back then

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    • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Never get rich? Have they abandoned pillaging? Like, without that, what’s the point?

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    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I guess it was easier for both back in the day when you got paid in salt

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• PugJesus@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Need to be literate to get the good promotion opportunities, though!

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