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> “structure of technological products”

Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.

Looks like it was a satire? I couldn’t find any authoritative sources on it.

https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...

What? Can you explain?

I think Tokugawa-era samurai fits the description better. The Meiji era saw the samurai stripped of most of their stipends and privileges, and with little left but their pride they had to go find respectable jobs.

Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.

No, it was because of the low fertility rate. Most powerful class in Sparta were rich widows, even kings had to borrow money from them.

Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.

Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.

The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.

The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.

Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.

In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.

Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.

Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.

For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.

Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization

[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.

So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.

[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999

I live in a country that was ruled by the military many times in the past, and the US never looked to me under treat of a military coup.

In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.

is it really that far fetched that instead of bikes, football, and basketball, klingon society decided to give all their kids batleths, so everyone grows up really into it?

> Oddly enough I don’t see “money” mentioned, at least not simply

"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and

the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.

Close enough.

> and that should probably be reason #1

Article goes on to explain that:

it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’

Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.

Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.

I do think it's worth looking at a few of his other posts (I'm a fan) to lend some credence to this one speficially. The more history-focused (so not aimed at worldbuilders) pieces are consistently well-sourced in a way that most blogs aren't, and he has a pretty long history of this same level of care.

Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.

I guess it’s so long-winded you never made it to the four paragraph section, about 20 paragraphs and two subheadings in, about economic motivations for recruitment?

> The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle.

Why would "money" be necessary?

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

You're right about reason #1. And you've probably heard about strong contenders for #2 and #3.

There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.

When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."

If you think its quite long winded taken note it's title includes PART 1