For the elites: conserve their hierarchy and the structures that enable the gradual accumulation of power in the hands of the few.

For the rest: conserve their place in the hierarchy and the comfort of the familiar.

Hourly wages for school teachers? I’m worried I might know the response, but does prep work outside school hours, in breaks etc. count as hours worked?

Honestly, yeah. I spent decades developing and maintaining it, hopefully will spend a few more decades with it, but after that? I have no use for it anymore, but if it’s still in decent condition, it would be a shame to waste it.

I’d rather have it be of some use to someone, and “drink mead out of it” is very high up the list, right after “use it for science or education” and right before “use it for semi-realistic (but doubly awesome) historical weapon tests or demos”. Other contenders are “deco piece”, “movie/theatre prop” and “ritual implement”.

Actually, that probably applies to most of my body. Reuse or repurpose as much as you can, turn the rest into fertiliser.

Failing that (if my spouse or family can’t stand the thought of cremating my remains, I don’t want to force them), at least bury me with some weapons. Not because I believe in Valhalla, I just want to troll some future archaeologist. Bonus points for mixing eras and qualities, e.g. a wallhanger 1700s cavalry sabre, weapons-grade Xiphos and a non-functional gun reproduction, dressed in a 900s Samurai armour.

Wait, you’ve had a skull grow on you? You’re boned

Safe-ish, until some other driver on the crossing road approaches way faster than estimated, sees the light go yellow and floors it. Sure, they might see it in time, but there’s a risk they don’t. My dad once didn’t see a crossing car at a yield intersection despite looking that way and got T-boned. He didn’t think he was doing anything unsafe either.

Still safer than just blazing through though, so I guess partial credit for being carefully impatient?

…then you use the brush to clean them? Is that a big deal?

I’m in your boat often enough. Sometimes a post assumes familiarity with a context and it may be hard to figure out the intent or sincerity without that familiarity.

If it’s real, I’m confident he had some competent assistant hire a competent crew for that photo-op. I’m guessing a competent PR consultant suggested a good photo-op in the first place, hit the right buttons to appeal to his wannabe cool image.

If it’s fake, some competent developer created a good tool, fed with competently selected data to create a rather convincing image.

What I’m trying to say is that there most certainly were several competent people involved in the making of this picture.

Just not the subject.

Germany uses lower quotation marks too

Both Medieval Europe and Antiquity were defined by wealthy landowners and poor workers. We don’t always see a whole lot of that in the writings that have survived until our time, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Most of the ancient sources we have were written by people with the both leisure to learn, travel around and write stuff down and the connections to have their writings be considered worth duplicating and preserving. In a word: the elites.

The issue here is that the poor and destitute didn’t exist in a vacuum just because resources were scarce. Even in bad years for the peasantry, the elites generally did fine.

These ancient sources don’t always spell that out, because it isn’t worth spelling out to them: this is just how they and their peers live. Most of these elite members owned property or the workshop and tools with which their workers labored.

By and large, they were rich. Whether that richness is defined in numbers on some net worth estimate or just in the amount of things they owned, the result is the same.

And even in Ancient Greece, the rich had to make some contributions back to the community (except for Sparta, but they’re a whole different beast of exploitation). Philanthropy has its roots there, even if it is a far cry from what we would term Philantropy today: The wealthy either voluntarily or out of obligation funded buildings, artworks etc. for the general public.

What changed with Industrial Capitalism and later Globalisation was mostly the scale of exploitation. But the principle - an owner class exploiting a labour class - has been around forever.

Ooh that’s a good one