yeah because I have a real job (retail) not whispering to the lightning through the haunted frame like yall
Damn apparently you’re a poet too
“Shopkeeper” would be a pretty damn good job title too compared to retail.
‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.
I don’t think the people in the 1700s would care
My career hasn’t changed much since the 1700s, I’m a winemaker. Our company doesn’t have a vineyard we buy grapes from farmers, so our winery is in the city not some villa on the hill. At first glance our warehouse full of barrels is pretty similar to an old school winery. I could show my counterpart advances we have made in automation, like our bottling line or the giant industrial press, and I bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift. Using food grade plastic instead of wood makes cleaning easier, and our pump is electric not hand driven, but ultimately little has changed. Our wine lab is pretty high tech and probably the main exception, I dont think they tested for things like acidity and sulfur levels until the industrial revolution. I was literally just talking about this yesterday with my coworker. We had the bottling line out in the yard and we were sanitizing it by pumping boiling water through it with a diesel powered compressor. My contemporary may not understand sanitizing, or the equipment we used to do it, but he would easily understand the bottler and the importance of keeping it clean. I would love to share a few bottles of modern wine with a pre industrial master and vice versa.
i bet they’d get a kick out of moving stacks of barrels or fermentation tanks with a forklift.
Yeah, that would be really impressive!
“What are you going to tell me next, you have a one-time cure for consumption?”
I’m currently in college to go into GIS (Geographic Information Systems/Science) and lemme tell ya I think more people in 1700 would understand “cartographer” than they would today.
You are correct. People these days are idjits.
Not even really that but people tend to think that others have just outright stopped making maps. “Haven’t we made all the maps already?” Is a common response I get when I tell them. They seem to forget about data analysis and all that.
And, well… They’re not super wrong about how mapped earth is. They just misjudge the sheer, enormous amount of detail we need (which keeps growing with our ability to get more of it), along with the fact that sometimes it changes a bit.
“Haven’t we mapped everything already?” is a bit like saying “Haven’t we born everyone already?”.
GIS also is far more complex than what is visible in a single map. An example for this are the capabilities of satellites observing the earth, IIRC very few to none of them are mere security cameras - most of them have quite interesting spectra to observe green house gas emissions or vegetation (ie. land use changes) for example. GIS can then use this data and gather hidden information, sometimes over large spatial dimensions.
Exactly. We know what shape the land is even for the bottoms of the oceans. But that doesn’t mean we’re done making maps.
I’m a peasant just like you.
I try to make rocks think with electricity and then cry when it doesn’t think the way I want it to (software engineer)
What’s electricity?
I spent about 30 seconds staring at this question, followed by 3 minutes pondering how to explain the phenomenon of electricity to someone unfamiliar with it, but nothing came to mind. Then, I went online and found that, while we have some understanding of how to detect and manipulate electricity, fundamentally, it’s just how our universe works and we don’t know exactly what it is.
I was moreso pointing to the fact that it wasn’t discovered until after 1700, not the fact that it could have been explained to someone in 1700. It’s still wild how we don’t know why it happens.
It’s just little tiny things wiggling around in wires. They’re always there, and if you wiggle them just right you can make rocks think!
I probably should have just said lightning instead
have you tried using Bauxite?
If someone working in semiconductor manufacturing were to answer this question they would probably have to say “I make sand think” and just walk away.
“You know how we dug out that trench to let some of the river through for irrigation, and then we fill it in for winter? Yeah I do that, but much smaller, and much faster, on sand. Got a shovel?”
I’m a literal wizard. I spend hours writing in an esoteric language known only by those who study it in order to bend the world to my will and make things happen as I wish it.
The structure of my magic spells determine what the outcomes will be, and things can get really strange if you mess up the syntax.
I take food from the baker and carry it to people’s homes directly in exchange for custom. We call it “being a delivery girl”. The amazing part is what the baker makes, it’s called “pizza”
Few people from 2024 understand what I do, so no.
Our customers are people who work on (redacted for privacy)
We help them keep track of if their work is on schedule.
Pause to explain the Internet here.
"The Internet is complicated. But imagine you’re holding a long string and I’m holding the other end. If I pull on the string, you’ll feel it. We could then have an agreed upon code like one hard tug is yes, two short tugs is no. Maybe certain patterns form letters , so we can spell words out for each other. Now we can communicate from pretty far away.
Now imagine if instead of me holding the string, it’s connected to a machine. Maybe that machine moves chalk over a chalkboard based on how you pull on your end of the string. I can then read this chalkboard at my leisure.
The Internet is much more complicated than that, but for my job that’s close enough. It’s a way to send information from here to there without anyone actually going there in person and telling someone.
My job is to work on the chalk machine. I help make sure it is set up right so it doesn’t fall over, and the code stuff like ‘one short tug is a, two is b, etc’ is agreed on and interpreted correctly"
Backend developer.
I’m a programmer. I think I would explain it as creating and operating mechanical contraptions that help students find books to read and help them write new works and send them to professors. I work at a university and that is basically what our program does.
I used to work. Now the kingdom pays me to just be.
Probably easier to explain to a 1700s peasant than most americans today
I’m an archaeologist.
Back in the 1700s this wasn’t really a thing. Although there were folk, usually educated people like vicars and wealthy land owners, who called themselves ‘antiquarians’.
This mostly involved them employing the local unemployed to hack away at old burial mounds/tombs looking for treasure. Buggering up the archaeology for us future scientists in the process!
They had accountants in the 1700s. The principles of double entry bookkeeping remain the same, but the technology difference with computers and accounting software would make the day to day work unrecognizable.
Hell they had accountants in 3000’s BCE, oldest know examples of real writing are receipts. Actually the oldest recorded name we know, Kushim, belonged to kind of accountant.
Do you watch stefan milo?
No, never even heard about him.
oh, he does archeology youtubes and just did a video on “the oldest name”. He’s pretty cool edit: It was a pretty cool video too. he also asked “oldest name we know a lot about” and “oldest name of a non-royal we know a lot about” in that video
“oldest name of a non-royal we know a lot about”
Iirc the oldest royal name we know is Narmer, and Kushim most probably lived earlier than him. We certainly do know more about Narmer than Kushim though.
The question he asked was more like “oldest person who’s life was somewhat documented” so he goes later to find the first person with a recorded history. I wanna say he ended up on someone in an egyptian king’s court
I think it was Imhotep, priest, architect and doctor at the court of Djoser, credited with designing the first great pyramid and later deified for that. Problem is that nearly all sources on him are much later.
I steer gigantic metal birds pulled by armies of horses carrying dozens of people, to the antipodes… in less than one day… using dead animal juice.
… But I don’t see any horses. Surely they can’t move on their own! Who is pushing them?
There’s a guy, Isaac Newton, he’s 57. Ask him about his
secondthird law, hopefully he came up with it already.
