Comments by "Jasper Mooren" (@jaspermooren5883) on "What if An Ancient Roman Saw Our Modern World?" video.

Wait you're not supposed to actually spend it all on salt and eat it!
53
@Laurence0227 I don't think that's so much the case. Even in countries where brothels are legal (I am Dutch, you can just walk to a brothel at any hour here if you want to), porn is still FAR more popular. It's cheaper and more private and much lower effort. I don't think Romans would be surprised by the prevalence of porn at all when they realise that you can show moving pictures of that quality to anyone instantaneously. Porn is so obvious that it basically existed the very moment it was possible. It's quite literally human nature to seek sexual enjoyment.
26
Well, we do use it for all the good reasons as well. We don't just watch cats and argue with idiots. Most of the time we don't actually. In fact I think that as soon as they actually start to understand how prevalent smart phones are and how much we use them, that the way we use them is actually very easy to understand for a Roman. They probably would do the same things if they had access to them. Entertainment has always been a major drive for humanity and debate would be very understandable for a Roman.
16
@GuukanKitsune Yes, I know that (it's where the word salary comes from for example). The joke was just that, like @loganshaw4527 said, eating too much salt can cause a heart attack. So it was a joke made by taking your obvious figure of speech literally. But jokes are hard to get sometimes in written form.
10
@Enyavar1 That's not really true though. Wood is still an afforable easily accessible resource. It's just far less efficient than steel is for making ships (and a lot of other things as well, wood is actually not that great from a pure material science perspective). It's more expensive and less effective (wooden ships have a lot more drag than steel ships, so it either costs a lot more fuel to get somewhere or you're going a lot slower). The prevalance of steel over wood really only happened after the invention of the bessemer process (which made steel significantly cheaper). Before that ships where made of wood, and forests where actually less in number and size at that time compared to the contemporary world. Brittania ruled the waves after all, despite the UK being famously laking in wooded land (forests in the UK are quite rare, it has been barren for literal millenia after most has been chopped down before even the Romans arrived in Britain). You don't actually need a lot of forest to make a ship. While I won't deny that pollution hasn't been a thing, forests are actually not really less in number than they were during Roman times (at least in Europe, we can't really say the same thing for South America for example), wood for building doesn't actually require that much land. Most forests were destroyed when humans started the practise of farming, because burning forests made for excelent farmland (and still is, most of the amazon that we are losing is not chopped for the wood, but burned for the farmland to grow crops). So a very large portion of human destruction of forested areas happened well before the roman times, and in the last century there actually have been fairly sizable efforts to reforest Europe and the amount of forested land has vastly increased, not decreased over the last century.
4