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A Golden Island To The West — California ISOT from 2018 to 1850

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Guardian54 said:
My computer crashed and had to reboot...

Chinook salmon - Wikipedia
You know how badly the various Columbia river dams fucked up the salmon population? Yeah... that's a problem. A big problem. There are quite a few valuable saltwater fish species that spawn far upstream in rivers.

And if you claim river fish isn't relevant in Europe (let alone North America), well, you might want to consider the fact that people aren't going to care about heavy metal contamination or other stuff when they're starving. And since carp was well known as edible in Shakespeare's time...
A river in a less absurdly over-fed country would not have anywhere near this magnitude of invasive fish problem. Kind of like how whenever I look out at the pigeons in my backyard I think "if this was China they'd all have been eaten already".
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I wasn't stating that they weren't relevant in a "fuck them let's build dams" way. They're just not a relevant staple food for large numbers of people in our day and age (or the 1850's).
 
pbluekan said:
I wasn't stating that they weren't relevant in a "fuck them let's build dams" way. They're just not a relevant staple food for large numbers of people in our day and age (or the 1850's).
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Meat popularization was very, very late, even in the Western world. Fish was a critical protein source of protein for almost all of history. In fact one of Henry VIII's earliest edicts concerned no longer legally restricting importation of stockfish (dried fish, dried on wooden frames called stocks--yes, the same sort of stock as laughingstock) to only be from Bergen, Norway. This was despite a third of England's fishing fleets going up to Icelandic waters to fish in those times (presumably as the North Sea didn't have as many fish in it as up there)!

River fish and saltwater fish that spawn in rivers were absolutely crucial to staving off starvation in the 1850s. And even today in many, many places.

When I was a child in China (late 1990s) I do not remember eating beef at any time unless perhaps at McDonald's (Chinese McDonald's, KFCs and other foreign fast-food places were at the time very, very classy places), but I remember I wasn't a fan of burgers at the time (or now for that matter). Pork was not all that frequent either. Most of the time we had meat or alternatives it was (in decreasing order of frequency) beans/tofu, eggs or fish (usually carp from local rivers), and we had a small flock of chickens which occasionally yielded up some meat (though this was less frequent than pork).

Before anyone makes a racist comment on eating cat or dog, I recommend starving for a while and then getting offered "roof rabbit" as your ancestors ate during the Great Depression or other hungry times.

I tend to react very badly to people assuming that this or that food were insignificant and negligible, especially when it's a protein food. I have a bit of a complex around anyone undervaluing food.

As Civ:BE put it "Your back is strong and your belly is full because back on Earth, someone else's back is bent and their belly is empty. Make sure your conduct is worthy of their pain." Change that to "somewhere else" and it applies just fine in the present day.
 
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Riverine fish had been thoroughly replaced by the 1850ies, though, so who the fuck cares about it being a staple dish before the 1850s. Let's not forget that quite a few fish species had been brought to near or actual extinction especially in big rivers thanks to industrial pollution and overfishing. You can't feed a city of 100k+ people on the fish you may be able to catch in the local river. Meat was the only option. Also, food could be quite monotonous and meat or fish wasn't considered an everyday thing and there was still enough demand to keep butchers a common job. Cooking a soup with bones is a thing. One can't think of the mass consumption of meat of today as indicative of the amounts of meat consumed in earlier centuries. A lot of it will have been in sausages, things like Salami tend to keep for months on end.

The first attempts at reefer waggons date to 1842 as transporting living livestock was simply causing too much loss through weight loss or animals dying underway and being able to move meat refrigerated was going to be a lot more profitable. Iceboxes on wheels entered service in the 1851 timeframe.

A pioneering Californian engineer could strike it damn rich by providing a cooling system that works with 1850ies train engines. Refrigerated transport is something with extreme demand.
 
Also depends on region. Some places have a lot of land not good enough (whether for soil quality reasons, water availability reasons, or others) for crops but good enough for pasture, where meat is common by default because it requires less water and transportation than vegetables and is more available than fish (places without the water for crops aren't going to be places with a lot of water, as a rule).

Granted, none of those places are in Europe, but much of the American West is like that - and the West is very much in the Americans' sphere of influence. Introducing refrigeration to American cattle country would not only have a big impact, it would have a big impact and buy influence in their own contiguous-with-places-already-in-their-sphere-of-influence backyard.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Also depends on region.
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THIS is a valid reason to talk about meat as more important than fish for many places. But it doesn't answer the question of hydroelectricity, which we were discussing.

Here, let me try to fit your narrative to the situation: "Because in the steeper upriver parts of rivers where dams are easier to build, the terrain is too tough for farming, and the rivers not good for floating logs downstream, thus animal grazing is a good use of land. Also, the rivers, while important for fish spawning, don't yield fish of adequate size except dead fish from say salmon runs, and that's only once a year."

I hope that's better.
 
pbluekan said:
Were in a very much past sense.

Freshwater fish haven't been a staple diet for a majority of the population since the early years of the 19th century.
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Nyvis said:
In 1850? I have doubts. From what I know, the large scale exploitation of fish was done at sea.
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Well as was pointed out earlier, depends on the region.
But Central, Eastern and Northern Europe were generally the main producer of salted fish or dried fish, and countries there were the main exporters to the rest of the continent and Mediterranean and Black sea regions.
1800 is also when artificial ponds for aquaculture start appearing en mass in Eastern Europe to meet export demands, and only grows in intensity for the next century.
Take also into consideration that Europeans were often Catholics, so that forced them to either not eat on Fridays, or have fish as the main course. Likewise, many cultural events, and religious days required fasting, making fish a very much preferred food type on many occasions.

Something I know thanks to my grandfather, that a group of villages laying close together (~10x10 km box), after a harvest managed to fish out 2,6 tons of fish sometime in 1946-7. Without resorting to extra feed.
 
From what I've read, large parts of Western Europe basically relied on ocean fish (largely cod, it dries well) for their fish, mostly from the Grand Banks (even before Columbus by some accounts - the Basque weren't telling anybody about where they got their insane cod catch). To the point where in some languages, the word for "cod" translates to"fresh salt cod".

So, for that part of Europe at least, its safe to say ocean was more important than fresh.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
From what I've read, large parts of Western Europe basically relied on ocean fish (largely cod, it dries well) for their fish, mostly from the Grand Banks (even before Columbus by some accounts - the Basque weren't telling anybody about where they got their insane cod catch). To the point where in some languages, the word for "cod" translates to"fresh salt cod".

So, for that part of Europe at least, its safe to say ocean was more important than fresh.
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In French, we have one word for the fish itself (cabillaud) and one for the salted version (morue).
 
Nyvis said:
In French, we have one word for the fish itself (cabillaud) and one for the salted version (morue).
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Ahh, the French language. When you want to add an additional two vowels to the one already present at the end of a word just for the sake of aesthetics. When you have to base your counting system on multiples of twenty just to stick it to the rest. When your language is incomprehensible even to your own countrymen, let alone foreigners. You can't help but love it.
 
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Sophie & Bonnie
  • Sidestory


    • Dear Sophie,


    Do you remember when you and I had to split up to throw off suspicions of us being together? Well, I traveled westward to hopefully find a place for us to live without fears of being found. Instead, I met up with another traveler named Anna. Together, we set off to find or create a homosexual community. Instead, we found California. And California turned out to be the closest thing to heaven on Earth. People of all races, sexes, classes, and even sexualities are equal here. We can even have jobs with higher pay and better working conditions than the Lowell mills we used to work at. We can finally be together again. And that's not getting into the magical technology and knowledge the Californians have. There is this thing called the Internet that houses all of the knowledge of the world that the new California came from. They also have flying machines that an fly across the continent in seven hours. I'm sending you a ticket for a flight to California, and I'll fly to New York with a copy of the ticket in case your ticket gets taken by someone. Or you can wait until the USS Roosevelt comes. I'll be on it as well as Anna and a kind woman around our age named Karma Tidal. You'll know what the Roosevelt looks like when you read about it on the news. Can't wait to see you again.


    From California with love,

    Ebony "Bonnie" Light

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    Sophie Singer looked at the letter, then at the boarding pass, and immediately started packing her belongings, including her telescope, clothes, books, $50 in cash and change, and her sketchbook as well as a red ballpoint pen that had been sent along with the letter and pass.


    "I can't wait to be with you again my love." she said as she arrived at the train station, with the intent of going to New York City's new airfield.
    ​
     
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  • Sidestory
    • Rise Comics said:



    Sophie Singer looked at the letter, then at the boarding pass, and immediately started packing her belongings, including her telescope, clothes, books, $50 in cash and change, and her sketchbook as well as a red ballpoint pen that had been sent along with the letter and pass.


    "I can't wait to be with you again my love." she said as she arrived at the train station, with the intent of going to New York City's new airfield.
    ​
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    was either of these historical? because I looked up the author of the letter and got racehorses and *ahem* "erotica"
     
    This is my render of the 7107 Trijet from the latest update. It is by no means a final render.
     
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    Some potential workarounds for copyright kerfuffles:

    - California shortens its copyright length to be in like with the rest of the downtime world (unlikely, Hollywood is still very powerful)

    - Works that were in the public domain prior to the Event but are still under copyright in 1850 are put under "semi-copyright". Existing adaptations based on those works (i.e. Barry Lyndon) are still held by their uptime copyright owner. However, if the author is alive in 1850, permission must be sought for future commercial adaptations. Semi-copyright doesn't cover distribution, only adaptions, so new print runs of books are fine.

    - Works created in the "Lost History" that were in the public domain prior to the Event remain in the public domain. Mostly this covers works published from OTL September 1850 to December 1922. You can't claim ownership on something you haven't made.

    - Orphan works whose IP owners were lost during the Event are either declared to be in the public domain or the rights to them are sold by the state of California.
     
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