Well, I did say "except in a few cases" & Vland itself may still be one of them.
But, what about the ones NOT on Vland (or in Japan)?
When the British created their Empire, they took their Britishness with them. In the case of a lot of the sectors around Vland, they were either assimilated or wiped out a long, long time back. All they've ever known is the Vilani way because the Vilani weren't very tolerant of things that were contrary to their methods because their methods were life itself as far as they were concerned.
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And then the Solomani came along, a long time ago & they all discovered that they didn't need to be enslaved by vilani culture anymore.
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Even by WWII the nisei and sensei in the USA were getting pretty much assimilated.
Some were.
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Most were.
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I think what happened in WWII set that back. The same thing happened in Canada. And we had the experience of having Chinese workers building our transcontinental railway (I forget if you folks down South there did the same) and they having them stay in every little town along the route. That's why you can still get excellent Chinese food all across the otherwise whitebread Prairie Provinces.
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Don't know about Canada but here in the USA it actually accelerated it.
It was very, very obvious which side was the 'loser' culture.
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A lot depends on what you mean by 'assimilated' though. Did they retain traditional values? A lot of them did. Did they retain cultural practices? Yes. Did they do the things necessary in the economy to get by? Probably had no choice.
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From my personal experience;
Nisei retained some traditional values but sensei were just as american as I was.
BTW, I would be considered 'sensei' Italian-American.
You see, like me, all the 'sensei' I've known retain little mostly cuz' they did speak the lang or read it either.
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I have a friend works for our border services and our immigration services. It's a funny thing about assimilation: Adults that immigrate usually don't assimilate (especially if there are 'Greek communities' or 'Muslim communities' or whatever in the major centers where they can speak the home language and they can shop in stores that carry the things they are used to, etc). The immigrants, in many cases, just simply learn the absolute minimum of language and more or less try to live as they did back home. Generation two (their kids, first born there) know they don't belong and so do the locals, so they do everything they can to blend in - they eschew stuff their parents liked, they try to be more 'local' than the locals. Generation three comes along (the second generation in country) who grew up with their grandparents telling them stories of the old country. Then they get interested, make trips to the old country, learn about it, etc. They are more middle-of-the-road but with more affinity for what the original homeland had than their first generation born in the new country parents. It's the 4th generation that makes a peace with the hybrid life and that's when full assimilation occurs. Even with modestly fast standards, the government figures it takes 50-60 years for the 4th generation to get to adulthood as fully assimilated folks. And as I said above, if there are large clusters of folks keeping the old ways and language going in the new country, that process can take even longer.
Sure, there are immigrants that blend in less than a generation, but statistically, this model is what planners work with.
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Yeah, but it's been how many years since the collapse of the ZS?
Let's see how your model works in in that period of time.
In most of the old ZS the 'Traditional Vilani Way' is about as relevant as the Roman Empire is to present-day Italy or the Persian Empire is to Iran.
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(While a lot of women still chafe under the influence of "Well, you can't really understand... you weren't born Japanese" I think it would be more accurate to say it this way, " 'Well, you can't really understand... you weren't born Japanese. IN JAPAN!")
It's not just women. Women have a very different life than what we have in the West have in Japan even now. It's not anywhere near what it was like, but it still is very different than what our lives in North America look like. Being born in Japan and growing up in Japan (or even in a Japanese population elsewhere that is keeping alive the culture), they grow up with a very different sensibility.
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Of course not.
It's anyone that chafes under the restrictions of a repressive culture.
And that's worldwide.
But then, after a regime change, there always are those who will pine for the good old days.
But after several thousand years? Nope, don't think so.
Doesn't take too long to figure out which option frees one & which option restricts oneself.
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I've personally known & grown up with both &, aside from the obvious difference in features, they could NOT be distinguished from the rest of us (USA kids),
I've seen that. I've also seen all sorts of unassimilated folks. I've met Pakistanis that work in IT and that seem very assimilated until you hear (from some) things like "Well, it's not my job to save you - it's your choice if you are all going to hell or not." I've worked with a lot of Lebanese. They may be functioning in our job settings but outside of that, the wife still often does not work, they still have hundreds of people at weddings, they eat the ethnic foods, and they still view things from the homeland their parents came from in a more or less similar way. I've known people who emigrated and never went back, had no nostalgia for their home in India whatsoever, and second generation (born in Canada) or third generation too, that go back, that attend the festivals, that do all the cultural stuff, etc.
But we're not really talking about *immigration*. We're talking about places that have been assimilated for hundreds of years. And not just one or two systems. Thousands of them if I read the map right. Given the stagnated level of the ZS, they had pretty much done their assimilation by any means required slowly and most of the sectors near Vland (and most of the area beyond until you start getting within a few sectors of the Terran sphere) have had Vilani rule for a long time. They would largely be assimilated. So it wouldn't be like 'Hey, you're born into a new country and your folks stand out and you can hang with the locals instead' but would instead be 'Hey, this foreigner is disrupting our government, not respecting our cultural values, and everyone I know is upset by this and these newcomers don't respect our values of community and careful action...'. And there aren't enough Terrans on any given ZS world to even begin to give the local kids the feeling that 'oh hey, we're in a whole new world' because those Terrans are so outnumbered by Vilani.
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I think you're putting way to much stock into the importance of being genetically terran.
Hordes of those desiganted as untermenschen under the vilani system, despite being genetically vilani. would've leaped at the opportunity to throw off the shackles of the 'Vilani Way'.
Wouldn't take them long to figure it out. Not long at all.
Assimilation does that & that's why I just don't see much of an 'imperium-spanning' traditional vilani influence still around by 1100 3I.
The people that come to a new place are the adventurers of any society. The rest of them never take that risk (unless their society is entirely wiped out). So they are the 10% or 5% or 1% that actually have the drive and understanding that they are heading to something better. The rest don't, if their nation is still functional.
And the only 'immigrants' will be the Terrans on long-held Vilani worlds.
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And once those forced by the 'Vilani Way' to be bottom-dwellers discover that a new 'Way' is avail they'd flock to it & be glad not to ID themselves a 'True Vilani' anymore.
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It's not so much about Valnd (or Japan) but about the vilani (or japoanese).
Vland is just a spiritual touchstone. It is about being raised Vilani.
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It's also about *choosing* to accept the lot in life when the 'Vilani Way' dictates to you, OR opting out & getting a chance at freely choose. A chance to move up.
Wouldn't take long to figure it out.
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I'sure that there's were vilani that were secure in their old ways but there were a heckuva' lot more instances where the kids didn't want to become 'bottlewashers' or other menial occupations just cuz' their parents were.
Vilani were far above our level of technology here at TL-9. They also have a cultural imperative NOT to be inefficient in order to maximize survival.
Those two things tell me most menial jobs aren't done by Vilani (they have robots that are better than ours). Kids that have any sort of ambition, and that ambition to be a success and contribute is cultural and arguably genetic given the natural selection processes in early Vilani, get to contribute in the ways they are most capable to do so.
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Yeah, sure, it was a "worker's paradise" wasn't it?
(where've we heard that one before?)
Everyone was just so happy, happy, happy that everything was already falling apart long before the Terran contact.
In any case there'd still those at the 'bottom', that once they learned that they didn't *have* to be there, would opt-out in the proverbial 'new york minute'.
There would've been a mass exodus away from that
This is a very particular viewpoint. I think this is like the same American theory (others have it but America has shown it more over the last century) that if you go to a place and take out their government, they will suddenly flock to the banner of the invading force because 'hey, freedom!'. That strategy totally failed in Iraq for a variety of reasons, but one was the US government expected more support than they got from the locals once the locals realized 'hey freedom!' had blown up their power systems, water systems, etc. and were not fixing them and that the government that was gone was bad, but they had had water and food as long as you weren't against the regime. The problem was in part that these people had a cultural conditioning which was not going to go away in a day, a week or a year. They also had not much of the experience of being brought up in the West (unlike immigrant kids) and they had all sorts of bad experiences of the war and its aftermath.
If the Western forces had brought Iraqi kids to their countries, made them welcome, I'm think it'd be fair to say a fair number would have assimilated if they had the same opportunity as everyone else. But they wouldn't have that and they didn't get that. They got their own country kind of rubbled in many places and no replacement for the most part.
And the Vilani-held worlds beyond the Solomani incursions wouldn't even have really seen the power of the Solomani directly, let alone the worlds/cultures the Solomani grew up on.
This isn't, as I said, immigration. The Solomani are an invading army. They broke the existing system and likely weren't too able (due to scope and not understanding the cultures they were dealing with) to replace those systems whole cloth and in a way that improved life in the short run for everyone.
So, these Vilani kids are hearing their parents and grandparents talk about these Solomani they'll never actually meet (because numbers say they can't) as destroyers of all that has been good in families and in society and their alien approaches are chaotic and have left people worse off than if they'd not invaded. They won't hear much if any in counterpoints.
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Your's is also a very particular viewpoint & one that I have very difficult time accepting inasmuch as it contradicts just about all of my direct experience.
Remember, these folks haven't *just* been removed from the 'Vilani Way'. The Vilani Way, in most locales was overthrown, what, 2,000 years ago?
Show me the Italians living the "Roman Way or the Iranians living the 'Persian Way'.
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& with the exposure of 'the vilani way' as the 'biggest loser of all', not much chance of preventing it.
Not convinced it *is*. They lost a war against an opponent that was militarily more flexible than they were and who developed a key technology at the right time. Not convinced that's the same as exposing the entire Vilani way as somehow 'the biggest loser of all'.
Also, given the fact the Terran takeover still resulted in a mess, not convinced all these Vilani who are culturally and even genetically likely to be almost reactionary to things outside of their culture would just somehow overcome that.
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Well, I am convinced & I believe that most 'Vilani' 'commoners' would've been too.
The collapse of the 2I would NOT have re-vaildated the 'Vilani Way', it was already dead. In fact, in the TU, the case is usually made that the ZS was just too far gone for the Terrains to save.
The 3I definitively proves that another 'Way' can flourish w/o subjugating, literally, everyone into a strict 'caste system'.
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p.s. funny that you chose Japan as, according to an article I recently read wrt the current RL 'plague', it's the "oldest country in the world" as far as avg age is concerned.
You want to know a big part of that?
For a long time, Japan was credited with the oldest population. That was largely based on the number of people over 90 (and over 100) compared to the rest of the world.
Everyone was looking at diet, other factors, etc to understand this. Everyone in their rush forgot that *statistics aren't the same as facts*.
It turned out that the Japanese system determined you were still alive if your pension cheques kept getting cashed. I think you can see where I'm going....
Turns out many families just buried the dead elder themselves and kept cashing the pension checks. No checks on them by public servants so not much chance of getting caught. It had went on for decades and decades. This bogusly gave the government the bragging points about their long-lived population when all it really meant was they had a government program that was easily abused because nobody checked on it.
Things are gonna' be changing there real soon now.
They've already changed once this situation I mentioned came to the public eye. They may have *slight* advantages (their diet is generally healthier than the average American or Brit for example) but no moreso than folks living around the Mediterranean, etc. The 'oldest nation' was really just bogus proxies being used to determine who was still alive.
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Sorry dude, the stats I was mentioning have only been compiled since COVID arrived and it still shows that the coutry of Japan has the oldest avg age.
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I used to have arguments w/ a, now ex, brother-in-law, 30 years ago or so. He was convinced that Japan was going to overtake the USA economically.
They are more efficient. They also understand how to form combines and how to have the government help them in international sales. What they are NOT is a country with energy resources, food resources, etc. and their ability to put out better quality products than others has been partly attrited by the change from family run (ongoing) large enterprises with CEOs that had their personal honour at stake to American style 'Get the good contract, be there a few years, run the company for short term profitability, get the bonus, get out before it crashes and burns.' That happened in America about the time the major auto manufacturers ceased being run by the generation that built those businesses (maybe the second generation after in some cases if the first generation of kids also valued their family name on brands). Once you get to today's way of doing higher management, there's no focus on the company as a long-term project. CEOs average something like 3 years in the US. And most get big severances - win, lose or screw the company up altogether. Those CEOs get put in because they DO generate profits for shareholders in the short run.
Japan, without a lot more foreign holdings that would give them energy and food security, could NEVER dominate the world.
But they are way more efficient in many ways.
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And also, way more corrupt as a number segments on '60Minutes' have amply documented.
It also depends on what you mean by 'efficient'.
If they really were that efficient, it seems to be that things wouldn't be so horrendously expensive over there.
And, BTW, their farming is NOT very efficient at all. Too many smal; plots amongst other things.
Harry Harrison, the sci-fi author, used to always mention the cost of food id Japan in his lectures when he hit the subject of "You think it's bad here in the USA".
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Example: Canadian company was going to sell Japan some chips. Japanese said 'here's our limits for the chips and the manufacturing process'. Canadians shipped them their test load, all in spec, and they were surprised when the Japanese company came back and said 'Sorry, we will not be partnering with you'. The Canadians couldn't understand it. They said 'We tested every chip we sent you and they were all within manufacturing specs!' The Japanese company said 'That is correct, but statistical methods on the sample showed that the variance indicated your manufacturing process has wider variances than we find acceptable - even if you threw out all the ones that failed to meet the standard. Our test was not just to deliver in-spec items, but for your process to be tighter and more controlled which it is not.'.
Just a matter of time. But even back then I argued that Japan was 'aging' too fast for that to ever happen & lo & behold, w/i a few years their economy collapsed & never has really recovered.
That's not because of aging. That's because of increasing corruption in politics and business culture and by the transition from family businesses to North American style corporate management (perhaps it isn't fair to name it that, but that's where we see the most of it and has now crept all over the place including into Japan, albeit not as fast as other places.
Oil shortages, massive foreign tarrifs including the USA's, aforesaid corruption, banking issues... there are a lot of reasons Japan is in the mix, but the bogusly inflated age curve wasn't a major factor. Fukushima lately hasn't helped - they've got it managed, but that was a big problem on a small island and the cost to the economy was distinctly notable.
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Well, like I said, they are more corrupt & always have been.
As far as "it's all because of the 'gaijin' influence excue goes, that's just another riff on the "it's all the fault of those other people".
But it does illustrate my point about how the 'Vilani Way' would yield to the 'Terran Way'.
And 'aging' always, always has an immensely transforming effect upon a societies/cultures.
Almost always underestimated too.
The ag-curve may have been 'inflated' once but it isn't anymore is it?
(Didn't you say that the 'fraud' has been ended?)
Japan is still the oldest country on earth. Surprisingly. Italy is now 2nd. Once again these a figures since Covid arrived.
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The 'Japanese way' has clearly failed to keep up with the rest of the world.
The Japanese Way used to be what the North American way was. Build a product that you can be proud of, that is enduring, and that is well made. That's something the US gave up by the mid sixties in some major sectors and that has largely gone in others by the 1975-1980 period. Not all - the US has a huge economy. It also has a lot of people who still value quality, but a lot want to do volume instead.
For most investors, it is about profit and get out. Once that becomes the investing climate, no CEO that wants to focus on long term corporate health can stay in power because someone with a short term focus can produce more money for shareholders.
There's also the reality that many of the hand made or craft-level constructions were beyond the need.
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But thery're still not keeping up.
The PRC left them in the taillights some time ago, didn't they?
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Another anecdote:
Henry Ford's corporate accountant was a man named Cousins. Cousins came to Henry one day and said "Henry, I've been talking to the engineers and they tell me we can reduce the driveshaft diameter on the Model As by 1/4" and we'd save $X (a modest but accruable amount) per car. They say it'll be strong enough." Henry looked at him and said "What size is the driveshaft now?" Cousins answered. Henry said "Okay, tell the engineering department to increase the driveshaft diameter by 1/4"."
Henry wanted to build something that his customers could rely on. He wanted a brand that stood for longevity, robustness and reliability.
Flash forward: We now make cars that are *designed to fail* within 7 to 9 years. We do not want people driving the same car for 15+ years. Planned obsolescence is built into modern iPhones and so on. My wife's iPhone failed 1 month after warranty ran out (25 months) and it was a blue screen of death - not repairable. Now they are pushing a new major iPhone release every 12-18 months. And the phones enough that you could get two basic business laptops for the price of one. My android Nexus 4 (well manufactured because they hadn't yet figured out how to cheapen everything out) lasted 7.5 YEARS. And the hand-me down android I got from a buddy has already lasted me nearly two years and he had it for 3 years. But the profit margin on the Apple product is so much higher than the android, no wonder they cost so much.
US business shifted away from quality to volume when they realized they could make more money at it. That's still going on. Now Japanese business culture (as the family run corporations are dying out) is the same as US culture. So there goes some of the Japanese way. It's not short term profitable enough.
Ironically, the *green* thing to do is what America and Japan used to do. Make something once, well, and nobody needs another one for 20 years. That saves tossing an item in the landfill every 2-7 years (phones to cars). So the 'volume' sale approach is better for the environment, but not profit margins.
Also, the volume approach with lower craftsmanship (but enough ... by someone's definition) means you can have foreign workers or robots build your product and you don't need craftsmen to the same extent. That also makes you more money.
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Gee, You sound just like my former brother-in-law.
Shouldn't they have whipped our asses by now?
Nope, too old, too slow.
Just like the 'Vilani Way'.
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Watched a segment on '60Minutes' about 5 years ago where one of their people toured a large apt suite in a Tokyo hi-rise. The sale price was still only about 1/2 of what it had been in 1990!
Corruption in government and business and energy crisis and other factors can do this. So can declining standards if the expectation of your brands is entirely that they *are* better than their competitors.
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Right!
Just like the Vilani probably were.
And that's why Japan just isn't going to to be able to keep up.
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That's a lesson the US might want to think on. It might not catch up to the US immediately (given OPEC etc. are willing to open the taps these days) but eventually business corruption and other factors will align and the US will be in trouble.
The whole 'cheaper to make it overseas thing' is an immediate result of the 'don't need craftsmen, just assemblers' approach to goods. Nowadays, most of us couldn't afford craft made major products. I studied furniture design with hand tools. Building a nice dining room chair that way means it would need to be sold at $400 per chair. Using machines to take some shortcuts, you might get a decent chair for $150-200 per. For the $100 and down versions, you won't get anything that will take repeated hard use for longer than a few years (or you got some lots of luck). I went to Ikea and not one of their chair models met up to my standards of endurance and solidity (not to mention carefully engineered comfort). I have chairs from my father's childhood that are more sturdy, more well designed than most of what I've seen in stores these days. And they'll be hand me downs to my daughter.
Then all the manufacturing workers in the fly-over states wonder why the jobs are gone and figure you can tarrif the work back into the country. It won't work that way unless you tarrifed stuff from every other nation that could produce it cheaper. And now, with robots getting cost effective, doing away with humans is getting more feasible for US internal manufacturers. So tarrifs can't fix that either. It is the best route for profit and corporations are amoral.
Silly books like that one titled, as best I can remember "The Japan That Can Say 'No'" have been revealed as essentially nonsense but amply illustrated the same sort of 'superiority complex'. I can see where there might still be stuff like published on Vland c.1100 3I. Considering the pokey way traditional vilani do things it might not get into circulation till after the author's death though.
The short term CEO problem is busy decaying the Japanese industries. That helps to level the field as do large tarrifs. That just stiffles trade. It's good to get some more work done elsewhere, but not clear that's back in the US. Even then robots are cheaper. And the workers that want those jobs can't be afforded without jacking up the price by a significant multiple - cost of doing business and of paying employees so they can eat in North America is far higher than in most other place (and robots are a factor now too).
Not sure that's better, except for the people who have the money to invest in corporations in a big way and whose business strategy is not value investing, but instead is 'get the profit and move on' investing.
To get this back on Traveller, the Vilani aren't the Japanese, though they could be I suppose with the right combination of external factors. And the business issues that have changed Japanese business in the 1980s until today (big business, small business is mostly still a very family affair on a very small scale) are not in play in the aftermath of the Terran war victory.
A lot, as in most of these cases, is in how you see things (or I do). Both have some coherence if the basic beliefs about the facts of the matter are accurate. Both just express different views of how these things work or don't.
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The vilani may not be Japan but Japan sure looks a lot like the 'Vilani Way'.
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p.p.s. You also indirectly argue against the ability of Illelish to effectively support 'The Rebellion'. It was one of the areas that should've been least affected by the fall of the ZS& therefore retained the 'old ways' , However, it never did appear that 'the vilani way' had much if any influence in that Domain anymore. Heck even w/i the confines of the official 'Domain of Vand there were large areas that chose NOT to be part of the 'Renewed ZS'.
Sure, and the Solomani had a lot of limits too because of internal factionalism. Their J-3 drive was a big part of their success. They were agile in warfare. It's much harder to be agile in regime change or remaking a society (see every little bog war in the last 40 years where a big power thought winning the little war meant a big societal change would follow but did not).
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Depends on what you mean by 'change'.
I think anyone that lives in most of those countries would tell you that a whole heckuva' lot changed!
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And others on this list have repeatedly called out the MT authors for failing to recognize the 3I as it was and having thus inflicted their own incompatible storylines from that.
The MT Rebellion both served the 'stir things up' need and the 'it's like Rome' flavour. Except that in Rome, the people assassinating the leaders were other Romans of power and authority. They were different factions, but nobody from outside of Roman well known families. Dulinor fits that model (in with the Emperor) in some ways but fails in others (the attempt to play Illelish as not Vilani (as a different ethnicity effectively ). It's not a good difference from the original Roman models because outsiders were not (until the late and troubled parts of the Roman empire) going to have any chance to ascend to the throne.
TomB
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I think we both agree that while DGP had done quite a bit of good work for Traveller (esp their 'task system' innovation), they fumbled badly wrt advancing the timeline. Mostly, IMO, cuz' they really didn't know the timeline already extant very well at all.
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.
So, that's the view I take of it:
- Not enough Solomani to actually replace anything but the very highest levels of Vilani rule
- Vilani high pop worlds in the un-invaded sections of the Vilani empire would feel little difference in the short run and the long run would be hundreds of years... and the Vilani, in their turn, impact how the Terrans would do business or government because it is a practical necessity over those years
- Culturally, many of the long held regions are functionally and likely effectively assimilated (not 100% of all peoples, but most of the rabble rousers were taken out and a lot of good cultural approaches the Vilani had succeeded with would show a steady, stable, predictable state of affairs with focus on efficiency and hard work by all (nobles not being foppish layabouts). That kind of thing sells to a lot of people.
- Individually Vilani LIVE longer than Terrans. That's got some significant advantages in experience and in built connections within the political sphere.
- Many VIlani administrators or nobles have likely been on the job for three to five times as long as the span of political life permits in Terran areas (all that freedom and so on) and that brings with it all sorts of wisdom and expertise and knowing where every last body is buried (Imagine Terrans trying to transform Vilani bureaucracies... think of Yes Minister and cast Sir Humphrey as a Vilani)