The Fiction Treehouse

OP: Why couldn’t traditional Chinese Yinpiao银票/silver drafts be forged if they were merely slips of paper? (cr大明宝钞，渐越)

Traditional Chinese yinpiao/silver drafts were paper vouchers issued by private banks starting from the Song Dynasty(960–1279). People could exchange these slips for physical silver at bank branches across the country.

Silver drafts were made in multiple copies with matching serrated seal edges. One copy went to the customer and others stayed at the bank. All edges had to fit perfectly together to withdraw silver. The unique split edge marks were almost impossible to copy.

This mechanism is known as qifeng骑缝 (split-joint seal) in China. It first originated in the Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). The Rites of Zhou records that contracts were written on bamboo or wooden slips in duplicate. Notches and marks were carved in the middle before splitting the slips, with each party keeping one half. The two halves would be matched by their notches for verification.

During the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221 BC), this idea evolved into hufu虎符/tiger tally tokens. A military tally was split into two pieces with identical inscriptions carved along the split edge. Troops could only be deployed if the patterns and characters on both halves perfectly aligned, serving as a metal version of the split-joint anti-counterfeiting system.

The technology matured in the Tang Dynasty (618–907). Government documents and private contracts commonly used split-joint seals stamped across the dividing line. The Chinese character "hetong合同" (contract) was written across the middle before the paper was torn apart, so the complete characters would only appear when the two halves were put together. This split-coupon system was later adopted for Song Dynasty (960–1279) jiaozi paper money and yinpiao/silver drafts of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912).

Official Song dynasty paper money (Jiaozi交子) was abolished in 1107. Private silver drafts issued by Qing-era piaohao票行 (ancient exchange banks) vanished completely in 1951, hit hard by modern banks and currency reforms. Nowadays silver drafts no longer circulate as currency. Their collectible value depends on their rarity and physical condition.

First they were called "chirographs", but later the word "indenture" (in its earliest meaning as just a legal document of any kind between two people) came to be used, originating from the practice of a contract being written twice on a single piece of parchment and then cut in half with serrated edges (as in dent, "teeth" -> indents -> indenture) in order for each party to take one half, so they could later piece them together and verify that there had been no forgery -- same as the Chinese silver drafts!

(Charter of the Clerecía de Ledesma, 1252, showing the serrated indents at the top -- presumably they are cutting rather than tearing because they're using parchment, which I expect is much harder to tear than wood-pulp paper like the Chinese were using)

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

So, let's talk about this. This is one of the things I feel is the biggest problems with our system as any response to sexual or domestic violence.

As a system, we do not center the experiences of victims. Victims are not a part of any kind of negotiations; furthermore, the incentives of an adversarial system of justice essentially require a defendant to clam up and avoid taking responsibility in order to avoid getting completely slammed. Victims are often cut out of the process entirely except for brief phone calls with prosecutors or victim/witness "advocates" (who seem to do more advocating for the prosecutors to the victims than they do advocating for the victims to the prosecutors, and again, this is structural). And then at trial they are interrogated, put through some bullshit, and finally have the privilege at the end, if they "won," of having their pain displayed for the prosecutor's purposes and trotted out to score an emotional victory or two... as an excuse to inflict state-originated violence on the perpetrator.

I think all this is fucking garbage.

But let's focus on defense attorneys in particular.

The way our system works, the way it poses the mountainous power of the state against the individual defendant and sidelines the victim, requires that, for any pretense of fairness, the defendant have a right to put their accuser to questioning under oath.

And what are the available defenses to something like rape? If the only evidence is her word, the only defense is that her word is wrong. Then it's only that she's mistaken or lying. If sexual contact took place, the only defense is consent.

As a defense attorney, this fucking sucks! I want to be able to defend my client and do it cleanly and ethically. I don't want to be complicit in the revictimization of anyone. (And, for what it's worth, I think bullying an victim, alleged or not, on the stand plays badly and is bad tactics too, in this era, so I only do it when there's a real paper trail of overt lying. And that does happen: courtrooms may only see a vanishingly small percentage of victims but it sees all the balls-to-the-wall liars.)

But this is my only ethical choice in that situation. If my client wants a jury trial, it's my duty to do it, regardless of who they are and what they're accused of. That's the point of a public defender. If "she's lying" is the only available defense, that has to be the defense. I will do it as clean as I can, because of the aforementioned reasons, and honestly I think having an ethical and calm and direct attorney in my position is worth a lot.

How much does that help you, though? Not a whole fucking lot! I bet it actually kind of sucks to hear me say that "actually, we can't help it even when we want to."

And why is it this way?

Crime is viewed as something an individual does against the order of the state. Not theoretically -- it's actually viewed like that, in a way that gets real-world consequences every day. That's why in many places the prosecutors represent "the people" (allegedly). That's why judges make the decisions. Here's the fucking problem: you're a human person and the crime was committed against you.

If anything, with sexual violence, the way the state is set up and the structures of power it reinforces have probably enabled that sexual violence. It certainly does nothing to prevent it.

This is one of the biggest reasons I think the current system utterly and completely fails victims of sexual and domestic violence. It needs a different system from jump, one that centers protection and healing. This way is wrong, and it boggles me that people can't see that and keep trying to force this retributive system where the victims are just shoved out of the case as much as possible.

Edit: the title for this comic is “Puzzle Rat” this one’s a few days late due to having a lot of doctors appointments sorry it’s  just 9 pages, and about some rats… it’s more symbolic than anything really

Also consider Mikinakoos' as they're extending support beyond their traditional service areas due to the scale of this emergency!

Donations for Namaygoosisagagun First Nation:

Donations for Whitesand First Nation:

Though people associate it with very old science fiction, you won't see any occurrence of the term in its current meaning (a human inhabitant of the planet Earth, as opposed to an extraterrestrial) prior to 1949.

Actually, the term was first used by the Old Man himself, Robert E. Heinlein, in his 1949 novel "Red Planet" (a novel remembered for a weird digression where they explain the ethics of adults responsibly allowing children to carry loaded firearms). This all the way back when the Old Man was not quite so old yet, when RAH was actually a hotshot young lion looking to make a name for himself in the pages of the greatest scifi pulp of them all, Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell, right at the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Heinlein created the term Earthling and used it in a lot of his work instead of human because it was very important to distinguish in his stories between humans from Earth and, say, colonists of human stock from Mars, like in Podkayne of Mars. Hello, Mars used another interesting term with the same origin, where humans born in space referred to humans that lived their entire life on earth (semi-derogatorily) as "groundhogs."

The term caught on because Heinlein used it in his juveniles (what today we'd call "young adult" books), and to every generation prior to the Millennials, Heinlein was THE science fiction writer, much like how Agatha Christie is THE mystery author. It's a strange irony that, now that young adult books run the world, the young adult scifi author has mostly vanished from prominence.

Prior to 1949, scifi writers used a lot of other variant terms for humans from Earth. E.E. Smith, who Heinlein admired and listed as his single biggest influence (and from who Heinlein got the idea of space marines in power armor, an idea the Old Man used in Starship Troopers), used the term Tellurian to refer to humans from Earth in the Lensman novels, as Earth in his future era was known as Tellus, an erudite term for a god of Earth in Greek Myth used in Hamlet. Humanoids in the Lensman series were known as "Tellus-type lifeforms."

(You know, I feel like Tellurian for human and Tellus for Planet Earth should make a comeback.)