[BorisTheBrave]

I don't think you've really thought about how awful the middle ages are.

> The Kings had access to much more information than they cared about already.

Royals used to have portraits painted and transported just so they could get an idea who the person their arranged marriage with actually looked like. Bet they'd like Facebook.

Louis XIV commissioned a more accurate map of france. It took 4 generations to make.

The first semaphore was so valuable it was initially reserved just for government use.

Oops, no wait, these are all post-medieval by a few centuries! Things were even worse before.

> The King could do the same, all day, every day, with personal chefs familiar with their preferences, and without fear for the expenses...

The king would be stuck with local food, in season only. At least he'd probably be able to afford some foreign spices. And they probably couldn't get food in an hour, due to the less efficient kitchens of the time, and not having thousands of restaurants already on standby to serve every kind of meal.

> Oh, how Kings would be jealous of the magic of Uber...

That device that travels twice as fast as a horse for hours without break, and at more comfort? I think so.

> As for Kings who didn't die in guillotine

England has never had a king live past 81. It's even worse if you look at medieval kings. US Life Expectancy is ~79. Even ignoring life expectancy, pretty much all illness was vastly more unpleasant. As a king, you'd likely have gout (called the "disease of kings") or an StD.

> Who wants to be a middle class schmuck

The purpose of the exercise is to determine who is poorer in terms of what is available to them. Kings are no doubt more important and powerful, but can we agree that's besides the point? I for one, would take the quality of life of said schmuck.

[TimTheTinker]

People really underestimate just how hard life was in prior ages, especially due to disease.

An old person my wife once talked to said that "penicillin changed everything". It certainly did, along with vaccines and other very effective treatments (including hand-washing!) for once-deadly diseases such as dysentery, typhoid, cholera, diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, mumps, even leprosy.

Death was a major part of life for folks living prior to the late 1800s. Everyone experienced frequent life-threatening sickness and death of close friends, infants & children, family members, and acquaintances.

If I had a choice, and avoiding a very hard life & early death were my only criteria, I'd choose to live now rather than then, regardless of social status.

[hatchnyc]

I recently received a copy of a letter with some information about my ancestors from the 1700s. Apparently they owned an inn in a small village in France (it is still there and looks like a relatively nice place to me, so…I guess they were doing ok?). They had 10 children, of whom 6 died before the age of 3. The mother died at age 39, in the last 8 months of her life 3 of her children died.

Yeah, no thanks.

[WalterBright]

Pray you don't need a root canal!