Is it? Some people think it's harder to govern the rich.

... So, that's somewhat complicated, but rich people have more to lose if things go very badly? If people are starving they rebel very easily; if people are happy they consider what they'd lose before rebelling. And since they had enough to eat growing up they're often smarter and have better self-control? And you can tax them more, because they have more stuff, and this added wealth makes you much better at fighting off enemies? But it's also true that they are usually much better at finding ways to oppose governments they dislike. Personally, Silda mostly tries to solve this by being good at running governments so people don't dislike her, but other people have tried other solutions.

Is it that important how much you eat when you're growing up provided you don't, like, starve?

Oh yes! People need lots of food and lots of different kinds of food. Your body is building itself bigger with the food it eats, and it needs specific things in order to build itself as well as it wants to, and if it doesn't have those you'll be less strong and smart and healthy and tall.

(Silda is very obviously extremely healthy, and is, indeed, much taller than the average woman.)

Nutrition is a whole complicated field, but it's generally a good idea to eat a lot of different things, including meat and grains and vegetables. Some people don't eat meat (Silda usually doesn't) (purely to stay in character of course), but in that case you want to eat lots of eggs and beans and other [untranslatable]-containing food.

Why do some people not eat meat?

Religious reasons, sometimes? Or they don't think it's kind to the animals to kill them for meat. Silda mostly did it because it was the sort of thing you did if you wanted to be elected.

...elected by people of those religious persuasions?

Yes, or who care about animal suffering.

Huh. Around here it would be really weird to turn down meat you came by.

Then in that case she will not worry about it, here!

Oh good, they're having mutton tonight.

(Not worrying about it, as she said.)

So, back on topic: What's his tax policy look like?

He will explain it to her! It's... kind of a mess but he's earnest about it.

... Right. Well, that's fixable, that's fixable, that's... actually a famously hard problem... but sort of fixable...

Any other crises he wants a random person from the future very far away to help with?

He's happy to keep her busy all day. It turns out during the course of this that he does not read very well.

Huh, any particular reason why not?

Well, he only started trying to learn a few years ago. He's used to mental arithmetic and there's not much that isn't numerical to read. Sometimes writing things down mixes him up more than not doing that. So he doesn't practice much.

Oh, that makes sense. Silda learned to read when she was a child, so she's gotten lots of practice.

... Wait, there isn't much written? Do they... not have printing yet?

That is not a word in his language so he cannot tell her?

Oh, it's a tool for making lots of copies of books very quickly. Her people have lots of tools, and at some point she should get a room full of smiths and metal-mages and explain how to make all sorts of advanced tools. She's not sure how to best trade off between government-resource-generation as opposed to world-resource-generation; how does Rixo organize its crafts?

What does she mean by that?

... So, if everyone grows twice as much food, there's twice as much food, and the world is twice as well off in food. But if the government keeps taxes at exactly the same level, the government isn't better off. On the other hand, if the government comes up with a brilliant way to make one tax collector do the work of ten, the government can afford to hire only one-tenth as many tax collectors, which saves it nine-tenths of what it was spending on tax collectors' salaries. So that would help the government's resources without making people better off, except indirectly as having the government have lots of money makes the citizenry better off.

Fascinating! That makes sense! What does she mean about organizing crafts though?

So, some places have rules that say that you need to pass a test to be allowed to be, say, a smith, because smiths who aren't licensed might end up burning down their smithies. Or say that all the smiths are supposed to organize themselves into a specific organization that should make sure no incompetent people become smiths. A lot of these rules tend to be worse than doing nothing unless you're really, really good at it, because most good-sounding ideas turn out not to work out. Silda thought you might have laws like that?

There are rules like that for the priesthood but that's priesthood-internal.