Wrangled would be more hogtied. That’s more mangled.

What about the Toyota Water Cruiser?

Or the Honda Bucolic:

(it’s surprisingly hard to find an antonym for “civic”)

I’ve come to terms with the fact I’m not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.

I’m just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.

Even those contain RAM.

It’s more “regulatory capture” than it is capitalism. In any system where there are supposed to be people who protect the rights of the people, if those organizations are prevented from doing their jobs, you get stuff like this.

The USSR, for example, was famous for its “new word formulation” after the revolution, which George Orwell referenced as “newspeak” in 1984. I mean, the official Soviet newspaper was named “Pravda” meaning “Truth” when it was famous for publishing propaganda that was clearly untrue.

you’re trolling attempts

Now whose trolling?

I figured.

are there enough people like that to make the “having sex with children party” win the elections?

The GOP? It seems like it.

Football (futbol) is actually played on varied pitches. A legal pitch can be anywhere from 45m wide to 90m wide, and can be from 90m long to 120m long. Legally you could play a game on a square shaped 90m by 90m pitch, although in practice those are rare. The City of Manchester stadium is the biggest pitch in England’s premier league, and it affects the way the team plays and gives them a home field advantage.

Anyhow, I don’t think there should be an “even playing field” because that’s not realistic. Where would you ever encounter a perfectly flat steel floor, other than at battlebots? It would be fine if that artificial constraint led to more interesting robots, but it doesn’t. It leads to boring fights. I mean, imagine if there were a competitive first person shooter game where the teams faced off against eachother across a completely flat, featureless expanse. It would be awful. As long as every robot has to deal with the same conditions, the conditions are fair. So, I think they should make the arena more interesting.

Are you dodging the question? What makes someone a historian? Is anybody who writes a book on history automatically an authority on history?

Everybody likes a mix of capitalism and socialism. Nobody likes 100% one or the other.

Everybody who has experienced it likes socialized medicine. Public education just makes sense. The idea of having to pay a contract to get private fire service seems absurd.

At the same time, nobody wants to stand in a bread line, or for the law to forbid an artist to profit from creating art. We like certain forms of capitalist activity, like a mom and pop shop, or a restaurant, or a good mechanic, or a lemonade stand.

Every country that believes in capitalism still has a mix of socialist elements. And, every supposedly “communist” country has realized that it doesn’t make any sense to forbid artists and craftsmen from owning their own tools and selling the things they made. The real question is where to draw the line.

The problem, as always, is the rich and powerful. Capitalism was supposed to be an improvement on feudalism because it required capitalists to compete, rather than just collect rents. But, that requires anti-trust, anti-monopoly laws, and for those laws to be enforced firmly and fairly. If a company has no competition, it can go right back to collecting rents and not doing any work. Communism also fails when “the state” owns everything, but really “the state” is a single dictator, or is a bunch of oligarchs who see that they get more than the rest.

So, writing a book makes you a historian. It’s not studying history?

So, you think anybody who writes a book about history is a historian? No wonder you are so lost.

Regardless, if you don’t think historians are writing history books, what do you think they’re doing?

Researching it and writing papers for other historians.

Do you think most historians write popular history books for non-historians?

What’s wrong with that?

It depends on what they did. Maybe they want to make insulting the king legal, that might be a good thing. Maybe they want to make sex with children legal…

On the other hand, any country that allows its prisoners to vote has a constituency that wants to decriminalize what ever it was that they did.

Not to mention, that arresting is not imprisonment. Merely being arrested doesn’t put you in prison, you need to be convicted first. When cops can easily follow orders from the top to arrest people with the wrong skin colour, getting people arrested is easy. But, with a decent system of courts, it’s a lot harder to convict them.

Look, I get that the context is about political prisoners. But, really, if the system is so corrupted that people are being convicted of something merely based on their politics, it’s laughable to think that it has free and fair elections and that voting by prisoners is going to change things.

Historians are the ones who break through the myths. Myths are what you’re taught in school. In school they told you all about how the US founding fathers were heroic figures fighting for their freedom…

They’re of course going to give you the surface level, popular version of what happened. If you want to actually know the real story you need to talk to historians.

Yes we do, it’s literally the reason they left in the first place.

According to what you learned in an American elementary school?

We were meant to be rugged individuals, but rugged individuals living in a community with other rugged individuals.

Also, farming has always been a hard job. People who garden are doing the kinds of farming that farmers did before automation became a thing, but they’re doing it on a tiny scale. One farmer using non-industrial methods is going to have to really work like a mule to keep just themselves and their family alive. So, gardening using those same methods is never going to produce enough calories and nutrients for anything meaningful.

That’s true, but it’s also nowhere near enough to live on.

They get a huge batch of something all at once, and then it’s a scramble to eat it, give it away, pickle it, can it, etc. But, the total number of calories produced throughout the season isn’t enough to even keep one person alive.