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.

Enshittification. They have their users locked in, and now it’s about trying to make money for their advertisers.

There’s a subreddit where there are thousands of people. The equivalent community on Lemmy has a dozen. I participate there, but it definitely isn’t the same. I haven’t logged into Reddit in a couple of years, and I browse that old subreddit using old.reddit if that disappears the choice is logging in or using new reddit, neither of which is going to work for me, so I guess that’s it for me.

A lot worse.

We do know that the colonists hated what they considered overreaching British control

Do we? Or is that the story that has been written after the fact to justify what they did and make it seem more noble?

It sounds to me like you’re a product of the US educational system and have accepted what you learned there without questioning it.

How directly was he involved in the negotiations? Often the king is the ultimate authority in a country, but they don’t actually make many decisions themselves.

It’s well known that the colonists were looking for a reason to break away, and that the taxation issue was a convenient excuse. After all, taxation without representation was the norm. It wasn’t like all of England had the vote and had representatives in parliament. Entire cities had zero representation but were still taxed. Ireland had been part of the British empire for ages and it didn’t have representation.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight to keep it mutually intelligible for all speakers/writers.

Right, surely you must question your assumptions when there are no violent deaths at all.

The kinds of injuries they’re talking about cranial fractures, a blow to the head, multiple fractures, etc. surely are seen today in people who die on construction sites, or in car crashes or after falling off a building.

If you’re not finding those kinds of remains, something else must be happening. Maybe there was a taboo against burying people who didn’t have perfect bodies. Maybe anybody who died from violence or violent accident was given a “sky burial” or something.

I mean, put aside the idea that there was no war. Is it reasonable to think that in the bronze age, people aren’t getting mauled by wild animals? They’re not getting kicked in the head by their livestock? They’re not falling off buildings?

alot of schools

And paid for wars that were fought for the benefit of the colonists. Similar to how US taxes today are paid to the state and are used to pay for wars that the government claims are for the benefit of the American people.

Most of the US founding fathers were smugglers.

And, which was largely fought (and won) in a way that dramatically benefitted the colonists.

Ever wonder why there are so many places with French names just slightly inland from the original 13 US colonies have French names?

• Bayou La Batre, Decatur, Lapine, Leroi, Mon Louis, Dauphin Island, etc. Alabama
• Louisville, Paris, Versailles, Montpelier, etc. in Kentucky
• Leroy, Napoleon, Montpelier, Saint Croix, etc. in Indiana
• Bellaire, Bellefontaine, Louisville, Marietta, etc. in Ohio
• Dubois, Duquesne, Labelle, Fort le Boeuf, Eau Claire, etc. in Pennsylvania
• The name “Michigan” itself (originally Ojibwe, but interpreted into French), and a whole lot of parts of that state, including Detroit
• Ozark (aux arcs), Benoit, Bellefontaine, D’Iberville etc. in Mississippi

New France went from the Gulf of Mexico north, included all the Great Lakes, and kept going up to Hudson’s Bay. American settlers couldn’t go west without entering New France, so England fought a war to allow the expansion west. It won that war. The resulting treaty gave the British colonists in the Americas a huge amount of territory they could expand into, leaving only a small amount behind for France and its native allies.

The British colonists in the Americas were asked to help pay for the war that gave them that opportunity to expand west, and they rebelled. And then, after the rebellion, they decided they didn’t need to abide by the terms of the British treaty with the French and took over most of the remaining land that France had been left after that war.

Except that the British were offering that concession, and the negotiators for the colonists didn’t want to take it because really the taxes and lack of representation were just an excuse.

Yeah, the saws and hammers in Battlebots might have been a good idea, if they actually did anything. I can’t remember them ever having a decisive effect on a fight. Given the armor of the bots, it was like using a feather on them.

A pit, on the other hand, can end a fight. Frequently in Robot Wars, a really good robot lost by being pushed into a pit. Having said that, a pit doesn’t discourage wedge robots or flippers. It only slightly discourages spinners because they sometimes aren’t easy to control.

I’d just rather have a wavy / bumpy or otherwise uneven surface so that a low-to-the-ground design might get stuck.

In a sense, I understand why they designed the arena the way they did. It’s extremely uniform so it’s the same for every competitor. If it’s damaged in some way it’s easy to put it back the way it was. People can make their own versions at home so they can test their robot in a similar arena. It’s basically trying to avoid having the arena itself become a decisive factor in any battle and leave the winning or losing to the robots. But, by doing that they lead to all robots being boring and optimized for that one arena. That means a battle over who can have the tightest possible ground clearance tolerance.

I want wheels, legs, tracks, not ground-huggers. So, I don’t want perfectly even, perfectly level, perfectly boring arenas. I want arenas that will challenge bots. Ideally, I’d like one where there are different sections of the arena. Maybe there’s a “plains” section where the low-to-the-ground bots have an advantage, but then there’s a “hilly” section (even if it’s just a steel floor with some dents bashed into it) where you’re screwed if you designed a bot that has a clearance that’s too low. Then you might have certain bots trying to make sure the battle happens in their section of the arena. That adds interesting strategy.

The problem with that is that the matches tend to be win or lose, and end when one of the robots is unable to continue. If you lose but the audience votes for you, does that mean the winner doesn’t get to proceed?

What makes it boring is that the engineers optimize for the arena, and the arena is boring.

They made it an almost perfectly flat metal surface with no features of any kind. Robot Wars was more interesting. Not only did they have house robots which looked like The Shrieking Maimer, the arena was also more interesting with pits, house robots, flame areas, etc.

IMO a more interesting arena would lead to more interesting battles, especially if the arena weren’t perfectly flat so it wasn’t optimal to have one that had a 2mm clearance. Even better would be if you had a variety of arenas, and the contestants didn’t know until the day of the battle which one they’d be in. Some might be flat, some might have a water hazard, some might have sand, some might have a dirt floor. Then you’d have more walking robots, more tank-tread robots, etc. so they could tackle a variety of terrain.

Yes