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

IMO it’s much more subtle. There are still really cold days in winter. There are still mild days in summer. You can even have a whole summer that’s cool or a whole winter that’s incredibly cold. I’ve heard that one of the effects of climate change is that the weather is more unpredictable.

Having said that, there’s a winter festival here that relies on naturally frozen outdoor water. A couple of years ago they had to cancel it because for the first time since it started it never got cold and stayed cold enough. If you look at the data, the length of that festival has been getting shorter and shorter every year. As for summer, having an air conditioner used to be uncommon, now it’s a necessity.

It’s tricky because some of that is lifestyle creep. An air conditioner used to be a much more expensive luxury, but now they’re cheaper. Technology changes, expectations change, so behaviour changes. We’re also notoriously bad at remembering what was normal in the past. We remember events and extremes, not averages. But, the number of days a festival can stay open in the winter is a much more concrete thing. It was just a given that it would be about 2 weeks when I was a kid, and they had a lot of freedom when it could be. Now it’s a matter of waiting for the weather to cooperate, and often it can’t run the full 2 weeks.

if they really really want them, at least make them electric

And very expensive.

In the modern day, They could EASILY educate themselves with the actual current and up to date scientific research, the internet exists.

The people putting out actual scientific information are not rewarded for making their information easy to digest for the uneducated. They’re rewarded for publishing scientific papers in journals that are read by other scientists.

I don’t know about you, but I very rarely read scientific papers, especially in a field that isn’t one I know well. Even if you know the field well there are all kinds of terms and math that mean reading a paper is hard. If you don’t know the field, even understanding the terminology they use is a huge challenge. It’s not realistic to expect someone with only a high school education to read papers.

Making media that appeals to, and is easily digested by regular people is a completely different skill set. Some people doing that actually care about real science. There are heroes who spend their time reading and digesting scientific papers so that they can explain them to regular people. But, there seem to be far more people who just make shit up that they know will go viral. If you’re a product of the Mississippi educational system, you probably can’t tell the difference between a legitimate science communicator and an asshole who’s making shit up to go viral. For every David Attenborough, there are probably a dozen Dr. Mercolas. And, let’s not forget that one of the most well known scientists writing about honesty and ethical behaviour was found to have plagiarized her research. So, even if you were reading scientific papers she’d written you might have been misled.

My mom is on that path, but still alive. She won’t drink regular tap water because she’s scared of fluoride. She no longer believes germs exist. She won’t get vaccinated or get flu shots (and won’t vaccinate her dog either). Her “doctor” is an hour’s drive away because she had to search far and wide for one who wasn’t part of the “big medicine” conspiracy.

It’s all so exhausting.

My hope has always been that if self driving cars are successful, almost nobody will own a personal car.

Cars are massively wasteful. Put aside the idea you’re hauling around multiple tonnes of steel and glass frequently to just move one person. Ignore the pollution aspect too. They’re also wasteful because they’re used for maybe 2 hours per day, and the other 22 they just sit somewhere taking up space and getting rusty.

Just think about how many stationary cars you pass when you’re out in the world. Nobody’s getting any use out of them, they’re just sitting there in case they’re needed, meanwhile they’re taking up useful space. There are other potentially expensive things you only use for a short amount of time each day: say, a good kitchen knife. But, most of them are indoors where they’re not exposed to the elements and deteriorating without being used.

In a future with self-driving cars, owning a car could be a luxury that enthusiasts could pay for, if it was worth it to them, but everybody else who needed a car could just rent a car for an hour or two.

I’m really hopeful that Steam Boxes and Steam Decks etc. mean that peripheral manufacturers start making sure their stuff works well on Linux.

Honestly, a lot of the time all they’d need to do is document the protocol and publish it and probably someone else would build and maintain a driver for them. I think it could undo a whole chicken and egg situation. Right now, manufacturers don’t build their stuff with Linux support because not enough gamers run Linux. As a result, not many gamers run Linux, which means it’s reasonable for manufacturers not to build in Linux support.

As for the unknowns, there are unknowns in Windows too. I’ve had to go into the registry many times to tweak something so it worked the way I wanted. The only difference is that my Windows install was the result of months or years worth of tweaking and customizing. Well, not the only difference. Linux is much more tweakable, and it’s something where you go in expecting to have to spend more time adjusting things. But, Windows didn’t have its unknowns too. It’s just that most of them were already behind me. With Linux, I knew I’d have to start from nearly square one. I’m glad I did in the end, but it was still frustrating at times.

its

It’s like the “physical version of a save icon”.