Hossenfeffer

I think i win when the other person starts resorting to insults at least

Bell end.

Did you just assume their pronouns?

So? How was it?

Whoever has been left as its leadership is a dumbass.

Not in the slightest. More likely their annual bonus depends on boosting revenue right now. So they’re incentivised to generate short term increases in revenue but not for longer term. Plus, also, if/when Youtube goes tits up they’ll just get a different CEOing job (with “increased revenue by 25% in 2024 on their resume”) rinse and repeat.

Kind of my point. We gained ecommerce, streaming services, platforms such as this one, online gaming, mapping services, and others - at the cost of the freedoms for which people are nostalgic. And now we have ads, personalization, tracking, and inevitable enshitification.

Back in the days of the wild frontier things were chaotic, anarchic, violent, and unconstrained.

Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the Telegraph Road

And now we’re all fenced in, regulated, allowed to wander only in approved lanes… oh, wait, sorry, we’re talking about the internet, not real life!

I mean, sure, it’s no looker, but if it makes mail carriers’ lives easier then that’s a win. Will probably be ‘iconic’ in a decade or two.

Me. Sigh.

No, that’s Baloo. A balut is a system or occasion of secret voting.

Don’t think I’ve got the head-egg shape quite right.

She’s a former prosecutor. He’s a compulsive liar, misogynist and racist former reality TV star with dementia who isn’t used to being told to wait his turn before he can speak.

And together they fight grime?

First thing I turned off in my new car when I got it. I hate the feeling that the car is no longer responding to my inputs.

SOCRATES: What’s a what, now?

I hear the Pope smears it on everything, including altar boys.

Friendship is based on shared experiences.

So you need to find some experiences to share with people. Whether that’s evening pottery classes, joining (or starting) a man’s shed, joining a book club, joining a local amateur sport team, getting into a virtual TTRPG, joining a bridge club, or a chess club, or litter picking group, or bird-watching group… or something entirely different it’ll work as long as you have repeated exposure to the same group of people. Unless you pick a group who are all assholes. Or if you’re an asshole.

What kind of yellow mustard? American, English, and German mustards are all yellow but differ significantly in flavor and heat.

No, but they were:

Strategic bombing of a civilian population

The most successful besiegers were probably the Romans. It wasn’t so much the act of laying siege that caused cities to surrender, it was the utter, uncompromising determination of the Romans to see the siege through to the end, and the atrocities they would commit on the surrendering population that made them so successful. Surrender immediately and you don’t get enslaved or butchered… hold out and things will go very, very badly.

I don’t recall all the details but there was one siege in western Europe where the mayor of the town declared ‘you won’t take us: we have supplies for four years in our store houses’ to which the Roman commander replied ‘then we’ll take you on the fifth year.’

Or take Masada, a supposedly impregnable fortress built on a mountaintop. First the Romans built walls all the way around it, both to contain the Jewish ‘rebels’ but also to protect the Roman siegeworks from any potential rescue force. Then they just built a ramp. A massive, massive ramp, that reached all the way up to the fortress walls (which weren’t that strong because who builds a strong wall when your fortress is perched on top of a mountain?). Then they wheeled up some siege engines, smashed their way through the walls and discovered most of the inhabitants had commited suicide rather than face capture.

Strategic bombing of a civilian population has only ever hardened that population’s resolve.

Are you including Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that?

Sweet, sweet, dessert planet…