Columbus was a slave trader up and down the African coastline before he was sponsored to make his voyage in 1492.

He then enslaved the natives. It was his first response to meeting them. That included child sex slaves. This is an account from Columbus himself talking about how 9 and 10 year old girls were “in high demand”

He forced most of the people he captured to collect gold for him, or die, and then, because he didn’t actually have the means to feed the people he enslaved, he forced them to live on grass. Most of them starved to death.

There are accounts of slavers beheading their exhausted slaves rather than go through the effort of releasing them from the chain around their neck.

No, Columbus was a fucking monster, but Italian Americans of the late 1800s to Early 20th century wanted a “hero” so that the racist assholes would stop being racist toward them. So they appropriated Columbus as an Italian and whitewashed his crimes against humanity.

Why are people just repeating the same thing over and over?

Part of it was also the lack of canon. The ancient world didn’t have “one true version” of anything, it had the version at hand. Which was usually the version that the current (local) king wanted.

I’ve never worked with stainless, but I hear that it’s a pain in the ass. And then, if you have no coating on it, it still stains from touching all sorts of shit.

Windows has always had broken versions. The old advice was to always skip every other version.

NT, Millennium, Vista, 8… 10… 11… More misses than hits really. And the bad updates are turning hits into misses.

I liked the Ed Helms episodes. He approached the subject as more of a journalist than a comedian. Which sort of changes things up. Robert got to rock some of his own journalism.

I think with a slightly different subject matter the two could mesh quite well.

Maybe something that Ed Helms has some passing knowledge of.

If someone poured a shitload of money into it, and had actual humans on quality control and some writing… You could generate a setting with a bunch of NPCs who have generated back stories and connections and shit.

And it would still come out as some of the blandest of bland as for as game went. But hey, a bad game is better than no game right?

I always hated the Leninist model of communism.

Lenin betrayed the revolution because he lost the 1917 election.

He dissolved the newly elected assembly 13 hours into it’s first meeting. (Not that the meeting lasted for 13 hours, they had adjourned for the day, and then Lenin declared them all Counter Revolutionary)

That single act started the Russian Civil War.

Then he has the gall to claim that the new totalitarian government he formed was in any way socialist.

If the state owns everything, and you have zero say in what that state does, then you don’t live under socialism, you live under feudalism.

The only path to socialism is via democracy.

Bots building post history in an abandoned looking sub. Usually done to get access to some other sub.

With the right looking post history you can scam your way onto a surprising large number of moderation teams.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

Did you know that Nelson Mandela was the leader of a literal terrorist organization?

He ordered attacks that killed people. That’s why he was in prison.

And every one forgave him, and even voted him into power.

All because South African Apartheid was fundamentally evil.

Israeli Apartheid is orders of magnitude worse than the South African version.

Have you checked out Live from Emmett’s Place?

Live jazz streamed every week.

Lenin betrayed the revolution. You mention the banning of the political parties. While it’s true that they “took up arms against Sovnarkom”, you’re leaving out the part where Lenin used Sovnarkom to coup the newly elected government because his party didn’t win.

Again, Lenin was flat out wrong. But I don’t think he ever actually cared about Russia ever reaching the true Marxist communist utopia. Lenin cared about power first and foremost.

He built up that dictatorship, and then handed it over to a monster.

Tried a bunch, but tried wrong.

The Lenin model of communism is inherently flawed for one simple reason. An Authoritarian Communism is an Impossibility. It cannot exist by pure definition.

The true ideal communism is a stateless utopia.

So yeah, the Lenin model is flawed to the point of uselessness. Or worse because any authoritarian government is going to kill its own citizens, while also being a low grade threat to neighboring countries.

No. The only path to true communism is via democracy. And there are countries that are moving in that direction.

There’s actually some merit to this statement.

In the late 1940s, the philosophical arm of the Lehi terrorist organization literally plagiarized Nazi race science with Aryan scratched out and “God’s chosen people” subbed in.

You may not, but the company that packaged the rice did. The cooking instructions on the side of the bag are straight from the FDA. Follow that recipe and you will have rice that is perfectly safe to eat, if slightly over cooked.

The more important point where the graph is misleading.

While their market share went down, that says nothing. The market exploded over that period.

Total installs is the thing you want to graph.

Or Monthly Active Users, which has been mostly flat or slightly declining since 2019, the oldest date that Firefox currently lists on their website. Because all sorts of graphs are publicly available on that site.

I’m also certain that I can find data going back further.

I have a better idea than the gallows. Give them a minimum wage job that deals with customers.

A small one bedroom apartment thrown is as well, and no access to their money for a few years. just their minimum wage.

Over on reddit there’s an entire genre of this sort of fiction in /r/hfy

Edge cases like you describe are a key part of Ordinal voting systems, Cardinal voting systems are immune to that sort of thing.

Also, Cardinal voting systems can be super easy. Take Approval.

Simply take a list of names, and mark next to each candidate you approve of. If you feel like you need to have a moral conundrum over what you feel like approval means, then go ahead, but just mark the next to any or all of the names on the list that you like.

After that, the counting is simple as well. You add up the approval of each candidate, independent of what any other candidate gets, and then the winner is the one with the most approval.

It is literally impossible to elect an unpopular candidate via Approval, unless only unpopular candidates run.

STAR is slightly more complex, in that you rate each candidate on a scale of 0-5. Again, no one actually cares about your personal journey in rating someone a 4 or whatnot, just do it and move on.

Then when counting, you again add up the numbers, take the highest two, and see where they rate on each individual ballot. If one is rated higher than the other, they get the vote from that ballot.