lennivelkant

You mean the one from the company that pays out their CEO a fat $6m salary, paid for by Google bribing Mozilla to be the default search engine?

I don't trust your recommendation. Do you even realise you're being herded like sheep?

(I actually use it too, but I won't pretend they're saints. It also occasionally has trouble with some websites, but I haven't done any comprehensive testing to confirm whether it's browser-specific.)

That was the joke I was setting up for :D

What's your recommendation then?

I think if your organs are all tarred up, you have a problem

Homotopic: Having the same (homo-) topological properties (-topic)

As I understand the hostility towards merchants, it essentially stemmed from a one-sided view of their behaviour:

The king (or Duke or whoever) demands taxes in coin, so you need coin. Up pops a merchant offering to buy your surplus grain, but trying to haggle the price down to as little coin as possible.

You have to find some buyer so you can afford the tax, and the merchant exploits that necessity. To afford the tax, you may end up having to work more so you can sell more. But then a bad year rolls around, you struggle to survive at all, and to add insult to injury that merchant is offering to sell you some of the grain you need... for much more than he last bought some from you, carving a profit out of your misery.

Of course, from a modern perspective we can see that the merchant is an important logistical service provider to feed the city folk that do non-agricultural labour (some of which may circle back to benefit the farmers, like ploughs), the profit essentially being a wage for that service, and the real vampire are the aristocrats that grow rich off that circle of exploitation.

But as farmer, you don't see the king get richer. There's no newsfeed showing pictures of the grand new mansion he built himself. You see the merchant trying to squeeze you for as much as possible, and you hate him for being a leech.

I'm guessing most of the inland farmers holding those views had less contact with the pirates, but also, if using force to take what you want is normalised anyway because there's another war rolling past every few generations (if not more frequently, depending on where you live), piracy may seem less "wrong" too.

Historians used to be extremely reluctant, due to lingering Victorian-era mores, to acknowledge GSMs in history.

Alternative explanation: They were eggs / so deep in the closet they didn't even know they were.

(Probably not, but I like my version of history better)

I'm in the process of starting a fight with my neighbours. They complained (indirectly) about our garden being unkempt. I asked them for an appointment to talk directly so we can figure out just what the problem is. I'm not doing shit until they can tell me just what part of my little piece of nature is breaking any laws.

Product packaging for non-foods

What, you don't think 1cm² of product should be packaged in a 7×10 cm doubled-up plastic sheet?

Obvious cruelty aside, tossing city-dwellers on a bit of land and telling them to become farmers has to be astronomically idiotic. It's like having a boss that doesn't understand what their employees are doing, except a lot deadlier.

Shai-Hulud actually does some good though. Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.