Start an example?

Considering consumer laws are pretty good in Europe and jurisprudence tends to set example in the euro-space, it may cause other countries to do the exact same thing.

The company may appeal. It may even win. But the bad publicity hurts. And if they lose, it gets even worse, as it will have to pay what it is being demanded.

Or not pay and get fines on top of that.

Months ago someone shared a link to a study by a swedish or norwish institute where they had done those calculations.

Our species will top around the 11bn and slowly fall back to the 9,5/10bn, with optimist expectations. Lower numbers would be in 8/8,5bn.

Biggest problem? Resource sharing. We are able to feed our species two fold and then some. Just eliminating bad commercial practices and food waste, would nearly double the available food, as is.

Before, it was the rise of living standards cutting the birth rate down. Now, with poverty, inequality and automation on the rise, people have another reason to not raise families.

Our species will shrink and fast. Faster than anyone expects. Korea, Japan, Italy, even my country, are showing fast signs of aging.

What will they try to do? Conscript women’s uterus like Russia is, supposedly, debating? Even China is doing the math and the numbers are not good.

We owe nothing to governments. They are our servants. People forgot about that. Allowed megalomaniac interests to takeover our lives.

Will things get grimmer? Yes. No doubt about it. But I hope I will live to see things get better.

Considering how lopsided the distribution of resource consumption is, I’ll label this as skewed.

Somehow, I don’t think Russia cares.

I do.

I cook a lot and often by nose, as in I can gauge how weak or strong the seasoning of my food is by the smell, and it rarely fails me.

I also know when I’m sick or sick-ish by not smelling or not finding as pungent the odor of the nasty stuff.

You do get desensitized over time and the smells become more tolerable. I’ve met guys that can tell if a given place is going to be troublesome to clean just by smelling the odors wafting out and looking at the colour. Others never stop feeling nauseated or even gagging when some particularly nasty smells hit them.

Got any questions I can answer for you?

That is nice to know

Sincerely? I’d expect to see astrolabes or sextants being pulled from storage.

My country is a bit towards the south and nobody really knows how our ships still manage to float.

We have ships where the entire navigation suite has been replaced with a commercial GPS.

The guns are fired… Every now and then. Sparingly. We still have ammunition from the 70’s in stock. Some times we even manage to misplace equipment.

Yet somehow we’re considered as the reliable ally, although a bit… wierd.

It would be both terrifying and fabulous if the dead were to rise and fight back.

The religious crackpots behind these extremist governments often hold deeply entrenched eschatological views and concerns.

The dead rising would scare the lights from them.

In my country, jury duty can be refused and is deemed as a role, not an obligation. It is an honor, as it is very rare to have such added role in court; takes very complex and often serious crimes. People called for it often accept but I have heard of situations where people object from personal or moral values.

And, again, in my country, voting is not an obligation, nor legal, nor moral. It is a right and the duty to vote is considered a matter of respect towards the right that was acquired through a revolution and the individual right to be part of the political destiny of the nation, no matter how small.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs, here, but I don’t care.

A duty arises from a personal sense of necessity to do something. Call moral obligation if it is easier for you. Being moral relative… Obligation is determined, enforced and enforceable by law.

I have the duty of cast my vote in any election, not an obligation.

A simple example.

You be the judge of it:

• punched through a tempered, textured, 3mm thick glass, leading to several cuts on a hand and wrist
• kicked a glass panel on a door and got a nasty cust on my toe
• several instances of cutting myself on different types of thorny bushes
• perforation with glasses rim on my eyebrow
• severe cut on my other eyebrow, another on the bridge of my nose
• broken arm, twice
• fall from a 1st floor balcony, landing on a bush, after breaking a cabinet with my back and legs, until finally reaching the ground
• hundreds, if not thousands, of small scrapes and bruises
• bitten by dogs, leading to deep gouges, on my calves
• severe tear on the back of my left hand, with a broken bone, not exposed, leading to surgery
• many, many, many sprained ankles and wrists
• three pulled teeth plus all the bleeding from losing my baby teeth
• minor burns on hands and fingers, from cooking
• several nasty cuts from kitchen knives and a perforation by a lobster spike, which led to a severe infection, with a piece of lobster shell stuck underneath a finger nail
• a few near choking to death episodes
• two electrocussion incidents (230V), for mere seconds

duty ≠ obligation

To need it explained and clarified into body of law is scary.

I’m going to risk there is none.

Many hand to hand combat weapons were bespoke to the user.

Using an example I’m fairly familiar with:

In Portugal, we have a martial art called jogo do pau. It uses a simple wooden staff. Today’s schools insist the staff has a standard lenght, width and shape.

An old school practitioner I had the pleasure to meet taught me the staff was always made to fit the wielder, not the opposite.

As a general guide line, it should have the lenght of the distance from the wielder’s armpit to the ground but there would be people that prefered longer or shorter staffs. Some people would prefer thinner staffs, nearly cylindrical in shape, others would prefers heavier, thicker, almost eliptical in profile. The amount of customisation and variation capable of being put into the weapon itself was so diverse, it made each staff unique.

I’d risk this same logic would apply to more classic weapons, like the flails you ask about.

I’m not against supporting a software in a recurring form but the web browser is essentially the lock and key of accessing the entirery of what exists outside your machine.

That would garner an immense power to whichever entity developing one. Remember Microsoft and the IE case.

Firefox is not perfect and apparently on a downwards spiral but what made it stand out was because it wanted to be free and for all. Chrome is far from being a good thing.

The Mafia and most, if not all organized crime syndicates, started as a way for people to defend themselves from abusive governments, officials, etc. Mafia thrives by getting along with people, not openly prey on them.

Syndicates also tend to be patriotic, in the sense that they are defending or at least looking to preserve their interests where they are rooted.

Mafia tends to arbour great disdain for police and similar forces. They can be useful if bribeable or somehow coherced to look the other way but they are still police. The enemy.

I’ll give you an extreme example.

In Brasil, the Comando Vermelho is one of the largest, if not te largest, criminal organization on the country. They are well known for their extremely violent and cruel methods. Yet they are the biggest employers in the areas they control. They build schools, pay people for their work (mostly unrelated to criminal activities), distribute food, run clinics. They act as de facto police, courts and punishers, to keep peace. They nearly replace the state because the state nearly abandoned the poorest of poor, amongst who they set grounds, in the favelas.

I can’t imagine the resistance they would pose to an invading force.

And, I can’t confirm this, but I have a memory of reading somewhere that during WW2, the Mafia helped the Allies infiltrate areas.

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Still too rich for my blood

That sounds very nice!