Lol, I saw a clown nose.

I do love me a good heist, but piracy is so pedestrian. Suitable only for novices and the lazy.

I make sure to properly steal hard drives from the developers’ computers on launch day.

Gotcha, that was the context I missed. Thanks!

See, the fun thing about English is: if you have a word we need/want, we’ll just take it.

a 77-year old woman and a child?

I’m not seeing where you’re getting a child from.

This fifth defendant business irks me, too: four men and a woman are already five, any further defendants with different sentences should be at least sixth. But that’s more on the journalist/editor, not you.

Never been a better time to start moonshining.

The aristocrats of the western empires may have still carried weight to their names, but the Great Depression was really putting strain on the legitimacy and popularity of the established order.

As for Japan: they were already scrapping with the Soviets at the time in Khalkhin Gol. If anything the American entry to the war freed the Soviets to just a single front. American efforts in the European theater I largely take to be more “maintaining market access” to the UK and France than any real desire to be there.

France may have sat back, but I kinda doubt it. A weakened Germany after fighting the Soviets would have tempted them to retake lands east of the Rhine that they’d lost following the Napoleonic campaigns. My take is that none of the powers were peacable or invested in the status quo, just less rabid about expansion than the Nazis.

Do they? As much as we like to play it quiet, the US exports a lot of food globally- China gets some $17b worth. Those tend to be perishable, so any hot war would have to be over quickly for China to come outahead, and any protracted war would see them need a new breadbasket eother domestic (reducing the industrial/military work pool), or international (which comes with the same risks they have now over US ties).

I’m afraid you’re gonna have to come up with a specific timeframe here.

WW1? The Germany Empire wasn’t really the spark for this one. The entire royalty of the continent was effectively cousins. There may be some wiggle room, but most of them were literal cousins, with Wilhelm II and Nicholas II being most notable in this context.

Nobody was ‘fond’ of Russia in any way. Most European nations then saw it as they do now- large, unpredictable, and territorially aggressive. France and Britain were a part of the Triple Entente not because they trusted each other, but because it was a reasonably sensible counter to the Triple Alliance.

WW2? Royal intermarriage was mostly a moot point after the first go around even in nations that managed to not get their entire lineages deposed. As for the Soviet Union, still wildly unpopular. If your point is that Nazi Germany might have gotten away with things if they’d stayed tied up with Russia instead of trying to diversify their murder portfolio- I’d disagree. They would have gotten the OK from other Western powers for a time, but would still crumple from internal strife, the war was as much a wallpapering of those issues as it was any grand ambitions of Hitler’s.

Do we have any fun infographics to help educate those that aren’t autodidacts?

Exactly. Current meta is “soup that makes them blind for 1 day”, and I don’t see that changing in the next few patches.

Fair 'nuff. I hadn’t really considered an alt account.

It isn’t really that odd, considering you’ve only been here a couple of weeks. Mutual Aid is a foundational idea in most if not all anarchist projects and theory.

There may be many scammers, yes, but the goal remains the same - get help to those who need it from those in a position to give it.

As for being part of the problem, I must disagree. Scammers aren’t leeching just this, they’d be present in any system purporting to help others (in gov’t systems this is called fraud), the goal of these grassroots aid projects is to help those who fall through the cracks of more formalized systems and decentralize some aid in case the church/NGO/gov’t can’t or won’t help (see the Hurricane Helene/Katrina responses when FEMA is overwhelmed).

Means-testing recipients is kinda a dick move anyway: those who have demonstrable need will have a harder time getting aid and time/money that should be spent helping are now spent with verification.