Yes, many times. Historically, it seems like the very strong empires first defeated themselves and once they were sufficiently weakened for outside forces to be able to threaten them … they still kept being self sabotaged by their own elite who prioritized maneuvering against each other for temporary power/wealth grabs over working together to face the outside threats.

The late Roman empire has a bunch of good examples: blatant corruption, over taxation of the poor, many assassinations, sabotaging their peers that were trying to improve the situation, constant civil war, the battle that destroyed the military backbone of the western Roman empire was fought between romans, … And all that while the empire was being torn apart by outside invasions.

Or a more recent example: the polish Lithuanian commonwealth had a paralyzed government thanks to corrupt elites with veto powers in their parliament of nobles (sejm) and only once the nation was mostly destroyed and the nation on the cusp of final destruction, did the sejm introduce some sensible new laws, but it was too late.

With smaller regional powers you can have cases like “they were in a golden age and had never been as powerful, but then the mongols appeared”, but with hegemon empires the failure of their inner workings is always going to be instrumental in their own demise.

Starting with pulling on the door is already impolite imo. If there is no visual cue as to the occupancy of the room, then the first thing one should do is knock. If the light is off or the occupancy signal says it’s free, then sure, try the handle. Otherwise knock first, give the person who is shitting there a chance to reply with “occupied” or to knock back. But looking through gaps or trying if the door opens with the handle and then going “oops sorry”, please no.

Same goes up for offices, meeting spaces, bedrooms etc, when the door is closed and it could be occupied, always knock before attempting to enter. Less bad when someone does it, but still, one could just knock.

Why didn’t you try knocking? Knock twice 2 times, with a few seconds pause in between, if no response, then you can try the door. Going straight to looking into the gap is … creepy imo.

Edit: this was in reply to “The only way to know was to look in the gap.”. And no it wasn’t. Knock for fucks sake, have some manners.

The glider attack happened in ww2, not ww1.

If you are from Luttich as you say, then in ww1 the part of Belgium where you’re from, was a part of Germany. The German speaking parts of Belgium, namely Eupen and Malmedy, were only allocated to Belgium with the treaty of Versailles (1919). But since you are from the German speaking part of Belgium, you of course already knew this.

For those confused by the place names: in Belgium there is a city called Liège (French speaking) in a province called Liège. Luttich is the German name for Liège. Eupen and Malmedy became a part of the province of Liège in the 1920s.

Bravo, another vague link. Can you explain how what you link to supports your claim?

The wiki article is actually very good. The historical revisionist is just claiming that it says things which it definitely does not.

That’s an article about a military campaign in a war that was already on going. The article even has a section called “outbreak of the war”, in which the actual outbreak of the war is explained (which was not Germany invading Belgium). The article does not in any way support your claim that Germany started world war 1 by invading Belgium.

Why are you linking articles and then misrepresenting what is in those articles?

This is a very novel take of historical revisionism, first time I’ve encountered it.

Do you have any sources other than yourself that support your claim that ww1 was started by Germany attacking Belgium?

At first glance that top map already looked bad, but then I zoomed in on the legend and the cutoff for the white areas is an annual deficit of 60.000 … What a ridiculous scale, that entire map should be blood red.

The internet did not end up in the trash heap after the dot com bubble burst. Ai too has real world uses that go beyond the current planet wrecking bubble.

Great find.

I checked a few other historic front pages on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_oldest_newspapers The Oxford Gazette from 1665 used the same month-day format. The first edition from The Guardian from 1821 also used it. Some British news papers like The Times never stopped using it, while The Guardian is now using day-month. So it was the British after all.

I wondered whether maybe the us americans had continued using the old style and it was Britain that changed, but no: Britain appears to have been using the day-month-year order since medieval times. This latin letter from William Wallace from 1297 has that order: https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Lubeck_Letter

*Given at Haddington in Scotland on the eleventh day of October in the Year of Grace one thousand two hundred and ninety seven. *

The latin line with the date starts with “datum”.

Over time the salt crystals will fuse together (form clumps) because of moisture in the air. Sugar does the same thing. The clumps can be easily broken up and are still perfectly edible, but clumps in new product would be considered a quality issue.

Edit: this is an educated guess as what that best before date means, but I’m actually not a 100% certain. I’m not from the sector.

That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don’t have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.

One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn’t have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.

No, most coal comes from plants in swamps, because the water helped preserve the organic matter.

Plants in swamps die -> organic matter on the bottom of the swamp -> peat -> brown coal -> black coal.

Oil apparently comes mostly from plankton.

On the different origins: https://www.carboeurope.org/how-are-fossil-fuels-formed-the-science-behind-oil-coal-and-natural-gas/

It’s like the saying goes: true beauty is on the inside.

Access to safe drinking water was a known issue in loads of places at that time, not just in developing countries. My dad grew up in the 1950s and still drank table beer in his elementary school. There’s no way that a 1960s food scientist would have been so incompetent, to not know that not everyone had access to clean drinking water. We can also know that they weren’t acting in this way out of ignorance, because they continued with their unethical practices for years after the consequences became public knowledge. They only stopped because of the world wide consumer boycott. And only a few years after they promised to do better, they started rule dodging again. They simply don’t care about people, only profits matter.

From the study summary: We combine birth record data from over 2.6 million infants across 38 countries in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) with reconstructed historical data from annual investor reports on the timing of Nestlé entrance into infant formula country markets. Consistent with the hypothesis that formula mixed with unclean water could act as a disease vector, we find that infant mortality increased in households with unclean water sources by 19.4 per thousand births following Nestlé market entrance, but had no effect among other households. This rate is equivalent to a 27% increase in mortality in the population using unclean water and amounts to about 212,000 excess deaths per year at the peak of the Nestlé controversy in 1981. https://haas.berkeley.edu/ibsi/research/mortality-from-nestles-marketing-of-infant-formula-in-low-and-middle-income-countries/

Seems pretty damning to me, but will it have any consequences for Nestlé or any of the big honchos at Nestlé from that time? Probably not as usual, since corporations are apparently allowed to kill people as long as they do it in an obfuscated way.

Is it possible that you’re thinking of slaughterhouse biomass? I was talking about the biomass of concurrently alive animals and I would expect just milk cows to outweigh chickens in a lot of countries.

My guesstimations are for Flanders, the northern half of Belgium. There’s also a lot of chickens, but pigs + cattle weigh more per animal + live longer, which is why I expect them to weigh significantly more than the chickens at any given time. It’s not sustainable in any way, I read once that about 90% of the livestock food is imported, 2/3rd of that from outside Europe.

This is just mammals, so most water creatures aren’t being counted, which is going to be the majority of all animal biomass. So those waters you mention are mostly being ignored, but for living on land and for explaining land usage, just comparing the mammals is more informative.

I suspect that for my country, if you’d add human + pig + cattle biomass together, that you’d end up with about 99% of the biomass of all land animals. The remaining 1% is probably going to be mostly chickens. Other livestock, pets or wild animals will be lost in the rounding error. It’s only a suspicion though, I can’t find actual numbers straight away.

Edit: I did find some numbers after all: humans + pigs + cattle are 99.9% of the mammal biomass in my country. It’s actually worse than I thought it was going to be. I can’t find a number for chickens + birds, just the mammals.