Apart from tigers and a few others which went through even worse bottlenecks

What OS doesn't do that, even linux has xdg dirs

"Most historical settings"

Roman sure, especially as you get closer to Africa but nonzero elsewhere also

Middle ages, mediæval and renaissance almost certainly limited to higher nobility households either as nobles or "interesting" servants or major trading ports, especially closer to Africa.

The chances of a mediæval serf in a germanic country not looking northern Europe, or Mediterranean at a huge stretch, are functionally zero though, as anyone who came with the Romans will have been long dead with their genetics widely dispersed, and anyone who came over recently would likely be in an urban area, with marriage or higher level employment being their only chance to end up in a rural area.

I think yellow is actually fine - a lick is 3 seconds of contact maximum and you're not sucking on it or ingesting it...

Lithium's the only one you'll ingest decent quantities of and it's just gonna taste fizzy and soapy with no real lasting damage, stuff like lead you won't even ingest and even if you did it'd probably be fine in such low quantities, even mercury is probably ok to lick if you're careful

That said, with the radioactive ones you need to be careful of what isotope and sample size you're licking, so licking a huge ingot of U235 would probably do some lasting damage just by being near it, but licking a small piece of U238 is more than likely fine so long as it's solid and not dust

Same thing with seceding

It depends on the situation though...

There's voting to secede (East Timor), seceding through civil war (South Sudan, Somaliland, Ireland), sededing through coup (collapse of the Soviet Union), wanting to secede but being oppressed by a regime (Catalonia to an extent, Cabinda, Xinjiang) and a foreign regime deciding part of your territory wants to secede because they want control over it (Abkhazia & South Ossetia being invaded by Russia, same with much of Ukraine, Armenia invading and genociding Artsakh in the 1990s and then Azerbaijan invading and genociding it back recently)

How do you define "standing in their way" with all these and when you've even had places like Malta and Singapore being forced to secede against their will, it's never as clean as "this is what the people want"

That said, recognising Palestine while also very much not simple is clearly the desire of the majority of the people there, but still there are places with equal popular support and implementation of independence that aren't recognised but you're always going to piss someone off I guess

Still more than the 10 days I imagine you get by stating it as 2 weeks though I guess

About 165 minutes for Anchorage... For reference, Helsinki is also 165, Glasgow is 135, London 120, even Milan is 95

Coming from anywhere in Europe the idea of somewhat balanced day lengths throughout the year sounds wild

> items decaying due to not being cared for > items being actively destroyed because people don't care about them (Elgin Marbles moment, if they hadn't been stolen they would've been pulverised to make building materials and yet now Greece are crying for them back) > items being actively destroyed for political reasons

There are huge amounts of things in Western museums that were looted, stolen, or otherwise illegitimately acquired (Koh I Noor among other things), but equally a lot of stuff was a case of "eh we don't want it so if you're going to pay for it in cash we'll snap your hand off" - if you took something valued by the people then yeah you should give it back, but if you saved something unwanted from getting destroyed then I think the moral high ground is with the museum when they get a request for it to be returned

Qwant actually have their own indexer, but even then I feel like Microsoft can push their own products as they want given you are free to ignore it... It's not like there's no alternative browsers, search engine indices or operating systems, and loads of other products are built off shared technology without it being an issue that it's closed off generally

OCaml has an equally good type system without being pretentious about it

Github pages?

The websites (or at least Google & Facebook - not sure about Microsoft, it could just be low value ad space that nobody really wants?) you've described are known as "walled gardens" in advertising, meaning the DSP (demand side platform, where people who run ad campaigns manage those campaigns), SSP (supply-side platform, where websites & apps with available add space list that space) and at times the website itself are all part of the same company.

This creates a conflict of interest - essentially DSPs want to place as few ads as reasonable as they only want to advertise to people the ads will have an impact on. SSPs want to show as many ads as possible so they get paid more. This results in walled gardens, like Google & Facebook, showing ads more than they should be resulting in overcharging as a result compared to an optimally run campaign. Many reputable companies and ad agencies are aware of this and so advertise less with the walled gardens, resulting in proportionally higher scam ads, as no agency would run a campaign for them.

There's also the fact that they have no relationships to maintain. If a DSP is constantly showing scam ads in the ad spaces they buy, then they'll get blacklisted by the SSP. Same the other way around if the SSP keeps selling misrepresented ad spaces that will never be seen or will be resold every 5 seconds to the DSP, or otherwise not being a trustworthy partner to work with. As the walled gardens don't need to maintain this relationship and there's no risk of being blacklisted, they can effectively advertise whatever and put ads wherever on their website - they're generally powerful enough that people will use their product anyway, so there's no downside for them to accepting scam ads if they're paying.