The reason they have to manipulate the audience is because people look for validation and so feel good when other people react to things in the same way as them. If another equally funny show has a laugh track and you don't, yours will likely be less enjoyable to watch unless it's a specific form of humour which benefits from not having a laugh track.

Basically a laugh track can't save a terrible show, but it can manipulate people into finding a mediocre show more enjoyable to watch, but a mediocre show will make people laugh organically at least a few times anyway.

Yeah either you live in London so are paying at a minimum 1600/month or 20k/year for a 350k mortgage, or if you live in the north or less desirable parts of the south you're gonna be paying 750/month or 9000/year for a 175k mortgage, either way if that's 40%, once you consider tax, bills, heating, food, transport (because no way can you afford to live within walking distance of work as a first time buyer) and whatever else you frankly don't have a whole load left all in

"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.

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

You don't see it again and again but you usually recommend it to other friends so they go see it with their other friends?

> 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?

Do you need to know?

It could be interesting to have it just be a canonical "black hole, ie nobody knows what's there - it started with people, animals and plants disappearing and then jumped to hills, buildings and even weather systems until there was nothing there at all as far as the outside world is aware; nobody who goes there ever comes back, satellite photos come back corrupted, and people are scared to even mention it

Some things "just work" on linux where they don't on windows. Fewer things "just work" on windows where they don't on linux. The stuff that doesn't "just work" on windows can probably be made to work with 1-2 hours of fiddling at most. The stuff that doesn't "just work" on Linux will more than likely take most of your day to get working if you can get it working at all.