(yes, Wero, Vipps etc, but Visa/MC are still huge in Europe)

That feels like retrofitting a modern frame onto a very different situation? I don't think any of the European elites thought in terms of "the power of Europe" as any kind of unified front vs the rest of the world until after they lost the world wars. It was intra-European conflict as it always had been. England/France/Germany(+)/Spain/Austria against each other; those elites that were unhappy with the fallout of the last great redistribution of power at the Treaty of Utrecht.

(there's probably a chunk of history I'm missing as to how Russia went from enemy of Britain at the Crimean war in the 1850s to the ally in the Triple Entente which caused France and Britain to go to war with Austria-Hungary; but WW1 is definitely not the fault of the any kind of British elite, we can blame it on the Austrians and, of course, the Serbs and ultimately one guy with a gun)

The rest of the world wasn't conceived of as independent powers until the Russo-Japanese war. They were prizes to be allocated among the (European) players. At that time, it was even conceivable that the European powers might take and divide China as they had done with Africa and India.

(+) strictly, Prussia; remember German and Italian unification happened during the Victorian era.

In some ways this is similar to the concurrent-systems problems that memory barriers are a tool to address. Your emulator will come in two halves, a CPU side and a gfx/sfx side, as well as control inputs, and the "intermediate" approach is when you're just trying to preserve the sequence of load/stores between the two with an accuracy relative to frame timing. Maintaining ultra precise timing within a frame imposes more detailed coordination requirements on both sides of the emulation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchase_of_commissions_in_the...

I don't think that's correct; the end of Empire was the two world wars. Much of the empire didn't leave until the late 40s/early 50s.

https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/old-corrup...

-- Karl Marx

> Landowners were expected to take on government roles, also for free

This was just the dying embers of feudalism. Which is still theoretically present in England, having been abolished in Scotland in the year 2000.

Also, food unevenly distributed across the day. Any one individual probably wouldn't have a large breakfast and elevenses and a large lunch and afternoon tea and a large dinner, on every single day. Even if you can find examples of each of those separately.

Where from, or is this just lifecycle accounting for the construction works?

> tyranny of temperature - like all heat engines you want higher temperature inputs for efficiency

Yeah. The input heat is ""free"" but the process of turning it into work isn't all that efficient.

Now, there were negatives to the concept, and it always relied on a certain amount of public/private hypocrisy to maintain a high public image while hiding deviations from that standard, but it did mean that people who misled the public would voluntarily resign.

Shame worked. Unfortunately due to overuse, like antibiotics, the public sphere evolved shame-resistant personalities.

> The sorts of people who I would think ought to be at the forefront of any sort of positive reactionary movement seem to be bent on making sure that any sort of traditionalism is utterly and rightfully discredited

If they had anything positive to offer, they wouldn't be reactionaries.

Today I'm thinking of the recently deceased convicted perjurer and world's most successful prison author, Lord Jeffrey Archer.

Unfortunately being "pro AI" means relinquishing any control over what the AI, or more importantly the company running it, might be doing.

The administration has gradually modernized so that all the legal requirements of tax/registration/insurance can be checked online.

However, there's a loophole that's apparently becoming popular: "ghost plates". Number plates aren't a secure document. They have no authenticity markers. So you can just.. print your own, slap them on, and you're very unlikely to get police attention. A subset of that is plates which are IR scattering so they don't show up on speed cameras.

I believe Napoleon once said "the graveyards are full of indispensable men"