It would help to at least try doing that, but in practice this would probably be very difficult - it’s likely not possible to always drink boiled water and well-cooked food, and given the possibility of contaminating food and drink after boiling, you might effectively have to prepare all your drink and food yourself, which is logistically difficult given the length of the work days. Diseases also spread in other ways, like smear infections (e.g. on toilets, doorhandles, tools) and airborne infections.

While it’s true that races aren’t defined by borders (if we even want to entertain the notion of races actually existing), the wrong meaning might absolutely be the intended one.

Europe is not a monolith, though - Putin’s Russia will happily watch the planet go up in flames. So it’s clearly “both”.

I don’t think that can accurately be described as “racism” though, if even the “racists” won’t say that the ethnicity they’re hating is a different race. More general terms like ‘chauvinism’ would fit better.

Depends on context. In the context of an informal conversation about a specific kind of law it’s fine IMO. It’s also fine if it’s obviously not that serious, like e.g. different styles of toilets that are both found in the ‘developed world’. When you’re talking about a topic where generally richer countries do it one way and poorer countries do it another way, that’s where calling the poorer countries ‘uncivilized’ starts sounding racist (or maybe just classist, considering countries like Belarus which are poor, authoritarian and underdeveloped but not inhabited by any brown people).

If you can moderate, it isn’t really an addiction. At least, not by the strict definition. If you use it more colloquially, sure.

I think that doesn’t really work for physical addictions. Even if you can easily stop using because your mind just works that way, if you used an addictive substance for long enough you’ll get withdrawal symptoms.

I think that depends a lot on the specific addictions and which circumstances make you want to give into it more. e.g. physical addictions like to highly addictive drugs are typically harder to moderate that non-physical addictions.

Weirdly, as a non-native speaker I find UK headlines even harder to read.

You don’t need a popular election to elect a state figurehead, Germany just has it done by existing parliaments. And figureheads who aren’t monarchs don’t usually have vast landholdings like most monarchs do.

Influencing their subjects (especially other aristocrats) through their economic power was always important for monarchs, though. The medieval period had lots of weak kings who had substantial trouble bringing the aristocrats under them in line, a lot of the time they weren’t even able to collect taxes at the kingdom-level (you kind of need a money-based economy for that, and civil servants were in very short supply in the middleages).

Still not convinced that the tourists wouldn’t come anymore if you depower the monarchs and keep the palaces etc. as state-owned tourist attractions, TBH.

You really think the tourists would stop looking at British castles etc. if the UK became a republic?

Which king?

it’s a cheap, simple concession

Depends. AFAIK the English monarchy is fairly expensive.

I have a hard time believing that not having enough sex was ever the reason that prehistoric people had too few children.

Fetal alcohol syndrome has to have a huge negative impact on population survivability. I have a hard time believing that even that one one-in-a-million genetic freak superman is able to offset that. Seems more likely that if anything, the general benefits of alcohol consumption (e.g. incentive to settle down into agrarian communities, increased social cohesion) outweight the negative health impacts.

I’ll probably die of dysentery. Just because I know modern hygiene rules doesn’t mean I’ll survive interacting with all the other people who don’t but are used to local bacteria and viruses.

Only one of those is actually what I’d describe as “polo shirt and sweatpants” - first one isn’t really wearing sweatpants (and doesn’t have super hairy legs like many men) and the third one isn’t wearing a polo shirt. And yeah, the look might work if you’re fit and at least know how to pick clothes that match (color and fit) both with each other and with the way your body, hair etc. look. But the way you’re describing yourself doesn’t really sound like it.

OP seems to care about appearances a lot, they’re just not good at it themselves.

Thanks, not sure where I got alt+tab from - I think ctrl+tab is actually the more common shortcut for tab switching nowadays.