The squire owns all the land, and all the buildings. The people work on the squire's land, growing crops, raising livestock. Some of them work in the big house, some of them make clothes or furniture for the squire's family.

Then the squire buys a machine that can grow crops and raise livestock, and process food, and make cloth, and make everything he wants, automatically, and to a much better standard than he's used to. So he stops buying those things from his tenants, and he shuts down the bakery and the weaving shed and all the rest, because he doesn't need them any more.

The people realise that if they don't do something, their standard of living is going back to the stone age, so they riot.

The squire goes and talks to the man who sold him the machine, who tells him there are basically two options. Either he can buy a few more of these machines, let his tenants use them, and they'll probably leave him alone. Or you could just shoot the lot of them.

It's a very interesting area of philosophical debate, but I suspect it will probably involve high-fructose corn syrup and gooning.

@Lensflare Not as badly as the UI on my somewhat vintage iPhone.

The fact that I am seriously considering upgrading to a newer device because of this makes me feel dirty.

Some of the advanced stuff is really useful if you're a genius who never makes mistakes.

Eric Gill was a colossal pervert, that might explain it.

@Lensflare durian.

Although other sources compare it to pig excrement, turpentine, or gym socks.

It's been a galloping clusterfuck and this week doesn't look much better.

Either tomato, or that thing that smells like rotting meat.

@jestdotty That doesn't work, it's a scam.

But the internet says I need to drink olive oil out of a lemon to get rid of cortisol belly.

Can your science explain that?

I rather think not.

Selling things to people.

Generating porn.

@emmascott63 Ted Hughes would have considered Stickman Hook unworthy of his contempt.

Every PR should include one little deliberate mistake, because attempting to make it perfect would be blasphemous. That's my excuse.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Also because the concept of what "not case sensitive" actually means is a total headfuck.

Absolutely.

Right in the fucking mouth.

If you offer someone a nice clean markdown doc and they tell you they prefer word, the only reasonable response is to knee them in the balls.

Skill issue.

I dislike public fields.

@TrayKnots Proverbs 26:11.

The problem with a full funnel is that you have to shove it up your arse blunt end first otherwise all the stuff falls out. An empty funnel is a lot more comfortable.

Yes, I do feel your pain, and I have some grounded, practical advice.

Close your eyes, visualise whatever it is you're trying to do, in your case selling some shitty online gambling bollocks, and imagine yourself rolling it up into a long, thin sausage shape.

Now take the imaginary ad spam sausage, and shove it up your arse.

Keep shoving until it's hanging out of your mouth like an anteater's tongue.

Then shake your head from side to side so the imaginary sausage swings back and forth, whilst intoning "hmm, sausage".

This won't actually solve any of your problems but I think you should do it anyway, ideally on public transport at rush hour.

@whimsical If I told you that, then I suspect ddos would very much be my problem.

@Lensflare Watery hole.

Arguably reliable high-speed internet infrastructure was largely created in response to demand for porn. Without that, cloud computing wouldn't have been a thing. GPUs were created in response to people playing games.

So the mother of most of the major inventions in tech, at least indirectly, was a fat hermit playing quake in between furtive bouts of onanism.

The greater fool hypothesis.

Your mum is rumoured to offer endless replay value, but each session is basically the same as the last.

You do at least get to compete against friends though.

I put too much water in my pot noodle at lunchtime.

@Lensflare That's in American English. They changed a lot of things just to break our balls.

As a wise man once said: "I'm not clever enough to do functional programming and neither are you."

There's a "rusty trombone" joke here somewhere.