The Netherlands colonized half the world despite being smaller than Mongolia - Venice was able to stand up to countries like the ottoman empire despite being only a single city.

Financialization isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing either.

Testing (including my own) find some such system prompts effective. You might think it’s stupid. I’d agree - it’s completely banapants insane that that’s what it takes. But it does work at least a little bit.

How often do you upgrade your computer? I do the same but without really trying, it’s literally the case that by the time I start to feel I need a new pc there is already a new CPU socket, often several, and new ram format. I’ve almost never been able to actually reuse stuff. I imagine the only scenario where I could do that would be if some component straight up broke

Same in Denmark - Adventskrans. Learned about it recently (its my first Christmas in Denmark with my partners family wish me luck folks!)