I think this is more of a raid than a genocide. The objective of the aggressor is to secure resources, not to exterminate the victim. And why would it? There's no ideological conflict, it doesn't need to claim land for its own tribe to live on, nor does it seek riches out of vanity. It just needs food, and to that end, it invades and robs the dwellings of its prey.

I don't think it even cares about fighting the defenders. Would be kinda stupid to entirely annihilate its source of food too. Someone needs to survive to rebuild, breed and feed a new generation of food, after all. It just tears down the defenses, then absconds with its loot. Really, it's more a form of exploitation, albeit cruel to modern sensibilities - robbing the young directly instead of the food used to nourish them as raids in human history would.

It doesn't bomb the nests along with their contents, capture and abuse the inhabitants, then lay eggs in the ruins and accuse all who criticise its imperialism of being Antipernites.

(Yes, I spent too long on this, and there really isn't any point in applying human morality to creatures that don't have the sapience to weigh their actions beyond the drive to secure subsistence. I just came up with and liked the term Antipernites and wanted to use it, so I came up with an elaborate setup.)

All good, I appreciate your intention. Thank you for taking the time!

I wasn't entirely sure if that's what they mean, but I considered the possibility. I opted to give a serious response just in case, accepting the possibility I'd be wooooshed.

I did.

A watch. I knew it. Nice one.

Is that frequency something you can control or measure? Do you agree on a shared "let's meet" frequency you set it to, and if the other happens to have it set to that as well, you end up meeting? Or is it more of a random chance thing, like running into each other in places you both frequent at coincidentally matching times and deciding it must be the bracelets' doing?

Or am I falling for a joke?

Both Medieval Europe and Antiquity were defined by wealthy landowners and poor workers. We don't always see a whole lot of that in the writings that have survived until our time, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Most of the ancient sources we have were written by people with the both leisure to learn, travel around and write stuff down and the connections to have their writings be considered worth duplicating and preserving. In a word: the elites.

The issue here is that the poor and destitute didn't exist in a vacuum just because resources were scarce. Even in bad years for the peasantry, the elites generally did fine.

These ancient sources don't always spell that out, because it isn't worth spelling out to them: this is just how they and their peers live. Most of these elite members owned property or the workshop and tools with which their workers labored.

By and large, they were rich. Whether that richness is defined in numbers on some net worth estimate or just in the amount of things they owned, the result is the same.

And even in Ancient Greece, the rich had to make some contributions back to the community (except for Sparta, but they're a whole different beast of exploitation). Philanthropy has its roots there, even if it is a far cry from what we would term Philantropy today: The wealthy either voluntarily or out of obligation funded buildings, artworks etc. for the general public.

What changed with Industrial Capitalism and later Globalisation was mostly the scale of exploitation. But the principle - an owner class exploiting a labour class - has been around forever.