I remember just after all this kicked off last October there was an interview with an ex hamas guy (who is now an anti-extremism researcher) about what their plan was with all of this.

He mentioned how their plan had always been to force a reaction from Israel and then use social media to build support among specifically both the Muslim diaspora and progressive non-muslims in Europe/NA.

The worse it gets in Gaza, the better it is for Hamas. Their support in Gaza goes up, and they gain additional support abroad, while Israel loses support. Win/win/win

To be fair, before Trump took over the party, the Republicans were generally considered to be in a death spiral.

The prevailing idea was that the party just didn’t have a future. Their brand was this basically an unappealing mix of boring religious people and self-professed ‘sensible’, common-sense stewards of the status quo. Looking at demographic trends at the time, they were trending towards irrelevance.

Then Trump took over and brought back the enthusiasm. They also started to court minority votes (Hispanics, Blacks) which tend to be very socially conservative. At the same time, the democrats slipped into the ‘boring status quo protectors’ role.

Hopefully the Dems wake up, but it might take a while.

Politics (especially among republicans) has become a bit religious, so it’s not really THAT different I guess

Just look at history though and you’ll see that most significant changes (both bad and good) happen abruptly and it’s often a bit messy.

Unfortunately it’s just the way that humans work

I don’t know anything about the campaign in Oregon, but most people are scared of things they aren’t familiar with.

Also I’m guessing neither party really supported this much, since they benefit from first-past-the-post.

Status-quo politics is dead, many major western parties just haven’t realized this yet. People want firmer political leadership that promises fundamental change and isn’t afraid of breaking things along the way.

It’s just fucking unfortunate that (in most countries) it’s only the far right who are ahead of the curve at realizing this.

Center to left parties need to reinvent themselves and focus less on pleasing everyone or fighting losing battles. They also need to present a much clearer vision.

This is 90% just a proxy for how their parents will vote.

Its only a very small portion of kids that age who are going to have substantially different views than their parents (not that they don’t exist!)

Personally I always always buy phones with two sim slots. It’s super practical if you travel semi-often.

Idk about apple, but basically all of the mid-range androids have this feature. I guess this is about the US though, so it’s probably Apple.

My credit cards I’ve had in Germany/Austria were all basically glorified debit-cards which had their own bank account attached to them. Technically I had a credit limit of a couple thousand, but I never went into the negative.

The only difference (for me at least) was that I could use them to rent a car, which is nice.

Yeah most of europe is waaaaay better when is comes to mobile plans compared to the US.

I don’t use use that much data, but my 8gb plan is just under €6 per month.

In the US, I had a plan like this for over $30…

I can’t check at the moment, but that sounds like something ‘Simply Perfection’ would be capable of.

It’s essentially an addon specifically for tweaking the appearance of gnome stuff.

It’s really fun! I picked it up yesterday and I’ve been playing on ky deck.

I will say that I usually prefer tower defense games with more ‘linear’ pathing (think bloons) but it’s been a good time regardless.

IPTV is generally for live TV channels rather than on-demand.

Imagine your town/city starts completely catering to people from richer countries coming there to get completely wasted and intentionally act crazy… that’s what happened to a huge portion of Spain.

That mentality is largely the result of overtourism though.

Spain is a country of under 50 million people which has over 70 million foreign tourists visit every year.

The US is 330 million people but only has 50ish million foreign tourists.

So imagine that the US has roughly 8x as many tourists per year (to match per capita) and imagine that a huge portion of these tourists were mostly coming from much richer countries and had the mentality of ‘let’s let loose in a cheap party spot’.

Just about everyone is in favor of some tourism, it’s just currently completely out of control in much of southern Europe. The numbers just completely dwarf just about anywhere else.

I’m sorry, but this is completely backwards with regards to the situation in Spain or many other poorer european countries. I’m much more familiar with the situation in Croatia, but this applies to most of southern Europe (including Spain).

Yes, the countries take in a sizable portion of their gdp from tourism, however this is generally at the expense of the average citizen. Tourism is notoriously bad at distributing any wealth it provides, while the average person living in these places gets all of the negative side effects. Tourists are generally coming from richer countries (USA, Germany, UK etc) and able to/used to paying much higher prices. So the local economy shifts to focusing exclusively on tourists (it’s where the money is) and locals get all of the negative externalities (inflated rents, inflated prices, crowding, poorly behaved tourists) with very little benefit.

Local and national governments focus exclusively on further investments in tourism (since it’s such an ‘important’ part of the economy!) at the expense of other investments (education, non-tourist infrastructure) which would be more beneficial to the overall population.

Not to mention, compared to just about anywhere else in the world, the number of tourists in Europe is absolutely overwhelming compared to locals. Croatia is a country of under 4 million people, but gets over 20 million visitors a year! The average salary is somewhere around $1000 A MONTH, so it’s no surprise that so much of the country is instead focused on the needs of tourists who can easily spend $1000 a week…

This isn’t the same situation as a tourism hotspot in the US, for instance (where I’m originally from). Yes, wages vary geographically in the US, but not nearly to the same extent. The areas often grew around tourism rather than being a normal functional city where families have been living for centuries before very recently turning into what is essentially a theme park which is largely unaccessible to natives.

Yeah, I played through the whole thing on my steam deck and it was mostly a great experience.

The last act was, performance wise, pretty rough though. Maybe there was some setting I could have changed to make it smoother, but the framerate was only about half what I got during the other acts.

Yeah controller would be really rough.

You just need to get invited by someone you are friends with.

It used to be you had to be friends for at least a week, but I think that isn’t the case anymore.

It’s really good if you are into moba-type gameplay.

Some people will compare it to something like overwatch, but it’s really closer to Dota 2 with shooter combat. It’s a cool mix of map-control/strategic elements of Dota with more twitchy aspects of arena-ish shooters.

I’ve really enjoyed it, but then again my two most played games of all time are dota and tf2.