Only flagship samsung and google phones offer 7 years of OS updates support.

Swish is very popular in Sweden and has no fees(for individuals)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_(payment)

Noone uses cash in Sweden, except for maybe drug dealers and super old people(and the occasional tourist). Most businesses dont even accept cash anymore.

It isnt just the convenience of not having to carry cash, it is also much safer. Much lower risk of getting robbed, for both individuals and businesses.

Either is fine but i strongly recommend going for amd, especially an x3d one, like 7800x3d(if you care about gaming).

What a bromance.

Whisky no, doesnt expire but its cork might have dried, fall apart, alcohol escaped, etc.

You dont need to sell your stocks to access that wealth. You can use that as collateral to take loans or exchange stocks.

I.d.k. why i thought that Euclid, and perhaps also others, were around Plato

There was an Euclid that was a pupil of Socrates. He was a friend(and classmate i guess) of Plato.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_of_Megara

And dont worry, it wasnt just you who was confused

"Editors and translators in the Middle Ages often confused him with Euclid of Alexandria when discussing the latter’s Elements. "

I mean anything is possible if one side is basically ignored. The UN Plan offered was just terrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annan_Plan

The only reason it even got to where it got was because Turkey wanted to join the EU and Greece wanted to normalize relations with Turkey. But ultimately, Cyprus(greekcypriot state) is an independent and democratic state, so it decided against it(and Greece follows whatever Cyprus decides).

If Turkey was a normal country, you could say that all the disadvantages of the plan wouldnt be relevant in the long term. But Turkey is a mini-Russia and as Russia has shown us, appeasing nations with imperial ambitions doesnt work in the long run.

Imagine any european leader saying to their neighbours “We could come one night”. Or “our neighbours are scared because our missiles can reach their capital”. Both statements were said by Erdogan. Only in the last year, he has chilled, mostly because of the invasion in Ukraine. For once, the West did something good, instead of writing “stern letters” so Erdogan is afraid that the West might actually military support Greece in case of a turkish invasion.

Also because Greece is getting f-35 jets and Turkey needs american engines for their homegrown ghetto “f-35” equivalent(so the US told him to shut up and be nice or else no engines for their “f-35” or upgraded f-16).

Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.

Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).

Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.

The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.

Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).

If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.

So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).

World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).

But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.

There was also a version of Zeus dedicated to “hospitality”(philoxenia, friend of foreigner).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus#Roles_and_epithets

Zeus Xenios (Ξένιος), Philoxenon, or Hospites: Zeus as the patron of hospitality (xenia) and guests, avenger of wrongs done to strangers

It is down for the over the Mediterranean Sea routes and up for the from Turkey into Greece routes. And through the Canary Islands.

How long the downward trend will hold remains to be seen, however. Smugglers are always quick to adapt and find new routes around border controls. In the Eastern Mediterranean, the second-most-used route, smuggling networks are now using speedboats in increasingly aggressive ways to avoid controls and targeting islands farther away from the Turkish coast in the central Aegean, according to Greek authorities.

The number of migrants arriving in Greece by sea and overland during the first eight months of the year rose by 57%, U.N. data shows.

Doesnt this imply that, for Putin, Crimea and Donbas are not part of Russia? Those have been repeatedly hit by long range western missiles.

Maybe someone should inform the Russians living in those areas that their leader thinks less of them than other Russians.

What keeps them engaged with Destiny 2 despite its apparent lack of a clear path forward?

There is no alternative. The First Descendant is p2w. Once Human has different structure and resets your progress every season. Warframe is pretty different and similar to First Descendant. Overwatch basically cancelled its pve. Darktide is clunky.

And none of these games have the polish and shooting satisfaction that Destiny has. If people want a pve game, with long term progression that has enjoyable shooting, Destiny is all there is. What keeps them playing? Copium.

Slowly but steadily Destiny will die. And thats when Marathon will come out. But Marathon is very different, so i am not even so sure that most Destiny players will migrate to that.

I am not even playing Destiny. Destiny is the game that i want to love so much but always shits on me, so i gave up. It seems to me that the easiest thing in the world, is to keep Destiny going and address its minor issues. But somehow Bungie doesnt think so.

They are deliberately bad and obvious because they want stupid people. If those messages were more realistic, they would have had a lot more “hits” that would just waste their time because ultimately, they wouldnt be able to scam them as easily.

When it comes to military action, it is all about proportionality. Obviously Israel has the right to defend itself but killing(and starving) tens of thousands of people and flattening Gaza is not proportional. Obviously the US has the right to defend itself but invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years, suspending human rights(Guantanamo/cia black sites/patriot act) is not proportional.

And the Iraq invasion was straight up imperialistic, literally what Russia is doing now to Ukraine, which is why tankies use that invasion as a “gotcha”. Which is why everyone in the EU opposed, even most EU governments. There were a lot of protests in EU in opposition of that invasion.

Lets see what George Orwell wrote about that. Try to read all of it, especially the last paragraph. It isnt about being against pacifism, it’s about how pacifism can be used by authoritarian regimes on liberal countries and how that societal asymmetry defines the end result.

Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’.

The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

Mr Savage remarks that ‘according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be “objectively pro-British”.’ But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious ‘freedom’ station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with.

In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.

Not all wars are good. I was against the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. But this war is one of the few occasions where american interests mostly align with the moral thing, helping an invaded country defend against an imperial invader. This is one of the least controversial and relatively clean cut wars in history.

Because Kursk wasnt an active combat zone and it is part of Russia, most of the military there was conscripts, ie random kids from all over Russia but mostly cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The issue is the border of Gaza and Egypt, the philadelphi corridor. Israel wants to control it or at least have some presence there.

Thats because a lot of Hamas(and non Hamas palestianians) fled to Egypt. And once Israel pulls out, Israel doesnt want Hamas or military supplies to flow back into Gaza.

The american proposal offered reduced israeli presence in the area, with the Palestinian Authority managing it and Israel “supervising”.

Hamas rejected the proposal because they dont think Israel should be in Gaza in any capacity.