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

My sleep-routine is that I read (usually my kindle) in bed at night.

It’s kind of great both because I like reading, but also because it makes me fall asleep.

I went through a pretty big libertarian phase way back in my late teens.

Not the ‘deregulate everything’ type, but rather more of a ‘everyone’s place in society is governed by the choices they make’ social-darwinist sort of angle.

Once I got out and experienced real life more (and learned about all the little nuances behind everything) I realized just how wrong I was.

Nowadays I’m a big leftist/socialist

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.

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.

Nothing is preventing a business from building parking spaces though. It’s just getting rid of the requirement to do so. It’s essentially a free-market approach.

I think there are bigger issues wherever you are, in that there doesn’t seem to be (enforced) parking laws. I see this pretty frequently in the Balkans, for instance.

The issue is basically that a lot of places people have this idea that, just because they own a car, they are entitled to a cheap/free place to park it. That type of incentive just leads to more and more people buying cars (and expecting a cheap place to park them) so it just makes the problem worse.

It’s not colonialism to prefer one culture (or certain cultural traits) to another. In fact, it’s natural.

I’ve lived in a number of countries and each had their own distinct cultural norms. Each has had aspects which I perceived as either positive or negative.

Add it all together and I definitely have preferred certain cultures, not because they are “better” but because they more closely match my own preferences. Other people would prefer different cultural norms.

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

It definitely looks a lot like Toronto, but it’s been a while since I was there

Melbourne has the world’s largest tram (streetcar) system!

Not a raspi, but I had similar issues on my opensuse HTPC which turned it to be related to issues with (or missing) media codecs in Firefox.

After (re)installing all of them, it worked like a charm.

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.

Why does it need to be equal to population?

I’m not saying that all immigration is bad, but rather that above a certain level it gets difficult to integrate people. For european countries this is a much lower number than the US, since populations are much lower. At the same time, there are many more refugees than in the US.

It’s a genuine challenge here in Vienna, for instance, at the moment because recent immigrants make up a large percentage of school kids, who often have few language skills, tend to be very religious, and have extremely conservative views on things like feminism and gay rights. Unfortunately, their views tend to self-reinforce rather than become milder over time due to being the majority view among their peers/in their school/community.

You can’t really blame the kids, obviously they are just a product of the culture they grew up in, however you also can’t just ignore the issue. There isn’t any mechanism for preventing immigrants groups from clustering in specific areas (and I don’t think most people would be in favor of anything that draconian)

In an ideal world, maybe there is a perfect solution, but the reality is that the current system is facing a huge challenge. Like it or not, this is directly tied to immigration rates.

The issue is though that “segregation between state and religion” is a cultural trait. It’s not something that every culture values, nor is it something that inevitably happens.

In fact, it’s almost certainly a minority opinion on a global level. Particularly in (although not exclusive to) poorer non-western countries which tend to be much more conservative and religious.

A small number of conservative immigrants won’t hugely impact views in the host country, but a sizable number (particularly if they are concentrated in certain areas) absolutely can.

You know there are other countries tries right?

A lot of european countries are only a few million people…