There are gamers and there are gamers.
Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.
I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.
Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.
This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.
Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.
One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.
Portugal has exactly the same system (I’ve lived in both countries) which has actually even more features (such as letting you pay yours bills at any ATM) than the Dutch one.
I think that at least in Europe the countries were ATMs rely on VISA or Mastercard for inter-bank withdrawals like in the UK and US are the exception rather than the rule.
I live in a 10 million people European country which is the leading cork producer in the World
Also the first European country to explicitly decriminalise drug consumption.
Those two things are unrelated.
In all fairness, he never had any in choice in your relationship and you always treated him like a baby.
I’ve lived in a couple of cities in Europe and I can tell you my nose was runny and my throat a bit rough far more often in a poluted place like London (UK) than it is in the small city I live in now in Portugal or the places I lived in when in The Netherlands.
(In fact moving to a small city in Portugal from London hugelly improved of my health when it comes to that kind of thing)
I suspect that the tendency to catch colds and suffer from alergies is often coupled with all the Sulfur Oxide gases around in cities with lots of car polution, since those turn into various sulfur oxiacids when those gases mix with water in the nose and airways.
There is a real possibility that the person who would be best for Palestine would be Trump simply because he doesn’t follow through on what he says and is too incompetent when he does.
It’s a very sad state of affairs that the US Presidential Candidate that might be the least Nazi-supporting one is Trump, not because of his ideology not being Fascist but because he’s incompetent, inconsistent and has a tendency for non-interventionism.
You have it backwards: going after the natural voters of the other side in a two-party system is the riskiest thing you can do because the other party has a massive advantage with those voters which is an historical track record of telling them what they want to hear and them voting for it - rightwingers trust them on Rightwing subjects and are used to voting for them.
Even if (and it’s a massive massive if) a party succeeds at it once due to the party on the other side having deviated too much from its traditional ideology, all it takes for the party on the other side is to “get back to its roots” to recover most of those lost votes and subsequently win, whilst meanwhile the leftmost party that moved to the right has created for itself an obstacle in their own “going back to its roots” in the form of a section of the electorate which feels they were betrayed.
Sure, they’ll eventually get it back if they themselves quickly “go back to their roots”, but it will take several electoral cycles.
Further, if that gap remains too long on the Left even in a two party system it would create room for a third to grow, starting by local elections, then places like Congress, then Senate and eventually even the Presidency.
One of of the key ways in which First Past The Post maintains a Power-Duopoly is because growing a party enough to challenge the rest in multiple electoral circles takes time and the duopoly parties will try to stop it (generally by changing back their policies to appeal to the core voters of that new Party).
The US itself once had the Whig Party as one of the power duopoly parties and that exists no more.
The Democrats abandoning the Left is not a stable configuration for them and carries both the risk that the Rightwing electorate sees them as fake and the Leftwing electorate feels betrayed, and now they’re stuck in the middle with a reduced vote.
Whilst the first paragraph does make some sense, it presumes that in such a situation the Republicans would not conclude it’s the style of the candidate rather than his ideas that caused the rout. That might be a little optimist considering that the traditional Republicans’ were just as far right economically before and almost as right in Moral issues, but they had a different style of candidate (remember Reagan?).
It might also be a little optimist to expect an absolute walloping of anybody, Republican or Democrat.
That said, it’s a valid scenario, though it relies on very low probability events.
The second paragraph is inconsistent with every single thing the Democrats have done in their pre-electoral propaganda, from the whole “vote us or get Trump” (something which wouldn’t scare the Right) to the raft of pre-election promises on Left-wing subjects like student debt forgiveness or tightening regulations on giants such as Telecoms a little bit. If they really thought they could win with only votes stolen from the Right, they would be making promises which appeal to the Right, not the Left.
Besides, the whole idea that Rightwing voters would go for the less-Rightwing party rather than the more-Rightwing party is hilarious: why go for the copy if you can get the real deal?
From what I’ve seen in other countries were Center-Left Parties totally dropped their appeal to the Left and overtly went to appeal to the Right, they got pummeled because the Maths don’t add up and, as I said above, Rightwing votes will choose the “genuine article” over the “wannabes”.
It’s not by chance that in Europe even whilst becoming full-on Neoliberal parties, Center-Left parties maintained a leftwing discourse and would throw a bone to the Left once in a while (say, minimum wage raises) when in government.
Three points:
In summary:
Any unbiased “what if candidates had done things differently” evaluation must include the actions of all candidates that resulted in a Democrat loss. This means it should include how much Clinton herself screw her own chances, for example by comparing the votes she got on those states with the votes previous Democrat candidates got in those states.
(I strongly suspect that Clinton has a far larger proportion of the blame for her own defeat than all 3rd party candidates put together)
This focus on blaming everybody else but your own leaders is just the traditional tribalist mindset of “the chief is good, it’s everybody else whose a problem”. The decades long enshittification of the Democrat Party is mainly the product of its supporters acting as mindless tribalists rather the rationally, thus not holding their “chiefs” to same standards as they do everybody else.
Unsurprisingly we see the very same problem of the Democrat Leadership having carte blanche from the party fans to do just about everything and even damage their own electoral chances - with, as we see right here, the members of the tribe eagerly scapegoating it all as being the fault of 3rd party candidates - with their support for the Israeli Genocide.
White vans, no less.
I’ve done this almost from the very beginning (back in the 90s) and always had very small mobile communications costs because I could easilly change providers and plans and even do things like use a local SIM card whilst abroad to avoid roaming costs.
The style of architecture (notice the roof shingles, chimney shape, the dark red brick low wall between the street and the pump court and the iron fence in the middle of the road that goes by the pump - the photo was taken from the other side of the road), the kind of cars there, the weather and even the guy working with a reflective vest (all the way to the right of the picture) all suggest UK.
In fact even without the title the whole thing looks very UK (as opposed to other places in Europe, though I wouldn’t be as sure).
I lived in Britain and this picture immediatelly said “familiar” and “UK” as soon as I saw it. What’s funny is that to write this post I had to try and understand what elements made it so familiar.
Indeed.
60 years ago we were supposed to having to work very little by now thanks to automation, then automation came and instead of the productivity gains of it ending up spread across society, what happenned instead was that the extra productivity went just pushed up dividend and CxO pay higher and due to the reduced need for workers due to automation the purchasing power of salaries actually went down (for example, in the US the percentage of corporate revenues that went to pay salaries fell from 23% in the 70s down to 7% by 2014).
Expecting that, under the exact system that’s been moving us more and more towards Dystopia with each wave of automation, AI would somehow end up making things better for most people rather than better just for the Owner Class and worse for part or most of the rest, is pretty ill-informed and naive.
I all fairness, the short sentence “Person X with a fan in France” could just as easily be meant either way.
Probabilistically I wouldn’t be surprise that the fan that blows is more likely that the fan who is a person simply because everybody but a handful of people in the World do not really have legions of human fans they take pictures with, but once in a while some of them might in fact be mentioned along with the mention of a fan of the blowing kind.
It’s only the picture and us recognizing Lana Del Rey as a celebrity that lets us know it’s one kind of fan rather than the other kind.
BDY sells their vehicles in Europe.
I do believe the safety regulations in the EU are actually stricter than in the US.
There are no penalties for filling a bogus DMCA takedown and the legal cost for restoring the content falls on the victim of such a takedown: the DMCA legislation was designed exactly for it to be used as Mazda and many other use it against individuals and small companies who can’t spend thousands of dollars fighting bogus takedowns.
I’m truly, totally, completely shocked … that Windows is still being used on the server side.