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).

I think the Galaxy Store occasionally has some offers, like 50% discount on purchases and stuff. If you play gacha games, you can “save” a lot of money.

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.

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.

With geforce now(and other similar cloud gaming services), you can play all kinds of AAA games in your browser, including diablo 4.

One more reason to get out of Athens as fast as possible. If you are visiting Greece, dont spend too much time in Athens. Do the tourist things, like Parthenon, Plaka, etc and get out.

The ancient Olympic Games was literally the biggest and most important political event in ancient Greece(and during the hellenistic period, in the “World”).

Everyone gathered there, wars were temporary suspended so if you had anything important to announce, you did it there. And thats why alliances were often announced there, alongside with shitload of backdoor deals and politicking.

You could argue that what we have isnt true capitalism, since our current system doesnt include the environmental cost. If we could do that, then the cost of doing things would greatly increase, thus forcing capitalism to be more environmentally friendly.

I dont want to defend capitalism, but there is a potential version of capitalism that could work. Kinda how we use the replicative aggressive function of viruses for healing.

The fact that in the West, right wings are often insane, doesnt mean much. 95% of new coal power plants are built in China. Are they right wing? I think they are but tankies think China is socialist.

Obviously China has immense demand for power and it is in many ways a developing country. They took some measures to reduce the negative environmental effect. Their cities were covered in smog till recently, they had to do something.

But despite that, they still value the growth/wealth of cheap electric power.

While capitalism is a big accelerator of climate change, socialism could do the same. Whether you exploit the environment for capitalist profit or the perceived profit of human society, the end result can be the same.

All animals want to exploit nature for their benefit, even if it is a short term benefit but a long term loss. Humans, and arguebly capitalism, are just more efficient. But here is an infamous example of socialism fucking the environment

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

PS People’s issue isnt with socialism, it’s with supporting authoritative regimes, that dont even claim to be socialist(Russia for example)

If your phone has stopped getting security updates, then that is a big issue. Even if the phone is working fine. People are using their phones for banking, paying stuff, email, saving personal photos, etc. You dont want people hacking into your phone and an unpatched phone is an insecure phone.

Which is why samsung/google(and apple before them), have started offering 7 years of OS support. Modern phone hardware, especially flagship tier one, can last for a long time. Other than the battery degrading, the rest of the phone is still powerful enough for everything.

They have US military bases there

There are no US military bases in Cyprus. There are british ones(since Cyprus used to be part of the British Empire).

And there is 0% chance that Cyprus would let israeli military launch attacks from Cyprus.

Nor is there much strategic reason to do so, unless Hezbollah has some s-300/400 and Israel needs to go around them and attack from a different direction. But they dont. And even if they had, Cyprus has basically no reason to allow Israel to do that and there is 0 precedent for that either.

I think it is just Hezbollah being an attention whore.

From what i have read, it was a freelancer dude who wrote 1 article for Al Jazeera, 5+ years ago. I dont know why there is this need to make everything so biased/black and white.

No, it isnt anything like that. The EU elections are different than the national ones and they arent explicitly connected in any way.

But they are implicitly connected. His party just did very badly in the EU elections. He could technically continue to govern till the next national elections or he could go to early national elections and ask the voters “hey, you didnt vote for me in the EU elections, do you still want me to rule this country or not? Please confirm that you still continue to support me”.

Basically Macron is saying “You just saw how fucked things are, with the far right getting over 30% of the votes in the EU elections. Vote for me or the fascists will win”. It is a move intended to rally the voters to his party but he also risks losing the elections(resulting in a fascist government).

As a general rule, in many countries the governing party does worse in the EU elections, because the EU elections are often used as an opportunity to vote for small/minor political parties or protest vote. The EU parliament isnt as legislatively relevant. They dont make laws, they just approve/reject laws proposed by the EU Commision.

The EU Commision isnt directly elected by the voters. The european country governments appoint EU Commission members(one from each country) and the EU parliament votes for the EU Commission leader. This is a point of contention.

Technically it is “democratic” because eventually everything comes down to either national european governments(who are democratically elected) or the EU parliament(which is also democratically elected). But many people think it is weird to have the most powerful EU institution appointed instead of directly elected. The procedure isnt as transparent as people would like and it involves a lot of backdoor “politicking”.

PS On the other hand, directly electing the EU Commission would give its members a lot more political power, basically on par or higher with the elected country leaders. Being directly elected greatly increases your political power.

This looks awful. The rifle keeps going up and down while it is walking, no stabilization and they didnt show any accuracy data. You might as well ducktape a rifle to a roomba.

Aiming at targets far away is very hard. Even if it has to stop to shoot, how does it aim? By moving the body of a giant robot dog? That doesnt seem it has the sensitivity it needs. If the rifle is moving that much during walking, how can you accurately aim at anything, since you dont know where the rifle will be aiming when you stop? The camera seems to be on the robot and not on the rifle and everything is jiggling.

Also why even use a full goddamn rifle? You wont have a human holding it, you can just use a modified barrel basically. Are they not embarrassed by how bad this looks? Are they so clueless?