There's the expected whataboutism.
DdCno1
The fourth one is absolutely hilarious. It demonstrates just how weak and insecure Chinese nationalism is that propagandists feel the need to create such a flimsy, self-congratulatory lie so that mainland citizens might feel something resembling pride about their crumbling dictatorship.
Are you seriously trying to promote a false equivalency narrative?
In a two-party system, you're throwing away your vote that could get Harris instead of Trump elected for not even a blip on the radar. This is at best pointless grandstanding.
Edit: Decided to read a little into her. She's nothing but a spoiler candidate, meant to syphon voters away from Harris, just like Stein. Cherry on top: Apologia for China and North Korea and funding from China, which alone should motivate any decent human being to avoid her like the plague: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_De_la_Cruz_2024_presidential_campaign#Criticism
This is so strange to hear. I loved Frostpunk, but found it to be the very opposite: Far too easy and forgiving, which made the finale in particular, as the music swells up dramatically and the storm reaches its peak, feel kind of anticlimactic, because everyone was well-fed and warm(ish) in my settlement on my first attempt of playing it. Not one person froze or starved to death, no kids were sent into the mines and we most certainly didn't serve a 19th century spin on Soylent Green.
I know this sounds like I'm bragging, but I think the reason why this game felt so trivially easy to me is that I grew up with far more complex, challenging and punishing city builders, like Caesar 3, Pharaoh, The Settlers 2, 3 and 4, Anno 1602 and 1503, etc. I must have played many hundreds of hours of Caesar 3 alone, watching city after city succumb to fires, pestilence, barbarians and unrest until I figured out how to deal with these issues. There are so many more variables and difficult decisions in these games compared to Frostpunk, despite their idyllic presentation. Frostpunk's core city building mechanics suffer from the very idea the narrative and the few scripted decisions aim to avoid: Pretty much every problem the player has to face when building the city has an ideal and obvious solution (if you know your city builders). It's more of a puzzle game than an actual city builder. A very pretty and atmospheric one, which is why I enjoyed the brief campaign, but still.
I hope this encourages you to pick it up again. It may seem difficult at first glance, but once you figure it out, you can cruise your way through it with little effort and spend most of your time looking at the pretty graphics, waiting for the next scripted event.
I've got a Steam Deck and two servers running on Linux.
... until you inevitably need to use the shell. Linux, no matter the flavor, has been very easy to use in the 22 years that I've tried to use it - until you need to dig ever so slightly deeper for something and then it very much isn't. I started out with a Knoppix live-CD back in 2002. Remember that distro?
No issues that you know of.
You might perceive this as annoying, but can't you see that I'm trying to get something more out of you, that I'm trying to encourage you to be at least a tiny bit intellectually curious, to think about this just a little bit? Hell, I would be ecstatic to sense anything resembling uncertainty from you. I might not always be showing it, but I am always second-guessing myself, am never even remotely certain about how I'm seeing the world. I am engaging in these discussions, because I want to both challenge and be challenged, but I've been mostly disappointed. There's nothing I crave more than a good discourse, a proper exchange of words and ideas. Civil, but not to the point that genuinely valuable opinions are being held back.
As a last attempt to get anything resembling a proper opinion based on your own thoughts instead of that of others out of you: Can you name any other occupation similar to this alleged one? Have you ever thought about finding comparable occupations? I've tried finding one that comes close or is even remotely similar, but haven't been able to.
The often cited South African Apartheid really doesn't compare, because there are Palestinian citizens living in Israel with, at least on paper, full rights (and minus one obligation - they don't have to serve in the IDF, but can voluntarily sign up, which a couple thousand are doing every year, more so after October 7th). There's even a Palestinian supreme court justice. If there was actual Apartheid, then this wouldn't be the case. In practice, Israeli Arabs are similarly discriminated against as people of color in countries like the US, but nothing in Israel comes close to what South Africa did to its Black citizens or what Jim Crow laws did in America. Feel free to pick this opinion of mine apart though (but please, with your own words for once - if I wanted to read Wikipedia articles, I would do this myself).
You can at least clearly see the difference between Gaza and the West Bank, right? In the West Bank, there's an agreement with the ruling Fatah for Israel to assist in security matters, although in reality, the relationship is more that of a vassal proto-state that is too weak to both secure its own territory without being overthrown and meaningfully resist Israeli military supremacy after having lost against it multiple times in the past. Israeli soldiers and police officers are routinely carrying out raids against terrorists together with members of Fatah security forces. They are also setting up road blocks, impairing the movement of the Palestinians living there not just at the borders to Israel, but within the territory as well (seemingly randomly and often to a paralyzing degree - I've read reports of pregnant Palestinian women failing to get to hospitals in time, for example), etc. There are settlers in parts of the West Bank trying to expand their territory, often using violence and with help or at least tolerated by the IDF and Israeli police (and they are further emboldened since the start of the war). This is more or less (save for some contradictory peculiarities, like the Fatah's controversial martyr's fund) what a "normal" occupation looks like and has always looked like even going as far back as antiquity, down to getting rulers from the local population to do some of the dirty work for you. None of this applied to Gaza before this war - but I wouldn't be surprised if that's how Gaza might be governed and ruled after the defeat of Hamas, except with a likely even stricter security regime.
Meanwhile, another territory actually occupied by Israel, the Golan Heights, is effectively administered like any other part of Israel's internationally recognized territory, with all Israeli laws applying to it since 1981. Locals there, including non-Jews like the Druze, are citizens of Israel, very much unlike Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. This is the kind of occupation that is labelled as such according to international law, because most nations outside of Israel don't recognize it as actual Israeli territory. Israel annexed it for purely strategic reasons from Syria (making it arguably a cause separate from the Palestinian one), since otherwise, its heartland would be extremely vulnerable to artillery and other attacks from this area. It's one of those cases where one can simultaneously acknowledge the clearly illegal nature of this occupation/annexation, while at the same time admitting that this tiny nation with extremely disadvantageous borders and lots of hostile neighbors can't really afford not to hold onto this small piece of extremely strategically valuable mountainous terrain. It's definitely a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" kind of situation, far from the only one Israel has faced and is facing. Once again though, this is completely different from Gaza.
Maybe I overlooked something totally obvious (wouldn't be the first time), so I invite you to try and find a state acting similar to how Israel did towards Gaza and this being labeled as occupation. Alternatively, you can just ignore this lengthy diatribe and we go our separate ways without continuing this conversation. It's entirely up to you.
Notice how this particular sentence is not sourced and how there is an entire section in the article further down explaining just how controversial it is to call the area occupied.
Can you explain to me, in your own words, how not having any boots on the ground amounts to occupation under international law? If you're trying to make the case that the border controls and wall were occupation, then I would like to preemptively remind you that 1) border controls are not occupation, but the right of any sovereign nation and 2) those were a direct reaction to a series of terrorist attacks, including stabbings, shootings and suicide bombings, as well as numerous rocket attacks. Nobody would deny a nation the right to enact measures that prohibit those from occurring on their soil against their citizens. If anything, October 7th showed that this often criticized wall wasn't even remotely sufficient to counter the threat terrorists from the strip posed against Israel.
Israel forcefully removed all of their settlers from Gaza in 2005. They essentially ethnically cleansed themselves. There were no IDF soldiers on Gazan soil and the administration of the strip was entirely in the hands of Hamas from that point onward. Under no definition of the word occupation was the strip occupied after 2005.
It is undeniably satisfying though to turn all settings in a game up to maximum without performance tanking, but you and I (same card, but 1440p screen) are not the target audience. This is for people who want (and can afford) at least 4K with ray-tracing in the latest games and all of this at triple-digit frame rates - or they are actually using it for non-gaming applications: Even our old 2080 is a beast for tasks like offline rendering, scientific calculations, machine learning, etc. - and a 4090 is of course several times better at this.
I know this is going way off-topic, but I love providing a bit of perspective: The fastest supercomputer in 1996 was the Hitachi CP-PACS/2048 at 368.20 GFLOPS. In 1997, it was the Intel ASCI Red/9152 at 1.338 TFLOPS. An RTX 2080 achieves 314.6 GFLOPS at 64-bit precision (as used by the TOP 500 list of supercomputers) and an RTX 4090 1.290 TFLOPS. Granted, despite similar processing power on paper (and FLOPS being hardly an objective measure to compare vastly different architectures and systems), even ancient supercomputers still have modern GPUs beat in terms of the amount of memory alone (although latency is of course far worse): 128 GB (2,048 * 64 ~~GB~~ MB) in case of the Hitachi system, for example.