Shh, no spoilers. He obviously hasn’t gotten to that part yet.

those peoples no longer under Soviet/Russian control appear to taking major steps as sovereign entities to resist Russian reestablishment of its former sphere

I hate this spheres of interest argument for exactly this reason: it logically follows that Eastern European, central Asian and Caucasian countries neither have nor deserve any sort of say in their future. If you’re not a world power, you’re not allowed to resist imperial expansion (yes, that’s what they’re doing). As an Eastern European, I refuse that denial of our autonomy out of hand.

Could not agree more. I’m a democratic socialist. I firmly believe that the ideas of that ideology, properly implemented, can drastically improve the standard of living for a huge percentage of the population.

I live in a country where our democratic socialist party is fantastically corrupt, lazy and completely bereft of any motivation to do anything that doesn’t directly benefit themselves. Consequently, I don’t support them. Results over ideology is an important mantra no matter what you believe.

Europe is primarily white people

Hah, that’s telling. Just FYI, there’s been generations upon generations of racism and ethnic hatred here in Eastern Europe. I guess we have the advanced racists: the ones who don’t hate you for your skin colour, but who your parents were, religion and primary language.

I’ll bet that if your dad grew up here in Romania, he’d be complaining about those sneaky Szeklers trying to steal Transylvania and Roma people being subhuman.

Also, he seems the type to pine for Europe because “We’re all Christian!”. Trust me, you haven’t seen “Christian love” like state religions persecuting people of the wrong sect. Orthodox Christianity is the state religion here, and Protestants of all stripes get treated like heathens.

Yup. Did specifically say that I was missing tons of stuff in that super short summary of the formation of Israel. Also left out the Balfour declaration, the White Paper of 1939, the Buraq uprising, the Black Hand, Lehi and their attempted alliance with Nazi Germany, and much much more.

Here’s the long version.

Short version is that in WW1, the UK conquered Palestine from the Ottoman empire. 1922-1948, the British ran the territory, getting shot at regularly by both native Arabs, the tiny number of native Jews, and the comparatively much larger group of immigrant Jews. In the 1940s, the UK asked for and got US help with counterterrorist operations, especially against Jewish ones. Arabs and Jews pinky promised to play nice with each other if the UK left, so rather than continue getting shot by everyone in the region, they left. They immediately started a war as soon as the UK army left. Then, every single neighbouring country attacked the newly formed Israel, which they somehow survived.

(Missing HUGE amounts of context and nuance here, obviously)

Ground floor apartment here. Winter is hell, the storage area in the basement below us is unheated, so the apartment feels like Siberia. Summer is glorious though, nice and cool even in the middle of the most brutal heatwave.

If you’re interested, the short version is that instances (A.K.A servers) are run by different people in different places. A reason to move instances might be:

1. My admin, the owner of the instance, has been doing things I heavily disagree with (bans, blocks, etc)

2. I don’t agree with the rules on my instance.

3. The instance is run in a country which criminalizes something that I care about, and so has to ban discussion of that thing (piracy, porn, etc).

4. I want to run a community on a specific instance for whatever reason, and so need an account there

Please don’t lump trademarks with the rest. Makers have stamped their goods with their mark since ancient times, both as advertising and to signify quality products (and not knockoffs). Swords were especially commonly marked with the smith’s trademark.

It was illegal to sell bread in ancient Rome without a trademark, for example. The punishments for doing so were harsh, as they wanted to be able to track down the baker if someone sold tainted bread.

In modern days, they’re useful for customers to know what company they’re buying from.

Did anyone seriously expect it to be a real wall with Rober sitting in the driver’s seat?

“secret” lmfao

You can keep a secret between 3 people if 2 are dead.

Yeah, I work daily with a database with a very important non-ID field that is denormalized throughout most of the database. It’s not a common design pattern, but it is done from time to time.

It’s necessary to split it out into different tables if you have a one-to-many relationship. Let’s say you have a list of driver licenses the person has had over the years, for example. Then you’d need the second table. So something like this:

SSN_Table

ID | SSN | Other info

Driver_License_Table

ID | SSN_ID | Issue_Date | Expiry_Date | Other_Info

Then you could do something like pull up a person’s latest driver’s license, or list all the ones they had, or pull up the SSN associated with that license.

Theoretically, yeah, that’s one solution. The more reasonable thing to do would be to use the foreign key though. So, for example:

SSN_Table

ID | SSN | Other info

Other_Table

ID | SSN_ID | Other info

When you want to connect them to have both sets of info, it’d be the following:

SELECT * FROM SSN_Table JOIN Other_Table ON SSN_Table.ID = Other_Table.SSN_ID

EDIT: Oh, just to clear up any confusion, the SSN_ID in this simple example is not the SSN itself. To access that in this example query, it’d by SSN_Table.SSN

Non-German but I am in the EU. Didn’t find it odd at all. Just assumed it was “flow market” in German.

Maybe this’ll finally be the event that causes Canada to drop those ridiculous internal tarrifs and trade barriers.

There’s another factor that nobody mentioned: the sales tax in EU countries is different for different products. This allows countries to incentive or disincentivize different classes of products by ramping the sales tax up or down. Higher tax on junk food, cigarettes and/or alcohol, low or nonexistent sales tax for basic ingredients and medicine.

Interestingly, France and the Czech republic tax wine and beer respectively like basic food.

Many people (not all) rent because they can’t afford to buy, not because they don’t want to own property.

(remember, your aunt charging below market is the exception, not the norm)

Isn’t this definitionally true? The norm, by definition, is the market rate.