Do you think private individuals should also be able to own tanks, ground to air missiles, fighter jets, aircraft carriers and nukes? Why stop at rifles? What do you think rifles will do against a fighter jet?

If you think the people should be able to violently overthrow the government, then the people need to have appropriate armament for something like that. Yet i dont see many people advocating for the right to have tanks.

If more guns means more democracy, why all the places that have tons of guns are so undemocratic? The only exception to this is Switzerland but there people dont actually have guns. Technically they have guns but they have no ammo and their guns are locked and arent allowed to openly carry rifles around.

Everything has a price. And the price for your unrealistic "the government should be afraid of the people because the people have guns" position is the dead children. It's the every time someone gets angry over something, they have a weapon that can easily end the life of someone else. Do you honestly trust the general public with that power?

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.

Italy's? Dont you mean Greece's? Italians(romans) were just wannabe greeks, greekaboos. Literally every aspect of roman society is copied from the greeks. And luckily for us, greeks were one of the first people who started writing down shit, in a language we can understand, so there is no reason to go further back.

This isnt a good argument. For Fox News carbon emissions are irrelevant or good or whatever. But since Taylor Swift is saying she cares about the environment and according to her carbon emissions are bad for the environment, it is hypocritical to use a private jet.

The problem Fox News have with Taylor Swift isnt her carbon emissions, it is her hypocrisy.

I feel the internet is kinda going overboard with the opposite. Not every ancient relationship between 2 men was sexual and even if it was, bisexualism is a thing too. Say no to bi-erasure.

Iliad literally starts with Achilles arguing with Agamemnon over female slaves(Chryseis and Briseis) and who gets to keep who. And it was because of this, that Achilles refused to participate in the fighting from then on(also because he was OP as fuck and the game devs needed a reason to keep him on the sidelines, kinda like Superman dying in the Justice League).

And it wasnt till Patroclus(Achilles' friend/boyfriend) took Achilles' armor in order to help the losing greeks(raise morale thinking Achilles was fighting again) and then died to Hector, that Achilles went on his angry superman killing spree. Here is a rare video of Achilles after Hector killed Patroclus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpVnot2y-hk

Also ancient greeks wrote about their potentially sexual relationship but ultimately, this whole story was a myth. This was "ancient history" for the ancient greeks of classical Greece, something that happened almost 1000 years ago. And there was a "dark era" in between Mycenaean Greece(Iliad) and Classical Greece(Athens and Sparta bullshit), that we dont know much about.

History, as we know it(ie the writing down of actual historical facts) only became a thing during Classical Greece. Herodotus, the "father of history", sometimes was accused by his contemporaries of embellishing his stories, "content brain" was a thing even then.

Designing phone ui for fingers first. While there were many other touch phones, many of which could be used with your finger(especially if you were a hipster, you could modify them to be more finger friendly), their ui was primarily designed for stylus use. This is a huge point that basically defined the OS and app design for the next 15 years.

Making capacitive screen popular. Before iphones, almost all(all?) phones had resistive touch screen, which required you to actually push your finger on the screen to do stuff. This was fine with stylus, less fine with finger. Capacitive worked with the lightest touch, which gave a smoother user experience.

Made multitouch mainstream and a core part of touch interface. Again, older touchscreen phones were mostly made to be used with a stylus, so multitouch wouldnt make much sense.

It is important to note that one of the reasons apple succeeded was because nokia was too stubborn and late to adopt and promote touchscreen phones. Thats why while nokia was the phone bid dog of that day, users had turned to sony ericsson(SE) for their flagship, touchscreen phones.

And for 5 years before the iphone, people were using phones like the p800, that had a large touchscreen and even a removable keyboard for that full touchscreen experience. SE had taken nokia's symbian OS and made it more touch friendly. Nokia continued releasing super capable(great cameras, video, fm radio, etc) but non touchscreen phones or with a small touchscreen for years after that, allowing SE to dominate that market. For example nokia released the 6600, which was a great phone but didnt have a touchscreen and its screen was small in comparison to SE's touchscreen flagships.

The first iphone had a terrible camera and couldnt even film videos. Something that other "smart" phones could do for many years. The first iphone didnt have third party apps. Competitive smart phones had had apps for over a decade. The first iphone wasnt 3g, couldnt share stuff over bluetooth, etc. It was a pretty but pretty stupid phone in comparison to the competition.

But over time, apple kept improving, catching up and often surpassing competition in every aspect. I remember when iphones had shitty resolution and when apple caught up, they advertised it as retina display. Nowadays, iphones are the best or almost the best in everything. Now if only apple gave 120hz refresh on base iphones and a faster charging rate. And werent closed garden assholes.

Latin and Greek are nowhere even similar to each other. You might as well say that Latin and German are the same language. Greek and Latin are 2 different linguistic branches of indoeuropean languages. Latin is the precursor of romance languages like Italian, French and Spanish. Ancient Greek is the precursor of Greek. Other major European language branches are the Germanic(German, English, Swedish, etc) and slavic(Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, etc).

Cool single indoeuropean individual language branches also include Armenian, Celtic and Albanian.

Finnish and Hungarian arent indoeuropean languages.

Tankie has been a thing for over half a century. The Soviets used tanks(from other countries) to invade and crush antisoviet revolutions/protests in Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

This was considered shocking for some communists and other leftists while some communists supported those actions. Those who supported this "intervention" were called tankies, in order to differentiate them from the non tank invasion supporting communists.

In Greece(my country), which was in the "West", this event caused the split of the greek communist party(KKE) into 2 separate parties, KKE(Moscow controlled tankies) and KKE "interior"(weak ass soy communists who cant stomach the use of tanks in order to create a better tomorrow).

KKE "interior" kinda eventually became SYRIZA which surprisingly won the elections in 2015(breaking the 2 party status quo). Then the EU decided that the greek people decided poorly and punished them. So when the greek people decided correctly(elected a right wing government), the EU rewarded them. Carrots and sticks make the world go around. Thats how you make a majority leftist country, into a right wing one.

PS Greek debt is as high as it has ever been but Greece issued negative interest bonds. Tell me again how is the economy supposed to work? Noone talks about the greek debt anymore, it's a non issue, Greece has been accepted into the EU's infinite money glitch scheme.

Because keeping a low profile is how they can manage to survive in a homophobic society. Everyone is grandstanding while living in liberal western societies, ignoring how hard things are for less fortunate people.