> If it's a brand of good quality (Miele, Henry, DeLonghi) it probably does not need to be advertised, as word of mouth and price point is generally enough.
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
I'm guessing high-end appliance brands are enough of a niche market that it just doesn't make sense for them to advertise in relatively unfocused ways. You'll see plenty of ads for high-end appliances and cookware if you frequent gourmet-oriented websites and magazines.
The West Bank is shown under Jordan, while Gaza under United Arab Republic (Egypt, plus Syria for a brief period, and almost Iraq). This reflects the reality in 1965. It was after all the height of Arab nationalism, with legitimate widespread desire to unite all Arab people (east of Libya at least) under a common country, and Palestinians were included in that.
In 1967 that would change, both coming under Israeli control/occupation.
> While not perfect, Saudi has very clearly moved "Westernly" on many ideas, most notably social
Citation very much needed. It's still a country where you can be executed for being gay, protestors against government projects get murdered in the streets, and anyone vaguely critical against the government (that includes being critical for things which have since been allowed, like women driving) being imprisoned for long periods of time. Oh, and did they not execute a dissident in a consulate? Did they not bait various government detractors living abroad to return to Saudi under threat of harm to their families?
It's still a reactionary theocracy. It has liberalised, socially, in the years since MBS has had de facto control, there is no denying that; but they're nowhere near "westernly".
> At what point does the narrative about their investments on the larger stage become less pejorative?
When their sportswashing and investmentwashing ends up entirely working. It will probably take years, Khashoggi's murder was still only 7 years ago. It will also depend a lot on how their World Cup works, a lot of the world will be watching that one closely and it will have big ramifications.
Sure, 2 inches per year, 2 steps ahead 1 step back in a good year. In 2000 years they may approach current levels of personal or religious freedom that average western country has. Till then, its absolutely horrible place if you are in any sort of minority group, or woman, or want that pesky freedom for you or your children.
The USA isn't the only country in the "western world", please stop equating the two.
Even for Britain, France, Germany, the countries with the biggest far right/reactionary political groups, where there are legitimate chances for them to end up in power, none of them are religious. Or even that socially reactionary for that matter.
Since only nine Vice-Presidents have succeeded through death/resignation, and zero Speakers of the House, I don't think there is much danger of a theocracy even if the Speaker wants there to be one. Furthermore, in the unlikely event he becomes President, Congress still passes the laws and the Courts still require the laws to be constitutional. The whole system is designed to thwart things like this.
But let's not ignore the danger from the Left. Sure, a transcendant, self-sacrificing God is out of the picture, but enthroned in his place is My Self-defined Sexual Identity, or depending on the variety, Those We Define to be Oppressed. In the new atheist Puritanism, dissent will get something worse than wearing a scarlet letter. The problem isn't theocracy, per se, its the fact that dissent is not tolerated, and the Left isn't any better here.
Never mind third in line, the dude who is currently President just put out a memorandum declaring "anti-Christianity" to be on the same level as "support for the overthrow of the United States Government."
I really wouldn't go this far, there is _way_ too much religion in US politics for proper separation of church and state. When elected politicians regularly quote religious documents in their reasoning for making decisions, agreeing and disagreeing with others, etc. you can't claim a theocracy isn't on the cards.
No, it has not. But you cannot deny that religion being a visible, daily, part of politics, and being very often quoted as justification for political, and even worse, judicial decisions, is closer to a theocracy than it is to separation of church and state.
> There is the COVID sect. They even masked themselves outdoors in public - like the women in Iran back in the day. Without any evidence - and they did it even against evidence. It was a very religious thing
Bloody hell are we still at this nonsense today?
Public health authorities, across multiple continents, said to mask up. Did it limit spread? Yes, it did, and studies proved so. What the hell is your problem there? May I remind you the initial heavy weeks with makeshift morgues in ice rinks and refrigerated trucks, and military hospitals being deployed? Lockdowns and masking and vaccine mandates were reasonable, and reasonably effective, remedies for how horrific things could get (and did get, at the start, in multiple countries).
> There is the climate sect. There are many young followers with strong believes - but nobody has ever read any book on atmosphere science. And nobody has read any recent paper on the subject. Once you do, you'll find it very surprising how little substance is behind their dogmas.
Aha, so trusting the scientific consensus is "a sect". Do enlighten us, how is climate change not real? Or is it real, but God given? Or what is your deal?
> Another group now shouts for war - and if you listen to them they're about as intelligent as the worst kind of crusaders back in the day.
What war? Putting Russia back in its place? Si vis pacem, para bellum. The only thing a bully would understand is strength.
Not entire - football has Football Manager (def a niche compared to FIFA/EAFC, but still pretty major), and FIFA will one day publish their FIFA game (there was a licensing disagreement, so EA rebranded their game to EAFC, and FIFA kept the name and will presumably launch a game with it some day).
HAProxy's documentation is pretty bad (almost entirely of the style "here are all the parameters and options available, no concrete complete examples)".
Traefik has easy to parse docs with lots of examples, and mostly, it can autoconfigure itself based on a variety of sources. You can point it to your Kubernetes or Nomad or Consul, (and with small bits of info given when deploying your workloads to those places), and it just works.
> If you're a heavy Traefik user you're eventually going to need a feature that has been carefully omitted from the F/OSS projects
That's literally the point of open core software. It's free and open source at the core, but "enterprise" / "scale" features are behind a license.
Enterprises/Scaled users that can pay, have to, to get the features they need. Everyone else can enjoy and profit off fully free and open source piece of software.
Win-Win-Win.
It's probably the only software business model that allows for a company to actually make money while also giving out most of their products for free as open source. Just selling support/services does not work and does not scale. Cf. literally everyone, the only orgs that somewhat pull it off are foundations/volunteer based projects like Django, Debian, etc but they are not commercial for-profit entities (there is nothing wrong with that, but most people want to be paid well). And your $1k/year, while decent towards a volunteer organisation, would be probably worse than nothing for a commercial company that has costs associated with each contract (legal, administrative, support, etc). For a fun story on the topic, check out HashiCorp's first commercial deal with Apple for a Vagrant plugin, that resulted in HashiCorp losing money on the deal due to the amount of money spent on lawyers reviewing Apple's terms and time spent supporting them afterwards. The only existing somewhat exception is Red Hat, but even they have moved more and more into open core with Ansible Automation Platform and OpenShift, which are their money makers, and have scrapped CentOS as a RHEL compatible free OS.
I mean, if you have one container service only and everything else is ran by systemd, then it makes sense to keep it easy. But other than that, why? Systemd's syntax and docs aren't particularly friendly or easy, so it's not like you gain in simplicity vs just running docker/podman-compose, or even a lightweight orchestrator like Nomad.
- seamless container logs (journalctl), no weird separate logger
- service start/stop/enable-at-boot no weird separate command
- integration with system/user slices, triggers, cronjobs (timers), exposing containers as first class commands overall!
Basically it's worth seeing container services work with non-container services.
If you don't like systemd, or have no stake in it, sure, have fun without it, but it's definitely added value when you're running services, and want to start containerizing some of them without abandoning all the good tools you are using in favour of docker logs docker run etc.
It is the default sport because the barrier to entry is basically having a ball. Random rocks, backpacks, whatever you have can serve as the goalposts.
Most other sports require other equipment too (volleyball needs the net, basketball the hoop, etc. etc.).
It's also easy to understand, and being the most popular sport by far in most countries, allows for an easy appropriation to a community and sense of belonging.
> was forced myself to play it in my childhood
So you're just trauma dumping your childhood issues?
also football can be played in basically any number, from 1:1 to 11:11, which means you can go out with a ball, meet one other kid and play, and random other kids can just join in.
I've literally seen kids unable to speak with each other because of different languages able to join a match :)
I was terrible at football as a kid so it's not like it did much for me, but one cannot deny how universal the game is.
Polish football is mafia an gambling, one of the largest Greek companies is... football prognostic agency. Spanish players are millionaires in early 20s while others get 10% unemployment and if lucky salary 1200 euro. European football is cesspit.
Nah, they advertise (probably) for a similar reason as car brands do, to make the people who bought it already feel better and more reassured about their choice.
Also, obligatory "lucky 10k" xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1053/
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