I won’t count on this being particularly productive. Most people in Lebanon are glad to see the old regime finally out of power but I don’t see any optimism about this one.

doesnt look so bad

Everyone knows having less than 30% of the open air prison you call home be tuned into an unlivable scorched hell is perfectly normal. Decadent luxury even. Most of the population isn’t even getting shot within seconds of going outside! Having fun in the sun in Khan Yunis and Rafah, who needs the north? We truly did it R*ddit!

With all the doom posting going on here you would have thought Gaza had been turned into rubble.

You’ve really pulled the scales from my eyes, you have given me perspective I’ve desperately lacked. I now understand that I should shut up about it until the entire population of Gaza is fertilizing the ashes of their home, and only then will feeling anything other than ironic detachment be valid, even as part of my own country is currently occupied by the IDF with increasingly unrealistic demands being asked for them to withdraw.

Thanks bro! Really showing us all how much better Lemmy users are than R*dditors. I’ve got IDF MK drones buzzing outside reminding me of who has the arbitrary power of life and death over me, but it’s not the drones, it’s comments like yours that scare me. Jesus fucking Christ.

pray together for it to turn into reality

I guess you can say that, but I think what’s more important is that when he says something that goes against their presumptions they are forced to deal with it.

Francis’s low-bar acceptance of queer people really made a big difference in how many of his followers actually interact with them. Very, very far from perfect, but a huge number of people were forced to challenge their prejudices. Where I live, most people regarded the Venn diagram of gay people and child molesters to be a circle, and now while you’d still still be treated like shit, the idea that you can be gay without being the scum of the earth is much more common. The pope said they’re not bad people, so millions have to find it within themselves to follow what he said.

The Catholic Church will never be a beacon of progressivism. But they’ve been okay at giving stragglers a trustworthy lifeline to slightly more open minded positions.

I don’t think this excuses the bad stuff they’ve done (since this is always brought up any time anyone says anything positive about the church) but I don’t see the church disappearing anytime soon. I’ll take the good where I can find it. (Also the church is very influential where I live, so it’s important that they keep challenging the regressive ideas a lot of powerful and enfranchised people are holding on to. You don’t want to be challenging the pope by denying the atrocities in Gaza do you?)

Edit: just saw that you were replying to someone asking about the US. My comment is about Christians in the Middle East, both (Greek and Latin) Catholics and Maronites which are in communion with Rome. There’s spillover in attitude among the other, non-Catholic sects of Christianity, of course. And further, fainter spillover among others folks.

I do have an oversized battery buffer. Most people are discouraged from cooking or using any resistive load on the batteries, but I opted to invest in a bigger battery backup specifically to be able to do that, it’s why I said 85%+ and not like 40%. The battery buffer really is the point of this system, having 24/7 electricity in my home that I can pull over 20 amperes out of at the drop of a hat is without a question the most decadent luxury I have ever experienced. That’s not something I can just hook up to my house.

If I reconnect the grid-charging circuit, it is more than enough in the winter months nowadays (the grid was down more often in 2020-2023). But that gets really expensive, and relying on the grid is not wise.

If I use the secondary (mafia) grid more frequently (as I did in 2020-2023 out of necessity) I can pull a tiny amount of amps at an extortionate kWh rate, that’s enough to keep things like the fridge and lights and the water pump running. But turn on one hot plate or accidentally use the microwave, turn on the heater to the wrong setting (or the AC to the right setting but at the wrong time) and you have to cover up to get to the freezing street to switch the breaker back on. Sounds obnoxious? Well pre-solar that was the only option for 12+ hours of the day. I remember going down to flip the breaker over twenty times one day as a kid.

Let’s not get into the water situation. I just spent a weekend grappling with neighbors and floater valves.

I live in a country with abhorrently unreliable electricity.

Even now that I have solar and even if I mostly (85%+) cook on a plug-in resistance hob and electric oven, gas is just unbeatable as a backup during the winter. No sun? Grid down? Milk boiled over and got into the hob’s thermostat? Need to cook more than one pot at a time? Israel decided to bomb a fucking residential substation for no reason again? Power company operator decided to accidentally pull an epic prank and route the wrong voltage to everyone’s house, frying a whole town’s fridges, during a year when people couldn’t afford to replace them (I can’t find an English article to link but I promise this happened)? No problemo

I also got a plug-in induction infrared plate and while it is pretty much magical it also makes my inverter shit itself uncontrollably (all my LED lights flicker and it makes an uncomfortable noise) so I really only use it when the ”good” grid is on (the bad one can’t handle it, the good one is the one from the prank above).

You can pry my backup butane from my cold dead hands. I replace the tank less than once a year, it’s fine. Not everyone who wants this option to stay is a regressive cultist.

“But if they say an illegal sentence like “child murder is bad” then we deport them too.”

Know a few people who emigrated to Germany. They aren’t thrilled. One of my friends was basically snubbed by all of his coworkers for months until one of them told him on the side that people suspect they’d get in trouble if it turns out he’s a “Syrian Islamic Extremist” down the line. My guy isn’t Syrian or Muslim. His name is Joe. Not even Youssef. Joe. جو. Fucks sake

“Doctors in Racism” is the way he described the people of Germany. Which is incredible because we’re from Lebanon and “Doctors in Racism” should be our rightful title. Geopolitical events are happening as we speak and people are talking about US stuff and changes in the US since it is so influential on what happens here, and I’ve heard someone say something about “that slave Obama”. This fucking week. Come on now.

FWIW Germany looks like a nice option for me, but I can’t say I’ve been convinced that the good will fully outweigh the bad. If I’m going to be a second class citizen I might as well go to the US and get a shot at making a bit more money.

While I don’t think it does us any favors to front-load any plans for the future with “just send <group> to <place>”, it’s also good to point out that a chunk of them are originally from Libya in the first place.

I’ve been reflecting on this a lot lately, especially after watching a video by an internet funny man I enjoy (Eddie Burback) about him locking his phone away for a month (not a feasible strategy for most people.)

I also enjoy pretty much anything online much more on the desktop. When things started pivoting to app-only it felt very weird at the time - the phone access was always the clunkier secondary backup nice-to-have.

That said, 80% of my browsing happens on my phone. It’s less fun and it’s more mindless, but that’s the truth. I think I’ll hit a point where I find my phone just too magnetic but as a dopamine crutch it’s cripplingly convenient.

Part of what drew me to the old site in ye olde 2013 was that it was the largest platform that wasn’t shitty about this specific subject.

Funny to see this is now the standard expectation for that place. Look how they massacred my boy

My country is being invaded illegally right now with zero consequences, I know what you are saying. But there should be zero way to profit from war, from an ethical standpoint these industries would ideally be nationalized and kept far far away from profiteers.

I know exactly what “peace” with the apartheid Nazis taking a fresh bite out of my homeland means, I’m not oblivious to that flavor of “pacifism” that gets promoted by the slimiest characters. You’re pushing back against a point I never made. I empathize with a lot of the sentiment supporting Ukraine specifically because I feel like that country’s relationship with Russia is in some ways analogous to our relationship with Hafez and Bashar’s Syria.

Arguably we need the weapons more. The countries controlling the world’s economic and social levers are more than willing to punish Russia, great, but then bend over backwards, and even spit in the face of their commitments to the ICJ, because we’re just in the way of a modern colonial project. I’ll take the guns in a heartbeat. I just believe it’s an unethical thing to privatize, monetize, and eventually promote to keep the numbers going up.

I think it’s sick that people downvote this in the name of civility. I understand people not wanting to make a super solid link between wealthy magic bean salesmen and societal issues and seeing it as a slippery slope, but the weapons industry? Fucking come on.

If you profit from the most literal form of human suffering, you are a statistical outlier even among outliers. I can’t think of many less ethical things to enrich yourself from than making the world a deadlier place.

This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.

That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.

The fact that he’s not advocating for the wholesale execution of trans people out in the street makes some people think he’s some kind of “crazy” pro LGBT “corruptor” of good Christian families.

At least here where I am, a stone’s throw away from Palestine, these are not topics that are dealt with with a lot of open mindedness. I hate “hate the sin not the sinner” just as much as anyone else on Lemmy, but I’ve seen the effect his rhetoric (specifically on gay people) has had and it’s certainly better than Benedictus 16 before him.

I don’t agree with everything he says (I attended a Catholic school, which is never a faith-enhancing experience) but I’m damn certain that he’s slowly dragging most of the Catholic faithful kicking and screaming into the 21st century when he just as easily could have been ten times worse on social issues. As far as a pope goes, this is pretty much the best case scenario as far as this stuff is concerned. The industrial-scale child abuse still needs a lot of work though. Let’s not kid ourselves.

Now if only he knew what a compiler is.

I’ve been to both touristy and more “normal” parts of Turkey, and I was pretty shocked how few people understood English (or French, since you mention it). I actually mostly got by with a broken mix of English and Arabic loanwords I know they have in Turkey (or Turkish loanwords we have in Lebanese Arabic).

Drive down any road in Lebanon and you’ll see most signs, especially newer signs, are in English. When I was a kid it was mostly French and Arabic, now it’s mostly English and Arabic with some French sprinkled in. I’ve also been seeing a lot of municipal road and highway signs use “Beirut” instead of “Beyrouth”.

I think we still lean more heavily on French loanwords in our day to day Arabic, at least when not discussing something tech-related.

Also cinemas have consistently used the original English audio now, while we had a good 20% of these movies dubbed in French when I was a kid. A lot of companies’ business operations now are almost exclusively done in English (I’m talking about the documents - the conversations are naturally in Arabic).

I guess none of this is strictly true, there are areas and sectors (especially law) where French is still much more dominant. But people who are French-educated all eventually learn some English, the reverse (the category I’m in) is very rare. I still understand French, even rapid-fire French French, but speaking it or writing it has become so rare for me that it’s really atrophied over the past few years. My English is fine, because I’ve actually had to use it daily.

This is all just additional info, my point is just that Lebanon should probably be higher than Turkey on the list. Turkey has a massive domestic media machine, business is done in Turkish there, I’m pretty sure their schools teach everything in Turkish instead of having some subjects only done in foreign languages like we do. So just based on what I know in these two countries, the placements seem off, and it makes me question what else is going on with the data.

I wonder what the methodology is. There’s no way Turkey is higher than Lebanon unless the metric is something specific that we have terrible data coverage for (which is very likely)