Then a bunch of white Ashkenazi/Sephardic/Mizrahi bois ship on over from Europe and Yemen and Morocco and try to claim themselves as the originators when they clearly aren't.

Israel has always been a country trying to coopt the culture of its Arab neighbors. They've tried to claim shawarmas, falafel and hummus, dishes that are quintessentially Arabic, as their own.

> Like most things about this World Cup, the reality appears to be different.

> Fifa should not have a problem selling out the games featuring the marquee teams - Argentina, Brazil, England, Germany and Spain, to name a few.

> We should be able to say the same about the host nations, but Fifa has priced these games so highly that only two of the nine matches featuring Canada, Mexico or the United States are officially sold out.

> on Saturday there were close to 74,000 tickets available across 86 of the 104 matches.

> It is going to price out most people.

Pretty much. I guess FIFA just figured they'd make more money milking the already rich. They must've seen the Superbowl finals performance and figured that broligarchs will pay those rates.

Unfortunately this is what I meant by the braggarts and resume padders. It's usually only after these people leave that the company takes a serious look at their books and then decide that they want to move away from SF.

Salesforce is the most bloated piece of any software I've ever seen, and I've seen Azure. Apples and oranges, yes, but Azure is far more navigable than Salesforce.

Once when planning to buy some property, I watched for 10 minutes as the real estate sales agent painstakingly took about 10 minutes to navigate through and book an apartment for me. Enough time for me to start second-guessing about buying the property. Had SF been faster, I would've been stuck with some really illiquid shit.

There wasn't any chance of Hamas being overthrown by the Palestinians either. With clandestine support from both Israel and Qatar, Hamas ensured that they were the only ones with guns on the Strip.

Yahya Sinwar was captured and imprisoned in a Mossad cell for years. Even if he weren't an active Israeli puppet, Mossad would've easily known the ways they could manipulate him into a specific action, and egged him to carry that out. It's already been established that the Hamas leadership in Qatar were in the dark with respect to the October 7 attacks when they first happened too. I don't condone Hamas either, but it's also very likely Israel is heavily complicit.

When Shiism took root in Iran, they enjoyed favor with Persian culture, which has always been a strongly defensive culture which has had to fight against multiple threats throughout its history. Persian culture has always had this "us vs the others" mentality, in which Shiism fit perfectly as a fringe movement.

Even then, most Shiites didn't take Shia practices or even Islamic practices seriously - many just continued their previous traditions as is. Even today, there are Shias who visit Zoroastrian fire temples and pray there, or depict imagery of Muhammad with fires around his head - something that would be blasphemous in Sunni Islam.

Had Ismail Safavid's conversion campaign not have happened, Shiism would have been just another fringe sect like Ibadism, the predominant sect in Oman which comprises less than 0.5% of the global Islamic population (3 million members).

People who've been to that border in normal times know how fiercely that border is protected.

It's much easier to start up a company in the US than it is in any part of Europe.

Iran can't even tell Hezbollah to stand down because the group was already extremely weakened after the October 7 war and the death of Haniyeh.

Where I find China lacking is in creativity and imagination. Yes, there are some changes in that front happening, but you'll never find OpenAI, Helion Energy or SpaceX being founded in China. Those projects won't even get the greenlight from the CCP to get started off the ground because of their high capital and startup costs.