Not long ago their Bundeskanzler openly said that Germany unaveringly supports a state activelly commiting a Genocide along ethnic lines because of the dominant ethnicity of that country - in other words, Race is the most important of all things, to the point that even Genocide is fine as long as the right race is doing it.
There's also plenty of videos of the abuse of force of the German police towards anti-Genocide demonstrators.
Both in terms of Racism and Authoritarianism - which are fundational elements - German views (certainly those of their political mainstream) and even practices are not tha different from those in their "good old days".
It looks a lot like the seeds of NAZIsm are alive and well in Germany, ready to sprout once again.
He's a psychologically sick guy with a profound Narcisist complex whose constantly harping about how he's great at everything.
People who believe themselves better than everybody else and hence would never fall for a scam are some of the best marks around for scammers.
So it seems like a reasonable explanation that he got swindled into doing something which superficially looked like a win - especially in light of the recent similar "win" in Venezuela - but had secondary effects which turned it into a defeat.
Mind you, I'm not "assuming" jack shit, I'm just putting forward what I think is a likely explanation.
My cash worked fine getting some extra groceries at the store when there was this Iberian Peninsula wide (so Portugal + Spain) daylong blackout the other month.
People without cash were screwed. Some were complaining of having no drinking water (because without power the water from the utilities was soon out as they couldn't run their pumps) and not being able to buy any because they had no cash to pay for it.
Also worked fine when we got hit by a freak storm that trashed lots of trees and plenty of roofs and took power down for 4 days, and I'm in a small city where utilities quickly got fixed - some people out there in small villages were still without power almost a month later.
Mind you, people paying by phone would be even worse - most phones run out of power in a day or two unless you have an external power bank to charge the phone (which I do, but most people don't).
None of this event was some giant deadly thing - the first was a loss of control on the Spanish side ofthe power grid that cascaded into a massive blackout as almost all powder generation ended up switched of and had to be brought up slowly block by block whist keeping generation balanced with consumptions and the second was a strong geographically very focused storm effect with high speed wins during the night that brought down power poles, including the high voltage power distribution ones.
There were no floods or more than a handful of deaths, just lots of topple poles and trees and roofs that lost tiles, so there weren't really any much more pressing issues than having no power and hence no water, with the former leading to unecessary extra problems for people who had no cash to buy groceries with (and because this was a highly focused storm event, there were no problems supplying the place with goods).
And this is far from the only situation were you're stuck without cash: for example banking systems going down means you can't pay with debit cards linked to accounts in that bank (a problem I've seen happen several times both here and when living abroad) and the banking payment system going down means you can't pay at all. The mobile network going down is also a problem because most electronic payment point of sale systems use it rather than landline. Beyond that there are all kind of issues linked to relying on a 3rd part entity for payments like the guy at the supermarket the other day whose just received replacement card wasn't activated so he he got to the till to pay a trolley full of shopping and couldn't.
In Engineering terms, cashless payments have a lot of external dependencies that cash payments do not, plus there is a natural "buffering" with cash (which you yourself can make deeper by having some cash at home) which doesn't exist with digital payments, making cash way more robust than digital payments when doing physically-present payments.
"Bullshitting" is probably the strongest capability of LLMs.
Should've figured out long ago from what repeatedly happened to the Kurds that America doesn't give a shit about any they call "allies" other than Israel, especially Trump's America.
They're furious that the White Jewish Supremacists are also racist against White non-Jews rather than only against non-Whites.
In all fairness, "This is false, Trump is lying" is by far the most likely thing when he says anything that makes him look better (or at least less bad).
IMHO the most likely scenarion is that Trump was played by Netanyahu, later figured it out or was told that he had been played and now is lying about not having been played in the first place.
In my own experience in Britain during the Leave Referendum, lots of Indians are conservatives and even Indian-Nationalists and they absolutelly are anti-Immigrant in the country were they themselves are immigrants as long as they think it's other immigrants that will suffer rather than they themselves.
In fact, this is a general rule, not just for Indians: immigrant rightwingers are no less calously selfish or relishi the hurt of others they see as lesser than local rightwingers, though granted people do usually bring along cultural faces from their country, such as for example a normalized perspective on discrimination against people from other casts for those from India.
Never assume that just because somebody is an immigrant they're inherently better (or worse) than the locals - the main difference between them is how much power they have in the country they live in and expectations informed by the culture they grew up in, not in Moral, Ethics or Principles.
Exactly.
My first personal e-mail way back in the 90s was with my ISP. Then I changed ISPs and saw the problem with that. So I moved to Yahoo.
Some years later, in the 00s I just decided to get my own, paid for, Internet domain and have my e-mail there, even though I could've carried on using Yahoo or get Google Mail (very popular amongst techies back then) for free. The main reason was that I realized I must made sure the e-mail address was MINE, not actually owned by somebody else with me allowed to use it under their conditions.
Twenty years later and guess it was pretty wise to not have my e-mail in the claws of "Definitelly Do Evil" Google.
Experience using and living with Tech, mainly once your understanding of it reaches the level of understanding systemic elements, naturally informs ones choices in Tech, and that often means chosing something else than the mass marketed "popular" stuff that's designed to lock you in, sell you stuff or sell your attention to others and eavesdrop on you and sell your data.
That, right there, is how much America has been made great again.
Start believing in miracles?!