In my case, out of nostalgia for the Google of old. I paid for a Pixel phone and was very unimpressed with the experience, so much so that after a lifetime on Android I went and bought a brand new iDevice. Oddly enough I found Google Fit to be a nice app to use, fairly straightforward and without too much crud. Oh well, off to the Goog Graveyard it goes!
That was my experience as well. Generally speaking the Pixel 7a is a competent phone with one (big) flaw. The battery life is truly terrible, and the charging speeds are glacial. I was honestly expecting more, especially as its advertised as Google's best. The forums are full of people complaining about it and the responses are almost the same: Turn off 5G!! Turn off wifi scanning! Turn off bluetooth scanning too! Dial down the screen refresh rate!
Returned the phone and got an iPhone 13 instead; and as painful as it was switching to iOS after 13 years of Android, I don't regret my decision. The iDevice comes with its own niggles, but at least I don't have to worry about battery life (yet). Maybe google will figure it out by the time the Pixel 8a comes out.
I do as well, which is why when I went to Athens for two weeks last September, I very much looked forward to lots of smoky old orthodox churches. Alas, it wasn't to be: the vast majority of churches I saw looked brand new and as if they had been designed by MacDonald's. Clearly the church has money - and the imagination/vision of petty shopkeepers.
> NATO operated in Libya to implement a security council resolution, meaning it had at least the tacit approval of China and Russia as well.
The criticism towards NATO in Lybia mostly boils down to NATO overstepping and going out of scope of the resolution. And clearly, it's not Russia, China or the US who should decide for Africa.
What about Syria? The US is relying on NATO infrastructure for its operations there. Who invited them?
What about Yugoslavia? This is an especially noteworthy case, judging by how hard the western propaganda tries to erase it from history. Just ask a Serbian whether they feel like NATOs depleted uranium munitions felt "defensive", or what they think of the narrative that current conflict in Ukraine is the first serious conflict in Europe since WWII.
Srsly, what is it going to take to drop an idiotic supremacist image of NATO as a beloved and welcomed knight in shining armor, and realize that it's just a tool of war.
Probably quite a lot, since it was born in a culture with a history of inventing supremacist ideologies, deaf to an idea that some might not really see it as a universal good, but rather as just another quasi-empire, minding it's own political and economic benefit before anything else.
Quite a lot of people in Eurasia and Africa see NATO as a threat and don't feel like being ochlos to NATO's demos. But what do these subhuman unenlightened savages understand, am I right? /s
There isn't some separate NATO army that does things at the behest of its members. Sometimes the members of NATO decide to do things with their militaries, alone or together. They have clubbed together on some equipment standards too. But the existence or not of NATO as a defensive alliance wouldn't have prevented those countries from intervening in those situations.
Turkey could have provided those bases for the US to use in Syria NATO or not. Indeed, they didn't just provide them because they're NATO, the US still had to make an agreement.
I think the Syrian Kurds were pretty keen on the US being there, and the Kosovo Albanians in Yugoslavia. If I recall that one correctly, Russia also sent a peacekeeping force at the same time.
> Quite a lot of people in Eurasia and Africa see NATO as a threat
Sure, but that doesn't mean they should. They can see the US as a threat, or an actor such as France. But the Polish army is unlikely to be bullying them around.
It's also impossible to please. When Western countries didn't step in to conflicts and genocide they're criticized, when they do they're criticized. Should they have just let the Serbs do whatever in Kosovo?
> NATO as a beloved and welcomed knight in shining armor, and realize that it's just a tool of war.
I've never seen it that way. It's a tool of war and tools of war are also tools of defense. My country is not a NATO member.
As somebody who has lived in that neck of the woods, I would want nuclear weapons and war in general to stay very, very far from my shores.
Equally I would want the current combatants to take a step back and have a grown up discussion about NATO expansion, security guarantees, ending the bloodshed - you know the boring nitty gritty stuff. I'm not dumb enough to cheer on a nuclear strike, regardless of who launched it.
The hot water was "scheduled" - usually twice a day. I don't remember that well as I was quite young at the time, but I think I was meant to be on for a couple of hours in the morning and another couple of hours in the evening. In reality however, the hot water was never more than lukewarm at best and the schedule itself was very flexible: I remember whole weeks without hot water.
Technically you don't need a degree to be an officer in the UK: you only need A Levels (finish high school) to go to Sandhurst and begin officer training. In reality however something like 98% of Sandhurst applicants are university graduates. I don't know the exact percentage of entrants who don't have a degree though, so don't quote me. It has been a while.
P.s. as a famous example, I believe Prince Harry went to Sandhurst without going to university first.
Your experience sounds similar to ours. We're an engineering company in the UK; in better days we paid £3,000 for 1,000 chips. Today we paid £58,000 for the same amount.
