When US policy can change in hours, based on the whims of a madman, it’s not exactly difficult to see why people lose faith in that stability. Investors want long term stability, and right now things are complete chaos.

That’s just living in Europe in general though. Everyone makes fun of everyone. Dutch and Belgians and Germans have jokes about each other since we share borders. There’s also stereotypes about the Spanish and Greeks being lazy, the French being rude, that sort of thing.

People book vacations like that well in advance. So there’s a time delay between the bookings and drop. Yesterday I read an article about Dutch travel agencies seeing far less bookings for US holidays. In january they saw a 20 percent drop, but they didn’t have February figures yet.

So by the end of this year, the tourism decrease will likely be much higher.

And the absolute insane part about it is: most actual religions are not opposed to vaccination!

The pope doesn’t mind vaccination, and indeed encourages it:

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/10/1071785531/on-covid-vaccinations-pope-says-health-care-is-a-moral-obligation#%3A~%3Atext=Francis%2C+85%2C+has+generally+shied%2Cget+inoculated+was+"suicidal."

Mormons encourage vaccination. Hindus and Buddhists have no issues with it. Most of Islam and Judaism are OK with it as well…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccination_and_religion

So if most of your mainstream religions agree that vaccination is a good thing - one of the few things they agree on, I’d imagine -it doesn’t make sense to oppose it on religious grounds.

Some people just want to difficult. And kids are dying because of it.

Harassment ‘of’ 10-17 year olds ‘by’ the game? My brother in Christ, 10-17 year olds ARE the harassment. As a 40+ gamer, I’m confident that we can drop harassment levels by 90 percent if those kids weren’t on it. Little sweaty shitheads are why I stopped playing multiplayer games.

In short, the complexity acted as a filter. It was a barrier to entry, which meant you had to be a bit of a nerd to get online. Back in the ‘90’s, people made fun of you for being an online nerd. But it also meant that the people who got online tended to be smarter. More educated.

The internet of the ‘90’s had a very nerdy culture. The worst debates were about Star Wars vs Star Trek. We disagreed on some things, but on the whole it was ‘us nerds’ online.

Now that we made it this easy, there’s no longer a filter: you can find anyone and everyone online. Including some folks who can’t really handle this much freedom without being assholes with it. The web also gravitated towards bigger platforms which, ironically, have much less of a community feel than the old web. In the 90’s, I knew everyone on a forum by name. But on a subreddit with a million people, there’s no real ‘community’.

The web these days is also overrun with politics, which simply wasn’t a thing back in say, 1995.

I’m an 80’s kid. We had to learn everything: MS-DOS, Windows, how to install OS’s and software, serial ports, etc. Nothing was easy or convenient. You had to LEARN how and why things worked if you wanted to run games and things.

My dad never used any of our actual PC’s. He wouldn’t know which way to hold the mouse, much less anything else. We tried to teach him, but he just couldn’t grasp any of the fundamentals.

But with an iPad? That’s easy. It just works. He can e-mail, do Facebook, watch YouTube or other streaming…

Point is: we made shit way too accessible and convenient. Kids never have to learn anything anymore. So they don’t. We literally had to teach interns the basics of working with a desktop; all they’ve ever used was an iPad and phone.

It also lead to the destruction of the old web. Back in the early to late ‘90’s, you had to be a nerd to use it. To WANT to use it even. But now that it’s so easy and convenient even my completely tech illiterate dad can get online, things have turned to shit. We never should’ve made it this convenient.