The toddlers were terrifying the poor IDF soldiers, hence they were terrorists.
The reaction of the rest of Europe to Trump's attack would lead Iran to expect that the usual suspects in Europe would attack Iran either way, same as they did back when America invaded "WMD" Iraq.
Certainly were I am (Portugal, which by the way also sent troops to Iraq) there are already people from America and Israel-aligned far-right think-tanks being invited to news segments on public TV about the American attack, where they're complimenting Trump on his action, calling it a "massive victory to Netanyahu" and scaremongering against Iran with exactly the same kind of "arguments" as were used for Iraq (Iran has WMDs, Iran is developing missiles which can reach European cities and so on), so the Manufacturing Consensus machinery is already running.
In the US, specifically, higher oil prices feed into higher prices for the fertilizer used in raising corn, which in turn feeds into higher corn prices, which then feeds into almost all food because in the US corn is used directly or indirectly in food to truly insane levels (for example, cattle is fed corn even though it's not natural and causes health problems hence the overused of antibiotics for cattle in the US and sugar is mainly chemically processed corn).
In other countries it's a bit easier to isolate oneself from the indirect effects of oil price rises if you don't drive ICE vehicles and eat locally grown food because this pathway from "oil" to "almost all food" is either not present or far weaker.
Mind you, I agreed that you can never isolate yourself totally from it unless you're some kind of hermit living in your own cave disconnected from everything else and growing your own food using 100% natural agriculture.
That's the thing: Ray Tracing as implemented on Graphics Cards (which is a subset of what's done in offline rendering for things like Film) only makes 3D rendering environments a bit more realistic in the domain of lighting, not even the same as reality, and this domain is only a small part of the big fucking pile of shortcuts used for realtime 3D rendering, so this improvement leaves all other ways a game space diverges from reality the same.
Mind you, this partial Ray Tracing thing tainting shadows next to brightly lit colored objects and doing proper realtime reflections for all reflective surfaces would be great if one didn't have to actually upgrade one's hardware and the performance loss was small, but that's not the case yet.
From an article about it:
Now, it should be stressed that this is a build of The Witcher 4 specifically designed to show off Unreal Engine's features. Yes, it's running on a standard PS5, but it's not necessarily indicative of the finished product.
So that's like saying "under laboratory conditions it has been demonstrated to work".
If you know what to look for you can notice it (mainly light bouncing of objects and tainting shadows with the color of those objects, such as the shadow above the green canvas here), but the difference to the non-RT version when one doesn't know what to look for is minimal and IMHO not enough to justifying upgrading one's hardware, especially considering that so much of the rest (the water in the streams, the snow in the mountains, the shape of the mountains themselves, the mud splash when a guy is thrown into the mud, the folliage of the plants and so on) has those visual shortcuts I mentioned.
Yeah, sure, it's nice than shadows next to strongly lit colored surfaces get tinted with the color of that surface, but is that by itself worth it upgrading one's hardware?!
When most games with RT in them deliver that performance on one generation old hardware and all environments, then you will have proven the point that for most gamers it has no significant negative impact on performance.
Games visuals are riddled with shortcuts and simplification.
You don't think the way the water moves when your characters steps on a puddle, the smoke rises from fires or the damage on the walls are Physics Simulations, do you?!
It's all a variation of a procedural noise such as ~~Perkin~~ Perlin Noise, particle effects, or at best (for example, ocean simulation) some formulas that turn out to look good enough.
(Want to see Physics Simulations in 3D generated worlds, look at Special Effects in Films).
Improving one element of game space visual fidelity - reflections - is nice but it's unclear that it's worth its downsides (more expensive hardware, slower performance) given how everything else is still one big pile of "good enough" shortcuts.
That's like saying that "physics simulation is the only technique that produces accurately shaped water streams" - technically true but generally not a sufficient improvement over the shortcuts currently in use to make up for the downside that the technically most precise method is slow as fuck.
Game making is at all levels finding shortcuts and simplifications (even games about the real world are riddled with simplifications, if only the gameplay rules being a simplified version of real world interactions because otherwise it would be boring as shit) and in the visual side of things those are all over the place even with RT (the damage on the walls, the clouds in the sky, the smoke rising from fires or the running water on the streams aren't the product of Physics Simulations but, most likely, the use of something like Perkin Noise or even good old particle effects to fake it well enough to deceive human perception).
Yeah, sure RT is, technically speaking in terms of vidual fidelity alone, better than the usual tricks (say, using an extra rendering step for the viewpoint of the main reflective surfaces such as mirrors). Is the higher fidelity (in, remember, a game space which is in many other ways riddled with shortcuts and simplifications) sufficient to overcome its downsides for most people? So far the market seems to be saying that it's not.
If people are drowning, anybody who promises to throw them a life bouy looks like a fucking heroe to them.
Far-Right Populists are riding this effect all over the World all the while mainstream "moderates" entreched in and winning from the current system see nothing wrong with it and persist in trying to sell "steady as she goes" as policy (after all, that's what's best for them personally), something which ressonates with the people who haven't yet been affected by the pillaging of the Economy by the ultra-wealthy - the well-off middle class - but not with those below who are suffering, and as the effects of the pillaging climb higher and higher up the economic ladder, the number of those suffering keeps increasing and so does the appeal of the far-right promises.
I'm actually a member of a small leftwing party in my own country and the current leadership totally fucked the party up in the last decade or so (falling from almost 20 parliamentary representatives to 1) exactly because the new and younger leadership whom the old guard moved over to give room to, were out of touch well-off middle class types who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and never really had to fight for making a living, and hence started parroting liberal talking points from the anglo-saxon world (because all they know besides the local language is English, and they saw that shit on Twitter and though it was "leftwing") all the while most of the people in the country were feeling the pain and it wasn't related to the political slogans that these people were parroting and the unfairnesses they obcessed about.
The out of touch leftwing-cosplayer crowd will never beat the far-right populists because the latter actually pitch radical solutions for the problems of the many (all complete total bullshit, but many people can't tell so go for it) whilst the former pitch "steady as she goes with a few tweaks" which works only for the "I'm alright" well-off middle class and above, not the many, so won't really appeal to the bulk of voters.
I'm not saying that voting for the far-right populists is right or will actually solve the problems of the many, I'm saying it's understandable that so many end up grabbing what looks like the only lifebouy in front of them.
Any genuine half-way competent leftwing politicians from a priviledged background should realise that their life experience is not representative and that the "inequalities" that are of concern to the upper middle class (a typical example: the "glass ceiling for women to become CEOs") aren't at all the biggest and most painful inequalities out there (they only affect a tiny proportion of people, who are already priviledged compared to most of the population and are not at all in pain) and actually fight against the pains that affect the many even if that requires breaking the very system that made them "winners" the day they were born.
Anyways, now in America we're seeing what far-right populists really are when they have power, similarly to what happened in Brexit Britain some years ago (and the "moderate" politicians there don't seem to have so far learned the lesson and keep on relying on the mathematical rigging of FPTP to get power less and less votes) and of course all their promises were bullshit and their "solutions" only make things worse.
"I would be alright".
Avoiding the shit from enshittification isn't hardcore, it's just the normal adult thing to do.
If we want to be realistic, then if there was a nuclear explosion that big on planet Earth all the nations around it would be nuclear wastelands from the shockwave and fallout and the rest of the planet would probably be covered in ice from the nuclear winter.
Most nation states on that side of the planet would be gone and the ones on the other side of the planet would at the very least be collapsing from the fall in agricultural production and subsequent wars of desperation.