Domestic abuse is made worse with alcohol, car accidents, work accidents...
There are many way the whole society pays for allowing people access to a drug such as alcohol.
Prohibition generally has fared poorly even for more complicated chemicals, but alcohol is essentially made from food. The ingredients for beer (and its distilled relations, whisky / scotch) are quite similar to the ingredients for leavened bread.
There is an "iron law of prohibition" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_prohibition) which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Such was what happened in the original Prohibition in the US; beer and wine were ditched in favor of more potent hard liquor, which was often poorly made and possibly dangerous to consume.
There seems to be some contradictory opinions on Prohibition's overall effects, but what I seem to gather is that, while drinking overall went down, access to alcohol was still fairly easy (as alcohol isn't difficult to make), and the problem drinkers became more disruptive (due to consuming stronger, often poorly made stuff).
Right, but - I have never engaged in domestic abuse. I have never caused a car accident. I have never had a work accident. And yet, I drink daily.
Why should my own enjoyment of life be curtailed, simply because others can't behave themselves? That would be punishing me for others' failings, and that is unjust.
Not that agree with prohibition, I don't; but the general answer to your question is because that's how society works. Sometime you have to give something up because in net in makes things better overall.
Physically due to it's geography(the arbitrary division of Asia/Europe aside, Turkey has a very significant population(over 10 Million people) on its officially European lands), culturally due to it's history(The Ottoman Empire has had its significant chunk in Eastern Europe), Culturally(Turks have quite an European culture despite the Islamic influence. That's what happens when you live for generations in Europe. Do I have to mention that the roots of many European cultures are in Turkey. Have you heard of Hagia Sofia for example?). The Turkish economy and Turkish institutions are deeply integrated with the European ones, that's still true despite the damage the Erdogan caused.
It's True that Turks are not much like the Germans or the Dutch but they are like the Greeks, the Spanish and the Hungarians.
The camels and the belly dancers are Tourist attractions. Not to be confused with how Turks live.
So? Peace in Europe is something unusual and we were lucky to have it from 1945 to 2022. The history of Europe is a bloodbath and the Turks took part in it. It's one of the reasons why Turkey is a European country, actually.
>Are you insane? The Hagia Sofia was built by Greeks centuries before the Turks arrived off the steppe.
Notice how the ancient Greek stuff is in Turkey now. Unlike the British, Turks did not move it. That's why I say the ancient European history is in Turkey, that's why Turkey is a European country.
Apart for the dominant religion, Everything about Turkey is European. Oh, and the dominant European religion has deep roots in Turkey and I'm not talking just about Hagia Sophia.
You should take a long vacation in Turkey. Huge enlightenment awaits you.
You mention the past. So many things have changed since then.
I am Spanish and I take offence at being compared to a Turk.
Turkey is a Muslim country that is completely placed in Asia with forced marriage and honour killings. There have been recent talks of bringing back the death penalty[]. Erdogan is the true face of the country despite the whitewashing that had been happening in the recent decades.
The fact that you are a self-admitted bigot (taking offense at being compared to any member of an entire group is the definition of bigotry)doesn't entitle you to change history or geography.
Turkey is geographically partly in Europe. Istanbul sits on the historical border between Europe and Asia, and there is a chuck of land west of Istanbul that is Turkish. In fact, there are parts of Turkey on the European mainland that are farther west than much of Ukraine or Moldova.
Islam is an important part of the culture of many European countries - Spain in particular has significant historical Muslim influence, especially in your architecture. Several majority-Muslim countries are firmly in Europe - Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, North Macedonia. There are significant Muslim minorities in a few other countries - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Montenegro, Georgia. Even in Western Europe, there are significant Muslim minorities in many of the old colonial empires - France, Belgium, Sweden, The Netherlands, UK.
Not to mention, Turkey is still a secular country, even if Erdogan seems poised to turn it towards fundamentalism unfortunately.
A man could have seen both the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the Moors being driven out of Spain in the same lifetime; yet you let the Turks take credit for the pre-conquest Hagia Sophia (which they didn't build), while also subordinating Spanish civilization to their Moorish predecessors.
The importance of the Hagia Sophia being in Turkey is to remind everyone that that land is indeed part of Europe, and has deep cultural ties to other parts of Europe, even if it was later conquered by the Turks. Anyone claiming that Istanbul is not part of Europe has to also claim that Constantinople was not a part of Europe. Not to mention, the Turks borrowed a great deal of culture from the Byzantines whose land they conquered. It's not like they burned down their cities and killed all the people - the Ottoman Empire was to a great extent built around the legacy of the Byzantine (Roman) empire. Even ethnically, most Turks today are much closer to the Greeks and Romans living in Byzantium than to the original Turkish conquerors (who were of Mongol descent), at least in the western parts of the country.
The Hagia Sophia can also act as a nice symbol of this: it is largely identical to the church that emperor ~Julian~ Justinian commissioned (the last Roman emperor to ever hold Rome, though only briefly), but it has been repurposed as a mosque, with two minarets added and several parts of the church re-painted for Islamic sensibilities. An Islamic church built on the structure of the old Roman/Greek one.
As for Spain, the situation is similar: when the medieval Europeans invaded Spain and (re-)conquered it, they then borrowed quite a bit from the culture that the Moors left behind there, as is plainly visible in Spanish architecture of the time and later, even up to the present. Of course, the Moors themselves had been influenced by the Roman & Spanish culture that they found when they originally conquered the peninsula themselves.
Edit: small correction - Justinian conquered Rome and had the Hagia Sophia built, not Julian.
Turkey is not a muslim country but a country with majority of its population being muslim. Forced marriages and honour killings are illegal activities in the rural regions that are becoming thing of the past thanks to the active measures taken. Arranged marriages are still common in the rural parts but almost non-existent in the cities.
And no, Turkey has no death penalty. Politicians may say that they would re-introduce it when they speak to their extremist voters and they had the political power for a decade to re-introduce but they never did. Do you know why? Because it's an extremely unpopular among the Turks.
So you’re just going full mask off and telling us you’re a bigot? Spain being a major contributor to racism and not always considered white must pain you.
Respectfully disagree. The line is not arbitrary. Turkey is the beginning of Asia geographically, culturally and historically. Hagia Sophia is not Turkish-made (obviously).They have an offensive military dogma towards all their neighbors and routinely fail every measure of "democratic" law. Erdogan still represents the majority and the government is in bed with the extreme right party. They invaded Iraq and Syria, they routinely suppress their Kurdish minority.
Can you give some arguments instead of statements? For example, maybe you can explain your reasoning why do you think that Turkey is geographically in Asia? Maybe you can explain why do you think that Turkey, the successor of an empire with more than 500+ years in Europe is Asian? A country deeply integrated with Europe is culturally asian?
Then we can see if you have a point. There's no use to disagree by just saying something different and give no reasoning.
And the "They invaded Iraq and Syria" statement is so ridiculous that I don't see point in arguing over it. If it's not clear, Google the topic and look closely at the dates of the military activities of UK/France/USA in these countries. You should also Google for George Bush and Tony Blair. Check out the British sentiment for Tony Blair's dealings with Bush. Look closely, why the British leftist are still bitter with Tony Blair's affair with George Bush? Look for videos of "Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf".
Plays football and basketball in their European federations. Probably any other sport too. Apart from that I personally think of Turkey as Middle East, Asia.
Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents? I wonder if some people would love for Israel to be considered European…but of course not the rest of the area around it…you know why. Wink wink.
>Why are Europe and Asia considered two continents?
Because the ancient Greek cartographers thought they were clearly separated, and the convention just stuck. Of course its easier for us to see it differently with satellite imagery.
I was inferring modern racism is why it is nearly embedded into our culture. I don’t think so many people would have issues with Turkey being European if they were paler and Christian.
I was testing this lately,Teradata, SQL server, Oracle and others just return ß for upper('ß'). Snowflake returns SS.
There is btw an upper letter defined for ß
The main question I have for DB is, how good is their query optimiser/compiler? It's fun that you can run some predefined set of queries fast. More important is, how good you can run queries in the real world, with suboptimal data models, layers upon layers of badly written views, CTEs, UDFs...
That is what matters in the end. Not some synthetic benchmark based on known queries you can optimise specifically for.
@AtlasLion you are right real world performance matters. We test extensively with actual workloads, and the speed up holds there too. For example: lots of real world BI queries are repeated over smallish data sets of 10 to 50 GB. We test that size factor and pattern all the time.
Their cofounder was behind vectorwise, which kicked ass in benchmarks, but died as no one even heard of it.
You can run the benchmark queries fast, that's great, but can you handle code migrated from vertica? Will you optimiser come up with a good plan for queries built on 15 layers of views? That's what companies in the real world have, not some synthetic benchmark that you can make sure you can run for marketing purposes.
The benchmark itself is kinda useless, so I don't see why they should. If you look at tpc-h for years, you had exasol as a top dog, but in the real world that meant nothing for them.
Exactly, companies learnt from Exasol
Out of the box performance is the name of the game
Executing a benchmark as complex as TPC-DS without tuning by Databricks or Snowflake is a big accomplishment
