Our commitments were made in an entirely different realpolitik environment, before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine.

Swedish gdp per capita has been stagnant for several years with significant real wage decline, particularly for low to lower mid-income households - an estimated 6.5-16.5% decline since pre pandemic levels in 2019, only starting to properly recover in the past year or so.

Simultaneously there’s increasing healthcare costs tied to an aging population, massive needs to increase defence spending (1% of GDP in 2019, 2.4% currently, 5% goal) as well as significant and increasing societal economic losses from crime.

Something has had to budge and this is, unfortunately, one of those things. Work continues albeit at a lower priority.

Make no mistake. Sweden is still and will continue to be leagues ahead of most developed nations, and does really well even compared to the global average. Compared to a Swede, the average human has a carbon footprint 26% larger, European 50% larger, German 90% larger, Chinese 126% larger and each of y’all americans emit almost as much as 4 Swedes put together on average.

Yes!

FM radio has to compete with (free) Spotify nowadays given that 4g coverage is pretty ubiquitous, at least where I live. This means they can’t stuff too many ads in there.

This person has had sixteen name changes. It’s frankly absurd.

Originally “Isabella Khatibi Ghabagh Tabeh”, born in Teheran. Currently “Fariba Juliette Jennifer Vancor”.

Seems like a shoddy ripoff of the “meme”/infographic from the Hong Kong protests:

Poor sods. The CCP trampled all over them, and now they’re all stuck under Beijing’s boot.

…or you can be coding assembler - it’s all just bits to me

Yup, quit Reddit when the RIF dev said he was done

Honestly I think the easiest thing would be to not allow images or embedding at all in PMs and perhaps display a warning message when clicking links “you are leaving [instance name]…”

Analyzing potentially lots of text and images in an effort to “guarantee” safety of users is likely a sisyphusian endeavour that is bound to fail - and furthermore also has privacy issues (namely that “private” messages aren’t private at all)

Honestly, I would recommend not books on atheism per se, but rather ones exploring non-theistic philosophy. Schools of thought amongst atheists and agnostics are just as diverse, if not more so than amongst theists. My world view is made up of many things, humanitarianism, empiricism and so forth. Ideas that build a foundation.

There is also the more emotional side, finding beauty and purpose in life. Personally I find myself coming back to the works of Carl Sagan, particularly “The pale blue dot”. Capturing, at least for me, a lot of essence.

Here is a short excerpt that he read. Just, wow.

What is the direction of causality here? Being physically able to bike to work inherently filters out a lot of at-risk groups. It’d be good to actually be able to read the study in order to check the methodology, and whether they compensate for these sorts of things.

Unfortunately, the uploader does not reference the source, which makes it difficult to check, and I’m not going to watch an entire video essay to try and find a reference in there (if it even exists).

There’s also umu!

It essentially (if I’ve understood things correctly) aims to replicate the behaviour of proton.

Works like a charm, I have a simple alias set up that will run almost any .exe - even installers and stuff. Only thing that hasn’t worked so far was my digital exam software (that is essentially a windows rootkit) because it couldn’t find the cursor images lol.

Idk if I’d call it 5d chess, more like a showman that uses drama with the intent of social manipulation without any scruples. That’s how he managed to win both the 2016 & 2024 elections.

No, I highly doubt that. For one, it isn’t feasible. A declaration of war wouldn’t make it through congress, and is highly unlikely that the US military would actually execute such orders.

The primary purpose of Trumps posturing - at least in my analysis - is a retarded way of intimidating EU countries into militarization to enable shifting US troops to other theatres (Middle East, Asia).

Well, that’s just called lying - US politicians haven’t been fiscally conservative in a long time.

Compared to Sweden

The tax rate is never the issue.

Maybe not where you live, but here (Sweden) where the average worker pays ~60% tax on their earned income the perspective is a bit different :)

Right now certainly isn’t a time to be cutting taxes, but when the gov:t ends up… checks notes… spending 74mSEK on modern art for a rail link that had already overran its budget by 30% - it gets a bit jarring. Meanwhile hospitals across the country are in full cost cutting mode due to the ongoing recession and inflation.

Usually fiscal irresponsibility comes in the form of lavish promises (subsidies, tax cuts, projects etc.) with a jarring absence of an answer to the question “How are we going to finance this?”

Euro perspective - When I hear fiscally conservative, that means supporting a governmental policy that is frugal with spending and responsible with public assets and finances.

This has several parts, here are some of the most important:

a) Keeping a balanced budget - the government should not be spending more than it is collecting from taxes and income. (A little debt in dire times is fine, but that should be payed off when possible)

b) Responsible management and long term planning - the planning horizon should be counted in decades

c) Focusing on core tasks: national security, infrastructure, healthcare, education etc.

d) Not raising taxes unless strictly necessary, lowering them if it is permissible according to the above.

Socially liberal => supports personal liberties

Now why does government debt even matter? Well, because debt is owed somewhere, and if it becomes large may mean that the government is beholden to other parties for the debt.

Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.

Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.

Currently these kinds of things can’t be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.

deleted by creator

deleted by creator

deleted by creator