Musk reposted a chart that claims Europe is suffering from a “fertility crisis,” saying “civilization may end with a bang or with a whimper (in adult diapers).”

Right. Europe. Civilisation. Coming from a bigoted, lying, racist, billionaire that’s hardly surprising.

Further, so what?

When I say Left, I mean Vänsterpartiet, not some nebulous coalition. See their stance here.

Chat control was a proposal on an EU level which meant that applications and social media platforms would be forced to scan all of their users messages. The proposal has been put forth by the EU comission as a part of a larger package with the purpose of protecting children against exploitation on the internet. The Left Party considers that the part specifically about chat control wouldn’t contribute to the end goals. There are more effective measures that need to be taken in order to protect children.

After significant criticism from us and many others the EU parliament has significantly improved the proposal. They have among other things removed all parts regarding automatic scanning. This has meant that all parties now are in support of the EU-parliament position. The proposal is now on hold among the member states and instead another, temporary law has been extended to counter sexual abuse of children on the internet.

Overall the Left (Vänsterpartiet) campaigns on a position of being against surveillance and the like. The Social Democrats (part of the Left coalition) however is in favour of it, because of course they fucking are. My issue here is obviously that they’re lying to our faces.

On a much greater scale I have a lot of issues. For the most part I align mostly with V and MP, but we’re talking on a level of like 60-70%, so they don’t actually represent my views particularly well. In the grand scheme of things that’s also not something I’d expect; I’m rather extreme but I also realise that there’s only so much we can do when operating within the system we currently have. Thus I align with the parties that align the closest with the core beliefs I have, V and MP.

One of my biggest icks when it comes to politics is hiding behind children. It infuriates me because it’s never genuine. It’s never about the fucking children, they’re just a convenient excuse because the moment someone criticises a suggestion, you can turn around and say “Oh so you hate children? Are you a paedophile? Why do you support children being harmed?”

I’m still fucking mad the Left voted yes for this. Campaigning on a no and then turning their coats immediately after the elections. Disgraceful, and I hope whichever party members are responsible get booted.

What!

Not at all, if anything I feel affirmed. He seems like a really cool guy. A shame he keeps getting shafted.

It happens. Times past they’ve used buckets of seawater to save villages from encroaching lava. Icelanders are built different.

Their current interim CEO previously worked at AirBNB. I’ve a hard time trusting the judgement of someone who’d help upend various housing markets across the globe.

Yes, unfortunately in the US it’s two parts 1) rural areas are not very well-serviced as you say

It doesn’t even have to be that rural, honestly. My friend lived in a town in MA with about 70k inhabitants. To me this is a fairly large town, my current town is about 20k, and my previous town was about 30k. Honestly I didn’t even have any idea that the town they lived in was so populous until now (as I just looked it up), because it didn’t feel like it. In terms of services and population I got the impression that it was smaller than my hometown at the time. It’s just spread out over a much larger area and very little is made to be accessible by walking.

My friend had a ~30 minute walking distance from their house to the nearest grocery store. In my current town I have 2 grocers within 9 minutes of walking distance. Both are easily accessible with bicycle as well.

There’s also the general consumption attitude. My friend went shopping once every 7-14 days. Nowadays I order in groceries in bulk every 7 days, but in the past going for groceries was a more spontaneous thing. I know plenty of people who pick up groceries more or less daily on their way home from work. From what I observed, a lot of consumer goods is available in larger bulk quantities in the U.S. compared to what you see here. You generally also don’t buy drinking water here, but in the U.S. that’s sometimes required.

There’s a lot of nuances. I live quite comfortably as a pedestrian/cyclist over here in Sweden. I don’t think I could do that if I’d lived where my friend did.

And if you live so rural that that’s not feasible – well that’s your issue then, nobody’s forcing you to live in bumfucknowhere.

Sure, no individual is like to force you to live in the middle of nowhere, but circumstances might.

I’m not saying that cars should be a thing, but rather talking about (some) reasons they are. The biggest determining factor really is just car culture. The car and oil industry has done a great job at manufacturing demand for cars, and I’d wager that’s the main determining factor.

If you want to see a reduction in cars on the roads, the best way to do so is simply to make other means of transport more feasible. You don’t fix traffic by widening roads, that just induces further demand. Instead, set up bus lines, mark certain lanes as bus only. Heck, convert some lanes to bicycle only lanes.

It’s been easy for me to take that kind of infrastructure for granted. Where I live for example, there’s a pedestrian/bicycle path all the way from my town, to the nearby larger town ~35km away. It’s fully possible to bike over there if you’re prepared for a 1-1½ hour ish ride.

It makes it all the more sad, I feel.

I’m sure this could be negated with flowy clothing that contains adversarial patterns. At least for a while.

I mean there’s status tied to car culture as well. It’s a common problem with consumerism, and why people build these tribes around brand loyalty and whatnot. The fact that massive vehicles are popular in NYC isn’t incompatible with the notion that delivery services and public transport is available there. According to this… Powerpoint (??) on nyc.gov, about 53% of households in NYC have access to a car (page 53), which is significantly lower than the national average.

As a Swede, I think the reason this baffles you has a lot to do with the fact that the U.K. is comparatively tiny, with 67 mil inhabitants on 244 sqkm. Sweden for example has 10.5mil inhabitants on 450 sqkm.

What happens is that densely populated areas will have access to these services, perhaps not for free, but they’re at least there. Less sparsely populated areas have less service coverage, and so you get more car dependant. Here in Sweden at least we have a decent public transport network so even in my old village of 600 people you could make do without a car, you just couldn’t be particularly spontaneous about things.

The U.S. is very much structured around owning cars. Massive roads, poor pedestrian/cycling infrastructure, and a general lack of public transit. I visited Massachusetts back in 2019 and got a completely different perspective on things. Until then I didn’t understand why my friend just didn’t bike everywhere, but having been there it’s easy to see that it’s not viable. Even the cul-de-sac they lived on wasn’t very pedestrian friendly.

That’s not to say that the U.S. could have more sensible sizes on their cars, they definitely could. I think the sizes of cars growing has to do with manufacturers wanting increased profit. We’re seeing an increase in the average car size here in Europe as well, with a lot of the more compact cars being taken off the market.

Do you need complex investment options in your bank? I’m sure some banks offer that here, but there are also dedicated services specifically for gambling on the stock market, which I think more people would be drawn to as they are focused on that specific niche. The bank investment options are more for long-term savings rather than proper investments.

I knew that the bloody AirBNB CEO was a bad sign of more to come. Mozilla is dead.

Police unsettled when homicide victim speaks up. Shot on sight.

Ah thank you. It paywalled me so there was no context.

Right? Do they mean anti-abortion groups, anti-natalists, or pro-choice people? What is an abortion group?

Astronomers are expecting a “new star” to appear in the night sky anytime between now and September in a celestial event that has been years in the making, according to NASA.

I mean, no. It hasn’t been years in the making, it happened a very, very long time ago. We just don’t get to see it until now.

It’s more that we’ve been anticipating the event for years.

Apple talks big about privacy but we only have their word for it, and they’re a corporation just as likely to lie and muddle things to fool their customers. That’s my main problem concerning Apple and privacy.

On paper their approach to ML is probably the best I’ve seen from any corp, and it’s probably the best I could’ve hoped to see since there’s no way they’d outright not go down that route.