(Justin)

Tech nerd from Sweden

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  • 287 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Food waste actually doesn’t smell if it’s kept dry. Put solid food waste, semi-dry coffee grounds, and oily paper towels into paper bags on an airy bag holder, and it should be fine for a few days to a week without any smells or flies.

    This doesn’t work for rotten food and larger amounts of raw meat, though. Those must be thrown directly into compost or trash.

    Make sure to keep it airy and dry, and use paper towels to absorb any extra liquids. If you let them sog up in a sealed bin, then they get gross.

    The resulting bags can be rolled up and closed and shouldn’t leak. You can use a plastic bag to be doubly sure if you’re taking them onto a bus. The bags can then be thrown into compost. in Sweden, they’re centrally collected to put into biogas reactors.





  • Western Europe does not have a monopoly on democracy and did not invent it, nor is Eastern Europe destined to restart 300 more years of Russian empire. Human rights and political progress does not care about geography.

    Western countries like Spain and Germany were dictatorships for the majority of the 20th century and countries like Poland and Finland were democratic republics for large parts of the 20th century.

    I think it’s closed-minded to think of democracy as a western thing, and Russian imperialism as an Eastern thing, and it contributes to the political divide between the EU and its neighbors RU, BY, UA, MD, and GE.








  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_intervention_in_the_Syrian_civil_war

    Obama did not do anything until the airstrikes against daesh, and even then it was very controversial for Obama in the US News. Less than 10000 us special forces have been in Syria, and Assad is still the dictator of Syria. Compare to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. where the US was in direct conflict with another state.

    12 years of administrations don’t count because they’re not Biden, the current president. What the US does right now has nothing to do what it did in 2003. The US foreign policy cannot be 80 years of regime change in South America, because the current US regime didn’t exist before 2021.

    Its not brainwashing to defend peaceful democratic opposition to dictators. Who are you going to complain to about imperialism if the US and EU give up on democracy and everybody lives as serfs under the thumb of some warlord?


  • The imperialists in the bush administrations were the exceptions. There was a clear difference in American foreign policy between Bush Jr. and Obama.

    It is important to recognize that countries do not have a foreign policy, presidents do. We can only describe trends that the presidents tend to follow. Iraq was not some shadowy CIA cabal, it was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who had power at the time. If you want to characterize US foreign policy by public polling for support in the war, it is very clear that public support for the Iraq war has evaporated since 2003, which is why the US didn’t intervene in Syria and let Russia and the Kurds duke it out. Fatigue from the Iraq War has also been used by Trump and his supporters to limit military support to Ukraine, NATO, and Taiwan.

    Also, the Gulf War is not a good comparison. The Gulf war was a UN-directed intervention in response to the invasion of Kuwait. It was not a invasion coup like 2003.

    Relevant video essays regarding American foreign policy post Cold War and the Russian propaganda depicting the US as “coup happy imperialists”:

    https://youtu.be/FVmmASrAL-Q?t=1916

    https://youtu.be/7OFyn_KSy80


  • The nuance is that American policy since the end of the cold war has been to use soft power to promote democracy. Offer pro-democracy propaganda to oppressed people, and sanction human rights violators. There is no evidence of the US funding insurgents in South America, Ukraine, Russia, or the PRC post-Cold War.

    In contrast, Trump ordered the CIA to return to cold-war era coups and just straight-up invade Venezuela.

    The first one is admirable and how foreign policy should be conducted, the second one is dangerous and is how America is portrayed in Russian propaganda.





  • At the same time, no home or business lives in a vacuum. With large projects like this, developers are expected to contribute back to the city to build the infrastructure and neighborhoods around the project, like we see with this. It’s better city design to build a neighborhood directly connected to the plant than it is to expect everyone to commute for an hour to get to work. Many company towns had very good urban design, even if they were mini-dictatorships.