I recently heard somewhere that the joke in India is that in western tech company’s “AI” stands for “Absent Indians”.

it’d be a great place to grow some weed.

This reminds me of that time. England and Iceland went to “war” over fishing rights in the 70s and just, like, cut fishing nets and rammed each other’s boats

Careful. You’re saying the quiet part outloud.

It stands out to me how they make a specific goal on increasing renewable capacity but make no such goals to reduce fossil fuel production. My concern is that if we don’t consciously do the latter, the extra renewable capacity will, in effect, be used to increase power output without reducing the absolute quantity of fossil fuels significantly. There’s a lot of capital wrapped up in fossil fuel extraction, and we would be asking a lot of very power entities to take a haircut on their RoI by not continuing to use it. I think it’s a non-trivial problem that is really not being taken seriously enough in these kinds of talks.

tomato, tomatoe. Not that I’d ever put tomatoes in a cucumber salad. That’s heathen shit.

I’m not your boss. Do it up, man.

If i chop up a cucumber and throw it in a bowl with some vinegarette, I call it a cucumber salad.

I mean realistically the most obvious thing to me is that something has to be done to make the prospect of having children less daunting. I can’t speak to Japan, but for my friends here, in our early 30s, we’re only just now getting to a place where moving out of our parents/a 5 person roommate situation is feasible. Many of us don’t have long-term romantic prospects, and work all the fucking time. Ok top of that, having a kid just sounds terrifying. The cost, and amount of effort needed to see a kid not have a terrible life is daunting (I’m a teacher. Just imaging the amount of effort I, as a parent, would need to put in to have a average kid succeed in a school environment is horrifying)

I imagine a real intervention for this sort of thing looks like less work; good, free child care; our cities building culturally relevant community spaces that people actually want to go to outside of the internet; and creating a culture of community-oriented sharing of the responsibilities of caring for children. In short, we’d need to make our society one that’s less hostile to having kids. That seems pretty obvious, and from my understanding, a lot of these factors are worse in Japan than in the US.

Not a historian, nor Italian, so double check me on this, but a big part of the “why” is that the facists were never removed from Italy. They’ve just been kind of allowed to fester since 1946. I mean, Germany didn’t really get rid of their facists either, but the Italian facist movement was basically unscathed. Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) was founded in 1946 by Facists literally from Mussolini’s party, and maintained relevance by making political alliances with other, more moderate conservative parties.

Some facists just straight up joined the Liberal parties. Fernando Tambroni, Christian Democratic Prime Minister of Italy for 116 days in 1960, for instance, was a Facist Party member during the war, and was quite the fan of Mussolini. The subsequent Prime Minister, Christian Democrat Party leader, Amintore Fanfani, who served five non-consecutive terms as PM, was also a member of the Facist Party.

In the 90s other facist parties, particularly Forza Italia, and Alleanza Nazionale were spun off from MSI and basically wore a better better mask, and managed to get Berlusconi, also a Mussolini Stan, in as PM.

We could continue doing pointing out facists in powerful positions in Italian politics, and we skipped the whole “decades of facist terrorism” thing, but really the reason Italy jumped to fascism is because it has been there the whole time, and has had power semi-regularly.