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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • A country can be losing but in an existential conflict seem to rarely outright surrender. Ukraines position, while dire, is far stronger than the talibans after the US invasion of Iraq. 20 years later, they were still fighting and ultimately prevailed.

    In my mind, this Inevitably is in ukraines future if allies don’t continue to materially support Ukraine - either way the Russian occupation ultimately fails, the question is does Ukraine defend itself and remain a sovereign nation or do they fall and an insurgency later force it’s reinstatement.







  • Part of the problem for the US is that such a huge amount of gdp is buried in the masses of beauracracy that makes up the US healthcare system, it’s essentially acting (economically) as proxy government spending to prop up a failing economy. The average US citizen is so heavily propaganda’d into hating government run projects that the sensible economic stimulus (government infrastructure projects or public services) are well and truly off the table.

    What this ultimately means is fixing healthcare isn’t just breaking up the cartels, preventing price fixing and untangling the web of nonsense that makes up the US private system… unless you want to inspire a massive crash (which absolutely has real human cost), it also means redistributing government spending and implementing (unrelated) government run services and/or projects to keep all these people employed (which would also mean re-training and potentially relocating) - all of which needs to be done against the overwhelmingly loud voices screeching “government employee bad”.


  • The court found him guilty, and then in a super sketchy, never before seen, closed door jury free appeal, a federal judge overturned it. Regardless, throughout Francis maintained support for Pell, including the period between his conviction and his incredibly sketchy appeal. There’s no lense where I can accept anybody as moral, Catholic or otherwise, when they have publically supported a convicted abuser of children.

    This is also only a a single example, there have been numerous cases of the vatican, under Francis, offering insultingly low settlements to silence victims based on their inability to afford to pursue what’s fair (the average is $268,000). There’s a clear pattern of the vatican, including during Francis’ leadership, of shirking the victims of their organization. This suggests is what little progress they actually do (very publically) achieve is more about marketing than justice.


  • There are lots of ways the Pope behaves that make it seem like anything he’s doing to address child rape by clergy is theatre.

    Pope Francis stood by George Pell and even let him have his funeral at the vatican. Standing by someone who’s been credibly accused of sexual assault of a child (and has definitely facilitated it by others) isn’t, in my view, something that can be done in parallel with an honest and good faith attempt at fixing the problem. It looks even more shady if you look at the conditions of Pella conviction being overturned (definitely special treatment because of his connections).




  • I’m not sure I could be happy if I hadn’t made the choices I made, poverty felt like a prison so I did what was necessary to set myself up. I played the hand I was dealt and I think I played it reasonably well, but if I was born in easier times I’d have definitely made different choices.

    I don’t the insinuation that “millennials had the opportunity to achieve wealth like their parents” these type of articles make, it feels dismissive of the sacrificed youth and relationships.


  • This is" true" for a (tiny) subset of the Australian population. I know that I straight up sacrificed my 20s to an engineering degree and fifo job and now, at 35 I have comparable material wealth to my dad when he was my age (who was a sheet metal worker in a major city). But even still, the tiny population who did what I did will never get another run at what should’ve been the best 15 years of their life.

    I’m unconvinced that my decision was better than the ones my (much poorer) friends who now have families made…








  • Existing nuclear tech is dramatically more expensive than every competing low carbon power generation alternative and will never have any place in Australia.

    Future nuclear tech (be it fission or fusion) may be a different story, but our power plants are at end of life so we need new power gen now, the world is dying so we need carbon neutral now.

    We can’t sideline this for 20 years to wait and see what happens, the strategy should be the roll out renewables to the point where the grid doesn’t need any major changes. When we hit the point where the grid does need big investment, reassess available alternatives. If nothing has changed, roll out the grid changes and more renewables or if fusion drilling geotehermal or nuclear or whatever has come viable work it out then.