Alon

I write about public transport and do research for NYU's Marron Institute. I've previously lived in Tel Aviv, Singapore, the Riviera, New York, Providence, Vancouver, Stockholm, Paris.

Public Key

npub1mdjkyeav9vmx0zwfc7ajjk5ahn422dt8zy0zntzwfyv6zq7tsyeqprk4tr

NIP-05 Address

Alon_at_mastodon.social@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdketzv7kzkdn838yu0weft2wme649x4n3z83f438yjxdpq09czvshnc7sx

Author Public Key

npub1mdjkyeav9vmx0zwfc7ajjk5ahn422dt8zy0zntzwfyv6zq7tsyeqprk4tr

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Last Notes

2024-09-06 17:57:34

Via @npub15l0…g3yx on Bluesky:
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/091/896/615/984/848/original/0c94e64b3f7658b3.jpg

2024-08-19 19:47:34

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@npub1yqu…t2x5 Please do not signal-boost the reactionary religious extremists of Neturei Karta. https://www.972mag.com/anti-zionist-jews-are-no-friend-of-the-palestinian-national-struggle/

2024-08-13 21:34:37

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Which city is this? I don't recognize it.

2024-06-25 19:15:02

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Moskal is just a normal Ukrainian expression for Russians that escaped the containment zone around when the war started.

2024-06-02 15:01:31

Some updates on the ceasefire issue.
To start with, Biden publicized a proposal that he said came from the Israeli government, which is fairly similar to what Egypt had presented to Hamas. The Israeli war cabinet had voted for it; Ben Gvir and Smotrich are threatening to vote down the government, while Lapid is saying that if they do, he'll vote with the government. It's leading people to say that it's not the real Israeli proposal, but it is, Bibi is just not announcing it.

2024-05-17 22:27:51

Machine learning is prime for a "what people think I do" vs. "what I actually do" meme, where the public discourse about it is that it's some kind of AI revolution that will change the nature of work, and what it actually does is provide better modeling for predicting public transit ridership.

2024-05-10 15:46:12

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 Can you transform the attributes from strings to numbers? Then three cards form a set iff they sum to 0 in (Z/3Z)^4.

2024-05-07 02:03:41

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@npub1u3t…c6ug The ICC is welcome to prosecute the US for this violation of international law.

2024-04-27 17:01:27

Live now, talking about the history of American car culture. https://www.twitch.tv/alon_levy Apropos of discussion in @npub1zdp…vqv8's mentions.

2024-04-05 23:21:30

The head of 8200 exposed his identity through poor opsec.
This should help clarify a) how the 7.10 Hamas massacre ended up happening under the IDF's nose and b) how accurate IDF intel is in identifying Hamas targets in Gaza.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/05/top-israeli-spy-chief-exposes-his-true-identity-in-online-security-lapse

2024-03-25 23:50:38

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 Q. What do you say to a gamergate that just succeeded in something?
A. Slay, queen.

2024-03-24 21:16:28

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 Yep. And now that the Houthis are making it unsafe to ship through the Red Sea, aid ships can't get to Sudan, which is making the famine there worse, which is part of why there are hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees crossing to Egypt. But Egypt is still not joining the US-led anti-Houthi coalition.

2024-03-24 18:30:48

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 Oh, it's even worse than this. International left-wing pro-Palestinian opinion, for example, thinks that Yemen is currently being destroyed by the US, UK, and Israel - but rarely mentions the country actually doing the fighting there, Saudi Arabia. So Canada announced an arms embargo on Israel while it's still happily selling Saudi Arabia arms, because the anti-Semites of Montreal and such couldn't care less about what the Saudis do.

2024-03-24 14:00:37

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 Was she married? Because the gatekeeper system makes it easier for unmarried than married women to get abortions in Israel.

2024-03-24 10:39:34

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 Abortion isn't even available in Israel on demand - there's a medical gatekeeper system (but it's lenient). Re gay rights, Shira Banki was murdered at Pride; Tel Aviv is safe to be queer in, but the homophobic violence in Jerusalem and in Haredi cities is bad.

2024-03-24 10:37:25

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@npub1j8m…v5r7 @npub1kr8…znpx You can have a nonreligious ceremony, but it usually isn't legally valid... But if you are married (e.g. in Cyprus) the Rabbinate will assume control and require divorce to follow halachic law, under which women cannot divorce their husbands without their husbands' consent. In terms of religion-and-state relations, Israel is not at all like any other developed country, and more like Iran, India, and other countries with a religious family law.

2024-03-23 12:45:25

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@npub1tpv…zwsk No, that's Europeans in August. Europeans in March are more like, "You haven't answered my email from three hours ago, why?"

2024-03-03 23:53:01

Cellphones have changed beyond recognition in the last 25 years, but people still run out of battery from time to time and that can lead to plot points in fiction, now as in 1999.

2024-03-02 19:39:31

Technologieoffenheit meets reality: the transport ministry is freezing hydrogen train projects until further notice, due to the technology's shortcomings. When I looked around in 2021 or so, I found that the trains cost about twice as much as battery trains and four times as much as conventional electric trains with pantographs.
https://rollingstockworld.com/economy/german-transport-ministry-may-hold-funding-for-hydrogen-projects/

2024-03-02 19:15:32

Per Haaretz, the US is saying Israel said yes to the hostage deal: 40 days of ceasefire, one hostage released per ceasefire day, release of Palestinian prisoners by a formula that depends on the hostage - the seven women who were included in the November ceasefire but weren't released because it was 10/day and there were only seven of them are at a 3:1 ratio, the others at higher ratios going up to 10:1, with female soldiers to be exchanged for actual Hamas terrorists. Ball's in Hamas's court.

2024-02-22 10:46:47

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Don't show this to the Berliners, they'll get mad.

2024-02-12 10:52:36

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@npub1f3s…jzfc You may be Jewish, but you traffic in casual Nazi rhetoric when you even say "the Dresden bombings." The bombings killed 15,000-20,000 people, not even the biggest among the Allied bombings of Germany, but Nazi propaganda turned them into something much larger, and Holocaust deniers love to overblow the death toll to make the Nazis into victims. To the historically literate, "more dead than Dresden" (over months and not days, on four times the population) is not terribly interesting.

2024-01-30 05:32:54

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@npub16gl…syzj Mastodon first, Bluesky second. I use them with different groups of people to communicate with; each is failing to replace Twitter as a mass network in a different way. I'm not on Threads, because (I think?) it has no chronological feed and I don't like having an algo-only feed from my experience with what Facebook was showing me in 2014 before I stopped using it.

2024-01-30 04:25:47

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@npub1mmf…eknq @npub1kna…9qpm @npub1e45…40nn I mean, you did fantasize about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast without realizing it was a glorified Indian Reservation-style system. So, so much of the "I was just criticizing Israel" stuff is not at all about Israel, but random shit like "the Irish were slaves too"-grade Holocaust relativization (which Gavi pointed out with some screencaps elsewhere, not sure if yours or someone else - I only checked a few days of his feed) or constantly getting Jewish history wrong.

2024-01-24 09:41:50

On Birdsite, @npub1lav…ugna points out that one of the benefits of having EU strategic autonomy would be not having to care every four years what some rando in a diner in Iowa or New Hampshire thinks about foreign policy.

2024-01-22 16:04:44

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@npub1vse…v7q2 How many trains do they need for C? (The D trains are 10*69 m, right? That's only a couple tens of millions of euros - maybe 100M€ since the CZK is depreciated; it's not what's driving the high cost of the project.)

2024-01-22 15:37:01

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Ugh, that's expensive - in PPP terms, it's around 2 billion € in capital for 32 km, so 65M€/km. Paris M4 was supposed to be 256M€/14 km ex-rolling stock; I'm seeing figures of 480M€ now. https://www.leparisien.fr/info-paris-ile-de-france-oise/transports/grand-paris-la-ligne-4-du-metro-sera-entierement-automatisee-fin-decembre-09-11-2023-AGEYUYPDOVGGNAL3EASE3DXKIA.php

2024-01-21 11:07:54

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@npub1psd…9sr7 @npub145u…qe4x Sure, and in that era, Isaac Asimov was running workshops on how to harass women at conventions. It's still good to kick out people for this behavior today.

2024-01-18 09:53:39

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Are you okay?

2024-01-10 17:10:23

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 Showing e^x grows faster than x^n.

2024-01-04 15:02:16

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@npub1vse…v7q2 @npub1yfp…jn74 It's probably not -25 there - canonically it's -15 way farther north. Early January 2024 seems unseasonably cold, and that's without 13 more years of global warming.

2023-12-26 20:29:15

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Nothing, but, what threats are you fighting with that autocannon that infantry screening for tanks can't fight?

2023-12-21 23:18:29

There was a mass shooting in Prague at Charles University; 14 or 15 people have been killed, including the shooter (official releases are unclear on how the shooter died, rumors say suicide). The shooter had killed his father just before the mass shooting, and none of the reports describes a political motive, just high gun ownership (for Europe) leading to the occasional American-style mass shooting event. https://apnews.com/article/prague-shooting-dead-injured-9a383bc6919c1b0d929cf06aa4818341 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/21/shock-in-prague-shootings-czech-republic
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1220939974/prague-school-shooting-deaths

2023-12-16 23:54:52

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Is this a Finnish map endorsing the current front line in the war or is it just a weird map? cc @npub1dyg…kajg

2023-12-03 18:55:41

Question to Slavic language speakers: how does your language handle adjectives and nouns? I'm asking because Romance languages and also Hebrew and Arabic treat adjectives almost identically to nouns, so that it's easy to nominalize adjectives. But I don't know if Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, etc. do that.

2023-12-01 15:41:13

Hebrew linguistic point:
In Hebrew, the coverterm for any populated place is "yishuv." A yishuv can be a city ("ir"), a village ("kfar"), a small town ("ayara"), a kibbutz, etc. The root YShB means "to sit." In English the best translation is "settlement," though in US Census-speak it's "place."
*However*, in an Israeli context, the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are not called yishuvim. The Hebrew word for one of them is "hitnakhalut," the root NḤL connoting a squat or seizure by force.

2023-11-22 04:28:20

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@npub1yqu…t2x5 Noura Erakat is a massacre denialist and works for that department and likely wrote most of the report, FYI. https://twitter.com/4noura/status/1725972374875427028

2023-11-16 13:44:28

The US law forcing GPS imagery to be lower-res over Israel (not even over the US) is not about protecting Israel. High-res imagery is of use for demography, social studies, watchdog groups, etc., and those are all predominantly the country's own citizens participating in civil society. The security state wants to restrict that; the USSR wouldn't even publish road maps. The uniqueness of Israel is that its security state gets to lobby the US but civil society doesn't. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/16/1212889717/satellite-images-us-israel-gaza

2023-11-08 19:42:35

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@npub19fc…ay3c "Month-old war" doesn't really mean much. Speaking of doing research: the IDF's draft-plus-reserves structure means it can't maintain this intensity of war for more than a few weeks. The main calls for a ceasefire-for-hostages deal in Israel come from recognition that there's no time to clear the entire Strip, only *maybe* Gaza City.
Past Gaza wars' death tolls were 2/3 civilians, 1/3 combatants. This time, no idea - but the IDF killed 1,500 Palestinian combatants *in Israel*.

2023-11-08 19:27:06

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@npub19fc…ay3c Urban battle, same way the US eliminated the insurgents in Fallujah and same way the US-trained Iraqi Army eliminated ISIS in Mosul.

2023-11-08 19:23:42

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@npub19fc…ay3c Not "threatened." "Launched a raid including the worst massacre of the 100-year-old conflict and mass rape, and is threatening to keep doing so until Jews are ethnically cleansed from Israel." The only reason Hamas only killed 1,000 civilians and not many more is that the IDF is a lot stronger. Time to stop coexisting with fascists and eliminate them.

2023-11-08 17:01:52

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 It's politics in the same sense that a Trotskyist splinter group's internal group dynamics are politics: if your internal politics repels the vast majority of your potential supporters (only about 5% of the people who've left Twitter in the last year are here or on Bluesky), you need to do something different.

2023-11-07 12:12:19

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@npub1u3t…c6ug The Ukrainian civilian death toll is absolutely not 10,000. It's not counted anywhere the Russians have actually occupied; the death toll in Mariupol alone is probably higher than this.

2023-11-04 06:41:22

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@npub1mmf…eknq I don't think you're right, but more importantly, a large majority of Israelis don't either. In English, I think the journos to read are Anshel Pfeffer and Barak Ravid (or Yair Rosenberg, who's American but has similar views). Nadav Eyal writes in Hebrew and is, I think, more representative of the zeitgeist, which is a revival of old style Labor Zionism. (That so many of the massacre victims were kibbutzniks is boosting the kibbutz movement and its previously-moribund values now.)

2023-11-04 06:22:26

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@npub1mmf…eknq Please don't explain Israel to me. I've been listening to what survivors and families of survivors have been saying in Hebrew since the war started. The anti-war minority is consistently complaining that they're a minority and it's scary how leftists support war all of a sudden. The mainline left position in Israel now is "destroy Hamas, negotiate two states with the Palestinian Authority." That's what you see in center-left media and politics in Hebrew if you can read it.

2023-11-04 06:14:20

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@npub1mmf…eknq Yes, vast majority, as I said. But these are not people calling for a ceasefire. Most call for keeping fighting in Gaza until Hamas is no longer in control of the Strip; a large minority calls for prioritizing returning the hostages (which is very different from the ceasefire-first advocacy of the Western left). Center-left activists will remind you that it was one of them who started the #HamasIsISIS hashtag while the state is MIA on that kind of hasbara.

2023-11-04 06:06:54

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@npub1mmf…eknq Okay, but the vast majority of Israelis support continuing the war to the end of Hamas's control of Gaza and also think Netanyahu should resign. If anything, there's more trust in the IDF now than there was at the beginning of the war, as it turns out the defense establishment knew something was brewing in Gaza and warned Netanyahu against prioritizing protecting settlers pogromchiks, but then Bibi reacted by accusing them of being leftist agitators.

2023-10-25 20:49:52

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Meta?

2023-10-21 11:02:49

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@npub1qg4…augv Politico is lying through its teeth - this guy is a random grifter who works for the prime minister's office to connect Israel with European right-wingers (such as Axel-Springer media). He is not and has never been the IDF spokesperson. He is unknown in Israel, where nobody thinks Greta is a terrorist.
Edit: I wrote it up in more detail at https://mastodon.social/@Alon/111268599480827285 - the conclusion from this is "Axel-Springer media lies," rather than anything about Israel or Palestine.

2023-10-13 14:55:05

At DeKalb Avenue on the Q, there is a water drip. It isn't raining.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/228/279/930/407/120/original/435401dd8dada965.jpg

2023-10-09 06:01:32

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@npub1cmg…rzd2 The thing that's easiest to implement: global search, opt-out or not even opt-out, rather than opt-in.

2023-10-01 12:02:02

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 @npub1cnv…wml3 The articles on immigration in Europe, same shit. Where in the US the articles go over descriptive statistics and the history of the major immigrant groups, here the articles list a litany of irrelevant social problems. The article on immigration to Sweden sees fit to mention Sweden's rape rate - which has been high for 25 years, since before most refugees came.

2023-09-30 17:23:14

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Final solution? Really? WTF?

2023-09-30 13:11:32

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@npub1vse…v7q2 @npub1y98…fhhs Proposal: abolish first class, make second class better. In exchange for FDP's support for this plan, pass a YIMBY law, reduce every C2 language requirement to C1, require government offices to speak English, and, I don't know, announce a new nuclear plant somewhere (it doesn't need to actually go through with how high the construction costs are, but eh, it's FDP).

2023-09-30 12:56:49

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@npub1vse…v7q2 I think when I rode the TGV there were no outlets in second at all? Or maybe it was some trainsets but not others? Cc @npub1y98…fhhs

2023-09-30 12:41:31

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@npub1vse…v7q2 ICEs are one plug per two seats.

2023-09-25 10:08:11

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 Lenin was successful because his strategy of surrendering to Germany in WW1 was surprisingly successful as within less than a year Germany was defeated in the west and thus the USSR could reassert control of Ukraine and the Baltics. Usually leaders who get power through a short-term surrender have a FAFO phase as it turns out that the power they surrendered to extracts more value out of them, but it didn't happen to the USSR because Imperial Germany shortly collapsed.

2023-09-23 04:50:37

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@npub1xzm…eykm Please make it opt-out (or not even opt-out - the stalker has other tools to get through); the opt-in infrastructure is non-obvious and you're competing with alternatives that have way better searchability.

2023-09-11 20:07:30

When you say "no forced birth in a country without universal health care," what I hear is "it's great when PiS and Fratelli limit access to abortion and it was great when Germany banned advertising abortion services until last year, because at least women who have to give birth could get some subsidized health care." Don't do this.

2023-09-08 14:51:12

Is there a good adblocker for YouTube that bypasses the anti-adblock measures?

2023-09-05 07:41:25

"I never thought they would eat my face," cries ADL leader who praised the greatness of the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

2023-09-01 19:35:46

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@npub1efv…4jx2 This regional categorization is so drunk. Southwest Florida is part of the Spanish Caribbean now? And Central Florida is part of the Deep South?

2023-08-30 21:20:44

Stop arguing about deplatforming Nazis and start arguing over what kind of real exercises of political power should be done against Nazis. There should have been a debate about cutting off the electricity and water to Sonneberg after the election. There should be one about sending Hungary the Leopard 2 battalion it bought from us barrel-first. Have these debates when white fascists commit terrorism, not just when Jihadists throw rocks at cops.

2023-08-19 04:02:34

There's a new MTA video explaining the basics of New York interlining. More positive on it than I am, naturally, but pretty balanced overall. It's accessible to non-experts, and short, so go watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP1JAmIhQSs

2023-08-18 09:14:06

FIDE treated the Polgár sisters like shit in the 1980s and 90s, denying them credit because they mostly competed with men rather than in the women's tournament ghetto. When Judit got to play Kasparov in 1994, he violated the touch-move rule but the arbiter didn't challenge him, and this is how Judit, who up until that point was tied, lost the series. Right now there's a huge sexual harassment scandal at FIDE.
There are no TERFs. There are just transphobes, who also hate cis women.

2023-08-15 20:34:40

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@npub1vse…v7q2 How the hell does your computer even consume 300 W? My old computer was something like 30 W when gaming. My new one, I have no idea, Windows 11 is too jank to tell me what my power consumption is right now.

2023-08-15 13:28:38

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@npub1vse…v7q2 [40 homophobic and anti-Semitic replies about how dare anyone suggest that Poland is not the best thing in the world next to Ronald Reagan and its army is not going to be able to solo-kill the entire Russian Armed Forces.]

2023-08-06 04:21:49

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@npub1zdp…vqv8 At your school, do science classes still cling to the "Africans use slash-and-burn agriculture and that's unsustainable" meme? Because I was taught that at an IB school in 2001-2 and my cousin's private school-educated American children were in the mid-2010s.

2023-08-03 08:57:15

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 It's not possibly to scale anywhere to take this population influx, but the influx that can be scaled is one that the capitals can handle - they're rich and people are trying to migrate to the Nordic countries anyway (and many succeed, Sweden is not the dictatorship of Jimmie Åkesson). The housing growth target in all Nordic capitals should be on the order of 12/1,000 people annually: the Seoul region and Tokyo are just below that and have way worse long-term prospects.

2023-08-03 08:51:57

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 Why do you need to keep rural communities alive for this? Migrants move to the cities whenever they have free choice; build extensive housing in the capitals, not in places that have not much housing demand and are full of people who want to keep their white villages white.

2023-08-03 08:17:04

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@npub1hpc…hjn3 @npub1vcy…gzn8 Spain?
But also, for what it's worth, in Italy, the polls have Meloni's coalition staying in power. The "wait, we didn't vote for an extreme right coalition" shift to the left is specific to Sweden and now Finland.

2023-08-01 16:49:44

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@npub1r7e…mre3 Much lesser corruption than that happened with Juppé and Fillon and that's why LR is dead and Macron won so handily. What's remarkable about French riot culture is that Macron is not corrupt and therefore the rock throwers make things up about him.

2023-07-11 21:25:00

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@npub1vqm…ccpx So, Meta is trying to make Elon Musk less rich? Sounds based to me.

2023-07-04 19:37:29

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Another army that I can't see how it could possibly sustain modern operations: Greece. This is a country with slightly more people than Israel, slightly lower GDP per capita, far lower militarization, and an actual navy; how the fuck does it think it can support 15 maneuver brigades (IDF: 8). I guess when the tank fleet is mostly Leopard 1s, a lot is possible...

2023-07-04 19:19:53

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Are they also building up sustainment for Abrams tanks? Those are extremely high-maintenance and only the US Army has been able to service them, there's a reason Ukraine wanted Leopards and not Abrams, and it's not political opposition to DU ammunition.

2023-07-04 19:16:11

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Is Romania planning to do any army modernization so that it can contribute too? The way all Eastern European NATO members have way more brigades in their TOE than their budgets could possibly support is pretty sus. No, Poland, you do not field four active divisions with 14 brigades; maybe you have 14 brigades in your TOE (Germany: 7.5) but your absolute-numbers military spending is sub-German and your overall headcount is sub-German too.

2023-07-04 16:59:37

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@npub1tpv…zwsk The lines about France and Germany are pretty weak. "Sahra Wagenknecht, a telegenic leftist and at-all-costs-peacenik, says pollsters tell her she could win 19-30% of a German national vote" - okay, but Die Linke is polling at 4-5% right now and nearly all leftists find Wagenknecht and her crypto-racism ("we don't need minority rights, we managed without them for centuries") embarrassing. And AfD is a pariah party to everyone, even the most hardline of CDU/CSU leaders.

2023-06-29 11:19:11

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@npub1vse…v7q2 Do fences even keep out cows?

2023-06-15 18:15:09

Estonia might be passing same-sex marriage? w00t! https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/06/14/estonia-same-sex-marriage-law-change/

2023-04-19 22:17:58

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#[0] No Anmeldung system where it takes months to get an appointment that by law you are required to go to within two weeks of moving?

2023-04-19 21:18:34

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#[0] How is this data so bad?

2023-03-28 21:48:14