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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • The rural population isn’t the issue, it’s suburbia which is where the majority of the US population lives.

    It’s not dense enough for public transportation to be viable and it’s zoned in a way that makes pedestrian traffic a non starter.

    Suburbia causes a lot of problems. I understand why it exists - owning a house with a yard is nice. I personally wouldn’t want to give that up to live in an urban environment if I didn’t have to







  • It was all part of an effort to economically hurt Russia in response to the war.

    Best case scenario was Russia deciding the hit to their economy was not worth the war and back pedaling. No one realistically thought this was going to happen though.

    The next best case scenario was for the changes in quality of life for the average Russian would create enough internal pressure that the war would be called off.

    This hasn’t happened yet but internal support for the war has been dropping over the last year and some of that is attributed to the dismal state of the Russian economy, which is a direct result of things like Lush pulling out.

    https://www.euronews.com/2023/12/02/russians-support-of-ukraine-war-collapses-finds-poll

    And even if neither of these come up fruition, the more Russias economy is damaged the harder it is to fund their war effort. This gives Ukraine a bit more breathing room in their war effort.

    While the effect of a single company like Lush is unnoticed, it’s the collective effect of everything from these pullouts, to trade sanctions and other soft power diplomatic plays which total up to a noticable effect.







  • Florida here checking in.

    Our government is hard at work on this.

    Check out this pending bill up for vote during the next session: https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf https://m.flsenate.gov/session/bill/2024/599/billtext/filed/pdf

    Essentially it makes it illegal to be transgender and have a job in government or government adjacent.

    Here is an excert: It is the policy of the state that a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait and that it is false to ascribe to a person a pronoun that does not correspond to such person’s sex. This section does not apply to individuals born with a genetically or biochemically verifiable disorder of sex development, including, but not limited to, XX disorder of sex development; XY disorder of sex development; sex chromosome disorder of sex development; XX or XY sex reversal; and ovotesticular disorder.

    An employee or a contractor may not be required, as a condition of employment, to refer to another person using that person’s preferred personal title or pronouns if such personal title or pronouns do not correspond to that person’s sex.
    An employee or a contractor may not provide to an employer his or her preferred personal title or pronouns if such preferred personal title or pronouns do not correspond to his or her sex.
    An employee or a contractor may not be asked by an employer to provide his or her preferred personal title or pronouns or be penalized or subjected to adverse personnel action for not providing his or her preferred personal title or pronouns.

    It continues on about not being able to fire people for thinking being gay is a sin and so on, but I don’t want this to be a novel.





  • No, what Israel is doing makes sense from a strictly selfish point of view.

    The question of ‘Why doesn’t Israel integrate the Palestinians?’ is a good one. The answer is numbers.

    Israel was founded as a Jewish ethnostate. Those who have immigrated there have done so because they wanted to live in a Jewish ethnostate. So one of the core values of the country is that it is primarily a place for Jews.

    If Israel absorbed the populations of Gaza and the West Bank into Israel, the Jewish population would become a minority in Israel if not immediately then within a generation.

    I don’t agree with the idea of ethnostates in general and I do believe establishing Israel as one was a mistake.

    … But if you imagine the viewpoint of someone who does want a Jewish ethnostate like so many in Israel you can see why this solution is a non starter.