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Cake day: August 24th, 2023

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  • My city hosts a number of cruise ships, and it was explained to me they can’t be connected to the city grid, so they instead keep their diesel engines running the entire time.

    It’s a local air quality issue, and the bigger the ship the more it pollutes locally, even though it might be more efficient on a global level.




  • it’s France of 1794. A bloodbath that ended, as it always has in history, with a conservative backlash and a dictatorship.

    It didn’t “end” with a dictatorship. Social change continued for a century, in which the people gained more and more power to the detriment of autocrats, until the establishment of today’s strong liberal democracy. The millennia-old institutions that opposed this change couldn’t be replaced in a day.


  • Mainstream western political theories holds the power of nations arises from their economy. What threat would Putin be were Russia incapable of producing weapons and supplying soldiers?

    Sanctions therefore seek to diminish the power of Russia, counting on its economy being sufficiently interconnected with and dependant on that of the West.

    In this context, sanctions hurting the common people is ultimately the point, because they’re literally trying to make Russia poorer, and therefore the poorest will be hurt most. Sanctions targeting the ruling class (such as seizure of assets like yachts) are at best symbolic.