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.

There’s good reason to presume carbon is required. Carbon has some nice, and totally unique properties that allow it to facilitate life.

The most important features to carbon in this context are:

1. Stable catenation of atoms. Carbon atoms can bond to other carbon atoms in a long chain, and that chain does not become appreciably more reactive. This allows for the construction of very large molecules with specialized mechanical functions.

2. Ability to form stable multiple bonds. Carbon can form single, double, or triple bonds with itself (and oxygen and nitrogen), which allows carbon-based molecules to have ridgid shapes. Double bonds are found all over the place in life because they allow molecules to have sections that aren’t just wiggly noodles of atoms.

3. Bond stabilities that fall in a kind of “goldilocks zone” where carbon bonds to other atoms are strong enough to resist falling apart, but weak enough to be broken later.

4. Nearly identical electronegativity to hydrogen. Carbon pulls on the electrons in its bonds about the same amount as hydrogen. This allows it to make stable bonds that are non-polar, which, when used in conjuction with other, more electronegative atoms (particularly oxygen and phosphorus) allow Carbon-containing molecules to be hydrophobic, hydrophilic, or both simultaneously. This property is what allows for complex structures like Lipid bilayers and proteins to be formed.

No other atom, not even silicon, has this set of properties, and it’s very hard to imagine how you would make all but the most simplistic verson of life without these.

I mean, I can agree that simple autocatalytic reactions can occur with chemistry based on other elements… but it’s a stretch to say that suggests “alien life might not be carbon-based”. Maybe very, very simple, life-like chemical systems, but life as we know it is defined by large, many-atom molecules, and no other element can do this the the way carbon can (not even silicon, whose bond energy decreases with catentation of more silicon atoms link, which, combined with it’s poor ability to form multiple bonds ruins the possibility of silicon-based life). Anything that we can conceivably think of as “life” beyond simple self-reproducing chemical, or bizzare Boltzmann brain-esque systems will have carbon-based chemicals in it.

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.

I’m kinda surprised how few people have mentioned Chrono Cross. It’s not the same game, but it has a lot of cross over, and might help scratch that itch for “more chronotrigger”.

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.