Article is paywalled.

Certainly interesting. It’ll be curious to see whether our 100+ year olds globally start decreasing in number at some point, due to improved abilities to check.

Well, alz & other forms of dementia are directly related to atrophy of gray matter in the brain. The general idea of rejuvination by adding progenitor (stem) cells which have fresh telomerase (enzyme that replenishes telomeres, the reason stem cells can keep replicating longer than other cells) in the brain is that they could develop new nerve cells. On a rather basic theoretical level that should also help with basic brain aging. I’m no neurologist though and haven’t been keeping up with the topic lately.

I think they’ve explored using it as a countermeasure for alzhiemers, but don’t recall how effective it was. In any case, that particular avenue isn’t likely to get significant traction currently in the west. Legally dubious and way too expensive for any of us mere mortals to afford.

With current tech, I think it is semi-possible but has potential ethical problems. There have been studies witth moderately promising results but all rather limited in scope. (This is from what I know when I studied medicine, may be somewhat outdated by now)

What you need is to have either have stem cells preserved since infancy or use stem cells from early embryos. These can be combined with dna from the patient and then reintroduced to revitalize organs reaching the end of their telomeric lifespan.

Afaik the main issue here is that the prior option requires cryogenically preserved stem cells (which basically none of our elders today have) or harvesting stem cells from human embryos (which is prohibited in western healthcare). Aside from that there’s also an increased cancer risk.

AFAIK the policy shift has more to do with wolf population increasing and now getting into more inhabited areas and killing domesticated animals. The rural/farming community has previously been pretty split on the issue, since they are quite often engaged in nature preservation & wildlife issues aside from hunting. However, these incidents have polarized the public against wolves.

For context, wolves were extinct in southern Sweden for roughly a century (since the early 1900s), and in northern Sweden for several decades before being artificially reintroduced there during the 1970s and slowly spreading southwards.

Regardless of the merits of tariffs and protectionism, it is IMO quite necessary that these kinds of companies, that churn out cheap garbage with no regard for pollution be punitively targeted. Not only does it ruin our planet, but it also undermines those businesses who actually try to produce decent products.

Ideally big corps that simply import and resell these types of products (either through willful ignorance or malicious intent) shouldn’t get away either, and need to be held accountable.

Which in turn would require enormous amounts of excess generation capacity and transmission lines.

Beyond a certain point it’s simply more efficient to install dispatchable electricity generation.

Oh and as for your last statement it is simply incorrect. Nuclear power plants are the single most reliable electricity producer. https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/nuclear-power-most-reliable-energy-source-and-its-not-even-close

More wind capacity wouldn’t solve these issues. They arise specifically when it is cold, dark and windless across Europe, due to a lack of dispatchable electricity production in Germany. Germany instead imports electricity from its neighbors, and Sweden (due to EU regulations) has to export. This in turn drives prices through the roof for Swedish consumers, despite a de facto electricity surplus.

There are already planned industrial projects in Northern Sweden that’ll wipe out the surplus. Hence transition lines won’t solve the problem, and neither will variable renewable sources (solar, wind) since the problems arise when it’s cold, dark and windless.

Fact is that Sweden carries its weight and more when it comes to clean electricity generation. We are one of the largest per-capita exporters of electricity, despite the disastrous energy policies of the former left-wing government. Germany has to get their shit together and stop bullying the smaller european economies with their incompetence.

Sweden, unlike Germany, is highly electrified, and vulnerable people are literally being run out of their homes by these power prices.

Yet the prior means that France is one of the least carbon intensive economies in the world. Each German unit of GDP has twice the CO2 emissions compared to France.

Expanding the transit lines at this point would only lead to German industry purchasing even more Swedish electricity, driving up the prices in the north of Sweden as well and killing the rest of the industrial base. The German effect deficit is larger than the entirety of the dispatchable electricity capacity in Sweden. In some 5-10 years, the northern surplus there will be used up anyway due to the electrification of the Swedish steel industry.

The ugly truth is that this situation will only be resolved when Germany take responsibility for their own grid, or the transmission lines get cut. The Swedish economy is highly electrified (~70% of energy consumed) and low carbon (~80% of energy consumed), especially when compared to Germany (~35% of energy as electricity, 25% low carbon).

One of the main differences is heating. Economically vulnerable Swedes are literally being driven out of their homes because of German electricity imports, which are enforced by the EU.

Yeah, religious extremists and regressives of all sorts tend to these sorts of horrors. Thankfully, the civilized world has become a lot more secular in the past centuries.

Even so here are still hundreds of millions of people living under governments with religious laws that enforce, enable and perpetrate these kinds of atrocities.

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

Would you care to cite the source of that statement? That’d be pretty significant news considering the number of dual citizens who are SD members and I haven’t seen anything about this elsewhere.

Euthanasia for humans is a difficult ethical dilemma. On the one hand, being allowed to die seems like a rather fundamental personal autonomy, on the other, it risks producing some very perverse economic incentives in both healthcare and society.

Nova Scotia cancer patient who said she was asked if she was aware of assisted dying as an option twice as she underwent mastectomy surgeries.

The question “came up in completely inappropriate places”, she told the National Post.

Canadian news outlets have also reported on cases where people with disabilities have considered assisted dying due to lack of housing or disability benefits.

The incentives, specifically, involve a slippery slope where it becomes more acceptable for society in general to push somebody considered a “burden” towards assisted dying as a way of getting rid of them. Terminally ill, elderly, disabled, mentally ill, unemployed etc. people may find the institutions that support them slowly become dismantled with society then proceeding to offer assisted dying as a “solution” when existence as a consequence becomes more and more miserable.

This might be a tad cynical, but I consider the risk of this ultimate betrayal of the most vulnerable in society as a consequence of legalized euthanasia so large that it outweighs the potential moral benefits.

I think you are highly oversimplifying the situation.

The rapid fall of the Assad regime means the end of the Syrian civil war, which is a good thing. Syria has been plagued by war for more than a decade now, perhaps some peace will finally settle and the millions of Syrian refugees will finally return to their homes. As for what happens after, it remains to be seen. The rebels are no monolith, they contain everything from Turkish backed mercenaries, jihadists to mostly secular Syrian anti-Assad nationalists.

Those who simply assume that the rebels are wholly “good” are no doubt naive, but there is certainly hope that the more reasonable elements of the movement will prevail and institute a more free society, perhaps by cooperating with the Kurdish autonomous zone in the east. If that happens however, or something else like a taliban-esque islamist theocratic tyranny is instituted instead remains to be seen.

Why not?

The stated goal of entering Lebanon was to end the threat from Hezbollah - if they stay away from the border and allow the Lebanese government to enforce rule of law, hasn’t that been fulfilled?

That is simply incorrect. I suggest that you educate yourself further on the topic and refrain from making similarly uninformed statements on related topics in the future.

Here is the wikipedia page of all current members of knesset:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_twenty-fifth_Knesset

Going from the top of the list of current knesset members, we have Likud party members (the current ruling party).

No. 4 on the list is Amir Ohana, current speaker of the Knesset. He is the child of two moroccan jews, and also happens to be gay.

No. 7 Shlomo Karhi, minister of Communications, Tunisian heritage.

No. 8 David Bitan - born in Morocco.

Q.E.D, feel free to find more examples on your own, there are plenty.

I would say that demographic tensions in the US, colloquially “american racism” primarily have a particular flavour - namely focusing on skin colour. In other parts of the world demographic tensions come in many other forms. Between Europeans for instance it is more often cultural and religious tensions (secular/atheist vs religious, protestant vs catholic, germanic vs latin etc).

For each region and people these sorts of tensions tend to have a basis in different historic catalysts. In Israel for instance, there are jewish-arab tensions with a long and complicated history, interreligious tensions (christians - muslims - religious jews - secular/atheist), intra-jewish ethnic tensions (mizrahi-sephardim-ashkenazi) and many others. Similar tensions can be found in other countries in the middle east.

The problem with applying the american lens to these other areas is that it will miss important aspects and risks exacerbating problems by applying inappropriate remedies.