So… you’re essentially carrying around a power bank on the back of your phone all the time? Seems like a gimmick at best.

Honestly, fast charging has turned this into such a non-issue that you’ll be hard pressed to find a more convenient solution.

I usually put on an audio book or podcast. Lets me put away the screen and turn off the lights. Also keeps the mind sufficiently occupied to not get caught up in runaway thoughts. Inevitably fall asleep after half an hour or so.

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.

Just saying that there are a lot of governments who like to pretend. If it’s called Peoples Socialist Democratic Republic of Utopian Communist Happiness, odds are that you should run for the hills.

The self-identification of governments is possibly the least reliable way to identify which are closest to being socialist/communist.

It looks like a European welfare state, because instead of upending the system and ending up in an authoritarian nightmare, people are compromising with each other.

Popular prosperity is a function of power being reliant on the approval of the masses, and thus will not be achieved in any meaningful way under an authoritarian regime.

Of all the people to be angry at for being wealthy…

Guy grew up in one of the most downtrodden areas of Sweden, single parent household and founded the single largest music service in the world.

Yeah, that deserves more pay than any one musician ever is worth.

Oh, and he pays taxes, in Sweden. Our taxes are insane.

Sure, it’s debatable whether any one person should be that rich. Sure, he could probably do more for the artists. Sure, there’s probably other stuff he messes up too.

However, the main problem is likely the record labels who own the majority of the shares after essentially forcing the founders to give up the company they built. Especially considering that he worked at µTorrent before going off to do Spotify, and was inspired by napster - the idea that music should be free and available to everyone.

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.

There is not a single Israeli settlement in Gaza. Their GDPPC is some 5000USD, which, for comparison, is almost twice that of Haiti. Insane amounts of international funding goes into Gaza every year. In fact, they receive the highest amount of international aid per capita on earth (more than 500USD/Capita!). In addition to that Israel usually provides both electricity and water at discounted rates, meaning almost everyone has access to both.

The Gazan leadership has been given numerous chances and opportunities for peace, yet over and over they chose to slaughter the innocent. The aid money, instead of buying food, funding education and healthcare goes to buying weapons, rockets and indoctrinating the next generation of genocidal terrorist.

This was an act of war, not a riot.

Israel disengaged from Gaza almost twenty years ago now, ending the occupation and effectively giving the Palestinians the chance to have their own state.

Since then, Gaza has attacked Israel, targeting its civilians over, and over, and over, clearly showing that the desire for genocide is no less today amongst the Palestinian leadership than it was in 1948.

I highly doubt that Israel will ever repeat such concessions in the future. Simply put, it was a grave error with a cost that Israel is still paying in blood to this day. This current invasion by Hamas only reinforces the fact that Israel fundamentally cannot trust Palestinian leaders and must keep any autonomy with a very short leash.