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Cake day: January 22nd, 2026

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  • The new food pyramid is just as influenced by lobbyist as the previous one. Only this time it’s the life stock industry.

    Plus anti-woke MAGA wants to distance itself from vegans as much as possible.

    But also, lean, fresh meat isn’t that bad. It does have a lot of protein, with really balanced amino-acids. You don’t have to carefully combine grains and legumes, in order to not miss out on essential nutrients.

    Meat also has a lot of bioavailable iron and vitamin B12. Both are important and usually insufficient in a vegan diet.

    If you count fish as meat, it also has bioavailable Omega-3. Especially fatty ocean-fishes like salmon. If you don’t eat fish, you either have to eat microalgae-oil or severely reduce your omega-6 consumption (no chips for you. They are fried in sunflower oil).

    In contrast to fresh meat, most processed meats are really bad:

    • Cured meat has sodium nitrate. That’s a known carcinogen.
    • Smoked meat has smoke particles. That’s another known carcinogen.
    • Charred meat has charring. Another carcinogen.

    And you also shouldn’t eat a lot of fat from land animals. It has a lot of saturated fats which, you guessed it, cause cancer.


  • They aren’t going to manufacture there. Chip manufacturing happens almost exclusively in Taiwan. That new building is just an office to design those chips.

    A lot of maths goes into designing computer chips. You need an army of highly trained mathematicians and engineers for that.

    And Israel is a really rich country that gets a lot of gifts and “investments” from people who want to show they aren’t antisemitic. They invest a lot of that money into the education of their citizens.

    Israel’s universities are some of the best in the world. While US universities are on a steep downhill.





  • No. To my knowledge, putting the means of production into the hands of the people was never a majority opinion. And democracy is important.

    However, there are many social democratic policies that I believe have very broad support, and that still aren’t being implemented:

    • Universal healthcare (e.g. through mandatory insurance with central price negotiations)
    • Ban on pharmaceutical rebates
    • Universal free preschool
    • Free school lunch
    • Incentivising local governments to zone more medium density housing.

    Then there are other policies that I think would be really good for the US, but I am not sure the support is bipartisan:

    • Tighter control on monopolies
    • Unlimited sick days with a doctor’s note
    • Minimum vacation days
    • Raising minimum wage and implementing an automatic inflation adjustment
    • Maximum weekly work hours
    • Banning false self-employment
    • Union protections
    • Parental leave
    • Free college admission

    The latter category is also where I would place steps towards market socialism. For example federal laws that allow worker cooperatives (currently only some states allow them). And potentially even lowering the tax on worker co-ops compared to conventional companies.

    What’s your opinion on those questions?










  • They are flawed as well. You will never agree with any party on all issues, so you have to already compromise during voting. Even more so if there is an electoral threshold.

    If that legislative would then try to find different majorities for every different issue, the population would still be represented relatively well. But that’s not what actually happens.

    Instead, two or three parties that represent just barely more than half the population get together and form a government. An executive government. That alone goes against the separation of powers.

    And after that, most legislative decisions are made unilaterally by that government coalition.

    That whole coalition circus doesn’t work without an electoral threshold, which again forces voters to compromise more.

    Instead, I’d like to vote for the government directly, through ranked voting. With a separate ranking for each minister. That way I could eg. give my highest vote to the green candidate for the ministry of transportation, and Dr. med XYZ of the conservative party for the ministry of health.

    Then, separate from the executive branch, I could imagine a parliament without an electoral threshold for the legislative. That would keep compromise during voting to a minimum. 0.5% of votes would already grant a seat. That way, voters can choose representatives they agree with on multiple issues.

    Although my preferred solution would be a more direct system of petitions and citizen’s assembly. If an open petition gets enough votes, or the government petitions something, then a randomly selected citizen’s assembly would be called to meet, research, debate and decide on that issue. Similar to jury duty in the US.

    Random selection sounds counter to what we generally consider democratic today. But it would be much less susceptible to corruption. And random selection means we get a representative sample of opinions.

    Direct voting on issues is also relatively safe from corruption. However, especially with less mainstream topics, it has a tendency to let extremists win. Because they are better at mobilizing their voters.

    For really important issues direct voting is still a pretty decent idea. For example for changes to the constitution. Especially if it takes 50% of eligible voters to change the constitution. Not just 50% of cast votes.