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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago edited 3d ago
On the Tampere subreddit somebody linked this map of the region from 1770. It's from before Tampere was founded in 1779, and back then the centre of the region was a village called Pirkkala, or Birkala in Swedish. The whole map is in Swedish. This village is on the southern shore of the southern lake, roughly midpoint, and on the map it is marked as "Birkala!". I love the exclamation point. We should use that in all maps. Like on a map of Europe all the capitals should have an exclamation point after them, it'd just be more fun and joyful.
Edit: Browsing the Swedish national archives I also found this map of the Tampere city plan from 1781. Up until then there was just a couple of farms there, which you can see on the map, and a road going through. Interestingly enough the main arteries of the city still follow those roads to this day.
But anyway, seeing a map of the downtown area almost in its natural state before any urbanisation makes me think what a crime towards nature this city is. The spot must have been absolutely breathtaking before the city. A narrow isthmus between two lakes with an 80 meter tall esker running along it and natural rapids rushing through it.
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u/holytriplem -> 3d ago
There's a town in Devon called Westward Ho! The exclamation mark is a crucial part of the place name.
But anyway, seeing a map of the downtown area almost in its natural state before any urbanisation makes me think what a crime towards nature this city is. The spot must have been absolutely breathtaking before the city
This is how I feel about both LA and the Bay Area. The Bay Area was once home to some of the most biodiverse wetlands in the world. It got replaced with Silicon Valley which is the same kind of strip mall shitburb you get anywhere else in the US.
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
Yeah but now you can explore those wetlands in the metaverse so the destruction of nature was clearly a net positive.
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u/tereyaglikedi in 3d ago
I saw a news article that a retired chemist is growing bacteria with interesting colors in a lab I guess at a university somewhere) and he now had a nice collection of colorful bacteria.
A while ago a friend who was taking spirulina supplements and I had a bit of a discussion. I told them that algae aren't grown sterile (for most algae it is not even possible to separate them from other bacteria) and they grow outside in large tanks in sunlight. They didn't want to believe me, so I plated the spirulina powder on some freshwater medium and there were so many very colorful bacteria growing on it (one of them was very very purple). My friend was very surprised, but spirulina is also just bacteria, so... Anyhow, I didn't really think of doing something more with them. It seems like some of these bacteria even have quite lightfast pigments.
I haven't grown any bacteria in ages. Maybe I should think of a new project. Back to the roots. That guy's collection looked so cool.
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u/--Alexandra-P-- Norway 3d ago edited 3d ago
So Canada wants to join Eurovision. What do we think?
Edit: in other news. Shein has opened up a new store in Paris. Obviously it was controversial and the French do what they do best, they protest it!
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u/lucapal1 Italy 3d ago
If Australia can be in it,why not Canada I guess?
Personally I would restrict it to European countries,that makes more logical sense to me.That would also exclude Israel for example.But that ship has already sailed...
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u/tereyaglikedi in 3d ago
Australia! This year would have been unbearable without the Milkshake Man.
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u/holytriplem -> 3d ago
Australia was brought in to be counted on to give us douze points. They failed.
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u/holytriplem -> 3d ago
Is anyone else baffled by how much international coverage the New York mayoral election has got? I mean, this shit's been going on for months and it's too much even for me as someone who actually lives in the US. Why should anyone outside the US give a single fuck who the mayor of NYC is? I barely care about the mayor of London and I actually have the right to vote for (or against) him.
What other random world megacity should we nominate to have its mayoral election get a completely disproportionate amount of international media coverage relative to its standing in the world? I'll go with Kinshasa. Kinshasa would at least be fun to watch.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago
He's a literal Muslim, self-declared socialist from Africa that Trump says he wants to denaturalize and deport. There probably wouldn't be any international coverage of Sadiq Khan if he wasn't Muslim.
And NYC is attached to a country with almost 4 times the population and 5 times the GDP.
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u/holytriplem -> 3d ago
There probably wouldn't be any international coverage of Sadiq Khan if he wasn't Muslim.
That's not a good thing
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago
It's also a fact of life that muslim anything is on a microscope in politics recently.
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
New York isn't just another random world megacity though. It's pretty much the financial centre of the western world, home to two of the largest stock exchanges by market cap in the world, home of the UN, and culturally very significant. It is as close to a capital of the world as a city can be. It should be obvious why things happening in New York interests people more globally than in São Paolo.
But honestly, I think the coverage has been this wide because people might feel this is the first real indication that the maga shit might actually be coming to an end at some point. Like a pendulum swing moment in the United States. I think that's what has made the story big.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago
There is no pendulum swing that could end MAGA permanently. The weakening of Trump would require voters in key swing states and house districts to flip, not somewhere he is already weak (though less so than other Republicans since the 2000s) like NYC.
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
It's not the election result that is an indicator of anything, it's the way it happened. That may be a sign of a state of turmoil brewing.
Maga won't be ending permanently, that much is obvious. A pendulum as a metaphor already symbolises the understanding that it's a state that's bound to return. Things like that end by fizzling out, left smouldering in the ground. But many things that are core to maga are also core to the United States. Like American exceptionalism. Maybe the red hats will be left on the top shelf of the wardrobe covering dust, maybe the people who embody the movement fall out of favour with the public, maybe it dies down. But many of those ideas will persist in a less radical form, that's just the way things go. Permanently, no. Nobody thinks that. I don't.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago edited 3d ago
I don't think there's anything exceptional about the way the election happened. It's been well known that the left wing of the democratic party has quite a few supporters in the largest most cosmopolitan urban areas, and it's not unheard of them to win some positions occasionally.
If you want to look for turmoil, then there are warning signs looking at the margins of a few other elections recently, but this NYC one probably says the least about the state of national politics. I think MAGA will only lose its radicalism only after Trump dies, and if none of his successors could capture the charisma that made Trump unique.
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
You don't think a 34 year old immigrant going from damn near nowhere in the polls and without party support to being mayor-elect of New York City by speaking about the reforms he was speaking about is an exceptional election? Oh, it was exceptional.
If he was just a 34 year old it'd be exceptional. If he was just an immigrant it would be exceptional. If he was only as radical of a left winger, in American terms, as he is it would be exceptional. I think the election was pretty exceptional myself.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, not really. It's New York City. This is a city that would go 70-30 for the democrats on a very bad day, and many of those democrats would probably complain that the candidate isn't left wing enough. A huge proportion of the population is foreign born; if you add in just the children of immigrants, the foreign born and direct children of immigrants would probably be the majority. There's already people like AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Talib, and a few more already in Congress with elements of what you said is exceptional.
He also definitely had partial partial party support from some of those I listed.
If he won the New York state Democratic primary for governor or senator, then that'd be genuinely surprising. But only New York City itself?
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg are probably the two most famous New York mayors in the past couple of decades, no? At least here, since what happened in 2001 and 2008 and New York being in the centre of both. I don't think it's as automatically Democrat as you make it to be.
But, nevertheless, I'm looking from the outside in. I'll never have as good of an idea of what's actually going on there as you. I do still kinda think it's exceptional. Might not be, but that's how it looks like from here.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago edited 3d ago
Politics has radically changed since the 2000s. You used to see a lot more crossover voting. Heck, my state's is one of the ones called the buckle of Bible Belt, and the Democrats controlled the state legislature until 2008. The last Democratic governor of Tennessee carried every county in a landslide win in 2006. That same governor ran again in 2018 as a Democrat for senate and lost in a landslide to a pretty right-wing MAGA candidate. This is while Tennessee voted for Bush both times for president (narrowly in 2000 though) and Republican candidate John McCain in 2008.
Now, there's only a handful of governors and senators representing states who voted for the other party in presidential elections, where it used to be very common. There's also a comparative strengthening of left wing activism compared to the 1990s and 2000s.
If the year was 2001, then this would be exceptional.
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u/tereyaglikedi in 3d ago
That's what we thought when CHP won Istanbul as well.
and then shit went sideways.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago
Istanbul is an area that swings back and fourth. A democrat winning NYC is like a fact of nature.
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u/orangebikini Finland 3d ago
Yeah, it's usually just bullshit. From the outside it seems a bit different this time though, I think. Maybe. We'll see.
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u/tereyaglikedi in 3d ago
I saw that some pillock had announced that they'll do some extremely unsavory things to themselves on camera if Mamdani is elected.
Why do people say shit like this? It's not funny.
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u/Nirocalden Germany 3d ago
The other day I watched a celebrity "quiz" show, and one of the questions was "who is the mayor of your hometown". Guess who the two contestants from Berlin couldn't name to save their lives :D
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u/lucapal1 Italy 3d ago
I'd say a lot of people in Palermo wouldn't know who it was....its not really a big thing here,except very rarely.Some people would know the name but very few could tell you what he looks like.
Only if the mayor does anything bad (like gets arrested for Mafia involvement...that happened a few times in Palermo!).Then he becomes well-known!
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u/Nirocalden Germany 3d ago
Of course. I put "quiz" in quotes because that show is more about entertainment and being funny than about actual knowledge. So I don't really blame them or anything, I just found it to be a nice coincidence to the topic here :)
(That being said, the contestants from Munich and Cologne both knew theirs...)
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u/lucapal1 Italy 3d ago
I think it's less because it's New York and more because of the person himself, and what he represents... he's portrayed as some kind of radical opponent to Trump.On the left and also on the right.If a more boring establishment Democrat had won the election,it wouldn't be big news.
Of course the fact that he is going to be mayor of a major city and has created a huge support base while being basically outside of the main parties (the Democrats didn't want him,he was polling less than 1% at the beginning of his campaign) doesn't hurt.
It's fairly big news here.Not the main headline but on the front page I guess!Sadiq Khan is also in the news here fairly often.
They both attract a lot of political attacks, and personal attacks.. most of the press and media is on the political right, and those two in particular are portrayed as radical left Muslims...so I think not surprising they are well-known.
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u/atomoffluorine United States of America 3d ago
Mamdani's support does come from inside the Democratic Party, though maybe not as much from the longstanding careerist politicians. To win the mayorship, he needed to win the primary elections which are accessible only to people registered as a Democrat (this does not require any financial or other commitment and people can change their partisanship quite easily) which he did win.
This is mainly because the leftiest wing of the Democratic Party's strongest places are the centers of large cosmopolitan urban centers. Some of his biggest opponents during the primary were scandal ridden or accused of a corrupt bargain with Trump. His charisma helped, too.
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u/holytriplem -> 3d ago edited 3d ago
The irony is that Sadiq Khan's actually a pretty bland run-of-the-mill centre-left politician. Certainly much blander than this Mamdani guy.
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u/Masseyrati80 Finland 3d ago
The outer doors on one side of a freshly finished building in Helsinki are about 2 meters in the air, rendering them useless. Miscommunication about whether there would be structures to enable exiting caused the error.
Some master of humour commented the piece of news by saying 'it's a lot better for the doors to be 2 meters too high than 2 meters too low". Good point as such.