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Is Finland’s prime minister going to abandon Ukraine to win the elections?
The Finnish prime minister Petteri Orpo seems to be implying he’d like Ukraine to make “peace” with Russia, so that Finland’s ailing economy would get a boost before the April 2027 parliamentary elections. While this conclusion is not yet supported by evidence of Finnish aid to Ukraine fading, Orpo’s incentives and his past behaviour give cause for concern.
When the umbrella starts to leak: Securing NATO’s Eastern Flank after the new U.S. security strategy
The new U.S. National Security Strategy shifts the United States to an unreliable ally at best – an active threat at worst. Europe and in particular NB8 countries on NATO’s Eastern Flank must draw their own conclusions, and prepare for a new world – by an independent deterrent if necessary.
Learning to live with weakly godlike tools
Technology has already given us weakly godlike powers. As our tools become even more powerful and accessible, the defining challenge of this century is setting the limits to their use — and to individual power.
Why Sustainable Civilizations Must Be Democratic
Every civilization faces a choice: share power or run out of planet. Environmental limits cannot be enforced by decree or managed by elites; they can only be sustained through fairness, accountability, and democratic control.
Notes: Examples of LLMs as Synthetic Human Responders and Agents
Note: This is output from ChatGPT5 Plus’s Deep Research (light) mode, 25 SEP 2025. References have been checked and some light editing done by me – Janne M. Korhonen. I’m going to return to this topic later, but due to popular demand, chose to share the note as-is. Researchers have begun using large language models (LLMs) to simulate human decision-making…
Russian industrial mobilization cannot alter the outcome of the war
Could the Kremlin regime mobilize the Russian industry to produce enough war material to tip the scales in the war? In brief, the most likely answer is “no.” Russia does not have the industrial base required to produce enough modern weapons fast enough to prevent the Kremlin from losing the war, and converting civilian industry to war footing takes too…
15.6.22 Book review: The Invention of Humanity (Stuurman 2017)
Stuurman, Siep (2017). The invention of humanity: Equality and cultural difference in world history. Harvard University Press. This is an important book that, in my opinion, ought to be read by everyone who is seriously interested in greater equality, or wants evidence that human thought has proceeded towards greater equality over time: slowly and unevenly, but nevertheless: “When a sufficient…
27.5.2022 – What is good in life, on feedback loops possibly leading to collapse
In early 2002, I had an epiphany. I had been depressed for months and queried whether there is even any point in living any more: in the long run, we are all dead, and whatever we achieve will crumble in the sands of time. In a century, barely anyone will even know that you ever existed. What convinced me to…
20.5.2022 Friday – On extinction risk, commons risk, “natural disasters”
Extinction risks or X-risks are an interesting research topic that, however, has its own share of problems. I have one article in the works about some of its blind spots, and will be getting back to the topic later. Meanwhile, here’s something on classifying extinction risks, based on the following paper: Cotton‐Barratt, O., Daniel, M., & Sandberg, A. (2020). Defence…
19.5.2022 – Bitcoin, Tether, Beanstalk
Jessica McKenzie writes about the less known trend in Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin miners and fossil fuel firms, which increasingly tend to be the one and the same thing, are buying gas-fired generators and use them right next to gas wellheads. End result: to solve the crypto sudokus, fossil gas that would otherwise not be extracted and burned, is extracted and…
On the Kremlin’s imperialism
Greetings from a Finnish leftist! The international situation has apparently left many people in the English-speaking countries confused. I originally wrote this thread in Twitter in the hopes of sharing a perspective I believe is widely although certainly not universally shared in Finland, most leftists included. This is a slightly edited version, for clarity. What we see happening in Ukraine…
A Very Short And Fairly Understandable Introduction to Models
Created Monday 29 June 2020 At …and Then There’s Physics , there was a post about the recent Nature comment on a “modelling manifesto”, “Five ways to ensure that models serve society”. I’ve despaired in the past about some of the uses and abuses of models in research and, in particular, as blunt political instruments used to bludgeon the hoi…
What if we really tried to save our civilization? An introduction to Plan B
Our society and, indeed, our way of life is facing an existential threat. The situation is grim, but not hopeless. These words could have been used to describe the threat faced by the world’s democracies in 1939, and they could describe the threat today. Eight decades ago, the menace of totalitarian autocracy unleashed a world war that democracies had no…
Book review: McAfee (2019), More from Less
This is an interesting book which could be a good book if its key message – that technology and capitalism will decouple economic growth from resource use in time to prevent serious ecological disruption – were supported by research. This, unfortunately, is not the case. Decoupling is not exactly a subject that has never been studied before. There exists a…
Technology in a Post-Growth World: Lessons from the 1970s AT Movement
Hello again! This post about lessons we could learn from the 1970s Appropriate/Alternative Technology movement is derived from a presentation I gave at Helsinki Sustainability Science Days 2019, 9.5.2019. The entire presentation can be found here. The above presentation and this essay are an outgrowth of my innocent plan to just write up some short notes about technology for would-be…
What climate strikers ought to know about our economic system
Dear participants of the climate strike and all the other friends of a livable future! First of all, I’d like to thank every single one of you for your work defending a future for all of us. In my eyes, all of you are heroes. Practically all environmental researchers and those who understand the issues are on your side and…
The possible anatomy of coming climate change trials
As I write these lines, we have an ever clearer understanding that 1) humanity is hurtling towards a disaster of unimaginable proportions, and 2) the responsibility for this entirely foreseeable disaster rests to a very large extent on a very small group of people, mostly businessmen and political leaders, who over the last three decades have done their utmost to…
Bitcoin is not a good fit for renewable energy. Here’s why.
Recent research suggests that Bitcoin network is using an appreciable fraction – 0.1% – of the world’s total electricity use and is projected to use up to 0.5%, or about what all the solar panels in the world produce, by the year’s end. These troubling developments have been met by claims that Bitcoin is actually a good thing, since increased…
Practical policies for transition towards post-capitalist, post-scarcity society
One question I get asked a lot is that post-capitalism and post-scarcity sound like good ideas in theory, but how do we get from here to there in practice? In other words: What are the actual, concrete political projects we should be advancing? This is a good question and I don’t have as many good answers as I’d like to…
Post-scarcity: a research review (in progress!)
I’ve been slowly going through research literature on post-scarcity and so-called scarcity, abundance and sufficiency (SAS) school of thought. TL;DR version: post-scarcity economy, where the economic problem of production has for all intents and purposes been solved and all the basic needs are met for all the people, seems to be a much more feasible proposition than many people believe. However,…
Pragmatic, inclusive energy discussion works
Here’s one data point for the debate about communicating nuclear power: The approval rating of nuclear power in Finland has risen by a whopping seven percentage points in a year. In Pyhäjoki, where the Russian Rosatom is building its highly-contested reactor, the approval of nuclear power hovers around 75 percent despite all the media attention given to the very real…
Why I believe we ought to build a spacefaring civilisation
The successful launch of the Falcon Heavy is a milestone, and it has raised again the important question: should we humans try to create a spacefaring civilisation, even if we could? This is a philosophical question, and answers to it are ultimately subjective. However, for those who are interested in such matters, I solved it to my own satisfaction…
My professional opinion as a blockchain researcher: I don’t see the point (yet)
I’ve spent the last 15 months researching the implications and possibilities of blockchains and related “distributed trust technologies” from a business and societal point of view. Sadly, I have to say that I don’t quite get the hype, as much as I’d love to believe in a technological revolution that democratises the world economy. (NOTE: I’ve edited this text a bit…
Necessity is the mother of inventors: my PhD lecture
The following is the traditional Lectio praecursoria a doctoral candidate in Finland gives to the audience before his/her PhD defence. This one is mine, delivered on 12th December 2017. Esteemed custos, esteemed opponent, ladies and gentlemen! You all are probably familiar with an old saying, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Many may also remember stirring tales of ingenuity, where…
Finland is the land of personal freedom, and that’s why I love it
On December 6th 2017, Finland celebrates her centennial as an independent nation. Exactly one hundred years ago, the Finnish Parliament finally voted for the motion to sever all ties to the revolutionary Russian government and assume the highest legislative power in the country. (As an aside, the motion for independence had been introduced on November 30th, but the speaker of…
Power and the (European) anti-nuclear power movement
This post contains some thoughts about the history of the anti-nuclear movement and in particular the European anti-nuclear movement as a struggle for power and empowerment; it’s posted here for convenience and as a reference, and as a caution against interpreting the anti-nuclear movement simplistically, such as a movement that is being powered by fossil fuel interests. I’d also hope…
Mutually Assured Economic Destruction: the strongest weapon in the arsenal of the masses
I just understood something profound (to me, very likely not to most others) about Brexit and other supposedly “irrational” decisions by less well off voters. The standard middle-class liberal critique of these decisions almost inevitably includes wonderment why the voters would choose to shoot themselves on the foot, given that the economic policies and realities of voting for Brexit or…
Flesh may be weak. Savotta is strong.
In a break from my tradition of complaining about things, a positive post and a recommendation – and about a corporation, no less! Savotta of Finland is one of my favorite companies these days. They make my life better, easier and less stressful by taking away one of the worries of traveling: the fear that I’m in some foreign country…
I’m no longer advocating for clean energy; here’s why.
My Finnish readers will already know that I announced some time ago that I’m done with energy/climate change discussions. I’ve been following the debate actively since about 2007 and have been writing about it since late 2010. I’ve written two books about the topic, one of which is translated to five languages, and blogged fairly regularly. But now it’s time…
Confidence in 100% RE plans is poorly justified and may be dangerous
The recent publication of an unprecedented critique against the so-called “WWS” 100% renewable energy (RE) scenario has re-ignited the debate about the feasibility of renewable only energy scenarios in the United States and abroad. This is a long-overdue debate the world sorely needs, and everyone who has the slightest interest in climate change mitigation should pay careful attention. At stake…
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