This is an article about the city of Östersund written in 2018, the few links between the Spanish flu and any reform are tenuous at best.
Having said that, I grew up in Östersund and found the article fascinating and a good read.
One interesting thing is that now, a 100 years later, the tourism of the region once again brings a pandemic. Swedens largest ski resort Åre, an hour west of Östersund, has a bunch of Covid-19 cases that has spread through after ski parties (which has since stopped).
Some context to the article not relating to Covid-19:
Jämtland, the region where Östersund is located, is located in the geographic middle of Sweden, but is considered to be in the northern parts because the demographic of the country is heavily skewed south. In the west it borders Norway and in 1563–1677 it switched between being part of Denmark/Norway and Sweden 13(!) times. Perhaps as a result of this there is still a strong sense of regional identity. Among other things Jämtland is a "fake republic" with a "fake president" which gives a speech during the music festival once a year. This is just in good fun and the speech is mostly about peace, love and understanding, but hearing 15k people singing the regional anthem "Jämtlandssången" after the speech always gives me goosebumps.
Östersund has always been strategically important militarily, in semi-recent times because the Soviet Union would have to pass it to take Trondheim in Norway and the harbor there. The article mentions the airbase closing down, but there were other military units that were disbanded as well. The article touches on this mentioning the university, but another reason the town is still successful today is that it also supported newly unemployed military personel in starting companies. Since one of the units that were disbanded(/moved?) was the military technical school, the city managed to keep a bunch of people with higher education which might otherwise have relocated and now has a few tech-companies and a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just some stream of consciousness stuff, while I live in Stockholm now I got excited "my city" was featured on HN. :)
It is a beautiful city and region with fantastic nature and a very long and fascinating history, definitely visit it if you have the opportunity!
Personally I would argue that we descriptively have different definitions of free before a choice and after.
Because the future has not yet happened, all possible future choices are indeed free in a sense, even if one of them is predetermined.
When we look back, I think we tend to think of free in a different way, that is, given that a choice has already been made, we can now say that it was the only choice that could have happened and did (determinism or not, I think we often tend to think this way in ordinary life).
When we judge moral responsibility, we tend to think of the actor in that moment of making the choice. At that moment the choice was still "free", because the future had not yet happened, and so we ascribe moral responsibility to these actions.
As Wikipedia phrases Harry G. Frankfurt (1969): "A compatibilist can believe that a person can choose between many choices, but the choice is always determined by external factors"
A bit sloppily put, a compatibilist believes a choice is free if the agent making it is not coerced or constrainted, even if the choice that the agent will make is determined.
Different compatibilists approach this as either being descriptive (this is how we tend to actually make moral judgements), or normative (free will is defined in these terms and moral responsibility for our actions follows from that).
Most incompatibilists agree that "freedom to act" is a necessary criterion for free will, but not that it is sufficient.
Quite a few of these wargames has an interesting history. I think at least Leviathan, Narnia, Behemoth, Utumno and Maze originates from a site I believe had the url wargames.net about 15 years ago. That site got transformed into dievo.org (Digital Evolution) which later closed. intruded.net picked up the wargames to keep them online and they then ended up on overthewire.org.
I have very fond memories of hanging around the wargames.net and later dievo.org irc-channels in my late teens talking to the wonderful and talented people there (lots of swedes if I remember correctly). While the late night talks might have messed with my school grades somewhat I'm pretty sure I learned more from those people than I learned from school anyway. :) I probably wouldn't work as a developer today if it weren't for those communities so a big shoutout from Woodman if any of you are reading this! :)
Having said that, I grew up in Östersund and found the article fascinating and a good read.
One interesting thing is that now, a 100 years later, the tourism of the region once again brings a pandemic. Swedens largest ski resort Åre, an hour west of Östersund, has a bunch of Covid-19 cases that has spread through after ski parties (which has since stopped).
Some context to the article not relating to Covid-19:
Jämtland, the region where Östersund is located, is located in the geographic middle of Sweden, but is considered to be in the northern parts because the demographic of the country is heavily skewed south. In the west it borders Norway and in 1563–1677 it switched between being part of Denmark/Norway and Sweden 13(!) times. Perhaps as a result of this there is still a strong sense of regional identity. Among other things Jämtland is a "fake republic" with a "fake president" which gives a speech during the music festival once a year. This is just in good fun and the speech is mostly about peace, love and understanding, but hearing 15k people singing the regional anthem "Jämtlandssången" after the speech always gives me goosebumps.
Östersund has always been strategically important militarily, in semi-recent times because the Soviet Union would have to pass it to take Trondheim in Norway and the harbor there. The article mentions the airbase closing down, but there were other military units that were disbanded as well. The article touches on this mentioning the university, but another reason the town is still successful today is that it also supported newly unemployed military personel in starting companies. Since one of the units that were disbanded(/moved?) was the military technical school, the city managed to keep a bunch of people with higher education which might otherwise have relocated and now has a few tech-companies and a somewhat entrepreneurial spirit.
This is just some stream of consciousness stuff, while I live in Stockholm now I got excited "my city" was featured on HN. :)
It is a beautiful city and region with fantastic nature and a very long and fascinating history, definitely visit it if you have the opportunity!