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What is the most powerful flying bug? This poll is closed. |
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| 🦋 |
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15 | 3.71% |
| 🦇 |
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115 | 28.47% |
| 🪰 |
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12 | 2.97% |
| 🐦 |
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67 | 16.58% |
| dragonfly |
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94 | 23.27% |
| 🦟 |
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14 | 3.47% |
| 🐝 |
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87 | 21.53% |
| Total: | 404 votes | ||
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Frosted Flake posted:But how many services are they producing? Apps? Game development? it's probably way worse than even that figure because a decent % is wartime military poo poo
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Dec 23, 2022 22:15
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i say swears online posted:70% decrease in industrial production holy poo poo the only productive sector of the economy that Ukraine will have left at this rate is the guys who scam NAFO clowns by writing messages on the same artillery shell over and over again.
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Dec 23, 2022 22:18
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Majorian posted:Europe has pretty firmly lashed its geopolitical fortunes together with the U.S.' at this point. They aren't going to stop aiding Ukraine anytime soon; the opportunity to do that was months ago. Now, even if they all decided today that they're going to cut off all help to the government in Kyiv, it would still take a while for Russian petroleum and natural gas to start flowing back into Europe. So they're in for a penny, in for a pound at this point. In the meantime, China may not be thrilled with Russia's war in Ukraine, but they probably aren't going to pull the rug out from under Moscow by selling arms or aiding Europe while this proxy war is going on. So Europe remains dependent on the U.S. and its contractors for its defense against the scary Russian bogeyman. The U.S. hasn't even had to bully the European governments all that much to put themselves in this position; Europe's own media did most of it for them. I would say for the being, but the war is eventually be over and the Russians are right there. During the Cold War, the US could bully Europe around because it was completely economic dependent on the US but as the Chinese economy surpasses the US economy both in adjusted and non-adjusted terms that influence will invariably fade. I would argue that the US is being stretched thin at the moment trying to retain the influence have but it isn't a sustainable strain. Also, the Chinese are actively helping the Russians, the balance of trade are actually very much in Russia's favor and they are almost certainly allowing "dual use" items to go to the Russians. Certainly, you could argue this has forced the Russians to be more dependent on China but this is hardly a victory for the US. At the same time, and at the same time the Russians have been improving their ties with much of the global south to attempt to balance that relationship with China. And I was just in the Netherlands, and no one gave a poo poo about the war, and I think even the European political class is hedging their bets. I see this whole fiasco as a net loss of American influence. (Also, now the US has to park a bunch of troops and equipment in Poland while they are attempting to contain China, great stuff.) The US tried to go in all in Russia and with effort can keep Europe in line but invariably it is a wasted sideshow, and if the US pulls back, everything will invariably reset. Ardennes has issued a correction as of 22:26 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 22:23
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what we can be reasonably sure about is that someone is going to do something really stupid in the next two decades. No way this geopolitical arrangement doesn't kick off something horrible.
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Dec 23, 2022 22:27
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so estonia is like 80-100 miles from st petersburg and has been in nato for eighteen years. have we not reached maximum escalation if there's no real push to put nukes in the baltics?
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Dec 23, 2022 22:29
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Frosted Flake posted:Not really related to Ukraine, other than race science produces weird outcomes sometimes. Ben-Hur, the best selling novel of the 19th century, was written at a time when the British were "discovering" that India had an ancient past and beautiful philosophical tradition that had identified many of the truths Westerners had presumed they had a monopoly on, first through Christianity, then through the Enlightenment, then through being racially superior. To keep in step, they had to develop ideas like the beautiful pure North Indian Aryans were proto-Christians, philosophers and basically Greeks/Persians who were subsumed and polluted by South Indians. Yeah... Not coincidentally, many of the Ukrainian nationalist theories propose a pre-history of a pure race that was "Russified/Polanized/Magyarized" and lost touch with blah blah blah. Frosted Flake posted:
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Dec 23, 2022 22:32
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Ardennes posted:I would say for the being, but the war is eventually be over and the Russians are right there. During the Cold War, the US could bully Europe around because it was completely economic dependent on the US but as the Chinese economy surpasses the US economy both in adjusted and non-adjusted terms that influence will invariably fade. I would argue that the US is being stretched thin at the moment trying to retain the influence have but it's a sustainable strain. The hot war may or may not end over the next year, but there isn't going to be a ceasefire, much less a treaty, that actually heals the divide between Russia and Ukraine over this. At best, there will be a cold war between Europe and Russia for the foreseeable future; at worst, the hot war will reignite shortly after the ceasefire is signed. Either way, European governments will happily buy U.S. arms until Russia or Ukraine are completely depleted and can't continue fighting. The fact that a lot of European voters are apathetic towards the war only makes it easier for governments to keep it going. It may be a geopolitical net loss for the U.S. in the longterm, but I think it's a near-certainty that this will be a win for the American Empire in the short-to-medium term. I take no joy in saying this,
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Dec 23, 2022 22:32
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i say swears online posted:so estonia is like 80-100 miles from st petersburg and has been in nato for eighteen years. have we not reached maximum escalation if there's no real push to put nukes in the baltics? Estonia is not a defensible position to place nukes, but Ukraine and Finland are. I wouldn't say we are out of the woods.
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Dec 23, 2022 22:32
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I've seen people just claim that NATO wouldn't lift a finger for the baltics. So maintaining strategic ambiguity is probably for the best, otherwise everyone might just walk into a serious escalation there.
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Dec 23, 2022 22:33
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Lostconfused posted:I've seen people just claim that NATO wouldn't lift a finger for the baltics. yeah gwb admitting them in '04 was incredibly loving stupid. i can't imagine the drama if russia invaded and we didn't do poo poo. other option is the end of the world
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Dec 23, 2022 22:36
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quote:- Regarding the "10-10-10" reform ( we are talking about the reduction of VAT, income tax and personal income tax rates to 10%, - ed. ), there are different estimates. Do you think that it will still be possible to implement it? herman cain mode
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Dec 23, 2022 22:40
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Makes the sign of the aquila The Emperor of mankind protects!  (He really doesn't)
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Dec 23, 2022 22:54
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Majorian posted:https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1605681082048946187 Another way to look at this is that Russia's military budget is 60-70 bn a year, so if you're sending 50 bn in aid a year and only eroding 50% of Russian capability, how good a deal are you getting? I suppose you also need to factor in that the US is a bigger economy and exists to shovel mountains of cash into the black hole of the MIC. quote:Wars are shop windows for defense manufacturers; any buyer in their right mind will want the technology made by the winner. Putin’s misjudgment has merely provided a fantastic marketing opportunity for its Western competitors. Also how can anyone read poo poo like this and not have an 'are we the baddies?' moment
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Dec 23, 2022 23:02
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Majorian posted:The hot war may or may not end over the next year, but there isn't going to be a ceasefire, much less a treaty, that actually heals the divide between Russia and Ukraine over this. At best, there will be a cold war between Europe and Russia for the foreseeable future; at worst, the hot war will reignite shortly after the ceasefire is signed. Either way, European governments will happily buy U.S. arms until Russia or Ukraine are completely depleted and can't continue fighting. The fact that a lot of European voters are apathetic towards the war only makes it easier for governments to keep it going. It may be a geopolitical net loss for the U.S. in the longterm, but I think it's a near-certainty that this will be a win for the American Empire in the short-to-medium term. I take no joy in saying this, Looking at the state of European militaries, it isn't going to be a much of a Cold War. Their budgets can't sustain it and there will eventually be a push to actually address the economic issues they are facing. I agree the US is getting one over the Europeans now as they took the brunt of the hit, but the question is if they don't start looking for the soonest offramp possible when there is finally a true lull in the fighting. Also, if the war starts turning in Russia's favor then the Europeans only have a more incentive to just make a deal.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:06
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Ardennes posted:Looking at the state of European militaries, it isn't going to be a much of a Cold War. Their budgets can't sustain it and there will eventually be a push to actually address the economic issues they are facing. I agree the US is getting one over the Europeans now as they took the brunt of the hit, but the question is if they don't start looking for the soonest offramp possible when there is finally a true lull in the fighting. the US has ways of dealing with stuff like that
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Dec 23, 2022 23:09
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Lostconfused posted:I've seen people just claim that NATO wouldn't lift a finger for the baltics. One of the naval operations textbooks, I think coalition warfare (?) mentions that they had to give up anything that resembles an independent military as part of NATO integration, so that one was supposed to specialize only in land and naval mine clearance, another on CBRN and I forget the third. The idea was ostensibly to prevent duplication of effort, save those countries' financial resources, that they could better contribute to NATO through specialization but it did feel, at least at the time I read it, as trying to remove their ability to cause trouble with Russia, crack down on their ethnic minorities too hard. I have no idea if that policy survived 2008 and 2014 though. It's easy to believe that if there wasn't already a Canadian battlegroup there, the public wouldn't assent to sending one to fight for them. Consent manufacturing could be cranked up though, who knows? Georgia really hosed up their military to be more useful to the Americans in Iraq, and a lean-modern-NATO-ready force but at the same time John McCain saying "we're all Georgians" had zero public impact. I like the Norwegians, I don't really care for the Balts, and I've avoided Babushka Duty. Not that I'm a decision maker or anything but even within the military - mid grade and especially senior officers have fond memories of West Germany, there's still very strong national goodwill for and identification with the UK, particularly in the military. The Americans are who they are, and our military doesn't really work without them, so even if people don't like them, they're our Closest Ally. There's Americans at my work, and you see them all the time in the various headquarters. Everybody likes the ANZACS, and then after that I've run into Dutch and French a handful of times, but people seem to like them enough. Jamaicans attend the military college and officer training here but many people don't like JDF officers lol so maybe that's an exception. I guess what I'm saying is that creating the idea of any kind of national kinship with many of these countries straight up does not work. The Ukraine stuff in Canada has been an all-out state and media effort, but imo has started to see diminishing returns. Within the military, look it's as easy as the Poles, Czechs, Dutch and Belgians fought in First Canadian Army, the Ukrainians were in the Waffen SS. It's been very hard spinning the country that's existed since 1991 as our "natural" or "historical" allies in any sense of the term. This has all been a preamble to say that Hybrid Warfare / New Generation Warfare is predicated on NATO countries not actually liking these people enough to come to their defence when they abuse their Russian minority populations and Little Green Men show up. I can't say I disagree with the theory, but that's why we have tripwire forces there. A Latvian battlegroup could get flattened tomorrow and the Canadian public is not demanding war, but the Canadian battlegroup is there because they would. The more I think about this, the more it seems like Washington arranging for Canadian troops to garrison Hong Kong... Frosted Flake has issued a correction as of 23:14 on Dec 23, 2022 |
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Dec 23, 2022 23:10
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Frosted Flake posted:Latvian *BEGINS HISSING*
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Dec 23, 2022 23:17
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You guys are talking about mid term long term win lost without describing the outcome of the war first IMO if the war lasts 2 more years and the actual line of control stays pretty close to the current line, it's not going to be a win for the west camp. The Biden admin has already committed 100B and probably will pony up 50-100B more for the next 1-2 years, they can't take the current outcome as a win. The GOP will dunk Biden from great height and sell it as great disaster. BTW, got a joke here. The US spending 100B on Ukraine is still a much better business deal than the 100B spent on the High Speed Rail because Americans can't do infrastructure to save their lives 
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Dec 23, 2022 23:18
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Atrocious Joe posted:the US has ways of dealing with stuff like that They can gladio as much as they want but eventually there is going to be a push from the European capitalist class itself.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:19
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https://twitter.com/EURACTIV/status/1605449396086251520
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Dec 23, 2022 23:25
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Ardennes posted:I would say for the being, but the war is eventually be over and the Russians are right there. During the Cold War, the US could bully Europe around because it was completely economic dependent on the US but as the Chinese economy surpasses the US economy both in adjusted and non-adjusted terms that influence will invariably fade. I would argue that the US is being stretched thin at the moment trying to retain the influence have but it isn't a sustainable strain. not sure if they count as global south, but also Turkey, Iran, OPEC and India, of course. also China knows it needs Russia and I don't see them gutting them even if they could.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:28
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I have heard an explanation/prediction that the only way the EU can resist US control is that the elites push in an right wing populist government first. Only thru the populists can they back hand resist US influence, alongside the other awful thing they do to the immigrants. Like Italy is teasing now.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:28
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Majorian posted:https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1605681082048946187 oh my loving god this is an absolutely horrifying take. the liberal obsession with penny pinching and ‘efficiency’ brought to its logical conclusion. i wonder what kind of force multiplier they’re using to spend 5% to damage 50%? maybe the blood and guts of hundreds of thousands of ukranians being churned up to lubricate the gears of war so the pentagon can save money on wd-40?? zero consideration of how we’re annihilating an entire country, arming nazi death squads, or bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war. gently caress consequences a year down the road, there’s no spreadsheet option for quantifying human suffering, we’ve got budgets to trim this quarter. just an obsessive focus on minmaxing damage KPIs and cost efficiency that would make curtis lemay or albert speer proud. this is the ultimate liberal ‘efficient’ war project, where collateral damage is an invisible externality or something you can leverage. thank you majorian this is some incredibly potent psychic damage 
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Dec 23, 2022 23:29
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lobotomy molo posted:oh my loving god this is an absolutely horrifying take. the liberal obsession with penny pinching and ‘efficiency’ brought to its logical conclusion. i wonder what kind of force multiplier they’re using to spend 5% to damage 50%? maybe the blood and guts of hundreds of thousands of ukranians being churned up to lubricate the gears of war so the pentagon can save money on wd-40?? I got more "we can take out the Russians with only a portion of our might, they are bugs compared out our greatness! Let the Empire live for 10,000 years! Hail Victory!"
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Dec 23, 2022 23:31
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Dec 23, 2022 23:32
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Ardennes posted:I got more "we can take out the Russians with only a portion of our might, they are bugs compared out our greatness! Let the Empire live for 10,000 years! Hail Victory!" its_the_same_picture.jpg this is how liberals have viewed wars since ww2, korea, vietnam. kills per dollar, kills per day, maximizing efficiency. it just totally ignores the obvious question of “how are we achieving that?” it’s like if a Roman general was bragging about killing 100,000 barbarians at the cost of only 5,000 Roman lives (and 200,000 dead Roman auxiliaries, but those don’t count) loving call of duty proMLG rear end way of looking at the world. psychotic
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Dec 23, 2022 23:55
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“bro who cares if the civilians have electricity check out my sick new k/d”
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Dec 23, 2022 23:59
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stephenthinkpad posted:IMO if the war lasts 2 more years and the actual line of control stays pretty close to the current line... The Ukrainian electrical grid, medical system and recruiting system are under severe and increasing strain. The civilian economy is is unknown, though pretty evidently bad, shape. State finances and taxation are getting worse. There's a reason the west absolutely refuses to report on Ukrainian military casualties, and that's because they're not sustainable. Nobody is really sure to what extent, things were looking pretty bad before they shifted focus to sectors Russia wasn't shoring up and got a much needed morale boost. At the moment they're feeding troops into a battle of attrition through the mud and the blood, and each day of that wears on the military, state, morale, budget. After this successes this summer I don't know who told them that following in the footsteps of Przemyśl, Isonzo and Verdun was a good idea, but their ability to maintain the frontline, or even stay in the war, for the next two years is being buried in a storm of steel that they have thrown themselves into.
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Dec 23, 2022 23:59
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I think in the next 1-2 years the intensity of fighting will be considerably lower. The Ukrainian side just can't bring themselves to negotiate right now. There is going to be a delay effect of GOP step in and say thats it we don't have unlimited funds (whenever that may be) and the Ukrainians accept the fact.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:06
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Frosted Flake posted:Jamaicans attend the military college and officer training here but many people don't like JDF officers lol so maybe that's an exception. Any idea why this is, or is this the obvious reason?
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Dec 24, 2022 00:08
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lobotomy molo posted:its_the_same_picture.jpg I would say the context is "if we needed to we should just bump it to 10% and completely crush the Russians." It is the assumption that not Ukrainian lives are meaningless you are keep on inching the nob higher to get a grander result. Frosted Flake posted:The Ukrainian electrical grid, medical system and recruiting system are under severe and increasing strain. The civilian economy is is unknown, though pretty evidently bad, shape. State finances and taxation are getting worse. It is why you need a narrative that the West could always just pump a bit more aid in and shift the situation to their advantage but in reality I think much of the trading has been going better for the Russians than they want to admit. If you are talking about 8-10,000 KIA Russians, that likely means only so much equipment was likely lost (especially since verified captures seem actually pretty rare). The entire "efficiency" argument is sociopathic...but it is also hollow. You need to put the Russians in a place where they can't replace their losses and honestly I just don't think that is happening. If anything Russian arms manufacturing seems to be upping production. The Ukrainians can still linger a while though, and they have the men still to put into battle but I wouldn't say things are looking better for them either.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:10
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Isentropy posted:Any idea why this is, or is this the obvious reason? yeah they're way too cool for those nerds
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Dec 24, 2022 00:10
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how many troops we talking
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Dec 24, 2022 00:13
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quote:Polish citizens deciding to join the Ukrainian army are motivated by solidarity with a country innocently attacked by an aggressor who does not conceal hostile intentions also towards Poland, as well as by patriotism, thus acting for the security of Poland, it adds.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:17
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Serenissima Res Publica Poloniae!
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Dec 24, 2022 00:21
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lobotomy molo posted:its_the_same_picture.jpg This will always be funny to me because in 1990 Bruce Ellis caused a stir within popular history in Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War, which demonstrated that the Americans buried the IJA and Wehrmacht under tonnes of shells, to the tune of 25-50k small arms bullets per enemy soldier killed. That had been well known professionally and among historians since the war itself, but it had never really made it into the public imagination. Probably because the Greatest Generation was alive and still influential, but there's likely other cultural factors. Anyway, industry wins wars, the Americans used industry to produce outrageous amounts of firepower. The year after the book came out, the Persian Gulf War happened and so precision took centre stage. Without going into all of the social and cultural things at work, the very easiest thing to understand about technology and surrounding narratives is that it broke a lot of those calculations. Ammunition got insanely more expensive, but - as I have argued endlessly ITT - it did not get equally more effective. So that while converting dollar expenditure, to ammunition expenditure, to battlefield effect can be done from WW2 to Korea to Vietnam, now the Excalibur costs $200k to the regular 155's $400. "A million dollar's worth of shells" obviously means something different given that change. That's on top of the bodycount system and the other quantification methods not working. Not in Korea, not in Vietnam, not now. First, it creates perverse incentives. In Vietnam American artillery batteries would just shell the countryside as H&I and that would eventually end up in reports as estimated X Vietcong KIA. Besides being poor accounting, this damaged farmland, and killed livestock as well as innocent civilians. Second, it is expenditure for its own sake, taking the conclusions of all the studies into WW2, dollar per German soldier killed for example, and works backwards in assuming that more dollars kills more Germans, if that makes sense. The people fighting the war did not have that level of statistical information and so didn't fight it along the statistical models, but everybody studying it afterward had their perceptions skewed by it. Mostly, you're right in that the cost is the Ukrainian Army, which is now on its third or forth iteration. Following closely behind is Ukrainian civil society, which is being thrown on the pyre, and after that the economy and the state. What this is costing the Ukraine is pretty much everything not directly related to fighting the war, and much that is.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:24
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Isentropy posted:Any idea why this is, or is this the obvious reason? I'd like to think it's something innocent like culture shock, or maybe the Jamaicans that are sent abroad are like the Jordanians and Saudis that study and train in the UK and US respectively, and are upper class and entitled. Probably it's more than a little racist. I've just heard general complaints like "keep to themselves" and "stuck up", and... they're attending a military academy in a foreign country, that's shouldn't really shock people. The Brits used to have the same attitude towards Canadians that attended Sandhurst and mock their affected British accents, so a little more self-awareness and humility from the Canadian camp here would be nice.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:28
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Frosted Flake posted:This will always be funny to me because in 1990 Bruce Ellis caused a stir within popular history in Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War, which demonstrated that the Americans buried the IJA and Wehrmacht under tonnes of shells, to the tune of 25-50k small arms bullets per enemy soldier killed. That had been well known professionally and among historians since the war itself, but it had never really made it into the public imagination. Probably because the Greatest Generation was alive and still influential, but there's likely other cultural factors. Anyway, industry wins wars, the Americans used industry to produce outrageous amounts of firepower. agreed, this is much more eloquent and specific than I could have phrased it. it certainly comes across as bragging about k/d ratios while ignoring the horrifying costs, justified with the most toxic kind of navel gazing corporate capitalist pseudo-math.
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Dec 24, 2022 00:35
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Wait - - For Ukraine, or FOR Ukraine???  
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Dec 24, 2022 00:55
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lobotomy molo posted:oh my loving god this is an absolutely horrifying take. the liberal obsession with penny pinching and ‘efficiency’ brought to its logical conclusion. i wonder what kind of force multiplier they’re using to spend 5% to damage 50%? maybe the blood and guts of hundreds of thousands of ukranians being churned up to lubricate the gears of war so the pentagon can save money on wd-40?? dark type stays winning
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Dec 24, 2022 00:59
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