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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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Ugh lol I had to pass some homeless people on the street today and they were cold. Get a loving grip losers. Ukraine is in danger and you are worried about this stupid poo poo. Do they not have heated floors? Lol, my wife and I upgraded a few months ago when I put in my Marvel mancave and it was well worth the extra 20k
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Dec 24, 2022 01:08
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grinning at my zelensky funkopop
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Dec 24, 2022 01:12
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iCe-CuBe. posted:Ugh lol I had to pass some homeless people on the street today and they were cold. Get a loving grip losers. Ukraine is in danger and you are worried about this stupid poo poo. Do they not have heated floors? Lol, my wife and I upgraded a few months ago when I put in my Marvel mancave and it was well worth the extra 20k I like how they painted the ground spikes the city council installed under the overpass to deter... 'the camps'... a nice, supportive blue-and-yellow, y'know? How do you like your Ukraine t-shirt? I saw the ad on facebook, and I knew I just had to get all my christmas shopping done there.
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Dec 24, 2022 01:14
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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. i actually don’t see how America/west can win the “meta war”. what would be needed? I guess Russia just fleeing Ukraine, returning crimea, and doing a large scale privatization as penance? otherwise any situation where the world becomes multipolar will be a net positive for the countries on the outside and a net loss for the west- primarily America but the other STier slavers as well. the scale of extortion is too high to think Russia could somehow lose more by fighting a slow paced war than is extorted by having to exist within an American global economy. absolutely China is the biggest winner. but I don’t think russia would care as long as China didn’t have the same policy towards them as America does. russias opportunity to be the largest economy in the world is long gone. this isn’t really related to the war I guess, but whatever
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Dec 24, 2022 01:18
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I didn't realize heated floors were a thing until that post. Seems like a fire hazard.
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Dec 24, 2022 01:19
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Electricity outages are causing chaos at the Ukrainian-Polish border. I feel like people may have underestimated the difficulty of fighting a war with an exploded energy gridРыбарь posted:🇵🇱🇺🇦🚛 About the blocking of the crossing on the Polish-Ukrainian border
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Dec 24, 2022 01:21
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Dixon Chisholm posted:dark type stays winning 
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Dec 24, 2022 01:23
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Ytlaya posted:I didn't realize heated floors were a thing until that post. Seems like a fire hazard. old school heated floors are absurdly inefficient metal resistors under the floorboards. they're so heavy they cost a lot to remove.
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Dec 24, 2022 01:25
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yeah the electricity grid attacks make a lot of sense in a very grim sort of way. if the objective has now shifted to breaking the ukrainian state and thereby its ability to field an army, hitting the grid is a good way to do it. it's awful for basically everyone in ukraine, of course - and as the financial burden grows heavier to bear, institutions like the IMF will place ever more onerous demands on the ukrainians to keep funding them, making everything worse for everyone war is just so goddamned *grim*
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Dec 24, 2022 01:25
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iCe-CuBe. posted:Ugh lol I had to pass some homeless people on the street today and they were cold. Get a loving grip losers. Ukraine is in danger and you are worried about this stupid poo poo. Do they not have heated floors? Lol, my wife and I upgraded a few months ago when I put in my Marvel mancave and it was well worth the extra 20k some people don’t even have an electricity grid thanks to russia and y’all made me pause my podcasts with this baby poo poo?? 🙄
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Dec 24, 2022 01:27
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Ytlaya posted:I didn't realize heated floors were a thing until that post. Seems like a fire hazard. they’re usually hot water with radiant heating I think
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Dec 24, 2022 01:31
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Dixon Chisholm posted:dark type stays winning blackout don’t crackout
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Dec 24, 2022 01:38
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Ytlaya posted:I didn't realize heated floors were a thing until that post. Seems like a fire hazard. floor heating is usually used when using a heat pump to heat your room, because a low power single stage heat pump (the most efficient and cheapest kind) won't heat water enough to work with classic radiators, which need like 40C water to induce enough convection and circle the air in your room properly
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Dec 24, 2022 01:42
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just set yourself on fire if you’re cold
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Dec 24, 2022 02:02
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sum posted:The deputy head of the Office of the President gave an interview about the Ukrainian economy and their plans to liberalize it that's worth reading. Notably, industrial production absolutely cratered in Q4 due to energy disruptions. Ukraine could get away with practically no domestic taxes at all with the USA et al fully bankrolling their economy. Perhaps we could say that in a way Ukraine just taxes the USA.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:25
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DancingShade posted:Ukraine could get away with practically no domestic taxes at all with the USA et al fully bankrolling their economy. Unfortunately, Western aid only covered half of Ukrainian expenses even before the grid was hit (which I do think is in fact causing devaluation). Basically, I think the war is going to be primarily funded by printing and using up the remaining assets of the Ukrainian population/state then the country he will dumped on to the side of the road.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:28
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Vomik posted:i actually don’t see how America/west can win the “meta war”. what would be needed? I guess Russia just fleeing Ukraine, returning crimea, and doing a large scale privatization as penance? The best wars are neither won nor lost, they need merely go on forever. The purpose isn't to win anything just funnel money to MIC interests and pork barrel away.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:29
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russia already did large scale privatization as a penance for the cold war, what would they do, shock therapy 2: shock harder?
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Dec 24, 2022 02:32
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OctaMurk posted:russia already did large scale privatization as a penance for the cold war, what would they do, shock therapy 2: shock harder? to get out from sanctions they would've had to re-impose basically a permanent yeltsin regime, probably under navalny - though he might be too personally formidable to tolerate
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Dec 24, 2022 02:34
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Frosted Flake posted:It's come up ITT that the Ukrainian border was extremely porous before 2014. In Western Canada in the mid 1800s, half of Canadians were American born and a quarter of Canadian born men emigrated to America. To make the 48th a "hard border", there was a massive effort to create this artificial linguistic and "racial" distinction with the US. It's a big reason for why the RCMP became a national symbol of Canada. Their first expeditions were to chase out Americans who were living in the western territories and to create a border to keep them out. why its almost as if borders are an abstract concept that are used to maintain power relations between sovereign states and dont actually have anything with local culture or the people who live near them
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Dec 24, 2022 02:35
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Ardennes posted:Unfortunately, Western aid only covered half of Ukrainian expenses even before the grid was hit (which I do think is in fact causing devaluation). Basically, I think the war is going to be primarily funded by printing and using up the remaining assets of the Ukrainian population/state then the country he will dumped on to the side of the road. We'll see, because uh again https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-commits-tighten-fiscal-policy-160932728.html quote:The IMF has also set an indicative target for the National Bank of Ukraine to buy zero government debt in the first quarter of 2023, though “in the case of a temporary shortfall in external financing,” the central bank would be allowed to print up to 50 billion hryvnia (more than $1.3 billion) for the period. If Ukraine did any clever accounting, and suddenly they're a few billion short, it's going to be a big whoops there. Also this IMF agreement doesn't even give them the money upfront. So Ukraine has to slash and burn everything it can, and they're already doing that, and then hope that all the western handouts are enough to survive on. Edit: There's also the question of the NBU letting the Hryvnia float, because I think they might still have a fixed exchange rate? Which is also going to cause problems with their budget plans. Lostconfused has issued a correction as of 02:40 on Dec 24, 2022 |
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Dec 24, 2022 02:38
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Lostconfused posted:We'll see, because uh again Admittedly, like a lot of fixed currencies I am sure there is already a black market out there, it is just not publicized for very clear reasons. If they floated their currency it would just essentially making that rate public which I doubt they would encourage. Otherwise, if the IMF is putting a straight jacket on printing, they are talking about lowering taxes, and industrial production is getting completely slammed I don’t know where they are going to go as they can only fire sale so much. I guess at best you could sell off the remaining farmland still owned by the state because Ukraine I don’t think that many intact Crown Jewels left.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:53
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Lostconfused posted:If Ukraine did any clever accounting, I think its safe to assume that clever accounting is well a truly a feature of the Ukraine economic landscape, both historically and currently.
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Dec 24, 2022 02:56
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Dec 24, 2022 02:58
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Ukraine can secretly sell some US weapons to the middle eastern market. That will buy them a couple months.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:01
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Dec 24, 2022 03:04
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Tina Belcher's plan for peace: butt-touching around the world.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:11
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Lostconfused posted:We'll see, because uh again Seems like the plan is to make enormous cuts to the public sector, cancel some tax holidays for small businesses, step up tax law enforcement and freeze social payments (even as the official inflation rate is 30%). MediaKiller posted:The Ministry of Finance has published a memorandum signed by Ukraine with the IMF for the next year. They're doing this for enough aid to pay out the budget for 6 months (assuming the budget deficit doesn't get worse).
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Dec 24, 2022 03:24
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https://twitter.com/JeremyAppel1025/status/1605664917780328448 https://twitter.com/JeremyAppel1025/status/1605668812849922048
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Dec 24, 2022 03:31
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OctaMurk posted:russia already did large scale privatization as a penance for the cold war, what would they do, shock therapy 2: shock harder? jokes on them, russia already mastered lighting reversal from that earlier boss fight
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Dec 24, 2022 03:34
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Lol, the author of that piece has nazi parents. https://twitter.com/muenzenberg_w/status/1284897066452475904
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Dec 24, 2022 03:34
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AnimeIsTrash posted:Lol, the author of that piece has nazi parents. FF is constructing a black powder artillery piece with six barrels as we speak
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Dec 24, 2022 03:35
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A state that can’t levy taxes or provide its own defence isn’t sovereign anyways, but this got me thinking. Alright, so first and foremost blood and soil nationalism is useful because it creates an worldview where losing sovereignty in any meaningful sense to America is acceptable as part of a greater racial/civilizational war against an other. Nothing can be more important than that, because the stakes aren’t loss of territory, national integrity or sovereignty, but racial pollution, genocide, whatever. The genocide talk from Ukraine started on day one, minute one and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Part, much discussed ITT is the National Mythology of aggrieved bumpkins, the famine stuff, but I think it has other purposes. Galicians were claiming that they would be exterminated by Jews in 1891, which I just learned from reading The Plunder. This means it predates the Holocaust and famine significantly. Similarly they claimed the Poles were going to eliminate them during the Polish Revolt when they sided with A-H and brutally massacred the Polish gentry of Galicia in 1846 (and many Jews). I’m not sure what to make of this. For example, in 1891 they claimed the Jews were destroying the Galician people by being too Capitalist, contrasting it with the natural collectivist nature of the Galician peasants, in 1941 they claimed the Communist Jews were destroying them through collectivized agriculture. I have never, ever, seen that mentioned side by side before. How they imagine their national character, ancestral way of life, swung on a loving dime. I wanted to put this to a test, so I went to the Holocaust section of the Axis History Forums, and lo and behold “the Jews had it coming because they were Communists” and “the Jews had it coming because they were greedy landlords, bankers and shopkeepers” exist side by side, often by the same posters at the same time. The only disagreement seems to be when Poles and Ukrainians argue in threads about who was the greater victim and who sided with The Enemy to oppress them. Poles say Ukrainians were Communists who sided with the Jews, often Jewish-Ukrainian commissars, the Ukrainians say the Poles were greedy landlords alongside the Jews exploiting the Ukrainians. This doesn’t happen too much as they seem to not bring each other too much and focus on the Jews or stick to their own threads about national victimhood. All of that to say, if they have constructed a contemporary narrative of Asiatic/Jewish Russians seeking to extinguish the White ”Western” European Ukrainians, White “Western” Americans are on their side and so no sovereignty is lost. How often do Ukrainian statements refer not to the state of Ukraine, but The West? The Civilized World? Pretty often. Within this framing Ukraine already disappears into a larger whole. You could go further and say the acceptance/subsumption of Ukraine into this whole is desirable. Ukraine becoming absorbed by The West, Europe, EU, NATO is a goal in and of itself and so it might not even be seen as “sacrificing” the nation. This brings me to another historical connection. Remember the first Galician/Ukrainian identity was as Imperial. That’s how they defined themselves against Poles and Jews for nearly all of the 1800’s. As Imperial subjects they have no sovereignty as a state. Rather, their nation is the bulwark of an Empire, a source of racial pride and patron of vengeance against their enemies closer at hand. They have simply exchanged one patron for another. Austria had a long history of doing this in border or restive regions. Examples would be the Pandours (Croats), Grenzers (Serbs) and Bosniaken (Bosnians). Each provided military service to Austria, loyal in battles and wars after German and Hungarian troops had given in, but domestically their loyal service gave them the license and military means to drive away their neighbours. Not only did they ethnically cleanse the countryside of their regions, they downright revelled in Imperial prestige and patronage. It became a big part of the construction of their national identities, and loyal service became intertwined with eliminating the disloyal and dangerous Enemy that threatened the Empire. This heated up with pan-Slavism and I can very easily see how they began to see themselves as not-Slavs, more similar to the Germans/Europeans/West. Only in this case Serbia and the Russian Empire have been replaced by the Russian Empire. Seeing national identity as consisting of westward longing and eastward violence, which depends on the western patron, make sense as a virulent Ethno Nationalism that doesn’t require national sovereignty or even independence. That actually is probably worth looking into, because I see a through-line from Vienna, to Berlin to Washington. I don’t think I’ve seen much at all about post-2014 being independent, charting an independent outlook or policy, but a lot about part of the West, EU, NATO. If there’s something to that mirroring the earlier Imperial identity, then it all makes sense to me. Galicia/Ukraine is finally accepted as a member of the Empire and gets to use the Imperial arsenal to punish all of their ethnic enemies. Big Israel.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:49
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AnimeIsTrash posted:https://twitter.com/JeremyAppel1025/status/1605664917780328448 Once again, I submit that Canada's flag needs a slight modification. 
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Dec 24, 2022 03:50
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AnimeIsTrash posted:https://twitter.com/JeremyAppel1025/status/1605664917780328448 lol these motherfuckers. I don’t think Americans really grasp how much we, as Canadians, enabled, facilitated, promoted this.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:52
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Organ Fiend posted:Once again, I submit that Canada's flag needs a slight modification. dont imly the entire nation is full of nazis op 🙄
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Dec 24, 2022 03:53
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sum posted:Seems like the plan is to make enormous cuts to the public sector, cancel some tax holidays for small businesses, step up tax law enforcement and freeze social payments (even as the official inflation rate is 30%). Yeah they were already planning to do a 25% even before the Russians started destroying infrastructure. quote:https://twitter.com/ackerm_ann/status/1570319702601105408 They're basically looking back to this summer and saying "yeah that's good enough". So all I can say is uh, good luck with that.
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Dec 24, 2022 03:58
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I read Coming Home to the Third Reich: Return Migration of German Nationals from the United States and Canada, 1933–1941 today. Would it shock you to know that despite fears that led to the internment of German-Canadians, the destruction of the vibrant German history and culture of Canada (about a third of the Loyalists, still estimated to be third most common ethnic background in Canada), the renaming of places, streets, people, and the elimination of parts of the everyday vocabulary, German Canadians sent less money back, emigrated back to the Fatherland less, volunteered for the Wehrmacht less, lobbied less, and were otherwise less of a fifth column / had dual loyalty than Ukrainian Canadians are openly, today? Because I was loving shocked. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/coming-home-to-the-third-reich/ During the 1930s, Germany’s industrialization, rearmament and economic plans taxed the existing manpower, forcing the country to explore new ways of acquiring Aryan-German labor. Eventually, the Third Reich implemented a return migration program which used various recruitment strategies to entice Germans from Canada and the United States to migrate home. It initially used the Atlantic Ocean to transport German-speakers, but after the outbreak of World War II, German civilians were brought from the Americas to East Asia and then to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway through the Soviet Union. Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 ended this overland route, but some Germans were moved on Nazi ships from East Asia to the Third Reich until the end of 1942. This book investigates why Germans who had already established themselves in overseas countries chose to migrate back to an oppressive and authoritarian country. It sheds light on some aspects of the Third Reich’s administration, goals and achievements associated with return migration while also telling the individual stories of returnees. Also, just a bit of trivia, Mennonites were shockingly supportive of the Third Reich, and Mennonites globally were a big portion of returnees to Germany before and during the Second World War. Apparently much of this has to do with the Russian Revolution, but I would have never predicted that.
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Dec 24, 2022 04:03
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It is also why I am skeptical they can't touch the printing presses since something has got to give. Mass austerity, industrial collapse, cutting taxes/revenue is going to only leave a larger and larger fiscal hole, and unless the West actually pony's up the dough in a big way (more than they have been that includes with the latest US bill) the numbers don't match up. (Also just cutting their defense budget isn't going to happen.)
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Dec 24, 2022 04:06
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I didn't realize this is the Luciuk that teaches at RMC, so I'm not going to say anything more about his wonderful column about a people crying out for recognition.
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Dec 24, 2022 04:16
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