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Nenonen posted:He's also plain getting old. When Putin first became president he was 48, now he's 71. Old people need to sleep more to function and especially to look presentable. Yeah thats completely wrong. Old people sleep less than young people, throughout the human lifespan our sleep requirement gets shorter as we age.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:32
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I wonder if in the immediately post-Putin period, one of the contenders would try to get NATO/western support for his bid by promising to go back to 2014 borders or something.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:44
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Nenonen posted:That's the conundrum, though. To function at that position you need to sleep. With help of drugs if not otherwise plausible. There's no point to showing on television if you are just rambling uncontrollably and looking like a tired dog poo poo. If that was at all possible dont you think every single western government would not be pushing this miracle sleep more to get elderly to keep on working drug? So much easier to just jack up the retirement age and dodge the social security ponzi collapsing.
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Oct 29, 2023 19:48
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Blut posted:Yeah thats completely wrong. Old people sleep less than young people, throughout the human lifespan our sleep requirement gets shorter as we age. quote:Do Older People Need Less Sleep? 
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Oct 29, 2023 21:23
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Subjunctive posted:I wonder if in the immediately post-Putin period, one of the contenders would try to get NATO/western support for his bid by promising to go back to 2014 borders or something. I imagine post-Putin will be an exact repeat of post-Soviet times, so I doubt having your platform based on western support would be very popular, but then again people aren't very engaged politically anyway.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:44
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SamuraiFoochs posted:FWIW if anyone thinks me just a gullible doofus, the main reason I'm convinced Putin's unwell somehow is I find it super weird how infrequently he appears, and I just find it weird that there could be SO many reports and have them be all 100% bullshit. Putin has always been remarkably private for a leader of a major world power, but it's not that surprising when you remember he's a career spy. Not broadcasting your whereabouts and activities 24/7 makes even more sense after Prigozhin's march on Moscow. He's probably been in better shape given how old he is, but nothing suggests he'll keel over and die any day soon.
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Oct 29, 2023 21:59
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Oct 29, 2023 22:11
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I haven't even hit my 40s yet and I wake up almost every night to piss, interrupting my deep sleep  I dread what my bladder will make me go through as I grow older
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Oct 30, 2023 13:31
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https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ukraine-must-prepare-hard-winter This was published 11 days ago but is a good read. One interesting tidbit: everyone knows that ATACMS hit Russian helicopters, and most of the discussion I saw was around the damaged and destroyed Ka-52s. I.e. the attack helicopters with long-range ATGMs. Something missed--and which I should have thought about, too--were the Mi-8s. According to RUSI, some of the helicopters hit were electronic warfare helicopters, of which the Russians have very few. Prigozhin's mutiny destroyed one, and it was newsworthy. Russia uses them to great effect to shut down drones over parts of the front, for example. That said, I think it's going to be very hard winter for Ukraine. Russia is up to making ~100 long-range missiles per month, and it's been a long time since they've launched a salvo at Ukrainian cities with more than a couple dozen. I maintain my earlier assertions in this thread that the US and NATO should be looking to increase defense spending to ~6% of GDP if they want to help Ukraine win, deter Russia from further aggression against its neighbors, and deter China from invading Taiwan. And that's to say nothing about keeping the latest Gaza-Israeli war from expanding further.
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Oct 30, 2023 14:17
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Ynglaur posted:I maintain my earlier assertions in this thread that the US and NATO should be looking to increase defense spending to ~6% of GDP if they want to help Ukraine win, deter Russia from further aggression against its neighbors, and deter China from invading Taiwan. And that's to say nothing about keeping the latest Gaza-Israeli war from expanding further. This seems incredibly unlikely to happen as many NATO countries are not even spending the mandatory 2% of GDP right now (or at least weren’t pre Ukraine invasion). Tripling that will probably not get through any of the parliaments. You’re probably right though.
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Oct 30, 2023 14:31
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Collapsing Farts posted:I haven't even hit my 40s yet and I wake up almost every night to piss, interrupting my deep sleep If you are waking up to pee that much, something else is probably waking you up and you just happen to notice that you have to pee and are blaming that. You might have sleep apnea or something else might be interrupting your sleep. It's basically the first thing you get asked when figuring out if you need a sleep study. KillHour fucked around with this message at 14:41 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 14:38
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LochNessMonster posted:This seems incredibly unlikely to happen as many NATO countries are not even spending the mandatory 2% of GDP right now (or at least weren’t pre Ukraine invasion). Oh, I agree. I didn't mean to imply I was predicting they would do that, only that that they should. It's unfortunately, but deterrence actually costs more than just being able to defend some land and prevent a total loss. Russia won't win in Ukraine, but Ukraine may not either. You need significant overmatch in modern warfare to win decisively (see: Gulf War 1). The West does not possess that overmatch right now, particularly with regards to China. Even in Europe, I'm concerned for the Baltic countries on a 5-10 year time horizon. I know walls are a bit passé these days, but if I were Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia I'd be building all sorts of obstacles and fortifications in depth along my border with Russia and Belarus. Even that won't help everything, though. Vilnius is, what, 20km from the Belarus border? It's drat near inside of 120mm mortar range. Everyone is poo-pooing Russia's attack near Ardiivka, but they've traded basically a brigade or two for about 5km of terrain. The West looks at that and says, "Fools! They can't afford that!" Russia may look at that and say, "Hmm, only a few more brigades would get us to Vilnius. We can do that."
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Oct 30, 2023 14:41
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LochNessMonster posted:This seems incredibly unlikely to happen as many NATO countries are not even spending the mandatory 2% of GDP right now (or at least weren’t pre Ukraine invasion). Going to 6% is a ludicrously dumb number. The US is only at 3.5% right now. During most of the Cold War, most of NATO was at roughly 3%. More important than meeting some arbitrarily high number to  about, would be finally start really doing the absolute minimum of things like increasing artillery shell production, increasing the priority of military investments, reducing roadblocks in bureaucracy, etc. It's horrifying that even that apparently isn't being done properly. Germany for example after pledging to meet the 2% target last year and on top of that investing 100 billion Euros in a special investment fund, quickly reduced that to meeting the 2% target this year with the special investment fund, and is now not even going to meet that next year - with the years after that looking even bleaker, as the special investment fund will run out by then. It actually took so long to start planning the investments from that fund (it still hasn't all been allocated), that roughly 10% of the fund had been lost to inflation before the first Euro had been allocated, much less spent.That is what is worrying. It does not seem like the "Zeitenwende" has actually really been internalized. Instead, it is just business as usual with a few small exceptions. Ukraine is getting some support, but only as much as can be done without really changing or sacrificing anything. And it doesn't really look like that is very different for a lot of other NATO members (with some exceptions). In the VFW Ukraine thread, Computer viking posted about the Norwegian defense industry not really getting anything with regards to actually increasing artillery shell production.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:05
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Ynglaur posted:Oh, I agree. I didn't mean to imply I was predicting they would do that, only that that they should. It's unfortunately, but deterrence actually costs more than just being able to defend some land and prevent a total loss. Russia won't win in Ukraine, but Ukraine may not either. You need significant overmatch in modern warfare to win decisively (see: Gulf War 1). The West does not possess that overmatch right now, particularly with regards to China. Baltics are under Article 5 nuclear umbrella. And regarding GDP percentage - it is not The West fighting the war but Ukraine and they rely on the generosity and willingness of the allies, who are not commiting as much resources as they would've if they were belligerents. They could've spared more of what they have but they don't because of various reasons.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:23
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Boy that's disappointing, I had been hearing they were getting their deterrent poo poo together for awhile after everyone got pantsed by a no-poo poo land invasion.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:23
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bird food bathtub posted:Boy that's disappointing, I had been hearing they were getting their deterrent poo poo together for awhile after everyone got pantsed by a no-poo poo land invasion. I can't speak for other nations, but at least here in Germany things are pretty different since the war started. I'm not just talking about higher cost of living caused by cheap Russian gas not being an option anymore, or the government giving the army at least the absolute minimum to function, a lot of minor things are changing: One of our airbases is up here in the north near the town where I work, and until the war started, I would often completely forgot it was even there, since nothing was happening. The only time we really noticed was when our troops got out of Afghanistan, since one of the units that was send over there was stationed near the airbase, so there were suddenly a flurry of transport flights going over our heads. Since the invasion, the frequency of those flights went up again, and never really down. Almost every day now we can hear or even see Bundesluftwaffe-planes going over our heads, either coming or going from that Fliegerhorst. There's also far more soldiers I keep stumble into on my working commute. Normally not unusual, since there's a division command in Hannover and with a Fliegerhorst near my work town, there's a steady stream of soldiers and officers using Hannover as a travel hub. But now again, the frequency of those meetings has gone way up, and there are also more often entire groups of soldiers or officers going in one or the other direction. Hell, even the number of soldiers in nearby grocery shops has gone up from zero to the occasional person in uniform suddenly standing in line in front of me. Then there's the entirely new brigade that's slowly being assembled to be stationed permanently in Lithuania, or the fact that Germany suddenly decided to move forward with the IRIS-T air defense system and wants to go from 0 (a working prototype) to 9 during the next few years, while keeping the flow of missiles and new systems to Ukraine going at the same time. The funniest thing (at least for me, since I keep taking note of things like this) was the uptick in Bundeswehr-advertisements in YouTube, and the change in tone: Before the war, the focus was on promising good work, good education for good money, now the focus from the ads I watched changed to prevent wars and using backdrops from devastated regions in Ukraine as an example what German soldiers should be fighting to prevent. Kind of a stark change in direction.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:36
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I agree with the generalization that a "better spent 2% of GDP" would be preferable to "arbitrary big 6% number." I just don't see private industry making the significant capital and labor training investments required for long-term expansion of things like ammunition production without a clear, large set of funding for the foreseeable future. i'd love to be wrong! Also, yes, I know that the Baltic countries fall under Article 5. I would prefer 1) that our first deterrence not be nuclear, and 2) that European countries are not wholly reliant on the United States for their own security against Russia.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:39
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2) is rather key given some recent Trump statements.
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Oct 30, 2023 15:41
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More than absolute or relative spending, the issue is simply running military materiel procurement in a half-competent manner. In business literature you will usually see an outsourcing decision matrix like this:  Many governments don't stop to think which bin things fit in, which together with a blind faith in the invisible hand has led to the mistaken belief that all procurement belongs in the lower right bin. You just put out a tender and the market shall provide, bing bong simple. We've now learned the hard way that things like artillery shells belong solidly in the top left bin. It should be stressed that actual businesses that try to operate their procurement like this usually don't survive very long.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:14
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Collapsing Farts posted:I haven't even hit my 40s yet and I wake up almost every night to piss, interrupting my deep sleep You should get a prostate exam, my dude.
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Oct 30, 2023 16:31
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quote:BRUSSELS — EU leaders endorsed unprecedented plans to use profits generated by frozen Russian state assets for Ukraine reconstruction, and called on the European Commission to make legal proposals to that effect, according to European Council summit conclusions. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leaders-approve-taxing-profits-of-russian-assets-ukraine-war/ Seems like a smart plan that puts pressure on Russia to eventually negotiate or else have billions of dollars of their own money flow to Kiev annually forever.
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Oct 30, 2023 17:32
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The article neglects to mention that the search for a legally foolproof way to seize those Russian piles of money, or at least their interest, which alone is a 10 figure number, has been going on a long time without success so far. The politicians have been pretty united in their goal of rebuilding Ukraine with Russian money. They still lack the means, however. Nobody wants a half-baked solution which will get successfully overturned in courts later, which has happened to some oligarch sanctions already.
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Oct 30, 2023 18:19
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Valiantman posted:The article neglects to mention that the search for a legally foolproof way to seize those Russian piles of money, or at least their interest, which alone is a 10 figure number, has been going on a long time without success so far. Seizing the principle is legally tricky, but I haven't seen any suggest that they can't tax the interest. Generally governments have broad powers to tax capital gains within their borders.
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Oct 30, 2023 19:53
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Ynglaur posted:https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/ukraine-must-prepare-hard-winter oh hey i mentioned this when it happened cuz yeah people tunnel visioned on the ka-52s. also I am almost positive that I am remembering correctly that wagner actually destroyed 2 of those in june as far as we know (allegedly a third mtpr too according to russians, but idr ever seeing any wreckage of the third)
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Oct 30, 2023 21:36
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KillHour posted:If you are waking up to pee that much, something else is probably waking you up and you just happen to notice that you have to pee and are blaming that. You might have sleep apnea or something else might be interrupting your sleep. It's basically the first thing you get asked when figuring out if you need a sleep study.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:01
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While the others are genuinely trying to be helpful, don’t get your medical information from the War in Ukraine Current Events thread.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:10
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ShadowHawk posted:And if it's actually your bladder, that ain't normal either. What you're describing isn't "aging" it's symptoms of some unspecified and possibly serious disease Ok but what about if it only happens during naps? I never wake up overnight and have a normal amount of pee in the morning, but if I take a nap, even if I haven't drank anything in 6+ hours and I peed right before I lay down (I've tested this multiple times because it's so weird) I will have a bladder about to explode within 45 minutes, and again 45 minutes later. I can't even take a decent nap because of it and it's infuriating. Why are my kidneys/bladder only supercharged during naps?
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Oct 30, 2023 23:17
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Kaal posted:While the others are genuinely trying to be helpful, don’t get your medical information from the War in Ukraine Current Events thread. This feels vaguely like all the speculation about Putin's health based on 2 second video clips
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Oct 30, 2023 23:20
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fatherboxx posted:Baltics are under the Article 5 nuclear umbrella. To add to this, a nuclear-only deterrence is incredibly inflexible and to a certain extent non-credible. You are essentially left with a one-size-fits-all response to respond to a wide array of actions from the opposition including "irregular" forces funded and equipped by both state and non-state actors or interference and attacks on territory or interests that arguably fall below the threshold justifying activating the risk of general nuclear exchanges. See the opening episodes of this particular war where Putin rattled the nuclear sabre to discourage Western involvement which has proven to have very real limitations. While it has certainly prevented direct participation by the armed forces of NATO countries in Ukraine, it has not stopped thousands of foreign volunteers as well as an endless flow of weapons, vehicles, and munitions that are directly causing Russian casualties and stymying their offensive and defensive efforts. Western military intelligence agencies have essentially operated as an extension of the AFU providing as much data as they can from the platforms it can operate outside of Ukraine along with analysis on Russian logistics and troop concentration as well as locations of high-value targets like senior officers for AFU strikes while AFU sends officers and technical experts to train safely inside NATO borders. A nuclear-only deterrence is no deterrence at all on many issues that fall below the existentialist level of threat.
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Oct 30, 2023 23:47
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A nuclear-only deterrence also means you have no escalation ladder to show how serious you are getting. It is really no deterrence at all; someone is going to call your bluff eventually and then you're hosed, because it's not a deterrence if it fails to deter. Conventional deterrence is really non-negotiable.
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Oct 31, 2023 00:11
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It's not no deterrence, but it's certainly not enough. My fear is that China looks at this and goes, "So, we'd lose 300,000 dead, a few hundred aircraft, and 100 ships to take Taiwan. Okay, sounds worth it." Credible, convention deterrence would have China say, "Nope, we are unable to use the military to achieve our political objective here. Let's try something else."
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Oct 31, 2023 01:33
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China would also completely crater their (and the world‘s) economy. And the Western World has shown that it is mostly willing to pay that price. But completely agreed that Taiwan needs an undisputably serious conventional deterrent. Which, to be honest, Ukraine‘s obliteration of most of Russia‘s original offensive force has made more believably achievable. Coming back to the Baltic states: they are members of NATO and have the full security that that means. As Libluini pointed out, one consequence of the Ukraine War is that Germany will permanently deploy a complete brigade in Lithuania. As in, full base, permanent living there, including families, etc. Nothing temporary like it is currently. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Oct 31, 2023 |
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Oct 31, 2023 01:49
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Antigravitas posted:It is really no deterrence at all; someone is going to call your bluff eventually and then you're hosed, because it's not a deterrence if it fails to deter. Conventional deterrence is really non-negotiable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVO85anasrA
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Oct 31, 2023 05:16
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Some rough reporting, granted I don't think Ukraine is going to lose but the fighting will continue. https://x.com/NeilPHauer/status/1718985842713112701?s=20
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Nov 1, 2023 12:53
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:Some rough reporting, granted I don't think Ukraine is going to lose but the fighting will continue. He's not wrong but there's more to the state of the war than just the lines on the map. He does acknowledge that there's dozens of caveats to such a statement and particularly assets and soldiers lost is a big point. I will agree that in the end, a Ukrainian victory is reclaiming their territory, so the lines on the map are pretty important. Is the action actually winding down though?
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Nov 1, 2023 13:53
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Military action almost always winds down in winter. There are different levels of success and different levels of failure. Ukraine hasn't moved the ball forward much but they haven't fallen back much either. Russia has lost a lot more in the past few months than Ukraine has.
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Nov 1, 2023 14:02
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If territory is the sole factor of determining the offensive's success, I'd agree. But I don't agree that it's the sole determinant: it's just the one most easily viewed from the outside. Clearly it hasn't achieved its stated operational objectives, but it's possible that has attrited Russian forces--and in particular artillery--enough to be decisive in a longer timeframe. There seems to have been a significant shift in targeting priorities in the past three months: Ukraine is using counter-battery fire very aggressively and effectively. North Korea can supply Russia with a lot of ammunition, but I don't know that they or anyone else would supply Russia with replacement barrels sufficient to replace Russian losses. Now all that said: the West's artillery production isn't really coming online in enough quantity until late 2024. I think the next 6-9 months in particular are going to be very challenging for Ukraine. Ukraine probably doesn't have enough artillery ammunition to continue large-scale offensive operations right now. Fast forward 9 months, though, and they may have both artillery and air power. They're clearly prioritizing S-300s and S-400s with ATACMs, which to me means they believe that with F-16s they might be able to contest medium-altitude airspace. I'm not convinced they can: F-16s are good medium-altitude fighters, but so are MiG-31s and MiG-29Ms, which the Russians still have in decent numbers. I'm not an air superiority specialist, though, so there are undoubtably many factors I'm not even thinking to consider.
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Nov 1, 2023 14:15
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Unfortunately, without the territory gains, that feeds into the whole "frozen conflict" narrative that politicians who want to cut Ukraine funding in Europe and the US love to tout. Hopefully the west can keep providing enough support for Ukraine to hold on there, but I am worried about the future. Donetsk was where much of Ukraine's pre-war industrial capacity was, right? I wonder how much Ukraine can do to replace that economic hole.
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Nov 1, 2023 14:23
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What do you expect when the west expects Ukraine to fight with one hand tied behind its back while Russia has unfettered access to all of Ukraine for their terror bombing campaigns. The weaponry did not come fast enough or in sufficient enough numbers to make any major strategic difference beyond slowing Russia down. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Russia has lost a lot more in the past few months than Ukraine has. Russia can also replace a lot more than Ukraine can and seems to be doing just fine ramping up its war production and bypassing sanctions to make precision munitions. They can wait the west out on this one. Not to mention people living in the west are dealing with a cost of living crisis and an economy that only seems to be benefiting rich people and land owners. People are seeing the billions going to Ukraine and asking “what’s in it for me?” I’m pretty certain Putin isn’t too worried about this he can throw lives and metal at the problem indefinitely because Ukraine just doesn’t have what it needs to do much more than kill Russian troops as new ones take their place until it runs out of ammo or the west stops providing it. The west is too fickle and disinterested to help Ukraine push Russia out and arguably the steps required to defeat Russia also mean the end of human civilization or WW3 so it seems plausible Russia will spend the next 10 years chipping away at Ukrainian territory. Also while the war has negatively affected the Russian economy to a degree they still have trading partners like China and India acting as intermediaries to launder their exports to the wider world. The fact is the Russian economy can persist through this war and through sanctions in the near term until its demographic issues become a problem later in the future. The Ukrainian economy on the other hand can only persist through IMF loans and cash transfers from western countries. How can you have an economy when your entire country is in range of suicide drones and guided missile attacks and such attacks are as frequent and random as the weather? If I was an EU company like Bosch or part of the automotive supply chain. Or if I wanted to open up a tech hub or data centre in Ukraine how is it going to be a good investment when a Kalibr takes out the electricity or the fancy new automotive parts factory gets blown up as a military target by the Russians??? At this point in the game I think Ukraine is just throwing poo poo at the wall and hoping the casualties they’re inflicting at Russia are going to be sufficient to make them stop. But it’s never going to stop because they don’t have the juice to inflict a serious blow to Russian. Everyone who’d oppose the war is living somewhere else, in prison or too frightened to say anything because of Russian state control. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Nov 1, 2023 |
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Nov 1, 2023 14:24
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Kraftwerk posted:. There's a big rhetorical jump here; you move from "ukraine's" production capacity to "the west" generally. Ukraine is not supplying Ukraine, "the west" is, and Russia cannot outsupply the west generally. Right now it's taking all they can do to compete with the equivalent of America's forgotten sofa change; all these weapons like Himars and atacms are stuff from literally the back of America's fridge. I saw a Perun video where he showed an atacms munition that had been fired on or near its twenty five year expiration date. Now can Russia outlast the west *politically*? Well, maybe, that's basically putins whole strategy. So we'll see at this point.
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Nov 1, 2023 14:32
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