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Cugel the Clever posted:For anyone who speaks French, France Culture did a deep dive with experts on the food situation. My French is a little rusty, so the only notable takeaways I got were confirmation of the various infographics about importers of Russian and Ukrainian grains and their claims to have reserves sufficient for this year, at least. But if the war fails to conclude quickly (or some pretty flimsy and/or corrupt regimes have cooked the books) things could get rough. I think Lebanon, in particular, lost a huge chunk of what it had in the massive explosion a while back. These are great and a good excuse for practicing my French, thanks for sharing them.
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Mar 17, 2022 03:58
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Ezra Klein did a good podcast on Russia and the state of the global energy markets that's worth checking out. In particular interviewed economic historian Daniel Yergin who talks about the impact of the shale revolution and the huge shift in thinking about European energy dependence. Decarbonization as a national security measure can be a powerful argument that can open a lot of doors. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-daniel-yergin.html https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000554830246 Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Mar 24, 2022 |
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Mar 24, 2022 01:13
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That's true, also I'd imagine it's similar to "why didn't the CSA send sabotage teams to cut railway lines from NYC to DC when they shared a language?" I'd guess the answer is that while Russia has been stepping on a lot of rakes they do still have a powerful internal security state and Ukraine can't freely send sabotage teams across the border without high risk of detection. Plus having guys trained to operate independently, know how to wreck the tracks, and not get caught half starved raiding a grocery dumpster as their contact didn't pick them up takes a lot of planning. The Confederates definitely sent a bunch of raiders to mess up railway lines, in addition to a variety of other guerilla activities. In fact there's a lot of connections between those cavalry groups and the formation of the KKK under Nathan Bedford Forrest. https://www.shirleendavies.com/raiders-of-the-civil-war-quantrills-raiders-and-other-guerilla-groups/
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Mar 29, 2022 22:15
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Nick Soapdish posted:https://twitter.com/MrKovalenko/status/1509278005469847574?t=MPLXcYVUQzkv29C05xzJPw&s=19 After running the numbers on that, count me as being skeptical that they actually have radiation sickness. Scared and exhibiting weird symptoms? Sure. Increased cancer rates? Very possible. Stem cell damage or skin lesions? Ehhh. The forest is dangerous but not THAT dangerous. They'd need to have dug pretty deep to find something that was still emitting at 5,000 times the typical rate in the forest.
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Mar 31, 2022 01:30
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M_Gargantua posted:Once it was over we had a cookout and kept swimming. Nothing at all horizon to horizon and 13000 feet of water underneath Sounds like a great memory. 🌊
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Apr 1, 2022 01:07
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Bored As gently caress posted:So what are going to be the effects of this war? I mean besides the horror, besides the casualties, besides the refugees this will cause, what are the second and third order effects this is going to cause? With the EU under stress trying to accommodate a wide variety of political beliefs, Britain’s Brexit is quickly becoming seen in a very different light. Certainly I think any chance of Scottish Independence or Irish reunification just got kicked down the road 20 years.
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Apr 7, 2022 01:32
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Comrade Blyatlov posted:Certainly makes the attempts to encourage Brexit look a lot nastier, huh? Definitely, and there’s been allegations surfacing that Russian propagandists were involved in British influence peddling as far back as the 2014 Scottish Referendum. Tories are battling to shed their appearance of Russian affiliation, and the SNP is fending off attacks on both sides as the Scottish Greens share government with them and yet sharply criticize any cooperation with NATO or the UK, and have battled on a host of touch points like vaccine passports, nuclear power, Scottish oil and gas independence, etc. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/scotland/2022/03/the-snp-has-missed-its-chance-for-scottish-independence
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Apr 7, 2022 02:23
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A Festivus Miracle posted:Here, have our astonishingly expensive and ineffectual for what they're actually intended for destroyers (that are larger than WW2 cruisers). As soon as they arrive in the Black Sea, you're going to need to put them in dock because the transition from Atlantic waters to Black Sea waters (being less saline than the Mediterranean) has caused an immense amount of corrosion and if you don't fix it the jets that move the vehicle are going to stop being able to turn in their mounts. The LCS ships are pretty junk, but they definitely aren't larger than WW2 cruisers. Even Arleigh Burke destroyers are significantly smaller than the old Cleveland cruisers were, though they certainly bridge the gap (and are only slightly smaller than modern Ticonderoga cruisers.
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Apr 8, 2022 15:01
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The real talk about “defensive weapons” is that the term means whatever people want it to mean. And generally that seems to be some variation of “not well-armed”. Tanks and fighter jets are used just as defensively as Javelins and Stingers. Finland defends itself from Russia with the largest artillery force in Europe. South Korea defends itself from North Korea with one million land mines. The most well-known defensive weapons are ballistic submarines, but I don’t think for a moment that any of the Neville Chamberlains would be comfortable with Ukraine getting command of those. I think the term is largely performative, and has mainly been employed by Scholz and the like-minded to help justify their lack of support for Ukraine. This isn’t an argument in favor of supplying any particular weapon system, so much as pointing out that the “defensive arms only” concept is hollowly rhetorical. Kaal fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Apr 9, 2022 |
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Apr 9, 2022 18:08
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Herstory Begins Now posted:im talking about the site as a whole, not how yall run gip, which seems to be entirely well run afaict and i have had literally zero complaints at all with this place I think everyone can agree there's a lot of frustration to go around these days.
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Apr 11, 2022 04:42
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Chemical weapons are only particularly effective against civilian populations. Troops spread out, bunker down, use gas masks/PPE, have access to medical care, and weather it. Civilians are much more vulnerable, don't have any resources, and die in droves.
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Apr 11, 2022 22:58
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:For Russia, those facts are all upside. Right, and for the Ukrainians it's all downside. The Russians also recognize that westerners aren't going to retaliate with chemical weapons regardless of what happens, and may not retaliate at all, so the deterrent effect is lessened.
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Apr 11, 2022 23:03
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A.o.D. posted:Dude doesn't know the first loving thing about soldiering. Unironically the best thing he can do for Ukraine is to coordinate English language propaganda with their Foreign Ministry. He's not speaking in terms of actually planning to go, so much as that he can't shake the thought of it. He fled the country on foot, and he understandably has doubts. And I think that anyone can understand that impulse to join in a desperate fight, rather than just do the sensible thing and watch it play out in the news. quote:The actor/filmmaker happened to be in Ukraine working on a documentary when Russia first invaded. While he’s been back in the United States since March, Penn said he plans to return to Ukraine at some point, although he doesn’t know when due to the ongoing war, as well as his own apprehensions: “I’m not an idiot,” he said, “I am not certain what I can offer.”
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Apr 12, 2022 14:53
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Arson Daily posted:This is actually something I've been thinking about for a bit. Why isn't Russia using their hacking abilities to gently caress with countries giving aid to Ukraine? Are their capabilities overblown or would doing such a thing turn a cyber war into a blow poo poo up war? There’s been a variety of reporting on this over the last week as Russia has not only been attempting to target Ukrainian power and transportation infrastructure with cyber attacks, but has been targeting American power and LNG infrastructure as well. So far they haven’t been as successful as in past years, partly due to proactive defense on the part of Ukrainian and American cybersecurity officials. https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-cyberwarfare-ukraine-us-attacks-2022-4
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Apr 18, 2022 08:29
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Blind Rasputin posted:That’s insane looking. I’ve always wondered what the underside of the VLS launchers look like on our US warships? Are those things in a space that like, beltfeeds further missiles into place fro reload or are they manually reloaded from underneath? The US design for VLS is fairly different from the Russian one, and each cell acts as both the launcher and magazine. They are reloaded with a crane from above, and it's quite difficult to do at sea so it's done at port. The Navy used to have more ability to do so by using smaller replacement missiles, but ultimately discarded the capability as expensive and unnecessary. The highly mechanical Russian revolver system looks like a reliability nightmare to me, and it can't be reloaded at sea either. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a27205/navy-reload-missile-silos-at-sea/
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Apr 18, 2022 15:32
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Mozi posted:I think these 'accidentally leaked' causality figures are neither trolls, hacks or accidents but intentionally published confidential information done by somebody working there who can use plausible deniability. It's a means of protest. Yeah I could see that. There's certainly more going on than just an accidental whoopsie-doodle.
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Apr 22, 2022 15:54
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Cimber posted:Gettysbug https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PrFocPT-Rs
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May 4, 2022 13:39
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It seems like a reasonable hedge. To the extent that attacking targets in Russia is strategically advantageous, there are other weapons systems that are capable of doing that (such as helicopters or special forces). There's an open question as to whether that includes Russian occupied territory, but I'd assume they've stipulated that.
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Jun 1, 2022 18:56
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Germany had committed heavily to Russian gas during the first SPD/Green coalition back in 1998-2005 under Schroder, when they started development of NordStream 1 and the so-called Energiewende project. While it was nominally done in the name of environmentalism, Schroder was working quite close with Russian gas companies and immediately joined them as a paid lobbyist once he retired from the chancellorship. They doubled down in 2011, and again in 2020, but it was very much part of an established national policy of subsidizing Russian gas.
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Jun 2, 2022 01:50
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aphid_licker posted:Ah yeah let's crater the German economy that oughta put them more firmly on our side lol Germany currently has enough gas storage to last six months, and about half of its gas imports don't come from Russia. Economists estimate that the GDP impact of halting fossil fuel imports would be around two percent, and significant government intervention could reduce that to only half a percent. There's good solutions available for residential heating and energy, industrial combined heat and power, and commercial applications (one of the biggest complainers is a German company that converts gas into fertilizer and pesticide, and doesn't want to increase their costs by using synthetic ammonia). The only real economic hazard comes from the government waiting until the last possible moment until they are forced into action - which of course is exactly what Scholz is doing. https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/05/31/olaf-scholzs-dithering-is-damaging-germanys-international-image https://www.politico.eu/article/olaf-scholz-kaiser-complex-ukraine-lurch/ Kaal fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jun 3, 2022 |
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Jun 3, 2022 17:11
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The Emberverse had a good twist on the genre: Three of the books featured a US Coast Guard ship off the coast of Nantucket that gets time-traveled to the bronze age and they set out to remake civilization from the ground up. The rest of the books feature modern society (specifically the Pacific Northwest) that is suddenly afflicted with "the change", where compression engines and electronics magically stop working and the world falls apart - apart from various folks who retain traditional cultural knowledge.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:38
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zoux posted:Oh and members of the Portland SCA Eugene becomes a hippie wiccan commune, Bend is controlled by cowboy barons, Corvallis becomes a merchant republic run by snobby professors, and Portland devolves into a cannibal society governed by Renaissance Faire - that's just cold-eyed realism.
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Jun 14, 2022 01:55
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Quackles posted:What about Ashland? Ashland gets wrapped up into the Central Oregon Rancher's Association, and it's on the frontier with the California death lands so it's pretty rough and tumble. Sadly the author doesn't go into how cool their heritage would be (he isn't actually from Oregon, and despite good research he misses things sometimes). However the "Station Eleven" book / TV show does feature a Shakespeare theater troupe in a post-apocalytic world, and I'd imagine they'd have been like that. Arrath posted:Well that sounds rad Newport and Tillamook get controlled by Corvallis and Portland respectively who run oxen-trains over the old rail lines to reach the coastal ports and do some trade with the Kingdom of Hawaii. But there's the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs and several Native American communities who get featured throughout Idaho, Montana, and Canada (plus some really confused Bronze Age folks who got swapped for the Coast Guard ship). Their cultural traditions as well as their relative isolation and close-knit community are all seen as key survival traits. The political map changes and expands over time as characters explore the country (and even do some international anecdotes like when the British special forces raid the Tower of London in order to equip themselves to evacuate the royal family):  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emberverse_series Kaal fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jun 14, 2022 |
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Jun 14, 2022 03:57
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fatherboxx posted:Switchblades so far have not a very good reputation in UA forces, they prefer homemade grenade+drone combo. Main issue is that using those is very difficult and they are not very reliable for their cost and they have impact of a small grenade. My understanding is that some of this may be true, but there's also a degree of Russian propaganda going on since the weapon is very much seen as an icon of American influence. So just as they immediately wanted to push back on the effectiveness of the HIMARS, they also wanted to push back on the effectiveness of the Switchblade. One of the very real problems is that the Switchblade 600 is in extremely short supply because it hasn't entered into production yet and they're literally built by hand. There's a fair number of the Switchblade 300s around, but they lack the range or firepower for artillery duels. The current phase of the war doesn't feature a lot of nearby infantry or light vehicles for them to target.
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Jul 8, 2022 16:02
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Lead out in cuffs posted:For cakes and things, sure. But hell if I'm busting out the scale just to make a quick batch of pancakes. I think one of the common elements of a European kitchen is that a scale and a graduated cylinder are generally already at hand. Or alternatively you can just estimate by eye. The idea is basically that if something is worth measuring, it's worth measuring correctly.
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Jul 16, 2022 19:59
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Marshal Prolapse posted:If it’s endangered and it’s an animal, then yes. Yeah China is the biggest market - practically the only market - for endangered animals. Bear, tiger, rhino, and elephants are farmed and / or trafficked throughout China, and the parts are used as magical ingredients for a wide variety of purposes. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/wild-laws-china-and-its-role-illicit-wildlife-trade https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/will-china-say-no-wildlife-trade https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/science/wildlife-trafficking-china.html Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jul 23, 2022 |
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Jul 23, 2022 01:40
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CoffeeQaddaffi posted:Holy poo poo, Lay Down and Mag Dump into the air actually works. I figured it was just a "Well, you can't really do anything but try to make them gently caress off" kind of thing. Amazing. There's been some movement towards adopting smart scopes that can allow standard rifles to track drones and accurately shoot them down. In particular the Israeli SMASH optic series has been adopted in small numbers by the American and British militaries. They've been iterating fairly quickly on it, and keep putting out new versions with added capabilities. The technology at play seems very similar to the XM-157 Vortex sight that the US Army is already planning to distribute fairly widely in its forces, so I would assume that there will be some convergent development in the near future to give infantry more organic defense against UAVs. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-smart-shooter-rifle-optic-adoption/ https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2023/07/05/british-army-selects-smart-shooter-smash-anti-drone-role/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JZVXts8LuU
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Aug 1, 2023 22:07
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Of course the context of all this is a world where the media is filled with propaganda, the government is openly corrupt, even your neighbors cannot be trusted, and the balkanized military is well-known for both waging covert strikes against their rivals and strong-arming civilians into doing their bidding. Making the wrong decision leading to you or someone you love manning in a trench in Ukraine is a very possible outcome from any interaction with a stranger.
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Aug 2, 2023 15:19
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Lovely Joe Stalin posted:I don't think there's anything awesome at all about a tanker getting holed to be honest. If that thing was laden it's another catastrophe for the region. If you’re a single-issue environmentalist then there’s really nothing better than blowing up oil tankers.
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Aug 5, 2023 04:20
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Armacham posted:I was president of one for a year because no one else wanted to do it lmao I think that’s the story of every HOA president. It’s a thankless and frustrating role.
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Aug 10, 2023 02:30
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Common neighborhood issues should be resolved the way God intended: Passive-aggressive notes followed by screaming obscenities while everyone records each other on their cellphones and waits for police.
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Aug 10, 2023 03:08
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M_Gargantua posted:So when BAE starts selling them for $10k a pop you know they're going to be terrors, but also will have missed the whole point. It all depends on how it's implemented. One of the quiet tricks that the US has up its sleeve is to drive up the cost of effective weaponry for everyone, because they can afford it. If an expensive drone can somehow make the cheap ones functionally obsolete, then everyone has to shell out big time or get stomped on. That's actually one of the biggest issues for NATO right now - drones threaten their financial advantage.
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Aug 14, 2023 20:10
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A.o.D. posted:That looks like one part of the hull was hit and other parts of the hull blew out. The pressure hull has to be a write off, and the internals of that thing have got to be completely wrecked, right? Yeah that looks totaled to me. You’d need to spend a couple years in drydock pulling all the electrical, replacing the hull, and repairing damaged sub-systems. It would be a complete rebuild.
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Sep 18, 2023 13:06
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The ATACMS costs about $1 million per unit, so keep that in mind when thinking about targets. It either has hundreds of bomblets for use against area targets, or a single 500-lb warhead for use against large moving targets like warships. The US traditionally employs it against air defense systems, which then allows aircraft to go in and drop cheaper ordnance against less agile targets (like a bridge). One expert believes that ATACMS will be used to focus on targets currently being attacked by Neptune systems, which would free up those missiles to go after the Crimean bridge. They also suggest that the American distribution of ATACMS will encourage Germany to offer up their Taurus bunker busters: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/09/15/ukraine-might-finally-get-atacms-heres-what-that-means/quote:ATACMS would offer much-needed additional capacity — particularly useful as Kyiv’s limited stocks of Storm Shadows and SCALP-EGs dwindle. This could free up Neptune missiles to attack targets within Russia. Alternatively, Ukraine could use ATACMS against targets in occupied territory that would have been assigned to the Neptune, then use the latter to strike the Crimean Bridge. The Neptune’s terminal guidance system — something ATACMS lacks — might make it better suited for multiple strikes against a single weak spot on the bridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-140_ATACMS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-360_Neptune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taurus_KEPD_350
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Sep 22, 2023 17:23
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Yeah the big question is clearly the mines. The Russians basically threw down every mine they could get their hands on. While they doubtlessly had deep stocks of them, it would take generations of production to construct the thousands of square kilometers of mine fields that Ukraine has been slowly digging paths through. I’m personally of the opinion that it was a trick they will not be able to perform twice - particularly with Ukraine continuing to apply pressure in ways that they couldn’t when the mine fields were initially built.
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Sep 24, 2023 05:52
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Jimmy Smuts posted:Imagine going to Finance and not getting a pay issue resolved, and so you sell secrets to the enemy to make ends meet, just lol Well when you don’t get the looted refrigerators you were promised, you have to get your paycheck somehow.
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Sep 25, 2023 19:36
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steinrokkan posted:The police the regime needs to survive is the riot police, not the cops whose job is to prevent crimes, do admin etc There’s an estimated 300-350k Rosgvardiya military police that report directly to Putin, and 750k-900k MVD federal police. Losing the latter would jeopardize quite a bit.
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Oct 15, 2023 17:17
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I mean say what you will about American or British treatment of women in the military during WWII, but there wasn’t the sort of open concubinage that was fairly common in the Soviet army. The topic got brought up more recently because of the practice resurfacing in the Russian military during their war on Ukraine, but war historians documented the abuse of Soviet women pretty thoroughly: https://www.rferl.org/amp/women-russian-military-field-wife/32342221.html Apparently the nickname PPZh became popularized in part because it was similar to the acronym for the PPSh submachine gun that was often carried by Soviet officers and veterans - the same figures who would claim women as their mistresses. A lot of the interviews with Soviet female soldiers feature some pretty wild stories involving this sort of thing, like officers throwing grenades into ponds where women were bathing in order to force them out, or how women would carry their babies into combat because they couldn’t leave them behind: https://books.google.com/books?id=D...&q=PPZh&f=false quote:It was a common practice for officers to take "campaign wives" or PPZh (Russian: походно-полевые жены, romanized: pokhodno-polevy zheny (ППЖ), lit. 'field marching wives'). Women serving in the Red Army Sometimes were told that they were now the mistresses of the officers, regardless of what they felt about the matter.[115] The "campaign wives" were often nurses, signalers and clerks who wore a black beret.[116] Despite being forced to become the concubines of the officers, they were widely hated by the frontoviki, who saw the "campaign wives" as trading sex for more favorable positions.[117] The writer Vasily Grossman recorded typical remarks about the "campaign wives" in 1942: "Where's the general?" [someone asks]. "Sleeping with his whore." And these girls had once wanted to be 'Tanya',[118] or Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya.[119] Kaal fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 19:10
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The Door Frame posted:Yeahhhhhhh that's why I was explicitly keeping it to postwar veterans. Actual treatment during the war was loving awful for female Soviet troops, and it's hard to think of any such large scale abuse that is comparable in any other group I was talking about It's a tricky topic, for sure. Soviet female veterans would apparently routinely bury their medals and hide their service because the negative sexual stereotypes about them were so pervasive. The topic got buried until the fall of the USSR in the 1980s, in part because their service challenged enduring patriarchal mores as well as reminded people of the widespread mass rapes and eastern VD epidemics after the war. It's unlikely that many American WAACs felt obliged to do that, though they also faced discrimination and were encouraged to return to their domestic role. quote:An ex-PVO gun crew commander reported that she and her friends felt they had to hide their soldiers’ papers and medals after the war; “we kept mum and didn’t tell anybody that we had been at the front,” she said.279 One female physician said that once when she wore her medals in public after the war,astrangersaid,“‘Ahha!Theregoesafrontlinewhore!’”280 BarbaraAlpernEngel discusses how the “postwar popular discourse transformed [women’s] feats into sexual transgression,” and observes that “No historian of Soviet women and World War II has discussed this transformation, in part, I think, to avoid detracting from women’s achievements and perpetuating slander best forgotten.
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Oct 30, 2023 19:54
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Madurai posted:Hang on. I need to go lie down. My first memory was of the Berlin Wall falling. I was three.
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Oct 31, 2023 02:27
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