|
Disgusting absence of https://twitter.com/LawDavF on the twitter recommendation list
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2022 20:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 05:52 |
|
|
It's entirely possible that Starlink and Musk are being upfront about their costs and problems. Donations and at-cost provision is great, but a private company shouldn't really be expected to be bankrolling a foreign war to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and it's reasonable for them to ask for their costs to be covered. It's also reasonable for them to pitch for commercial funding rather than at-cost funding as an opening bid. Starlink was a good pr donation but it was done in March and there was probably an assumption of how long the war would go on for and how much the donation would cost the company that has subsequently changed.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 08:42
|
|
|
Feliday Melody posted:I believe that the sums that Musk is throwing around isn't the cost to SpaceX, but rather the retail customer price that those services would have cost. It's entirely reasonable for them to calculate the cost as being the opportunity cost of lost revenue, particularly given that this is the start of a commercial negotiation they are doing.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 08:54
|
|
|
Inferior Third Season posted:It's also reasonable to nationalize systems that are vital to conducting war. If your long term national strategy for winning wars is to maintain a technology and innovation advantage over your opponents then this would be a terrible thing to do, particularly if you aren't actually conducting the war in question. e: nationalising also doesn't solve the problem of needing to pay to keep the thing running Alchenar fucked around with this message at 09:52 on Oct 14, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 09:36
|
|
|
I know you want it to wind down, but as we close off Elon-chat it's worth noting Ukraine's gov also sending clear 'don't yell at Elon' signals: https://twitter.com/Podolyak_M/status/1580945804193587200
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 17:42
|
|
|
This is what Minsk 2 foundered over. Ukraine's position was 'we want to take back control of the border first and then let the millions of displaced people from the Donbass return home, then we'll have a referendum' and Russia's position was 'no you can't do it that way around because we've already printed all the completed ballots, look we can just tell you what the referendum result is now if you would like'.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 19:48
|
|
|
This should be a trite point, but Putin doesn't care about the democratic legitimacy of his own regime in Russia beyond the theatrics and being a pressure valve for discontent, he obviously does not care about national self-determination anywhere else in the world.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 19:53
|
|
|
It wasn't bloodless there was a war. It's just that the fighting was in the Donbass.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 20:30
|
|
|
Being entirely dependent on Ukraine for drinkable water is one of the issues you would expect to be drawn out in a real referendum campaign. e: hell the existence of any sort of political campaign is one of those big hints as to whether you are looking at a real democratic exercise or a sham Alchenar fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Oct 14, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2022 22:19
|
|
|
Lol https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1581345747777179651 By 'free' he of course means 'I would like the markets to give me back the tens of billions of dollars I've lost over the last couple of days picking a bad fight' e: if he plays it straight then he might get to come out of this with his reputation enhanced the way it should have been. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Oct 15, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2022 19:13
|
|
|
cinci zoo sniper posted:
That's actually much worse than it being an old airframe they ran into the ground and couldn't maintain.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 23, 2022 13:27
|
|
|
In living memory Russia maintained an empire consisting of all of Eastern Europe, it's absolutely possible for a modern state to do this with measures short of genocide as long as you have a group of collaboraters willing to run the place, spend the subsidies necessary to maintain their police state, and are willing to roll in tanks now and again to make the price of dissent clear.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2022 06:40
|
|
|
Athas posted:I understand why mercenary companies can be convenient and how Wagner has been a useful tool for Russian foreign policy. But when fighting full-fledged wars, as the invasion of Ukraine has turned into, are they really useful anymore? Prolonged warfare between modern nations seem to require large citizen armies, and I don't see how mercenary companies are a useful part of that calculus, unless they also function as foreign legions and thus increase the available manpower pool. I understand that Wagner is also a political player, but at this point in the war, is it really contributing anything useful in a military sense that the regular Russian forces couldn't do? Wagner seems to be the mechanism by which prisoners are recruited for the war, but it's not clear to me whether they show up in useful numbers, or whether the regular army couldn't just raise penal battalions as well. The thing you need to bear in mind is that Wagner mercenaries exist to be barely-deniable Russian professional soldiers who are an unofficial arm of the Russia state. If you are a motivated Russian soldier then your career options are to take a contract and experience the awfulness of the Russian army or sign up with Wagner and you'll have to work for your money but get paid a lot more and the people around you will be similarly motivated.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2022 21:45
|
|
|
More CommentisFreed:https://twitter.com/LawDavF/status/1585236315947536384
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2022 22:44
|
|
|
I don't think the suggestion is that every Russian unit in Kherson is down to 6-8% strength, more that units are just being observed left to be attritted into nothingness rather than pulled out of the line to be reformed and regenerated.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2022 12:00
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/konrad_muzyka/status/1586273437223424000 Looks like a juicy War on the Rocks podcast coming soon e: edit for actual today content from Sam Greene: https://tldrussia.substack.com/p/tldrussia-weekend-roundup-706?r=15i4j0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email quote:What I’m thinking about Alchenar fucked around with this message at 10:07 on Oct 29, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2022 09:54
|
|
|
Boris Galerkin posted:What’s the context to the tweet because the one it’s quoting was deleted or something Someone claiming that the Russians in Kherson are completely out of artillery ammo and the Ukrainians don't have to worry about counter-battery fire.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 29, 2022 14:32
|
|
|
Freedman has done another really good blog, this time dissecting 'hey why does nobody who says negotiations are important ever analyse Putin's position?' Spoiler: it's because that makes it obvious why negotiations aren't happening https://samf.substack.com/p/why-putin-prefers-war-war-to-jaw?utm_source=twitter&sd=pf
|
|
#
¿
Nov 3, 2022 13:24
|
|
|
Eric Cantonese posted:Man. Restomodding is so hip now. If you have good optics and communications then basically you rely on the advantages of 'a bad tank is better than no tank' and 'the best armour is to shoot the enemy before he shoots you'. Fortunately the easiest bit of refurbishing and modernising a tank is to replace the radio and optics.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 17:43
|
|
|
Herstory Begins Now posted:You also slap on as much reactive armor as humanly possible onto it. Reactive armor as a % of total coverage appears to be one of the single biggest things currently for vehicle survivability. One of the things I really want to read about from an academic/doctrinal standpoint is whether each side has been actively choosing to use tanks to engage other tanks, or whether they have been trying where possible to use them to blast away at infantry while ATGMs/drones/artillery goes after the other side's armour.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2022 22:22
|
|
|
Russia's position at every point has been 'we are open to negotiations... but not with the drug addict nazi zelensky regime' so really it wouldn't hurt Ukraine at all to take a mirror position calling that out. e: the core problem is that Putin already rejected all the reasonable compromises so any sudden change of heart would be tainted by 'you are only agreeing to this because you have literally no other choice and will renege at the first opportunity, as you always do'. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Nov 6, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2022 10:24
|
|
|
More In Moscow's Shadows: In Moscow's Shadows 82: What Prigozhin Wants, What Putin Believes, and Why Russia Might Create its own Bureau 39
|
|
#
¿
Nov 6, 2022 17:35
|
|
|
Erdogan plays a very aggressive game of making Turkey indispensible and getting what he wants while not making friends along the way, but he knows which side his toast is buttered. As long as there isn't actually any imminent threat to Finland and Sweden he can posture for internal cred while actually squaring off against the Russians in the Baltic.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 7, 2022 09:33
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:On balance, in combat, churning commanders is going to drive better results. What. That is not how this works at all.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2022 19:00
|
|
|
Pablo Bluth posted:A few days ago the Royal United Services Institute (a UK defence and security think tank) published an in-depth look at the air-war so far. I've not had a chance to read it properly yet, and frankly I'm qualified to critique it... The tl;dr (although it's a good read) is that the narrative that Russia has been holding back its air force isn't actually true - there have been multiple phases of the air war over the last 9 months and at every stage both sides have been giving the maximum effort possible.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 00:34
|
|
|
In fairness every Russian over 40 has lived in a world in which Russia spent an enormous amount of money subsidizing the economies of the states around it and all they got for it was "please stop sending tanks to shoot the people protesting the brutal client government you are imposing on us". Never forget the reason the USSR fell apart wasn't primarily because the periphery wanted independence and the subsidies to stop flowing, it was because Russians decided that it didn't make any sense to keep paying for an Empire that hated them for it.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 11, 2022 21:07
|
|
|
The line is easy: 'no missiles would be being fired at all if Russia wasn't launching attacks on civilian targets'.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2022 18:55
|
|
|
Rinkles posted:
Given that he is interested in integrating into Russia the parts of Ukraine that he’s conquered successfully, does that suggest that if the war had gone better for him and he’d been able to conquer more of Ukraine that he would’ve been interested in integrating those parts too? It’s possible. It’s hard to say. I think he probably would’ve gone to Odesa and incorporated all of Ukraine that runs along the Black Sea up to Odesa into Russia. Whether he would’ve gone beyond that, it’s hard to say. Lol so he doesn't want to conquer all of Ukraine, but he does want to conquer literally all of Ukraine that he thinks he can conquer. e: holy poo poo Mearschiemer gets bodied in this interview; quote:You gave a speech about all this and said, “One might argue that Putin was lying about his motives, that he was attempting to disguise his imperial ambitions. As it turns out, I have written a book about lying in international politics—‘Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics’—and it is clear to me that Putin was not lying.” What is it about your study of leaders and lying that makes you think Putin was not lying? Alchenar fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Nov 17, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2022 19:04
|
|
|
Economists have predited nine of the last five recessions, and Mearsheimer has predicted twenty of the last five wars. e: the astonishing confusion here is that in one sense he's absolutely right: Russia has been very open and clear in its published policy and official statements what its understanding of the world and foreign policy objectives are. Has been for twenty years. It's what Eastern Europe has been banging the drum on - they bother to read these documents. That doesn't mean that Putin personally doesn't lie constantly. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 10:18 on Nov 18, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2022 10:12
|
|
|
The pre-Maidan elections where candidates Moscow did not like would mysteriously come into contact with nerve agents were of course completely legitimate.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 10:20
|
|
|
Vincent Van Goatse posted:It's a problem called "mirror imaging" in strategic studies. We (we as humans, not us ITT specifically) tend to imagine our opponents as thinking and behaving in mostly the same way that we do despite this being very obviously not true. An example being the various commentators who said there was no way Russia would attack Ukraine because they didn't have the resources to win such a conflict. I think there's a caveat-for-fairness to be thrown in here, which is that 99% of the Russian commetariat also assumed there was no way Putin would start a war because they didn't have the resources to win such a conflict. Interesting instance of double mirroring in that within the autocratic system they weren't able to see the indicators that Russian experts outside the system who were saying 'things have changed, Putin is absolutely serious about this' and so were assuming Putin would act like they assumed a foreign leader would act.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2022 13:19
|
|
|
Deteriorata posted:His actual job is as an analyst in the Australian defense industry. He hasn't been specific, but he's commented a few times that making and presenting PowerPoint presentations is pretty much what he does all day. He is probably extremely identifiable to his industry stakeholders while remaining anonymous to people casually googling him.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 25, 2022 22:47
|
|
|
These comments are specifically in the context of pointing out that there was a pre-war security order in Europe that was working really well for everyone, Russia was obviously in no risk of being attacked, Putin chose to wreck it, and Putin has the option of going back to it. Obviously if Putin chooses not to return to it then something new is needed, but it's important not to concede Putin's narrative that he was owed some grand new bargain.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2022 22:40
|
|
|
More in Moscow's Shadows: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1026985/11809676
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2022 17:54
|
|
|
Bremen posted:I'm totally fine with NATO giving Russia security guarantees, because it means nothing. No one is going to invade a nuclear ICBM armed power and everyone, including Putin, is already aware of this. If an empty gesture like that lets Putin claim a "win" to his people for his abysmal failure of a war than that's a small price to pay to stop the murder of Ukrainians. It's a problem if the guarantees aren't reciprocal because that sets all kinds of bad precedents. If Putin isn't willing to put all the Iskanders in Kaliningrad pointed at every capital in Eastern and Central Europe on the table, why should he get any guarantees on systems placed in Ukraine?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2022 01:05
|
|
|
I don't know how you get these threads wrong repeatedly, but the end of the gif makes it clear it isn't NMS at all and actually quite funny.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2022 22:34
|
|
|
WarpedLichen posted:I saw a video about a Ukrainian field hospital the other day that reinforces these points: Jesus chris man, mild NMS? The video opens with a guy being treated who has a huge chunk of his leg torn open (the guy is obviously in serious pain but after they treat him he is literally able to walk away so hopefully a good prognosis). e: \/ I actually agree, it's the kind of imagery you'd expect to see from an uncensored hospital documentary rather than war porn, but 'no direct shots' is a wildly inaccurate description. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Dec 12, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2022 12:07
|
|
|
And the really important thing is, your militarily useful population is in the 18-30 bracket, which is also the bit driving your civilian economy. Russia's demographics in this space are Not Good.  e: Russia has spent the last ten years struggling to deal with the costs of a rapidly aging population and an economy that doesn't really work. Mass casualties and emigation in the weakest and most critical demographic point is potentially catastrophic in the long term. e2: Ukraine's demographics look very similar. This is a war being fought on both sides by old men. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Dec 14, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2022 10:51
|
|
|
Panzeh posted:A lot of it is based on the bizarre idea that "multipolarity" would A. be achieved by Russian success in Ukraine and B. would somehow result in a peaceful world. Case in point, Dmitri Trenin (worth reading because he's a Russian Patriot trying to do sensible analysis on the best course for his country - you have to filter his work remembering he's writing to try to influence Kremlin policy makers) wrote on this a few days ago: https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/perelomnaya-tochka/ quote:In a new environment – even compared to the period 2014-2022 – Russia faces a politically mobilized collective West. With the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the degree of cohesion around the United States of English-speaking countries, Europe, Asian allies reached previously unseen values. Not only Great Britain, Poland and the Baltic States, but also Germany, France, Italy, Spain took a sharply anti-Russian position. For the first time in Russian history, Russia in the West does not have not only allies, but even interlocutors capable of playing the role of intermediaries, "translators" and the like. The traditional neutrality of a number of European countries has been completely reset and has come to naught. Not only Finland and Sweden, which decided to join NATO, but also Austria, Ireland and even Switzerland, which is not a member of any associations, actually joined the anti-Russian alliance. On the side of this coalition, numbering about fifty countries around the world, the Vatican also stands... Translation: you wanted a multipolar world? Congratulations, everyone who was previously neutral in Europe flipped to the other pole, and all our CSTO 'allies' have flipped neutral. e: like, it's something to consider that the Global South is not going along with the Western Narrative on the war, but Russia's great strategic objective is not to be friends with the Global South, it is to be the dominant power in Europe. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Dec 17, 2022 |
|
#
¿
Dec 17, 2022 11:29
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 11, 2024 05:52 |
|
|
There's also an element that you aren't targeting all Russians with the message, just Men aged 18-40, which gets you a lot closer to 'scouring online sources for news as to what's going on'. Particularly rumours of further conscription rounds.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2022 17:02
|
|