No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1d ago
Sailer's was joking how funny it is that Spielberg has spend like a million bucks on luxury Italian shotguns but there's like 2 photos of him shooting one.
No_one
1d ago
..didn't he donate tens to low hundreds millions of dollars to ensuring Trump loses his 2nd election ?
In my opinion, convincing someone to kill themselves or forcing them to kill themselves is morally the same thing.
If you are really going with "China depressed Uyghur TFR to 1.2", is suppressing their religion as being "genocide" then what's going in most of the world is also genocide. Religion is gone, TFR is in the crapper, no one is doing anything about it. The preferable solution is 'import people' to replace the dying out population.
What's true seems to be that a large % of their young males are in labor camps, there are anti-melee weapon measures everywhere (metal detectors, plastic shields, batons), there's a shit ton of police everywhere, much of them Uyghur. Strict surveillance, with people having to have tracking phone apps on.. (link worth reading, it's by a highly disagreeable person with no sympathies for either Uyghurs or Leninists.)
Which again, not nice, but unless they're getting worked to death on low rations, still not genocide. And with Chinese labor costs being as they are, I doubt they're not feeding them properly.
Now, not nice at all, but it's a just another case of 'fucking around and finding out'. Uyghurs failed to rein in their radicals, said radicals killed a couple hundred Chinese in machete attacks, caused the ongoing clampdown. Surely you remember the headlines? There was the big riot in the capital, then a half dozen big attacks in the following years.
No_one
1d ago
All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant
Carriers are also obsolete against peer forces who are just going to launch a hundred supersonic missiles at them a salvo of strategic air above to give planes something to dodge & overwhelm point defense and simply sink them.
That doesn't prevent them being useful against people who don't have hundreds of good ASMs on hand. That's why Chinese are building two.
If you can make a plane stealthy at a reasonable cost, it's still worth it, because it's going to make it a harder target against simple radar systems.
spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station
Multilateration aside which is kinda not talked about much but probably works...
You ever heard of IR sensors ? Yeah, sure, you say you can hide a MW level heat source against the cold sky. No, you can't. Even Yuropoor systems like the Eurofighter have IRST that detects planes up to 50 km from the front.. You think China's unable to manufacture similar sensors and stick one on a high pole in every square 100 kms and connect them by fibre? You think unless there's total overcast, a stealth plane with a 3 MW engine on cruise can just waltz through ?
Detecting IR is 1980s technology. Most air defence now comes with it. America is refitting such on its older warplanes.
Stealth works against countries with bad equipment. That doesn't mean it's going to work against a sophisticated enemy.
No_one
1d ago
By CNN metrics.
No, export models of Soviet and Western equipment armed with obsolete ammunition operated by Arabs whose average IQ is estimated to be 89. US army cutoff for recruitment back when there was a draft was 85. Anyone under that was just not worth having even in the rear echelon.
By CNN / newspaper chart metrics yes. By any actual metrics, no. It's a laughable claim.
No_one
1d ago
Bogged down in the poorest European country
1 ) Ukraine isn't the poorest. Moldova is, iirc.
- you are eliding that Ukraine gets all the surveillance and espionage data it needs to use the high tech weapons it got free of charge. Patriots, ATGMs, NASAMS, Himars, Storm Shadow, hundreds of quality artillery systems etc. Enough to equip a large EU/NATO army.
From less high tech weapons, it got ~1000 tanks, 1000s of IFVs, most of its artillery shells and so on.
Poorest country except it got military equipment on par with the French army, at least artillery wise.
Without that help and those supplies, it'd have been over for Ukraine by fall of '22 probably.
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you're also eliding that it gets specialist foreign troops operating air defense and elint equipment. (no, they didn't train Ukes to operate it. It takes years of training just to get basic familiarity. )
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but a failure by any objective observer. Yeah, the initial plan A (watch the bribed government scram) was a failure.
Plan B, grind down Ukrainian army to the point they can't go on is ongoing. Even Americans are now admitting it's unwinnable.
But it is also showing how faithless Americans are. Despite all their big words, they're unable to even provide Ukraine with something as basic as air defenses. Richest country in the world can't or won't give out thousands of radar guided missiles. Could it? (honestly don't know, but I suspect it has thousands of Aim-120 which should be adaptable for ground launch)
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
No_one
2d ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations,
And that's why I'm dooming on AI. Because enough people aren't psychopathic enough and causing a genocide isn't that easy if all you have is a handful of conspirators.
Meanwhile, in the real world, it took giant totalitarian states to do anything, years of effort. AI systems will however make it much easier to pull off a conspiracy or develop a lethal agent.
They'll also make it much easier to detect anyone trying to do either, but doing so is costly and paranoid so the conspiracies will have an edge. Also, gigadeaths, if it didn't involve just 3rd world getting killed would crash the economy and destroy the supply chain. I think the Venn diagram between "non delusional genocidal wannabe world masters" and "wants to live in ruins, relying on scavenging spare parts" contains exactly zero people, and the former category is also very small too.
We have only one that could probably genocide, and it's in a superpower competition so no matter how feisty they might feel, just doing an actual genocide is pointless. Besides, they're patient and rich enough to not genocide people as you can tell by what's going on in Xinyang.
No, what's happening is basically just chaos+information overload and stress. Schizos of a certain sort are liable to act out in such an environment.
No_one
2d ago
Look, unless you're a 13 year old girl, you should probably understand by now that almost anything any government says that's not in an ultimatum is either lies or bullshit. And even the ultimatums can be bullshit, e.g. bluffing. Historical record is full of lies of this kind.
"I don't believe anything until it has been officially denied" is a 19th century saying.
So why this insistence that what is officially being said by people who are unlikely to be privy to the real plans matters ?
What is said in ultimatums (government to government communications) or in secret cables matters far, far more. Anything for public consumption is typically fake.
No_one
2d ago
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
Now you're getting it. People have been talking about how a green service economy with little actual industry isn't actually useful when you need to like, blow stuff up or build it.
when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare
You know, it does takes years to build up big armies and industries. Germany was cheating in 1930s because their entire army was designed around re-expanding. They hired the best, they had WW1 veterans, everyone was trained on things a couple levels above him. And even then it took them like 6 years to build up. In a militaristic regime with relatively high approval rates, plenty of young people and so on.
Look at Biden or von der Leyen. Look at the green energy 20 year shamble.
Not gonna happen. It's late stage regime, the best it can do is suppress political opposition
Russia meanwhile doesn't have enough people to occupy Ukraine. It's not the world-conquering totalitarian state of scare propaganda. If they were, they'd not be hiring Nepalis, but everyone youngish but essential workers would be in the army and it'd be 4 million strong.
They could, if Putin was feeling insane enough try to take over Baltics and maybe (I give this low probability) Russian missile attack could wreck enough of NATO airbases (which I'm not even sure have solid air defenses against maneuvering, fast missile salvos) and then if NATO wasn't resolute enough to H-bomb Russian formations on the wrong side of the border in Baltics, then yeah, maybe they'll get taken over.
Which would be a net benefit to EU because 60-90% of working age non-Russians will just move away.
No_one
5d ago
Swedes tried to conquer Germany, mind you. And paid an extremely heavy price for that.
You're talking about small countries.
Large countries, with the exception of China, which just keeps sitting there, have a strong record of expansionism. Spain. France. United States. United Kingdom. Japan, once it modernised.
No_one
5d ago
I thought we are beyond this already, the same was said before invasion of Ukraine. I
People in the know (Mearsheimer had a talk on this in '14, Bill Burns-the ambassador said as much in his leaked 2008 memo etc) have been saying Ukraine is liable to get invaded if US tries to integrate it into NATO.
US:
- set up a defence treaty with Ukraine,
- vowed to integrate it into NATO at some unspecified date,
- refused to renounce that ambition
- laughed at the Russian ultimatum that sought a decrease in troop levels near its borders, disavowing ambition to integrate Ukraine
So who exactly was saying Ukraine won't get attacked?
No_one
5d ago
It is not as if NATO will fire nukes in face of conventional assault - so what will they do?
If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
That's almost exactly the disparity in population, GDP between Russia and Ukraine. In any reasonable war, conventional war between Russia and NATO should go far, far better than between Russia and Ukraine alone. After all, the developed West has much better everything. It has rule of law, human rights, less corruption, much better R&D sector, better education. One could go on.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
It is not as if NATO countries will ever muster courage to actually wage full fledged war with the aim to physically oust Putin from Kremlin
I'm pretty sure that's what Oppenheimer meant when he said "lot of boys not yet born will owe their life to the bomb". You know well from history how "waging full scale war to oust the despot in Moscow" usually goes. Especially when he has the support of world's biggest industrial power.
I doubt Putin would try to take Baltics unless there's a WW3 going on. There's nothing there, they barely have any forces worth speaking about, it's not defensible at all (or so was the usual expert talk) and all the forces there are just tripwire forces.
What use is NATO if it's unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend the territory of its members? Was it all a big bluff or what ?
No_one
5d ago
My own work is to deterritorialize away from the limitations of the human mode's structure and territorialize somewhere new.
??
deterritorialize
What does that even mean?
No_one
8d ago
There was some flow battery grid storage projected completed in ..Korea?
I looked it up, found the dimensions and then tried extrapolating. You could probably get the ballpark by finding energy density of these cheap grid storage batteries and then doing some calculations.
depend on available volume,
We don't live in zero-gee. Building up is costly, building down even costlier.
terraform's "power -> methane" thing certainly isn't efficient, compared to other forms of grid energy storage, but what it is is scalable. Basically it seems to be a bet on "power prices will be zero / negative some fraction of the time in some locations", which seems likely to happen if solar keeps being deployed at the current rate, or if any country anywhere in the world gets serious about fission power.
..there's such thing as manufacturing and maintenance costs.
You got 8 upvotes while completely neglecting that.
Terraform has some bullshit low price of $100k for a machinery that produces, without taking power into account something like $65 of natural gas per day. With solar it'd take 5 acres to power it.
So, I'm skeptical. Because industrial equipment is extremely expensive.
Look at this here. $100k for that much chemical processing?!
And does 40 tons of methane per year even get you $150k? 1 ton of methane is supposedly 14500 kWh (perverse unit to use).
1 kWh is 5 cents in the US or eastern Europe, .7 cents in Russia etc.
725$ per ton, 29k $ per year.
So how is this thing supposed to be competitive with natural gas in any reasonable place ? You can't hike price of heat up 10x like they did in western Europe and expect to not ruin any real economy. (based on production of actual stuff, not finance bullshit)
No_one
8d ago
That's nonsense and you know it.
Yes, it is probably not fast enough to keep with AI improvements. But that isn't the reason to just give up and accept being lame forever.
No_one
10d ago
Look up what Terraform is promising. Methane synthesis from water and captured CO2
I feel like it can't be real, that the numbers don't make sense, that making and running the machinery in a cost effective manner is impossible
No_one
10d ago
Extremely high voltage grids for thousand km transmission aren't cheap.
They're an eyesore to some. I love them though.
You need a lot more of them with a fluctuating grid like you're proposing.
No_one
10d ago
There's an insane startup promising to crash the methane market with solar powered methane synthesis from directly captured CO2.
No_one
10d ago
That's limited by geography.
Very few places could get days of storage that way, without NAWAPA style megaprojects.
No_one
11d ago
'Always a slum' With the 8-10x rate of homicidal violence between blacks and whites, and a roughly similar disparity in other forms of crime, it's fairly obvious one sort of 'slum' is a much more pleasant place to live.
I'm also skeptical of the 'always a slum' claim, as we have basically no slums in Czech Republic apart from the few Gypsy areas. Slums are not an inevitable part of life. They disappear once people have enough money to keep buildings repaired.
No_one
11d ago
It's a scam because you don't have magic energy storage.
Sufficient Battery storage - and you can verify this yourself - would require metropolitan area sized battery arrays. (I did some basic calcs for flow batteries)
So you either have to be content for closing down the country for a few random weeks in a year, or maintain an entire parallel mostly idle power system to pick up the slack.
That's what the Germans did. That's why after spending enough to fully decarbonize their grid via nuclear, they have the world's highest energy price and carbon intensity way worse than France.
She also lost a bit of weight and got somewhat fit.
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