No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
13d 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
11d 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.
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
10d 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. )
-
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)
especially given our advancements in biology
Bro, our gene pool is mostly decaying. Accumulating mutations. People who were pre-adapted to modernity aren't even breeding at replacement levels! We-on a societal/species level don't understand anything and don't want to understand anything.
We can't even safely rewrite a fertilised egg's DNA at more than single digit spots because of the error rates.
There have been no successful eugenic projects. Human nature is largely fixed because we're too pussy to do anything about it. All your mushy-headed idealistic bullshit is just putting lipstick on a week old stinking corpse of a pig.
Thanks to the religious, and by that I mean communists with their infinite malleability due to material conditions we're pretty much screwed. There's no good policy, most 'intellectuals' are deluded etc. Only animal instincts of people liking healthy partners are preventing total insanity.
it's that adaptability and change are at the heart of what it means to be human.
That's only true on a timescale of centuries and with very high losses involved.
Yeah. That's why Australian Aborigines after getting unceremoniously yanked from their stone age are now deeply involved in Australian's Aerospace industry and not being subjected to PSA's about the inadvisability of sleeping on the road or sniffing petrol.
Another shining example of 'human adaptability' were Norse in Greenland going extinct because they refused to eat fish, sticking to increasingly desperate farming until the bitter end.
No_one
8d ago
Wow. Imagine thinking US could do combined arms warfare in absence of air superiority.
No_one
20d ago
That's all irrelevant because groups that lucked into right beliefs thrive, those that had bad luck die out.
Thus over time, the rules of the groups that survive start to look pretty wise.
No_one
21d ago
You don't get it, do you?
Japanese aren't docile. They're still the same people.
They're just not at war.
No_one
21d ago
We know the IQ pretty much varies with white admixture.
So, it's not environmental.
No_one
2d ago
It's not a nothingburger. It was overhyped initially (as everything is).
Anyway, LLMs. Apparently you can prevent them from hallucinating and make them accurately give advice on the content of a textbook or manual. Or so says Steve Hsu, who founded a company that (he claims) did that. I haven't followed it up but supposedly they had an initial sale.
Looks like superhuman performance isn't going to happen through this architecture, as you can't do self-competitive play - what was done with games but incremental progress -people making the models reliable, useful, likely even assembling normal to middling smart human-intelligence agents, with a will -is likely in the near term (10 years).
So at the very least, within 15 years, we're looking at governments being able to use 'kinda dumb' spies, automatically flag problematic online, on the scale of an entire population.
To sum it up:
-call centres: likely a lot less employment
-increased productivity of at least software developers, lawyers, theoretically bureaucrats (lol no).
-automated spying on everything your write on an online device -but not very smart spying- almost certain. Combined with universal private messaging access by governments (EU -DC's sock puppet - wants this), it's likely going to happen. Even though 'chat control' the initial proposal was defeated, it's going to come back.. IMO I suspect having an app that is not broken might even be criminalised because 'Chyna'.
-social media is dead without independent ID verification. Automated, much better online astroturfing.
-good enough chatbots that waste time of troublemakers / get people to spend money on BS / troll
-textbooks that talk
-even more addictive porn in the 5 year horizon (people can overuse the porn to the degree they can find that one special thing that appeals to them. When that can be generated on the fly, crap..)
In 'other ML' news, autonomous killbots (ethical militaries will geofence them to combat zone) are 100% certain to happen.
100%, anyone who doesn't develop autonomous drone air fighters in is going to get absolutely wrecked by people who develop autonomous drones bombers. I'm talking machineguns vs cavalry style carnage on the ground. Developing a $1000, fast, evasive reusable FPV drone drop mortar bombs with pin-point accuracy is just a question of 4-5 good university aeronautics student projects. It'll zoom low across the ground at 50-100 kph, deliver a bomb, reload/swap battery, while getting target data from recon drones or troops. It's not even funny how brutal this is.
A countermeasure - autocannon with VT flak rounds costs $300k. And needs a vehicle. A vehicle that's vastly more expensive than an IR or optically guided missile.
Ray beams won't help you (at sea maybe) because of line of sight problems. Drones will spot them call in an missile strike. Poof.
No_one
7d ago
The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
Difficulty publishing porn on steam? I find that doubtful.
No_one
19d ago
Who ?
The GAE. The Gay American Empire. All the Christians who could surely find theological justification for selective breeding if the wanted to.
choose your biomods for you?
Stop living in computer games. The reality is the biggest risk factor for being childless is educability. Our policies are literally geared to makes us incapable of maintaining high technology.
No_one
7d ago
It’s even funnier to think the US wouldn’t have air superiority against the joke of Russian capabilities we’ve seen.
I guess you haven't been paying attention to Russia destroying US 'smart' munitions, in flight, repeatedly.
No_one
10d 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
10d 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
2d ago
You are, once again, living up to your name.
What it'll look like ? Services that create porn you want, on demand. People got addicted to porn merely with access to huge story databases.
Imagine how bad it's going to get when AI services will generate sexy waifus with precisely the right RP, on demand.
Your idea of 'porn AIs actually useful, using sex appeal to get kids to learn' is about as realistic of my idea of some governments paying for the development of something like a truly massively multiplayer ARMA / DCS combination and making kids play that so they'll learn some soldiering, instead of playing COD. Lol. No, not gonna happen!
No_one
19d 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
5d ago
With AI, the odds of automating zersetzung are approaching 100%.
It's much less disruptive than jailing people, and probably cheaper.
No_one
7d ago
Yes, being able to occassionally hit targets inside of Russia with small plastic drones or sometimes even an ultralight plane means "Russia isn't controlling its airspace".
LLM tier understanding on display from you, so bye.
No_one
8d ago
Point to how good multilateration is vs stealth please.
You want me to give you the kind of data that'd get you into ADX Florence or whatever its Chinese equivalent is ?
I think people are just full of shit. And when there's billions at stake, the incentive to deny and lie and hope it somehow works out gets irresistible.
Americans pointedly refused to even sell Turkey their F-35s because they apparently don't want it tested against it in a real environment.
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/us-turkey-continue-talks-to-settle-f-35-dispute
S-400 doesn't phone home, no military system can afford to, so it's obviously they didn't want the problem where Turkish air defence troops find out just how good F-35 is. There's little justification for it. They just want to delay the inevitable.
No_one
8d ago
Let's just ignore the reality of last years, that Ukraine is not winning but getting pushed back or that the US is unable to deal with an 80 IQ militia armed with a few Iranian missiles and assume it's 1991, it's always been 1991 and it's always going to be 1991.
And also let's pretend Ukraine is winning because you're giving them Stingers. Which you no can no longer make.
No_one
17d 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.
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.
Václav Smil explains it better here.
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