No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
5d 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)
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.
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