functor
16hr ago
now waving the flag of Hezbollah who actually killed a lot of those troops.
If you mean in Syria, not many US soldiers have died in the occupation of Syria. Why on Earth would we respect them? Hillary Clinton's campaign to destabilize Syria via hefty sanctions while the US flooded the country with weapons has been an absolute disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people have died, 13 million refugees of which a great many are in Europe, and the destruction of ancient and Christian culture in the region is nothing to respect.
Hezbollah has had a neighbouring country flooded with jihadists who are down right genocidal toward Hezbollah and Syrians of the same religious and ethnic background as Hezbollah. Why wouldn't they fight? It is absurd to call Ukraine an American interest and then condemn Hezbollah for fighting ISIS next door.
Conservatives make a grave mistake simping for troops. They did absolutely nothing for you. The military industrial complex has wasted trillions, murdered millions and is if anything spying and influencing far more than China and Russia combined.
functor
2d ago
The big issue for Ukraine isn't bodies to fill the military it is demographics and qualified people.
Soldiers take almost a year to train and cost a fortune to train. It is far more demanding to train a soldier than most college degrees. Militaries require officers, NCOs and people with specialized skills that require far more training. During peak Ukraine hype we were sold the idea that Ukrainians could be trained to do mechanized assaults in half the time it takes a western soldier to do basic training. The idea that Ukrainians can be trained extremely quickly died with the Ukrainian counter offensive.
Ukraine's doctrine has been to pool its veterans and experienced soldiers into elite brigades used for offensive operations and for stopping Russian attacks, while territorial defence forces man most of the trenches. These elite forces are heavily attrited, have gotten far less rest than they need and are worn out. Replacing them is going to require vast resources. The Ukrainian military is still largely using soviet equipment for which they can't get new parts. Replacing their gear with western equipment requires much more training. The median age in the Ukrainian army is 43 and these men have had hard lives. Even if the war ended half their soldiers would be over 50 within 7 years. Ukraine needs to train hundreds of thousands of men. This is not easy in the slightest and will be an enormous drain on European militaries that are not scaled for mass training of soldiers. Most western European countries only train a few thousand soldiers a year. Even Japan only trains 10 000 per year. Ukraine has over 3200 confirmed dead commissioned officers. The number of seriously wounded is probably 2-3 times that. Replacing those officers is expensive and time consuming.
The other issue is that most men aren't suitable for the military and those who are are often the most economically productive men. Removing them from the workforce hurts and the draft encourages them to leave and never come back.
Russia's war aim is to ensure that Ukraine can never join NATO. They can ensure that by having a war against Ukraine if Ukraine tries to join. Militarily wrecking Ukraine and creating a major incentive for Ukrainians to leave are ways Russia can keep Ukraine militarily weak.
functor
2d ago
There are several million Ukrainians in Russia and around three million Ukrainians have moved to Russia during this war. That isn't people who live on captured territory but people who voluntarily moved to Russia since February 2022. Russia risked losing 10 million Russians by having them live as a minority in a hostile Ukraine and have them slowly integrate in Ukrainian culture. A few million of them have moved to Russia, a few million live in the same place but their home is now controlled by Russia.
Ukraine is losing 4 million or so people in the Donbass, Crimea etc, 3 million moving to Russia and 5 million moving to the EU. This is a country with a birth rate on par with South Korea.
functor
2d ago
I am not so sure information doesn't matter:
Knowledge – or lack of knowledge – about casualties is related to attitudes about the conflict in a few ways. For a start, respondents who do not correctly answer that more Palestinians than Israelis have died are much more likely to decline to answer many opinion questions in the survey. Chart shows In the U.S., awareness that more Palestinians than Israelis have died is related to opinions about the current conflict
For example, among those unaware that more Palestinians have died, 59% offered no opinion when asked whether Biden has been favoring one side or the other too much. Among those who knew the balance of casualties, far fewer – 22% – had no opinion on Biden’s approach to the war.
In addition, those who are aware that more Palestinians than Israelis have died in the current war tend to express more pro-Palestinian views on certain questions. One example is that they express more favorable attitudes about the Palestinian people than do respondents who are not aware of the relative number of deaths on each side. Among those who correctly answer this knowledge question, favorable opinions of the Palestinian people outnumber unfavorable opinions by 61% to 36%; among those unaware of the balance of casualties, more have an unfavorable than favorable opinion of the Palestinian people (47% unfavorable, 39% favorable).
Similarly, those aware that more Palestinians have died are about twice as likely to say Biden is favoring the Israelis too much (35%) as to say he’s favoring the Palestinians too much (17%). Among those who do not know that more Palestinians have died, 15% say Biden is favoring the Palestinians too much and 9% say he’s favoring the Israelis too much.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2024/03/21/emotions-news-and-knowledge-about-the-israel-hamas-war/
Americans with the most knowledge about casualties are much more pro Palestinian. There is a major divide between young and old americans and that is probably due to getting info from pro zionist mainstream media vs those who get information online.
functor
2d ago
The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment. If anything blind support for Israel is their prime directive and they ignore things Israel does in a way they wouldn't do for anyone else. The October 7th attack was lied about to an absurd extent, with stories of mass baby burnings and rapes that turned out to be as true as Saddam's nukes. Those stories were pushed hard by pro zionist media which is essentially all media. This report has more credible sources than those stories.
functor
8d ago
What is the best way to access one's value in the dating market? I haven't been single for many years and my only real dating experience in the past decade is tinder. What is the best way to judge my realistic expectations in dating?
functor
8d ago
There is a niche for a third tier university to accept autistic weirdos who are kicked out of tier one institutions. This is far from just a wokeness issue, a lot of geniuses are difficult people. By creating a safe space for researchers who don't see what is wrong with asking a woman if she is pregnant or fat and giving them long term research grants, a university can increase the chances of getting groundbreaking research. If a university punches high above its weight class in research, it could compensate for other issues.
It wouldn't surprise me if a university in Asia adopted this strategy. Find deplatformed westerners and build a top tier research facility that rivals famous institutions with several times the budget.
The neocon hype cycle:
A new Hitler is launched. Saddam, Osama, Gadaffi, Putin, Ho Chi Minh is this evil person motivated by evil who wants to destroy the world because it is evil! We have to act now before the new cartoon villain kills us all! Nobody wants to talk about the lead up to the conflicts and the very real grievances the next Hitler has. His motivations are by default nothing but his cartoonish evil and his arguments don't have to be discussed.
Freedom fries and hype. We will take Berlin next week! Mission accomplished! People are waving their flags and hyping up the military operation that is quickly and surgically remove the new Hitler thanks to the new wunderwaffen. This war isn't like all the previous disasters, we are going to win cheap and fast!
A plan designed by politicians rather than generals is launched. We aren't actually going to have a war time economy and do what it takes to win the war in Ukraine. We weren't actually going to build a military base in every valley in Afghanistan, we weren't actually going to nation build Libya. We want the cheap discount option that is easy to swallow. Ukrainian soldiers can be trained in six weeks. Not because they can learn a year's worth of material in six weeks but because it is a nicer option than the alternative.
People start acting for the sake of acting. There is no goal in Afghanistan, nobody knows what winning looks like. But we have some spare stuff lying around so we can donate that to the Afghan national army. Do they need it? Do theyhave a plan for how it is going to be used? What will eventually replace it? Who cares, people who ask those questions are terrorist lovers listening to the Dixie Chicks.
The misadventure goes way over budget, hundreds of thousands of people die and we get flooded with migrants. Now people don't want to talk about it anymore.
Years pass and people start denying that they ever supported that war. However, have you heard of the next Hitler! They may have lied about every previous war, but this new Hitler they are being completely honest about. We have to kill him, the media that told us Iraq has WMDs and the Afghan army has 300 000 soldiers says this guy eats babies!
functor
10d ago
The Russian steel industry is more or less at American levels. Meanwhile the US has to fight a bunch of wars in the middle east and compete with China. It isn't that Russia is an insurmountable problem, it is that the combined weight of all problems is greater than the capacity to deal with them.
functor
10d ago
I don't think this is surprising. A lot of Ukraine's ability to resist was predicated on US assistance, which has become increasingly rare due to resistance from House Republican leadership.
It was never realistic to support Ukraine.
The defence industrial base has been slaughtered for 33 years. Most of the industrial base isn't doing magic military stuff but is tied into the overall industrial base which was shipped to China. There aren't that many welders, factory workers and machinists left. The idea that we have an advantage because our GDP is so high since we have socialmedia companies worth a fortune ignores that technically minded people in the west are working at a fin tech startup instead of a factory. When it comes to mass manufacturing pieces of steel financial hubs won't do well. The US sees itself as economically superior because smart americans work with insurance, investment banking and Netflix while Russians work in a tractor factory. The tractor factory will produce far more mortars than Netflix.
The US military isn't very army heavy. The US military is to a large extent a medical and pension scheme with military appended to it. Most of that military is navy and airforce with the army only being a minor part. The army is geared toward low intensity policing missions in the middle east, not fighting on the eastern front. NATO wasted trillions on fighting in the Middle East. That money had to come from somewhere and the industrial base took a big hit. The industrial base turned into manufacturing prototypes and small series of extremely expensive gear for special forces.
NATO equipment is maintenance heavy, expensive, incredibly hard to use and not designed for the mission at hand.
Just fixing the sorry state of NATO militaries would be a Herculean effort. The industrial base is barely able to replace the equipment from the cold war that needs to be retired. Now it is tasked with the additional tasks of feeding Israel and Ukraine fighting wars in a scale much larger than any European military was scoped for. Meanwhile China can pump out artillery shells, SAMs, ships and hand grenades at a rate that we simply can't.
functor
10d ago
The west would have benefited from Russia taking Ukraine in a week. Ukraine's pensionsystem is a complete mess, their infrastructure is worse than Russia's and they would have gotten 20 million new citizens that hate them. Combine this with sanctions on Russia and it could easily have toppled Russia. The plan was probably to give Ukrainians light weapons, training and let Ukraine become a Soviet-Afghan war 2.0. Three billion dollars of aid to the taliban played an important role in sinking the Soviet union. The architects behind the war had experience from Iraq and saw poorly funded militias cost the US tax payer the equivalent of the GDP of a medium sized country.
Instead they have gotten a nightmare in which Russian mass produced drones are being shot down by 250 000 dollar missiles in limited supply.
The neocon plan was to pull out of Afghanistan, have a quick collapse of Russia and then focus on China. Now they are the supply line for a Ukrainian military the size of the American force in Vietnam at the height of the war that is fighting a far more intense war while Russia is turning into a large arms factory. The aid won't stop when the fighting ends. After this war a force 4-5 times the size of the US marine corps including its reserves has to be completely rebuild and then sustained. They now have a military the size of the French, British and Germany military combined that is consuming supplies at WWIII levels and will need a complete restoration after the war. The pivot out of the middle east ended with a 7+ month war over a tiny strip of resourceless desert.
Meanwhile China builds more tonnage of military ships than all of NATO combined.
functor
11d ago
A good metric is the wars in the balkans in the 90s. 2/3s of those who fled stayed and 1/3 returned home. It is likely the numbers will be similar for Ukrainians who fled west. For the several million ethnic Russians who have moved to Russia it is unlikely they will return.
functor
11d ago
Ukraine's demographic pyramid says no
The future of Ukraine is Somali and Bangladeshi migrants working on farms owned by American financial institutions and managed by HR women educated in the US. Most likely the migrants will actually find their new homeland less enticing to have children in and probably will have fewer than migrants in western countries.
As for Russia the number of Russian men who have served is far below WWII levels. There might be a small effect, but I doubt it will be significant.
Israel blundered here. They bombed a consulate, which is going way over the line and looks awful. Israel has once again shown that it fights in a more brutal and barbaric way than other countries. They stepped over the line and Iran managed to make them spend over 500 million on interceptors, shut down their airspace, bombed several of the bases and caused panic throughout their country.
Iran showed that Israeli bombing and chaos in other countries can impact Israel itself. The Israelis stepped out of line and got smacked on the fingers.
functor
12d ago
It is a win in a multitude of ways:
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Israel spent far more on this attack than Iran.
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It caused widespread disruption in Israel. Few people slept well last night, flights were cancelled, large numbers of people hid in bunkers and thousands of soldiers participated in the air defence operation.
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Air defence is limited by industrial capacity, not money. The interceptors are complex machines and production is limited. SAM were low priority during the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan so few SAMs were bought and production capacity was reduced. Now Ukraine is consuming SAMs at a rate several times higher than production and their interception rate is dropping due to shortages of SAMs. Ukraine will also need thousands of SAMs after the war ends to rebuild. Israel is firing SAMs wildly as they are exceptionally casualty averse. Meanwhile China builds missiles are drones at a higher rate than any other country and they are stockpiling their weapons. Depleting SAM inventories is a success in itself.
functor
13d ago
A lot better than a regular call center job but not amazingly well. A lot of 27 year old business majors working 60 hours a week and making 50% more than their class mates doing telemarketing. Telemarketers do really matter. A good salesmen can bring in millions to the firm. Convincing a dentist to move his pension to their fund can generate tens of thousands in revenue over the course of decades. A small difference in conversion rate can have a major impact on the firm's performance. The top people were well paid.
functor
13d ago
Granted, my career in finance was short, and I only worked in tech, but in my experience most finance was underwhelming.
There were a lot of people who more or less had a call center job. Some were doing telemarketing, trying to sell pension-investments. Others were calling people, trying to get them to sign a form promising that they weren't using their pension money to fund ISIS. There was no point to the latter job except ticking a box for the regulators. Lots of people had jobs where their job was to open piles of PDFs, find a key number and insert it into an excel spreadsheet.
With that said, some developers and traders were truly impressive and had almost super human abilities. The issue is that the company was an inverted pyramid. A few people kept the show going, while the majority were support staff. The people who actually did the core work were remarkable people whose jobs won't be automated until we have AGI. The majority were just doing tedious office work in a toxic work environment.
The one thing that keeps demand up for junior employees is that regulation increases the demand for staff. There are fewer and fewer doers and more and more people who have to ensure that the clients aren't on some list of Russian oligarchs or that have to create graphs of carbon emissions in the investment portfolio.
functor
16d ago
If they had dropped more napalm on Iraq, it would have ended like Vietnam. The Soviets killed 10% of Afghanistan's population and did worse than the US. France put two million Algerians in prison camps in the 50s. Turning Iraq into a giant prison wouldn't be sustainable. There are 44.5 million Iraqis. Maintaining a police state for a population that large would be absurdly expensive and have no point. There wouldn't be an actual endgame as the regime would get toppled as soon as the vast police presence was pulled back.
functor
21d ago
(1) Attracting top talent.
It is a major weakness. People who move are people who are willing to give up on their people, country, friends and family for personal gain. They will leave again if another country offers a better deal. By filling elites with foreigners the US has greatly increased the rift between the elites and the common people. Foreigners in San Fransisco have as much in common with people in Missouri as westerns in Singapore have with Cambodians. The US becomes nothing more than a vehicle for personal ambition among the ruling class. The result is a low trust society with a fractured political system and low social cohesion. France did not benefit by gathering the elite of Europe in Versailles. Even worse, the actual wasp elite will become less American when their colleges and workplaces are full of foreigners.
(2) Economic security.
The US sanctions far more countries than China and places far greater demands on its trading partners. China has no problem selling to the taliban or various African countries. They have little interest in the inner workings of these countries. The US wants to reshape their entire societies to mirror American values. China is far less likely to sanction or even care about what happens in another country. American companies are far more likely to deplattform someone for dissenting values not directly related to the US while China really doesn't care as much about the world outside of China.
(4) Market discipline.
High speed trains don't have to be profitable to make sense. Roads are subsidized by taxes yet they aren't considered unprofitable. Rail way is infrastructure and sewers, railways and roads don't have to operate as a profitable business. Rail requires far less parking space in cities than roads, it produces a fraction of the air pollution, it is far less reliant on fossil fuels and it is faster. High speed rail delivers people straight to city centers and ties in well with other forms of public transit.
(5) Long-term economic trajectory.
China is a manufacturing super power. The US is the country that is heavily reliant on property speculation. The US is running an unsustainable deficit and growing slower than China.
(6) Friends and Allies.
China is the biggest trading partner for most of the world and most of the world has no historic grudge against China. They have never fought a war outside of Asia and have if anything been a big economic benefit to large parts of the world. The US has made a great effort to create grudges against it in the middle east and latin America.
functor
21d ago
The US is an extremely individualist country and is good at individualist projects which makes the US high in innovation. Meanwhile the US is terrible at large scale collective projects. California high speed rail, Vogtle nuclear power plants and a third of the country doing full lockdown during covid while another third are militantly refusing are examples of Americans being incapable of going with one strategy and ramming it through. Going Belarus and having no lockdowns for anyone, or going China and having lockdowns makes more sense than having half the population locked down while others are having raves.
Manufacturing chips is less about individual genius and more of a grand collective vision. The true innovation and genius is a decade ahead of what can be mass-produced. The timeline from physics genius inventing having a stroke of genius on a black board to manufacturing is long. These genius strokes of ingenuity are difficult to keep secret when they are going to be mass-produced. Taking an idea and building a 20 billion dollar plant requires a Herculean effort of tens of thousands of high skill workers pulling together for a common cause. Building high speed rail is less dependent on the next cool startup and more dependent on society as a whole coming together for a prime directive. China didn't invent the electric car, the mosfet chip, nuclear power or high speed rail, but they excel at scaling production.
Nuclear power is similar. The ideas for fourth gen nuclear power are not new, they are 60 years old. To be leading in nuclear power a country needs legislators, engineers, and technicians who can pull together to make fourth gen nuclear real. They don't need people who can invent novel exotic designs for power plants that won't be built.
As for black people they are useful for the system. A black lesbian woman with a rainbow flag is ideologically loyal. There is no risk that she will turn against the system or be disloyal, she truly believes in the liberal project. White men are a risk group. Chinese and Russian men are the most suspect. When France colonized Vietnam they promoted hmong people to positions of power. The Hmong people have been a minority in a weak position throughout history and had a grudge against the rest of society. They truly benefited from being a part of the French empire. Their loyalty made them good employees. A trustable mediocre employee is better than a disloyal genius.
functor
24d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine_Association_Agreement#Trade
This would have turned Russia's biggest trading partner and a deeply integrated part of the Russian economy into a state with the same rules for trade with Russia as EU countries. Effectively the idea was to bribe Ukraine into chosing the west by promising mountains of tax money from northern Europe in exchange for taking an anti Russian stance.
Several million Poles have moved west to work and western European companies are major employers in Europe. It is effectively a wage dumping operation.
functor
25d ago
My guess is that Bangalore is one of the world's premier hotspots for intelligence agencies. With a suitcase full of money and a high class escort, men who are 3 out of 10 in looks who make 1200 dollars a month can easily be persuaded to make minor code edits. Especially during the crazy days of 2021 the vetting process for developers was minimal. Infiltrating software companies was easy, simply apply for a job and pass a few leetcode problems and don't come across as insane during the interview.
functor
25d ago
Russia had no issue with Ukraine doing business with the west. It was the west who demanded that Ukraine cuts ties with Russia. An infeasible demand when they had millions of Russians in the country and deep economic ties to Russia. Western intelligence was deeply involved in the 2014 coup. Then our politicians who freak out over "it is ok to be white" had no problem funding people wearing swastikas who wanted to drive panzers into Russian cities while banning the Russian orthodox church and prohibiting the use of the Russian language.
Continuously shelling the Donbass, Merkel outright admitting that they were disingenuous during negotiations in order to buy time to arm Ukraine and building CIA bases right on Russia's border points to the US provoking a war.
As for Ukraine's economy their GDP increased 600% between the year 2000 and 2013. Since joining Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria in being border states to the US empire, their GDP has collapsed by a third over a decade. The polish option was never an option for Ukraine. Poland's export is labour. Poland's birth rate was substantially higher than Ukraine's and they have far more young people to export. Ukraine is demographically a combination of Japan's birth rate and Venezuela's emigration rate. Exporting labour when the demographics are comparable to the collapse of the Roman empire isn't sustainable.
I am sure there are Ukrainians who are fighting thinking that they can become a truck driver in Germany if they join the west but this doesn't account for the overwhelming political support from the west.
functor
25d ago
These guys missed that the Afghan military was 225 000 man smaller than they said when they had thousands of people on the ground.
As for Ukraine I think they massively misscalculated it. Their goal was to provoke Russia to invade and then turn Ukraine into Russia's Iraq war. The idea was sanctions against Russia while Russia is forced to integrate Ukraine's basket case pension system into the Russian system while they have to deal with riots, terrorism and stinger missiles shooting down choppers. Ukraine was supposed to be a repeat of the Soviet-Afghan war. Instead, they have to be the logistics and training for a Ukrainian force 4 times the size of the US Marine Corps including their reserves fighting a high intensity war. Russia didn't collapse and if anything their arms industry is producing at a record pace.
That was before Hezbollah. Secondly, they had no business being in Lebanon. The endless warmongering in the middle east has not had a benefit and has had a huge cost. If there were hundreds of foreign soldiers in Lebanon the Lebanese have a full right to hit back. Giving weapons to Ukraine but not acknowledging that the Lebanese have the right to defend their country is hypocritical.
Palestinians have a hostile nation occupying their territory, and they have every right to armed resistance.
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